The New Great Game: Reflection on The Emerging Geopolitics of the 2st Century.

This essay by John Gray in the New Great Game shines some light on the geopolitical context surrounding the increased stakes that are there with regards 'regime change' in Syria and involve the Great Powers.

'Alongside new sorts of warfare, older kinds of conflict have resumed. With India and China at odds over Pakistan, Afghan­istan and control of the South China Sea, the world’s rising powers are locked into strategic competition with one another – and also with the west. Whatever the upshot of French intervention in Mali, it will not be the last such neocolonial incursion. Africa is being remilitarised by western powers in what seems to be a response to China’s economic expansion into the continent. The case of the Democratic Republic of Congo – where millions of non-combatants have died as a result of decades-long warfare – shows the damage this kind of conflict can wreak. The terrifying destructive potential of nuclear weapons has altered the modes of warfare without necessarily reducing the human costs of war.

Further afield, significant reserves of natural gas have been identified off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, all already involved in long-running conflicts.

Many will resist the suggestion that the coming century will be shaped by geopolitical competition. Like Norman Angell, they will insist that war is no longer a rational method of acquiring resources; production and trade are so much more efficient. From an economic point of view this may be true, but it is not economic calculation that determines the behaviour of states.The Gulf war of 1990-91 was a pure resource conflict, and oil was a vital factor in triggering the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As the polar ice melts from global warming, the Arctic may become a site in the next round of the New Great Game. In turn, as changes in the planetary environment become more disruptive, governments are likely to resort to geo-engineering and future wars may feature climate modification being deployed as a weapon. Great powers will co-operate in many areas but against a background of continued rivalry and heightened risks'.

The Flaw in Chomsky's Worldview

The flaw in most "anti-war" spokesmen as regards global politics comes with the idea that Western policy somehow is formed in isolation or that non aligned regimes somehow necessarily act better or more morally.

In this respect, notice can be taken of radical journalist John Pilger's laudatory backing for Hugo Chavez's Venezuela whilst ignoring his support for the tyrannies of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Castro's Cuba.

As regards Chomsky, Gray ( who is himself an opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) writes, in a review of Chomsky's latest work Making the Future,

For Chomsky, it seems there can be no place for error or mixed motives in American policies. The war was not a mistake that might have been avoided if its opponents had been better organised and more effective. Invading Iraq was just one more example of American imperialism, an expression of a regime that is quintessentially criminal and evil.

Reading these articles, published between April 2007 and October 2011, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, for Chomsky, America is virtually the sole obstacle to peace in the world. Crimes committed by other powers are mentioned occasionally, but only in passing. Nowhere does he acknowledge the fact that many regions have intractable conflicts of their own, which will persist whatever the US does.

For Chomsky, conflict in the Middle East is exclusively the work of America and Israel. There is no struggle for hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or if any such struggle does exist it can be easily resolved so long as the US is ready to alter its policies. Again, unending war in Afghanistan does not reflect that unfortunate country's internal divisions and its long history as a focal point of geopolitical rivalry, which now includes a stalemate between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. War in Afghanistan could be ended very simply, if only the US withdrew its forces and brokered a grand diplomatic bargain.

The most formidible part of this demolition job of a much overrated thinker for thinking the world can be made better if only the US did not pursue the policies it did, as if China were not pursuing goals of Empire far more ruthlessly in Africa, for example, and that the US alone is uniquely responsible for global evil. Gray comments,

The picture Chomsky presents of the US is, in effect, a negative version of exceptionalism. For him as much as for the neocons, America is the centre of the world. Chomsky views global politics through the same Manichean lens: you are either for America or against it. The fact that much of humankind has aspirations that have nothing to do with America is not even considered. Anti-Americanism is fading along with American power, but Chomsky hasn't noticed.

John Gray-The Occupy Movements are the realists, not Europe's ruling elites

John Gray has also written a brilliant piece for The Guardian ( The Occupy Movements are the realists, not Europe's ruling elites November 15 2011 ) contrasting the greater realism of The Occupy movements that have sprung up across Europe and the USA in the wake of the economic crisis and the prospect of a double dip recession,

'The Occupy movements have been attacked for being impractical visionaries. In fact it is the established political classes of the west that are wedded to utopian thinking, while the protesters are recalling us to the actualities of human experience. Based on economic theories that left out human beings, the global free market was supposed to be self-regulating. Now a process of disintegration is under way, in which the structures set up in the post-cold-war period are visibly breaking up.

