The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, lit up the global landscape. Not only in these two cities, but wherever the news and the pictures reached during the first hours after the planes struck-all over the planet, therefore-there were people quickly able to make out features of the contemporary world that they had not previously taken in, or taken the measure of fully, things that challenged their earlier expectations and existing frameworks of understanding. Not, however, in one quarter. With a section of the Western left, the response was as if everything remained just as it had always been. Leave aside the callousness in much of the left's response toward the human dimension of the tragedy; but in explaining the crime of 9/11 the same thin categories that had been deployed in one conflict after another during a decade and more were instantly pressed into service. Imperialism and blowback-that was pretty much all one needed to understand what had befallen the citizens of Manhattan, the passengers on the planes, and the workers at the Pentagon, and there were accordingly people content to describe the attack as a comeuppance. The crime that so brutally illuminated the contours of the international political landscape thus revealed at the same time a frozen structure of concepts and assumptions. With the aid of it, many on the left shielded themselves from realities they didn't want to see or to assign their proper weight. In what follows I comment on some aspects of this theoretical nexus.

I begin from a short essay by Paul Berman entitled "A Friendly Drink in Time of War," which appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of Dissent. In that essay Berman offers six reasons why many on the left didn't see things his way over the war in Iraq, which he supported. Abbreviating them, and also adding a seventh to the six that he enumerates (it appears toward the end of his argument, though he doesn't include it as an "official" item with its own number), I set out those reasons: (1) George W. Bush; (2) the United States as being responsible for all the problems of the world; (3) support for anything construable as being anticolonial; (4) cultural relativism; (5) hostility to Israel; (6) a failure to take anti-Semitism seriously; and (7) lack of any genuine grasp of, or feeling for, the meaning of extreme forms of evil and oppression. As to this last point, Berman writes,


I have no quarrel with the claim that these seven themes figured as part of the left advocacy that Berman and others of us have opposed in the debate about the Iraq War. However, looking at things more generally, beyond simply the debate over Iraq, it is worth asking if any of these reasons have priority for the distinctively socialist left, some of it of Marxist persuasion or formation-and within which I would reckon cultural-relativist and postmodern tropes to be rather weak.

I suggest that two of them do carry more weight: namely, numbers (2) and (7). One way of supporting this suggestion is to point out that a very large segment of the political constituency I am talking about not only opposed the Iraq War, but also opposed the intervention in Afghanistan before that, and in Kosovo before that, and so on back to the first Gulf War that evicted Saddam Hussein's armies from Kuwait. And Berman's other reasons-(1), and (3) through (6)-did not figure, or did not figure every time, in the previous conflicts I have mentioned. But the United States as the foremost embodiment of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other-these have been two common poles throughout. Why does the combination lead so many on the left to come down each time on the side they do: morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?

One obvious answer-put to me on a previous occasion when I raised this question on my blog-is anti-imperialism. For it is a tradition of the Marxist, and also the broader socialist, left to identify with any "backward" (or third world, or developing) country in a conflict between it and an imperialist power. I am, of course, familiar with that tradition of identification, and so I am not surprised by the suggested answer to my question. But it is not an answer at the level of analysis I intend. I am interested, rather, in what it might be about these Marxist and other, broadly left, theoretical outlooks (within which anti-imperialism has been a large and proper concern) that so minimizes, if it doesn't completely evacuate, all competing considerations, as to lead the Western left, time after time, to campaign for courses of action that would leave the most hideously repressive regimes in place, whether in the countries they rule or in those they invade; and which seemingly forbids-as in Kosovo or Sierra Leone-Western interventions to halt ethnic cleansing, mutilation, and widespread murder? Why does the category of "imperialism" so dominate and exhaust the thinking of a section of the left as to lock it into these regrettable positions?

