The grand imperial puppet show
by Sam Kriss
HIPPOLYTA:
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS:
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst
are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA:
It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.210-213
Imperialism, as comrade Mao Tse-tung famously pointed out, is a paper tiger. The phrase has now become so well-worn that it can be taken as a familiar piece of imagery, that we can forget to ask: why a tiger? Why paper? The term is a Chinese idiom of some pedigree, but Mao was always scrupulously careful in his use of metaphor (especially when dealing with Western journalists), never missing an opportunity to interrogate every possible meaning. He says: In appearance [US imperialism] is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. The image emerges of something like Henri Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm, the fear blazing in the beleaguered creature’s eyes as the damp winds wash its frame into sodden pulp. (Rousseau’s painting was initially titled Surprise!, with the implication that the tiger is about to pounce on an unsuspecting prey – but it’s equally possible to discern in the awkward position of the animal, its leg half-suspended over the foliage, the idea that it’s the tiger that’s been surprised, caught out among the suddenly inclement elements.) This image, with the unhappy predator crumbling under the triumphant might of the people, has a firm place in the Maoist repertoire, recalling directly his slogan that the East wind is stronger than the West wind. But all this is complicated immediately afterwards. History as a whole, Mao declares, the history of class society for thousands of years, has proved this point: the strong must give way to the weak. The tiger appears strong when in reality it is weak, but the winds and the rain that tear it to shreds are weaker still; it’s only in this weakness that they can gain their victory. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about paper tigers?
Paper animals are transient, vulnerable to the elements, powerless against time. They’re not built to last. Paper animals are decorative; they’re entertainment. A paper tiger takes on the form of something very powerful, but it’s a self-conscious ruse. However convincing the representation, nobody is really expected to be afraid of it, except the children. Mao continues: When we say US imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. Another reversal: the thing that projects a unified, total image of power is actually weak and vulnerable; the thing that should be correctly understood as weak and vulnerable in its abstract totality is actually very dangerous in its concrete particulars. Mao’s programme for the practical struggle against imperialism is to behave like a child at a puppet show, reacting to each swipe of the paper tiger’s claws as if it were real, while at the same time never forgetting that it’s all an illusion. It’s not enough to simply refute the lies of the imperialists; you have to defeat them on the level of their own simulation: knock out its teeth one by one, even though they’re only paper.
All this is by way of responding to the recent polemic on anti-imperialism and the left; in particular two essays by workers and scholars whose thought I greatly respect: No blood for oil? by Matthijs Krul, and On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism by the sublunar entity known occasionally as Emma Quangel. The centre of the dispute, if I understand it correctly, is this: Krul argues that the slogan ‘no blood for oil’ represents a model of anti-imperialist thought that both understates imperialism’s scope and overrates its ability to succeed; Quangel responds by asserting that if the average protester does not understand wholly the conditions of the world petroleum market, they are still taking a correct stance against US Imperialism; that is: to condemn it. Krul cautions against an uncritical support for supposedly ‘anti-imperial’ states that precludes any actual appreciation for the political and social structures peculiar to the societies in question; Quangel maintains that the goal should be to try to hobble the greatest threat to building a better world.
It’s necessary to start with particulars. Quangel begins her intervention by stating that many of the youth coming into the anti-imperialist movement today seem genuinely confused about what imperialism is – what it smells like. What, then, does imperialism smell like? Burning oil wells, charred bodies, the sharpness of gunpowder and sweat – but as she points out, imperialism is not the same as imperial war. Imperialism is a global system existing primarily to perpetuate itself, stifling any germ of an alternate social order, and its primary vector is aid and development. Development money is used to integrate states into the general system of capitalist expropriation; recourse is usually only made to guns and bombs when these means are refused. Imperialism is an all-encompassing narrative, a puppet show being played against the backdrop of the entire world, and its smell is not the stench of war. Imperialism smells like roasting chestnuts, popcorn, fireworks, the sweet clinging night-time smell of entertainment.
Imperialism is seductive, in the full Baudrillardian sense of the term. In the nineteenth century, it operated along the principle of contest, propelled by the self-confidence of the newly dominant bourgeoisie, pitting its strength against the strength of others. In the twenty-first, imperialism operates within the other’s area of weakness, which is also its own. The precursor to any imperialist action, whether as development aid or military intervention, is always an initial rupture, a breach in the form of a humanitarian crisis. There are famines, or shortages, or a government crackdown on protests, or a civil war. When this occurs, imperialist powers do not proclaim their decision to act as a function of a world-spanning omnipotence. Instead, they plead their own powerlessness in the face of the catastrophe (as in Syria today) and their own vulnerability against the other, until the clamour for action reaches boiling point. Imperial adventures from Korea to Iraq have been launched in the form of desperate measures against a looming threat; it was not only necessary for Saddam Hussein’s government to have brought suffering and genocide against its own people, he was also required to have the capacity to launch chemical drone attacks against American cities. This is a dual weakness: it’s precisely on the terrain of the human catastrophe that imperialism is weakest, because imperialism is the mother of all catastrophes.