Anyone with a smattering of history could see that the hubristic capitalism of the past 20 years was programmed to self-destruct. The notion that the world's disparate societies could be corralled into a worldwide free market was always a dangerous fantasy. Opening up economies throughout the world meant ordinary people were more directly exposed to the gyrations of market forces than they had been for generations. As it overthrew existing patterns of life and robbed large numbers of people of any security they might have achieved, global capitalism was bound to trigger a powerful blowback.

For as long as it was able to engineer an illusion of increasing prosperity, free-market globalisation was politically invulnerable. When the bubble burst, the actual condition of the majority was laid bare. In the US a plantation-style economy has come into being, with debt-servitude for the many coexisting with extremes of volatile wealth for the few. In Europe the muddled dream of a single currency has resulted in social devastation in Greece, mass unemployment in Spain and other countries, and even, for some, reversion to a life based on barter: sucking society into a vortex of debt deflation, austerity policies are driving a kind of reverse economic development. In many countries a settled bourgeois existence – supposedly the basis of popular capitalism – has become an impossible aspiration. Large numbers are edging closer to poverty and a life without hope'.

John Gray on The Utopian Delusions of Global Free Markets.

John Gray has recently written much of interest as regards the crisis of the neoliberal project to engineer a global free market. In the Revolution of Capitalism ( BBC New A Point of View, September 4 2011 ) Gray states,

Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours....

More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.

But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.

.....as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.

Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.

In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.

If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.

More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.

In the process of creative destruction the ladder has been kicked away and for increasing numbers of people a middle-class existence is no longer even an aspiration.

As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx's proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we're cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.

But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you're getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.

The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you'll have to go into debt. Since at some point you'll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you're indebted from the start that's the last thing you'll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity.

At the same time as it has stripped people of the security of bourgeois life, capitalism has made the type of person that lived the bourgeois life obsolete. In the 1980s there was much talk of Victorian values, and promoters of the free market used to argue that it would bring us back to the wholesome virtues of the past.

For many, women and the poor for example, these Victorian values could be pretty stultifying in their effects. But the larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life.

When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It's the person who borrows heavily and isn't afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper.

When the labour market is highly mobile it's not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it's people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising.

In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie"

John Gray on Afghanistan.

John Gray has written an impressive piece on the delusions of Western foreign policy in the decade following the terrorist attack by Islamists on September 11 2001. In the New Statesman ( Perpetual Warfare ) he writes that the USA blundered into Afghanistan and conflated the threat of Al Qaida with the Taliban.

The conflicts triggered by 9/11 have all been fought on false premises. Bombing al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan was a legitimate act of self-defence and, in the context of US politics, may have been inevitable, but it was not the only option. The relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda has never been simple or unproblematic, and there is evidence that the Taliban may have been considering expelling al-Qaeda from Afghanistan when the bombing campaign got under way.

Gray is right that ever since the war has been justified according to a series of 'shifting goals'-from installing democracy, promoting social and economic development to defending women's rights. Moreover, he is scathing about the validity of the so-called "war on drugs",

Linking the Afghan mission with the nonsensical "war on drugs" has been predictably counterproductive. Destroying drug production - the Americans at one point thinking of spraying the whole of Helmand Valley with weedkiller to wipe out the opium fields - would also have destroyed much of the Afghan economy. There is constant talk of preparing government forces to take over responsibility for security, Bamiyan being the first province handed over, on 17 July. But where government is weak and lacking in legitimacy, and where allegiance to any authority has long been a tradable commodity, it should be obvious that improving the training of local forces will not ensure their loyalty. Presiding over a territory that has never been ruled by a modern state, the Afghan government is not much more than a funnel for endemic corruption. In the event of a full-scale pull-out of US-led forces, it would be lucky to survive for more than 48 hours.

Where Gray gets it slightly wrong is in adhering too rigidly to the idea of the West bungling into Afghanistan because they had no coherent policy at all.

There are some who see the entire war on terror as a cover for neo-colonialism. Behind all the pro­clamations about democracy and human rights, they say, the real goal was building pipelines in Afghanistan and seizing oilfields in Iraq. In fact, the course of events has been much more absurd. There is no evidence of consecutive thought of the kind required to make any conspiracy theory credible. Certainly there has been disinformation - plenty of it - but rather than concealing any covert strategy, it masked the lack of any strategy at all.

