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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
The Terror of
the Petrolarchs
An
Open Letter to Brother Perry Anderson
by PETER LINEBAUGH
Dear Perry,
When we recently met for the first time
you kindly asked me whether I had read Edward Thompson's memoir
of the death of his brother, Frank. Indeed, I have read this
book, and I commend it to you (I gathered you hadn't yet): E.P.
Thompson, Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission:
Bulgaria 1944 (Stanford University Press, 1997).
Frank Thompson was executed by a firing
squad in Bulgaria in 1944, set up probably by Churchill who was
already organizing the anti-communist post-war mid-east. Perhaps
you, Edward's intellectual antagonist in the wars of the old
New Left, and I, one of Edward's several students, felt his profound
grief for the loss of his brilliant brother. Certainly all who
read Edward felt his deep attachment to the ideals his brother
died for, ruined by the Cold War.
Frank served as an intelligence officer
in Iraq. You write now about Europe and Iraq, "The Special
Treatment of Iraq." I want to comment on what
you have published here in CounterPunch, because you leave
a couple of things out which I think Edward and Frank can make
us both remember.
Before mentioning these two omissions,
however, let us enjoy a letter that Frank wrote from the Western
desert (no uniforms, no hierarchy) in 1942. It echoes the oft-reprinted
chapter 15 of Volney's Ruins, published 150 years earlier
almost to the day. Volney also imagined a classless society,
after experiencing a mosaic of multicultural multitudes in the
mid-east, very much as Malcolm X did in Mecca.
Frank wrote, "there is something
epic about this 'Middle East' if only one could get a frame for
it. the Russians grinning fit to bust and giving the V-sign to
every one they pass; the diminutive Iraquis in khaki breeches
and puttees mounting guard among the white hollyhocks on the
Persian frontier; the Arab legion and the French meharistes,
slender and almost girlish in their red-and-white kefiyehs
camps like old Tamurlane on the green steppe-land, swaying round
the fire in dancesIndians the neatest,  cleanest,
and most dignified soldiers in our army, coons everywhere, squatting
round brush-fires, driving down main roads like a wind out of
hell, grinning in road-gangs; Fighting French, Poles, Canucks,
yanks in jeeps, huge south Africans " and so forth. As white
brothers, Perry, you and I wince at a diction that is not unaffected
by orientalism or anglo racism. Do we not also recognize something
else? "This war is demonstrating, beyond any hope of refutation,
the Unity of Man. No one, at least who's been in the Middle East
will want to deny it."
This was written before Israeli independence
and before the Arab-American oil pipeline. Yet, he is gesturing
towards an epic. There is something at birth--" if only
one could get a frame for it "--which the Zionist project
and the Seven Sisters put an end to, and which (here your strictures
are fully justified) the UN failed to express.
You review six reasons to oppose war
with Iraq. You then provide six clever answers to these six reasons.
The orderly march of the six's is then interrupted by a quasi-comic
interlude of the three, that is, you provide three explanations
of the "vast, passionate revolt" of popular sentiment,
before concluding with another set of six, six telegraphic propositions
to give the movement staying power. The impulse of enumeration,
always allied with analysis has replaced that of understanding.
You provide us with a structure of three by six, with an interruption
of three. It seems logical with its premises and deductions.
Livy, the Roman historian, drew no line between aggression and
defensive war. "The war that is necessary is just, and hallowed
are the arms where no hope exists but in them." Conquest,
expansion, defense of vested interests, support of the status
quo, manifest destiny, the American way of life, these are "necessary."
The banking, diplomatic, and journalist professions, as well
as the professions of arms, understand these "necessities."
You omit another six reasons against:
cupidity, concupiscence, greed, exploitation, pollution, and
corruption. How could you have missed this? Have you not seen
the slogan dripping in red and black from the posters and banners,
"No blood for oil"? Have you not paused to consider
its meaning? It takes us, afterall, directly to the political
economy of war with Iraq. C. George Caffentzis of the University
of
Southern Maine has provided a threefold interpretation: first,
the petrolarchs are thirsting for the one hundred billion barrels
of "sweet" reserves in Iraq, and competing with French,
Russian, and Chinese concerns. Second, OPEC alone is outside
the ambit of neo-liberal free market privatization, a fundamental
obstacle to World Bank and WTO structural adjustments. Oil is
the base commodity, it is the commodity of value transference,
and it contains a rent component. Hence, reflection leads us
to a third understanding, that "no blood for oil" entails
no blood for profit, or surplus value. This is why in excluding
oil from your analysis you also exclude capitalism.