Recent years have seen the grim spectacle of avowed leftists and socialists aligning themselves with the grand catastrophe of global imperialism to ward off the lesser catastrophe that precedes it. The counter-slogan, adopted from current trends in feminism, is that my Marxism will be anti-imperialist or it will be bullshit. The necessity of such a position is made clear by the abject pronouncements of empire’s left-apologists, less sleek running-dogs than mangy senile old hounds loping in circles as they attempt to gain a lick at their own anuses – but it also raises the spectre of an anti-imperialism without communism. A prime example of this phenomenon is provided by a recent article by Atheling P Reginald Mavengira published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation, alleging that the Boko Haram insurgency is a CIA covert operation designed to neutralise the supposed Nigerian threat to American regional power. He writes that Nigeria is a country which has always been known for its resilience and ability to resolve its problems without outside interference […] Why is someone somewhere hell bent on engineering Nigerians to form the un-Nigerian habit of harbouring and perpetrating desperate, extreme and unforgiving actions against themselves? As any cursory reading of Nigerian history should demonstrate, this is bullshit. Africans are just as capable as Europeans of delivering death and horror on each other. Mavengira has the correct stance on US imperialism – to condemn it – but it’s a condemnation arising from spurious allegations and bourgeois nationalism (although, confusingly, Mavengira doesn’t appear to be Nigerian himself but is instead a Zimbabwean businessman living in South Africa). He approaches imperialism as a function of American geopolitical ambition ranged against African states; in fact imperialism is perfectly willing to tolerate a strong and stable Nigeria. Capital always needs new spaces in which to expand: Nigeria was listed among the ‘next 11’ emerging economies by Goldman Sachs, whose board of directors now includes a Nigerian banker, and the operation of capital investment (and the enclosure and dispossession that goes with it) within the country is likely to be far more damaging than any mythical CIA covert operation. However correct Mavengira’s stance on imperialism, his analysis of it is politically useless.
Both the left apologists for empire and these vulgar anti-imperialists commit the same error: they’re taken in by the puppet show, confusing paper tigers for real ones. In the subaltern nations there is chaos and confusion; imperialism is an orderly and rational system. The only difference lies in whether they stand with this order or against it. Against this it needs to be stressed that imperialists are, for the most part, idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. The CIA isn’t some hidden cabal out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, directing events with a malign precision; it’s a hive of myopic nerds that excels only at receiving government money, levelling Pakistani villages, and systematically fucking up. The global ruling class might have been able to ruthlessly profiteer from the current economic crisis, but they couldn’t predict or prevent it. It’s always been this way. In the nineteenth century a grand geopolitical game of chess was played between Britain and Russia over the Central Asian heartland: the British played admirably, protecting India from any encroachment to the north; the Russians had no idea the game was even taking place. There is no master plan or secret logic: imperialism is a catastrophe. Not an explosion of violence or the sudden onset of famine, but a single, sustained, rolling catastrophe, blind and stupid and propelled only by its own weakness, that has bounced around the world for five centuries, until it has eventually become the world.
How should Marxists respond when imperialism threatens a foreign state, plunging through the rupture of some local crisis to substitute its own, globally institutional crisis? Simply condemning it has not, so far, brought much success, and reading the impoverished language of some vulgar anti-imperialists might explain why. It’s been remarked that much Anglophone critical theory reads as if it had been translated from French; this stuff, with its clunky sloganeering and reliance on the imperative, sounds like an inelegant translation from Chinese. Defend the heroic resistance against US imperialism! Stand against NATO aggression! People must write these pronouncements, and some might even read them, but it’s unclear why. As Krul points out, making a show of support for one or another ‘side’ (be it the ‘anti-imperial’ state apparatus or some inconsequential socialist sect) offers little scope for actively disrupting imperialism. The task is to, in a sense, play along with the imperial game of pitting weakness against weakness. We must see where imperialism is weak and confront it there, confront it with our own weakness in the face of its cataclysm, and that weak spot is precisely those crimes and horrors used by imperialism to justify its actions. These are not the lesser of two evils: they are non-heterogeneous to the greater evil. In a world shaped and defined by the madness of imperialism, there is no human tragedy that does not follow in some manner from these conditions, nor any real distinction between the local catastrophes and the grand catastrophe: the latter is nothing more than the sum total of the former. Our world is like the Chaos described by Milton: Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise/ Of endless wars […] A universal hubbub wild/ Of stunning sounds and voices all confus’d. Every imperial intervention is a strike against itself. To admit to the global supremacy of imperialism is at the same time to show up its monumental idiocy and weakness. Any system that conquers the world becomes isomorphic with it: imperial capitalism is now not only reshaping political geography but altering the planet’s climate – it has become the wind and the rain, but it’s that wind and that rain that tears paper tigers apart.