On the contrary, there is quite a lot of evidence that pipelines are held to be the key to stabilising Afghanistan by bringing in transit fees and uniting the regional powers that are signatories to the TAPI pipeline together under Western auspices. The fact that this aim of creating an energy corridor is, as Gray suggests, a delusion does not mean it has not played a central role.

Clearly, no war, least of all Afghanistan, is "all about a pipeline". Yet that does not mean that now the other justifications for "staying the course" for a decade have been revealed as a utopian mirage , that the completion of the TAPI pipeline does not remain the one sole consolation prize to be attained there.

John Gray on the Quest for Eternal Life.

John Gray has a new book out The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. In an article for the Guardian,( On humanity's quest for immortality, January 8 2011 ), Gray writes with his usual mordant way of dissecting the hubris and arrogance of progressive cults and creeds from Bolshevik god-builders and techno-futurists,

Kurzweil tells us in Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, we can prepare for immortality through a programme of vitamin supplementation, diet, exercise and preventive medical care, which will enhance longevity until it becomes possible for us to leave the flesh behind. For all its hi-tech novelty this is as incredible as the idea that dead scientists are at work to save the living, or a cryogenically preserved Lenin waiting to return to life and revolutionise the world.

The fantasies that possessed the psychical researchers and the god-builders still have us in their grip today. Freezing our bodies or uploading our minds into a supercomputer will not deliver us from ourselves. Wars and revolutions will disturb our frozen remains, while death will stalk us in cyberspace – also a realm of mortal conflict. Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.

The rest can be read here.

John Gray on the Con-Dem Coalition Government

As always John Gray has the most incisive viewpoint on British political economy and the illusions sustaining the notion that the recovery from the economic crash of 2008 is over or that there will not be radical upheaval in coming years.

Writing in the LRB, ( Progressive, like the 1980s, October 21 2010 ), Gray claims that there is nothing surprising in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government's neoliberal policies of "rolling back the state" but that events and the possibility of political upheaval could lead them to start to increase the powers of the state again.

The forthright support for George Osborne's policy of huge cuts coming from Clegg was not merely part of a political strategy.

On the contrary, it was inherent in the neoliberal creed outlined in the Orange Book in 2004 with its ideological belief in decoupling radical free market ideas from social conservatism and social democracy

The aim of the contributors was to reaffirm a version of liberalism they believed had been lost: one in which support for small government and the free market goes with a strong commitment to civil liberties and freedom of lifestyle.

This strand of liberalism was mistakenly discredited, they argued, when Thatcher attempted to link the free market with social conservatism.

The Orange Book liberals were avowedly anti-conservative. The principal target of their critique of British politics was not the free-market right, however, but the powerful social democratic strand in their own party.

Gone by 2008 was the old liberal belief that the state had a role to insulate and protect the public from the effects of an unfettered free market,society would be subjected to it in order to guarantee the best possible outcomes

Clegg never "sold out": his neoliberal vision was plainly laid out in the Orange Book long before the crash .

What Clegg and his fellow market liberals were engineering was a fundamental reorientation in the party’s values.

Instead of the type of liberalism exemplified by Hobhouse and Keynes, which accepted that the market had to be curbed when it failed to benefit society, the party was sold a liberalism in which the market became the benchmark by which society would be judged.

Rather than being assessed according to standards of freedom and equality, the market became the fundamental norm from which any departure would in future have to be justified.

Gray claims that the consequence of this follows on from the general decline in politics, from one where large parties with a wider membership and institutions of civil society could affect policy, into an oligarchical elite of cliques and micromanaging elites which have more in common with each other than the sale of different political brands suggests.

The hollowing out of parties continued with the rise of New Labour, which was invented by fewer than a dozen people who turned a mass political organisation into a vehicle for the Blair/Brown project of market-friendly modernisation.

As in the 18th-century elite politics analysed by Lewis Namier, British politics today is shaped by a handful of closely related people. The prosaic reality underlying the media romance of sibling rivalry between the Milibands and marital disharmony in the Balls family is competition within this small group.

If the coalition is a novelty in British politics, there is nothing that is remotely new in its ruling ideas....