Perry you write of, if not from,
and you write to, the mainstream. The mainstream accepts
neither discussion of capitalism or alternatives to it. For you
the mainstream is certainly a stream that flows in the West from
the West. Rather like the "ocean" that surrounded the
world's landmass as envisaged in the earliest maps of the Europeans,
this mainstream provides the outer boundary, a moat perhaps,
to that ancient Christian mystification called "the West,"
the fortress of empire, from which it launched its crusades to
the "East," for Jerusalem. The term has inescapable
theocratic or monotheistic vibrations, which are now given full-throated
utterance as the voice of empire. Only "chaos," only
"anarchy" resides beyond this mainstream, or Satan!
Since thinking of your problem--why place
yourself in the mainstream?--it occurred to me that you may not
know, so to speak, of other rivers. An old recitation piece can
come to our aid, Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human
blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns
were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
down to New
Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the
sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Do not take this as the négritude
of the distant 20th century (the color line has not vanished,
it corresponds increasingly with class): see rather in these
lines a neuration of possibilities.
Some things we know, Perry. We must leave
the mainstream, and find other rivers. The mainstream is actually
a dried-up, sewer-like place of wretched, craven ideas, a radioactive
ditch, a poisoned well, and scarcely purified by the three-by-six
matrix of logical filters, or three tablets of protest. From
the oil polluted Niger River delta, to the Ganges, we know that
we are against capitalism. It is a social system based on privatization,
commodity production, and exploitation. In the current period
its aspects appear to us as "globalization" or as "neo-liberalism."
Corporate growth and rule, financial control by the World Bank
and the IMF, these are its organizational manifestations. It
has a continuity with the past, fordism, the assembly line, and
the petrolarchy of Rockefeller. We have had to define and to
describe it once again. This capitalism is indeed triumphant,
and now has launched its bid for the petroleum resources of the
globe, the base commodity of development, accumulation, progress.
War provides it with vital spirits.
I bathed in the Euphrates. In his Letter
to America (1980) Edward Thompson quoted President Truman
writing in his notebook on 25 July 1945, "We have discovered
the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be
the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era,
after Noah and his fabulous ark." Thompson comments, "The
president's literal biblical reference is touching, and touching
also was his confidence that his instructions to the Secretary
of War that the weapon be used on a "purely military target"
only, and not "women and children,' would be obeyed by the
military executors." After Bush's press conference, we find
more than a touch of sentiment. Imperial presidents ally themselves
closely to the Jahwistic deity of Old Testament destruction raining
down the frogs, and fire, and floods, and boils, &c. in a
stun-and-awe campaign from the pastoral stage of history to justify
Hiroshima. True, the habitat of this projection, or this idol,
is along the Euphrates River. The mainstream replaces political
economy of war with the theocracy of war.
Besides capitalism, the mainstream does
not recognize the practicality of the old commons, that "primitive
communism" mocked by the Stalin of the Baku oil fields.
This is your other omission. We are against capitalism.
We are for common wealth. We know this from our experience
as proletarians, since we make that wealth through cooperation.
We have been expropriated from our commons. In Central America,
Amazonas, the Indian subcontinent, the Afghan mountains, the
forests of Sumatra and Indonesia, and in the Middle East, this
is the story of our era--call it the New Enclosures as we did
in Midnight Notes. From the transhumance of the Kurdish
highlands to the people of the reeds in the Tigris and Euphrates,
we know some meanings of cooperation and common property. The
migrations that result bring an experience of a home, of a village,
of an olive grove, of a pasture, of a little woodlot, of a field,
of a stream; it is the experience of subsistence, and it is often
hidden from state and patriarchal forms. On the one hand, this
is the ancient cry of the slave and proletarian--Spartacus led
the revolt of slaves for the ager publicus, the common
land. On the other hand it is always ridiculed, scorned, derided
by the powers that be, for they wish to turn these memories into
a sickness such as nostalgia or amnesia, a private longing designed
to make us forget or cry in our beer over 'backward modes of
production.' Toughen up, says the mainstream. Sink or swim.
The multilateral terror of petrolarchy
in Iraq has put an end to its commons, and recently. Gavin
Maxwell, People of the Reeds (Harper,1957) accompanied
Wilfred Thesiger and he relied on his famous contribution to
the January 1954, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society
for knowledge of the people of the reeds. This was the form that
the commons took in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. "
these cultivators reckoned the seasons by the rising and setting
of certain stars, the Pleiadies and the Dog-star for instance.