Mavengira and others like him (he is apparently connected to the ‘Economic Freedom Fighters’ party in South Africa led by the expelled ANC youth leader – Julius Malema) are *not* simply ‘vulgar anti-imperialists’. I would describe him/them as bourgeois-nationalist sub-imperialists’ whipping up nationalist (and in Mavengira’s case, pan-Africanist) sentiment, arguably for two main reasons. Firstly, they are members of a business elite that is outside of, or on the margins of critical state patronage and their anti-imperialist rhetoric is a tactic to help develop a broad, cross-class political constituency. Secondly, given their insecure class positions and marginalisation from the main sources of local capitalist accumulation they probably genuinely perceive an intensification of imperialist involvement as an economic threat to their personal aspirations and a boost to their local rivals. This emphasises an important corollary of imperialist violence – how it intensifies struggle between competing local elites and potentially sucks in other classes.
“Against this it needs to be stressed that imperialists are, for the most part, idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. The CIA isn’t some hidden cabal out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, directing events with a malign precision; it’s a hive of myopic nerds that excels only at receiving government money, levelling Pakistani villages, and systematically fucking up.”
Really? How do you know? Have you talked to them? Did they give you a guided tour of Langley? Have you reviewed their hiring procedures? Their strategy documents? What goes into their thinking? What about the State department – ever talked to them?
surely their continued and inexplicable refusal to give me an all-access tour of their facilities precisely demonstrates their idiocy
Good morning Sam-
Would like to point out a few things in your essay. First, maybe it’s because I’m a country bumpkin, but I’m rather unclear what you mean by “vulgar anti-imperialism”, if you could clear that up for me.
Second, I take issue with your words about Nigerians being just as likely to commit violence against each other as anyone else on earth. This is sort of like when the Tariq Dana piece on “Palestine’s Capitalists” was published in Jacobin, where the point was made that in some ways Palestine is more friendly to free market capitalism than the USA because it was written into their constitution. For sure, there are capitalists in Palestine – I’ve interviewed them myself – but the piece fails to mention the part where the US-NATO had basically held the pen while they wrote this document.
Likewise, I think it’s dangerous, and does the imperialists a lot of favors, to say there is an innate quality in man that enables him to commit violence to the scale of the dispossession of the Native Americans, dropping the bomb on Japan, the Holocaust, etc. We know better, we know it is a mode of production that encourages such violence that is responsible for these ills, not something hidden deep in the kernel of our hearts. Mass chattel slavery like the kind seen in the United States was unheard of in human history. Torturing prisoners, dropping a-bombs, these are all things I do not believe are inherent to the human condition, rather they are the results of history.
As for Mao and paper tigers: like Mao’s statement that the power of the people is more powerful than an atom bomb, he for sure does not mean that the atom bomb is something that should be deployed to kill itself, he means very simply that all power is subordinated to the power of the masses, which is true. Likewise, imperialists are paper tigers because they are defenseless against the power of a people united. As Mao says in his 1956 speech: “[Imperialism] is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too.” We can see that with Vietnam, which stood strong against imperial war, sacrificed millions, and successfully routed the American war machine. Of course, the imperialists were not there simply to change hearts with guns and terror; by destroying the entirety of the Vietnamese economy and infrastructure, the imperialists were creating a situation where aid could be deployed. The imperialists must build a machine, foster conflicts, and encourage divisions, atomize people, to discourage this mass anti-imperialist energy.