Both Cameron and Clegg have insisted that moving away from state provision is not just a matter of saving money: the result, they say, will be services that are more responsive to personal choice.

It is true that injecting markets into public services may not save any money; the large changes that are being rapidly introduced in the NHS may end up creating a service that is significantly more costly.

This only confirms that the coalition is ideologically driven. It may believe that it is responding pragmatically, but its view of things is shaped by the ideas of the 1980s: ideas that in many respects lag behind events, and which the coalition may yet be forced to discard.

This is as true in global politics. As far as the USA's prospects are concerned Gray has little reason to think that its decline will be prevented. Events have moved away from the USA and European nations such as Britain calling the shots or having a "progressive future" guaranteed.

Nor will the neoliberal state rejuvenate them vis-a vis the Chinese challenge any more than the way China has embarked on massive industrialisation mean that it is needs to "liberalise". It was by rejecting the IMF and Western advice, the "Washington Consensus" that it has the economic and political power it has now.

The US has been pursuing a Keynesian-style programme of monetary stimulus, which looks like being continued in another round of quantitative easing – QE2, as it is sometimes called.

Whether or not the stimulus will be large enough (some ultra-Keynesians doubt this), it will not be accompanied by any coherent action on the federal deficit. The collapse in Obama’s popularity is likely to result in the Democrats losing control of one or both branches of Congress.

Trapped by its archaic and dysfunctional system of government, the US will then be gridlocked. The global economy will continue to drift, and any recovery in Britain will fall away.

As a consequence of the financial crisis, the market-based globalisation of the past couple of decades is giving way to a model in which states are the principal actors. Chinese state capitalism has weathered the global crisis better than any market liberal economy and even Russia is less burdened by debt.

After the implosion of the American financial system emerging economies need no longer submit to the dictates of a ‘Washington consensus’ that was never implemented in Washington. It might be thought that the current phase of globalisation would allow a greater degree of international co-operation.

In some ways, however, this new phase is more disorderly. The retreat of American power has left the world without a functioning monetary regime.

Economic imbalances are surfacing in geopolitical rivalries and currency wars, and it is unclear how these conflicts will develop. What is evident is that the era in which states were ready to surrender control of their economies to market forces is over.

The postwar welfare state may be history, but governments cannot risk leaving their populations without a shelter against chaos. If social democracy is not a viable option, neither is market liberalism.

International situation pertains towards diminished influence and economic stagnation, then the domestic consequences look no less stark.

The Conservative Liberal democrat Coalition's neoliberal policies are a gamble and could merely intensify the crash that was determined in its intensity and by New Labour's irresponsibility and attempt to substitute public spending with easy loans and borrowing beyond one's means.

A roll-back of the state of the magnitude that the coalition envisages will leave people more exposed to the turbulence of world markets than they have been for generations. Inevitably, they will seek protection.

The prosperity enjoyed by the majority of those in Britain in the decade leading up to the crash was largely an illusion.

Debt-fuelled consumption masked the full extent of the increase in inequality, while the casualisation of sections of the labour force concealed the real scale of unemployment.

Reining back welfare benefits and shedding labour in the public sector as the government intends will only make the drop in living standards that is now unavoidable larger and more painful.

There is much talk of the coalition’s lack of ‘narrative of growth’ to complement the need for retrenchment, but in these circumstances its lack of any convincing narrative of fairness may be more disabling.

In the terms of The Orange Book, condemning the pattern of incomes that emerges from the market as unfair is a category mistake; there is no standard of fairness independent of the market. There is plainly some awareness of this difficulty in the government.

In his conference speech Cameron defended the withdrawal of child benefit from higher earners on the ground that it is fairer if this group makes a larger contribution towards cutting the deficit.

At the same time some ministers (including Clegg) have defended dismantling the public sector with the claim that those who work in it enjoy unfair privileges.

Public sector pensions are singled out for particular criticism because they provide a degree of protection against the risks of the market that is no longer available to the rest of the population: fairness requires that everyone be subject to the same insecurity.

Since the result is to place the settled middle-class life to which many people still aspire beyond reach, it is hard to see this view having much traction.

There will be no easy ending to the consequences of the economic crash.

With the possibility of a double dip recession, the capacity for discontent, an upsurge in far right radicalism and violence cannot be discounted. That is what happens when politicians and the public collude in a vast fantasy of debt fuelled growth and living on the tick.