At the beginning of each new season, the land on either side
of the canal below Rufaiya was marked off with real pegs into
plots of equal breadth, for which the villages cast lots. Generally
a man found himself with several plots in different places. He
might then join up in partnership with others or cultivate his
portion by himself with the help of his family." Wilfred
Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (Oxford,1964). They live on
floating islands, baffling maze of reed beds, movement is by
boat. Trade is despised. The mudhif is a barrel vaulted
guest house built entirely of reeds and matting. 5,000 years
old, ribbed roof and traceried windows. The marsh Arabs lived
in a reed commons--it is ancient, precapitalist. Intimate with
animals. Hunters and gatherers. Charging wild boar, women hardening
buffalo dung, the cathedral-like mudhif, the dancing boys,
the mockery of prayer and sodomy, the untreated diseases. For
five millennia they subsisted.
V. Gordon Childe, the New Zealand Marxist
archaeologist explained that writing, ceramics, and the city
came from the cradle of civilization on the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Yes, we look now less at techne than at social relations: the
periodic cancellation of debts; the jubilee of land re-distribution;
the communal ethic. Now expropriated.
We can observe the style of expropriation
from an Anglo to an American mode by an anecdote from Harold
Nicholson, upper class English diplomat, who at the 1919 Versailles
conference helped Lord Curzon get into his trousers. He made
himself useful, and wrote amusing recollections of 'some people,'
including the American, Miriam Codd. Much as he might detest
her lingo of 'behavioralism,' and her assiduous refusal to understand
others she is a more apt personage to sum up the objective historic
currents than Lawrence--the Americans were taking over. En route
to Bagdad, crossing the Tigris and Euphrates, they came to the
desert. "My!" she exclaimed, "it isn't flat."
"No, Mrs. Codd, the Arabian desert is not flat. It is, in
fact, intersected by mountains." Mrs. Codd had closed her
eyes again and pretended to be asleep. It was possible that she
did not care for information." The portrait grows in vicious
malice of that polite Edwardian kind. "And on we went. The
sun was above us. The sun sank behind. Towards evening three
vultures scattered at our passage: they flapped off languidly
with trailing feet, and settled again some fifteen yards away:
the body of an Arab lay there with the guts exposed: he was the
first human being we had seen for four hundred miles. Mrs. Codd
glanced at him indifferently, as if at a cinema poster passed
at Purley. The Colonel said, "My God! Did you see that?"
That is one aspect of the expropriation.
Another is told in Ghassan Kanafani's classic story of the Palestinian
diaspora, and the Persian Gulf proletariat. Men in the Sun,
translated Hilary Kilpatrick (Three continents Press, 1983).
Abu Qais falls to the ground at the Shatt al-Arab, the name of
the river after the Tigris and Euphrates join each other. Remembering
them from a childhood geography lesson, "When the two great
rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, meet " c. 1956 the Palestinian
carried all his years on his shoulders and fled across the desert
to Kuwait to find a crust of bread. Alien and insignificant.
Ten years and lost "your trees, your house, your youth,
and your whole village. Ten olive trees. He threw himself on
the earth again at Basra, "the scent of the earth rose to
his nostrils and poured into his veins like a flood."
We know, in general, that the expropriation
happened before in England. Given the destruction of the people
of the reeds, we can look at it more exactly. In 1772 the court
of King's Bench accepted oral testimony from Theberton, Suffolk,
that "everybody in the world may cut rushes on the common."
Though two years later this was reversed in a case arising from
Ludham Waste, Norfolk, which did not extend the right to cut
rushes to inhabitants as too vague a description." "Rushes,
reeds and useful grasses were also good for bedding, as a netting
in the plastering of walls, and a wrapping for soft milk cheeses.
They made cheap, bright rushlights too: a labouring families
got more than five hours of 'comfortable light' for a farthing,
and reported that a pound and a half of rushes gave a year's
light because they were used chiefly in winter: 'working people
burn no candle in the long days, because they rise and go to
bed by daylight.' William Cobbett was brought up reading winter
nights by rush-light. His grandmother never burned a candle in
her life. "It is to blaspheme God to suppose that he created
men to be miserable, to hunger, thirst, and perish with cold,
in the midst of that abundance which is the fruit of their own
labour."
