Greens on Iraq: small is beautiful, big is dangerous. posted by Richard Seymour

The Green Party's media savvy and erudite spokesperson Dr Caroline Lucas has produced a digestible statement of the party's position on the continued occupation of Iraq, which the editors of MediaLens have transcribed. I've saved the whole thing here .

I have a number of problems with it, not least of which is the reliance on the overused term 'globalisation'.

‘Globalization’ is used to refer to different, incommensurable processes which run parallel to one another, but not strictly as part of the same movement. For instance, there is no obvious correlation between the freer movement of capital and that of labour. At the same time, it is often alleged that the state is finding its powers encroached on: but while many relinquish certain social welfare functions, most are accruing to themselves greater authority of governance over non-economic life, a process with only tenuous connections to the internationalisation of capital. ‘Globalization’, in falsely bundling together these different processes, is a fiction, an ideological construct. What Branko Milanovic is complaining about when questioning the failure of 'globalization' is an economic orthodoxy, generally known as neoliberalism. If he said that globalization was making the poor worse off, while someone else said that it enabled one to communicate with many people of different faiths and backgrounds, they would not be disagreeing because they are speaking of different things. Therefore, I think it useful to chuck the whole discourse out and say what we mean: capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, class etc. These are the precise, robust categories that we need. The discourse of 'globalisation', because vague, is too inclusive, and allows woolly liberals to pose as radicals by invoking its name.

The main problem, though, is the way in which the violence of the oppressed is attributed to "the forces of globalisation", and aver that:

“The attacks – such as the two reported car bombings which killed 33 Iraqi police officers just last night – will continue as long as the occupying forces preside over the take-over of the Iraqi economy by the forces of globalisation.”

This is highly reductionist. Caroline Lucas always prefers to explain terrorism as a result of poverty etc., when it has been a reasonable fixture of political science for some time that it is more closely correlated to local state oppression and the perceived or (more likely) actual Western involvement in that. (Of course, for those who insist upon focusing on and magnifying such things, I will readily concede the semi-autonomous weight of ideology, religion and so on, so long as it is understood that the main issue in Iraq - and Palestine - is one of occupation and violence.)

But there is also the hidden punch in the term "forces of globalisation". Isn't this precisely the language of new Labour? Doesn't Norman Fairclough describe precisely such a rhetorical turn, in which agency is removed and bad things are seen to result from vague 'forces' that be beyond our control, aaahr. I strongly suspect that this is precisely how the Green political and intellectual leadership sees the current predicament: it isn't a problem of capitalism, just one of too excessive internationalism - those 'forces' have got beyond our reach. Hence, 'localisation'. It is no surprise that the Greens find themselves on the right of the anti-capitalist movement with the likes of Bernard Cassen of Attac. They believe that by reining in corporate power and enhancing the power of the nation-state, they can humanise capitalism. Hence, Colin Hines (in Localisation: A Global Manifesto, ) talks of the need to "improve the functioning of the market", and provide "secure demand levels" to bail out the market. Hence the call for the WTO to be replaced by an International Localisation Organisation, (a UN of world trade). Centre-left Keynesianism in green.

In this respect, they have mistaken the problem. The nation-state is not less powerful than it was before. It has simply switched from, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "social state to security state" (Europe: An Unfinished Adventure, 2004). As states eschew the regulatory functions of the Keynesian Welfare National State, they accrue increasing powers of intervention in the private lives of their citizens, as well as increasingly aggressive military postures. In fact, the agents, and guarantors of 'globalisation' are nation-states. Business rely on them to support markets, regulate labour, maintain infrastructural conditions, provide effective financial structures etc. States, in turn, work to advance the general interests of national capital, ensuring dominance among geopolitical competitors, securing opportunities abroad etc. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it bluntly: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the US army, air force, navy and Marine Corps".

It makes no sense, then, to talk of the 'forces of globalisation' in Iraq unless one is using the phrase as a synonym for American imperialism.

It is indicative of the Greens' inability to see the nation-states for the multi-nationals that Dr Lucas concludes:

“Last week’s historic, if flawed, election was a step forward for the peoples of Iraq, but only a tiny first step. It’s no surprise that it hasn’t put a stop to the violence.”

The elections were not merely 'flawed' but fundamentally fraudulent and unfair. The occupation in Iraq is not producing resistance merely because of privatisation and neoliberalism, but also largely because of political revulsion at the idea of being run by a foreign power. The CIA's profile of the resistance fighter is not one of an unemployed, desperate pauper seeking work at a newly constructed McDonalds - it is a person who has experienced or witnessed severe violence at the hands of the occupiers and who has taken a political (nationalist/religious) stand against that occupation. The problem, therefore, is not 'globalisation' but capitalism and its corrollary processes.