Stalinism. posted by Richard Seymour

The title is regulative rather than constitutive.

Tonight, Channel Four has a special programme on what it calls 'the last surviving Stalinist regime', that in North Korea. I wouldn't haggle over that description, despite there being what I would call Stalinist regimes in China and, in a much less repressive fashion, Cuba (and the latter at least has the excuse of an extraordinary campaign of US-directed terror against it). Among its scoops is a report that British American Tobacco, (which pays Tory leadership candidate Ken Clarke £150,000 a year plus £21,000 of benefits in kind), has an operation in North Korea that it has never quite declared. Tobacco companies like BAT increasingly rely on opening markets in poorer countries, and this one in particular likes to advertise its brands in countries where they are not even legally sold, then arrange for them to be smuggled in. I never thought I'd see the day that Ken Clarke would be implicated in providing revenue to a 'Marxist-Leninist' regime.

The retort, if BAT felt it necessary to reply to such piffling, powerless critics as human rights workers, would undoubtedly be the same as that offered to those who criticise Western courtship of the Chinese regime. 'Free markets', the story goes, will lead to democracy (in the neoconservative/neoliberal paradigm, it almost looks as if the two are cosubstantial). I don't know that there is any such thing as a free market, but it has become orthodoxy in most texts on politics and political science that something called 'economic liberalisation' is the royal road to international acceptability. Sometimes other euphemisms are used, like 'openness'. My prescribed Uni texts on the Middle East are almost unanimous on this point. What this really means is that authoritarian regimes that allow their people to be exploited by international capital rather than state capital will find apologists among those who profit from such transactions. The explicit formula would be capitalism = democracy, but that is something only an ideological diehard would try enunciating upfront.

At any rate, if North Korea repeats China's gesture and allows itself to become a manufacturing centre for toasters, toys, plastic bags, clothing and other low to middle-ranking consumer items, it could well find itself shedding the 'rogue state' label. As threatened as the Bushies are by China's rising star, they have to get past Wal Mart if they want to blast it out of the firmament.

Another Stalinist regime, whose passing will never be satisfying enough, was that in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. I have said plenty about it, its predecessors and successors here, here, here and here. But I just wanted to draw attention to this in Dissent magazine. Dissent is the sort of magazine that the CIA might well have sponsored during the Cold War, rather like Encounter. While the latter was an anticommunist liberal magazine, the former is a pro-imperialist lefty magazine. In each case, the function would be to regulate dissident discourse, policing the language and circumscribing key debates. And what will you find if you examine the enclosed piece? Not a bad account of present-day Cambodia's reckoning with its past, and not altogether irrelevant points about the bankruptcy of the Funcinpec-CPP regime. But also a rather gaping hole. The story reports how Cambodians are inclined to divide their recent history into three periods. Pre-KR, Democratic Kampuchea, and post-KR. Not a bad way of dividing things, you might think. Yet, the author of this piece, in a supposedly dissenting forum, cannot find a single word to say about either the US bombardment before the KR ("anything that flies on anything that moves"), or the massive US campaign of support for the ousted Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invaded and routed the genocidaires. The story also asks whether KR violence feeds new violence - it's an interesting question. Suppose one were to ask whether Nixon-Kissinger's Bismarckian violence in Cambodia contributed to the violence of the subsequent Khmer Rouge regime?


Commodity fetishism.

We have been encouraged in the past to believe that there is a pure antagonism between Stalinist regimes and the West, just as we are now encourage to think that Islamism and liberal democracy are mortal foes. The relationship, supposedly, is one of principled difference. In fact, what is more likely is that Stalinist regimes - regimes which legitimise themselves with the lingua franca of socialism, but which in economically backward societies ruthlessly pursue state-led development programmes oriented around the primitive accumulation of capital - have more in common with their Western antecedents than is usually acknowledged. The 'revolutionary' regimes in the Middle East, whether taking their cue from Stalinism or Arab nationalism, or even conservative monarchism, repeated the same gestures: they brought a new middle class to power, initiated state-led programmes of development, built up the urban centres etc. Stalinist regimes are therefore quite happy to ingratiate themselves with Western capital, whatever ideological narratives they happen to flatter themselves with. And Western states and capital are not slow to take the opportunity to profit where they can.