In 1950 Edward Thompson wrote a poem,
"A Place Called Choice." Remarkably, the common of
the rushes supplies the materials for the light enabling the
English working class to be made.
"Paine's Rights of Man which
once in some high Pennine valley
The weaver at his handloom, straining by rushlight, read."
Or again,
" In the frost-blue flames
Of the handloom weaver's rushlight the heroic shadows leap"
We have this choice too, though the places
have changed. We are not consigned by inevitable laws or gods
to the spaces of the mainstream.
You put us down, Perry, the millions
who poured into the planetary streets--"fixation of the
fan club, politics of the spectacle, and ethics of fright."
You chide us, "great mass movements are not to be judged
by tight logical standards." Are we loose and disorderly?
Are we illogical? Are we below standard? This is despicable;
it is not helpful. Our history is always made by masses of us,
whether in Hyde Park, the Hill of Tara, Woodstock, Tompkins Square,
People's Park, the Champs Elysée, the mall of Washington
DC. That's when we know that we are many, and they are few. Shoulder
to shoulder, mile upon mile, we see, hear, and feel it. A generation
of historians has taught and studied the crowd, the mob, the
mass. To enclose it, the Romans developed the stadium. To control
it, the Riot Act was passed. To channel it, cities were redesigned.
There is a politics to the movement, not a spectacle, or fright,
or fans. Hence, the importance of slogans, hence the millions
of images of the placards, posters, and signs we shoot around
the planet. From these we begin to smile, and to feel our strength.
We listen for other voices. Groups form; literature is addressed;
the old parties feel young; and the new find voice. Logical standards
grow from our movements! When it moves fast, in can have insurrection
in mind. So, we must assert, the mass movements may judge the
logical standards, not vice versa.
We also are not ignorant of history.
We know, for instance, that when disaster hits, as it did in
the wars against the French revolution, or against the American
confederacy, or in world War One, it is also a time when the
buried longings can become realized into the powerful revolutionary
forces of history--the Haitian revolution, the freedom of the
American slaves, the clarion of the Paris Commune, the third
world struggles associated with the names of James Connolly,
or Claude McKay, or Rosa Luxemburg. We do not advocate disaster.
We do not advocate Zion. The seeds of the new society are picked
by little birds in the ashes of the old and carried hither and
yon.
How to we get from what we are against
to what we are for? The distance from here to there is
the project of our organizing and our practice now, in the parks,
in the commons, in the streets, in the fields of the metropolis.
Here is where we embark on the steps required to build the force
that can restore a common wealth. Socialism, anarchism, communism,
feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, vegetarianism provide the
libraries of our heritage which have been renewed, invigorated,
in the streets. The opportunity we have now is to interface with
those commoners who have been let loose by the violences of war,
expropriation, rape, and terror. The third world is in the cities
of the north. This is the meaning of our slogans, "the whole
world is watching" or "this is what democracy looks
like." We sense our historical task.
We build on a) the indigenous peoples
who are the people with a relationship to the commons; we build
on b) the anti-globalization protests that began at Seattle and
have traversed the planet--Melbourne, Davos, Porto Allegre, Nice,
the people who dream the commons; we build on c) the Durban conference
on reparations, the people who want justice. These are the rivers,
Perry. Jump in. The water's fast-moving but infinitely welcome.
Frank Thomson and Iris Murdoch were lovers.
At Oxford they studied Agammemon together. During war
he wrote her, "the question of building a new communal ethic
is one of the most important that we have to elaborate."
This is what we are doing in the streets, in the great demonstrations,
the beautiful manifestations. We are practicing this communal
ethic. (Vandana Shiva, Maria Miess, help to guide us). (None
of this is to be found in the movie about Iris Murdoch). Many
years later Iris Murdoch concluded a poem in memoriam of Frank,
The young are bored by stories of the
war.
And you, the other young who stayed there
In the land of the past are courteous and pale,
Aloof, holding your fates.
In studying Aeschylus they read how the
common soldiers bemoaned their lot in life, their fate. Yet,
it was George Thomson, the Marxist classicist beloved of Ireland,
who pointed out that in this case "fate" referred originally
to the lots cast for the divvying up the common lands. The question
before us is how can we divvy up, in justice and in equality,
the wealth of oil, which has belonged to None and must belong
to All. To leave the oil to the Few, the petrolarchs, brings
terror and the shameless bulimic ethic of bloated binge and ghastly
vomit as 'a planetary way of life.'
Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at Bard. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's
favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: linebaug@bard.edu
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