There is really nothing left to do once the people of the world make up their minds that enough is enough. Go to any imperialist front, go to the capital city, go to where the expats hang out. See for yourself the lives they live. They are not idiots, I don’t know how much I can stress this to you. I’ve taken the FSOE myself and passed with flying colors. The idea of the test is that you have the ability to make good decisions based on limited information. Clearly not every cog in the machine knows the exhaustive facts of their station. But the ability to make a good decision based on limited information is very important. What keeps people out, even though they have this ability, is that their foundations for decision making are compromised. Whereas my ability to make a decision based on limited information may be sound, I am pulling on a foundation that differs from chauvinism/patriotism. The people who hold imperialist clerk and strategic positions are incredibly intelligent and hard working. The idea of the bumbling imperialist, the bumbling CIA agent is carefully crafted. We do a disservice to our analysis if we assume that the intelligent system of imperialism is made up of idiots. It is a ruthless, efficient machine, and it is focused in great part on reproducing itself.
Also from Mao: “Over a long period, we have developed this concept for the struggle against the enemy: strategically we should despise all our enemies, but tactically we should take them all seriously. This also means that we must despise the enemy with respect to the whole, but that we must take him seriously with respect to each concrete question. If we do not despise the enemy with respect to the whole, we shall be committing the error of opportunism. ” – 1957 Moscow
Much love,
EMQ
thanks for your response. i hope i’m not perceived to be advancing some kind of fatalist position in which human suffering is the result of some abstract and ahistorical ‘human nature’ that cannot be changed; if i did give that impression i apologise. the nigerian state apparatus has shown itself to be a ruthless and willing genocidaire – but the conditions that have led to this are not contained within nigeria or reducible to the human condition; they’re a legacy of colonial and a product of imperialism. the point is that imperialism is not only an action taken by powerful states against less powerful states; it is a global system reproduced internally within states.
this ties in to what i mean by ‘vulgar imperialism.’ in ‘imperialsism: the highest stage of capitalism’, lenin writes of kautsky that he critiques the political aspects of imperialism while neglecting the economic aspects. the same error seems to be pervasive in the contemporary anti-imperialist left. it’s similar to the political analysis offered by some of the eXile diaspora: if we could only get rid of the koch brothers, the democratic system would work again! similarly the argument appears: if we could only get rid of the cia, usaid, usaid, and nato military intervention, the world would be set to rights. of course imperialism depends to no small degree on these organs, and their loss would impede its functioning; it is right to oppose them. but they are not ontologically prior to imperialism itself. development aid is not given necessarily to draw countries into the us political sphere, but to open them up to capitalist-imperialist exploitation, which may come in the form of taiwanese or south korean manufacturing firms, german investment banks, south african telecommunications firms, and so on. in your essay you allude to ‘the class protected by us-nato’ – it’s the global ruling class, which rather than concocting conspiracies does its work in the open, its machinations itemised for shareholder reports, that needs to be most strenuously opposed.
this has always been an aspect. even in the 19th century heyday of colonialism, the united kingdom invested far more in (for instance) morocco than many of its own colonies, while the german chemicals industry was dependent on exports from british west africa. (although as the experience of 1914-18 demonstrated, this didn’t result in a kautskyite interimperial peace.) now the rise of domestic fracking means that the united stares 5th fleet is mostly protecting oil exports to china. imperialism has always constructed itself on an ad hoc basis. the early imperial adventurers didn’t think they were setting up a stable and rational global system; they were explorers, slave-owners and monarchs seeking personal wealth and glory, and as such what they constructed was a holistic catastrophe. when i write that imperialists are idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, it’s not to suggest that they aren’t often effective at achieving short-term goals, but that they have no practical goals beyond the short term: wealth and glory, and a secure environment for their acquisition. given the scale of the catastrophe, this can only be called idiocy. this is what it means to despise the whole but take the parts seriously: to recognise that while imperialism can strike with great effectiveness, there is no telos beyond its own reproduction and intensification.
any meaningful anti-imperialist praxis must take this into account. it’s not enough to simply oppose imperialism if what’s being opposed is a chimera. no number of turgid and prolix essays on imperial misinformation on syria (which undoubtedly exists, but is taken to embody imperial strategy as a whole) will be as effective as a thorough account of the lunacy of global economic exploitation and the human suffering it causes.
I apologize for trying to restate what you’ve said very stylishly in my own, narrow terms. Is what you’re saying that the right way to oppose isn’t to use a lot of abstract sloganeering, but to hold up a mirror to the current order and point out as concretely as possible the many ways in which it makes human beings miserable? Thanks.
pretty much. it’s something i kinda failed to actually do myself here, but the point is to show how the concrete human tragedies used by imperialism to drum up support for its interventions are generally produced by imperialism or at least within conditions of imperialism.