The question is all the more perplexing to me because of the particular generation of the left to which I belong. I mean the generation formed intellectually and politically during the 1960s, post- and anti-Stalinist in its conception of itself, and which labored strenuously-I mean this literally: it labored in its literary output, in dense and prolific works of argumentation, theory, historiography, social and political analysis-to separate itself from the earlier simplifications and reductions of the tradition it came from and that it sought to enrich. This was a generation for whom anti-reductionism was a constant watchword. A reductionist Marxist was something that, even at the height of Marxist intellectual fashion, no one wanted to be. Whether by way of the cultural themes of the Frankfurt School, of Gramscian "hegemony," Althusserian "relative autonomy," or the more empirically grounded methods of Anglophone socialist research, an enormous effort was made to establish a complex and multilayered theoretical sensibility, so that henceforth we might be in a position more effectively to grasp the multiple determinations of both the present and the past. It was a generation claiming to know that such determinations, in their range and variety, were intractable to being unified within one simple, all-encompassing story. Much of this effort, to be sure, was not related directly to issues of political strategy, much less of political ethics-an always neglected domain in Marxist writing. It concerned the need for a more advanced cognitive apparatus for grasping the complexities of the social world. Still, within this exigency, there was also significant recognition of the importance of democratic and related norms. Not everything was to be seen, henceforth, as reducible without residue to economic causalities and naked class interest.

IN AFFECTING the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. The political alignments are always defined by the primary determinant-imperialism. But how does this differ from imperialism's being the only thing, with every other social, political, or ideological reality merely epiphenomenal, taking its place and meaning within the whole from the one true cause?

This, in any case, is how the would-be correct left alignment seems perpetually to establish itself. Knowing what the United States is-hegemon of global capitalism-and knowing what it must be up to, you have no need to allow any explanatory or strategic weight to other social, political, legal, or ideological realities. No need to give any decision-making, choice-determining weight to mass murder, or torture, or the fundamental rights of human beings; to the laws of war, the effects of specific political structures and belief systems, or the effects of the operational and moral choices made by movements cast by part of the left in an anti-imperialist role; to the character of the regimes opposed to the United States and its allies, however brutal those regimes might be; to the illegalities and oppressions for which they are responsible, whether at home or beyond their own borders; to genocidal processes actually ongoing and about which something cries out to be done; to the threats posed to democratic societies by movements that have already shown their deadly intent.

If this basic way of establishing the obligatory left alignment-always "anti-imperialist," at best evasive and at worst apologetic with respect to tyrannical regimes and reactionary social forces on the other side of the conflict from democratic capitalist powers-does not by itself suffice, other supplementary moves are also available. The United States is responsible not only for what it demonstrably does or has done; it is responsible also for all the reactionary forces, whether regimes or movements, opposed to it. It created them; it armed them; it used to support them (even if it no longer does). The United States-or imperialism-is therefore bad not merely in its direct embodiment, but indirectly as well, in the way it reappears within every noxious political reality across the globe. And even if it did not create and/or arm and/or previously support whatever unpleasantness is at issue, that still is not the end of the story. For the U. S. hegemon works its effects in multifarious ways. All bad things lead back to it. There are grievances out there simmering, and they too are its fault. Its global impact makes for grievances, and these grievances are transmuted into regressive ideologies and movements that, even if this section of the left does not unambiguously support them, it contrives to "understand" in a more or less indulgent way.

There is another route to the same conclusion. Once a conflict breaks out, you can forget about the codes of war or even the most elementary moral norms deriving from centuries of ordinary human experience. Moral responsibility for every wrong that occurs in the conflict resides on the same side. If American soldiers kill civilians or commit atrocities, the United States is to blame. If those against whom the United States is fighting perpetrate similar wrongs, the United States is to blame. This might be because it started the conflict (as with Iraq in 2003); but even if it was itself responding to an act of aggression on U.S. soil (as with Afghanistan), then, well, in some deeper sense, it still started the conflict. Either the grievances at the "root" of the crime it was responding to are traceable back to it or it should not have responded in so aggressive a manner. In the endless circle of the left-apologetic mind, everything always goes back to the master cause of worldly evil, to its unique North American source.

The first part of an answer, therefore, to the question I posed above-why the category of "imperialism" should so dominate the thinking of a section of the left that, in one conflict after another, has positioned itself so lamentably vis-à-vis the very ugliest regimes and movements on the planet-is that this section of the left operates a kind of de facto or practical reductionism, all the theoretical sophistications of the Marxism of the last decades notwithstanding.

THE SECOND PART of the answer-to which I now turn-is a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly.

This is a complementary failure. Elsewhere I have argued that Marxism is as familiar as any other intellectual tradition with the realities of human violence and oppression and the more negative traits and potentialities in the makeup of human beings. At the same time, because of its utopian aspiration-which I do not mean in any pejorative sense-because of its progressive and meliorative impulse, there has always been a tendency within this tradition to minimize, or sometimes just deny, the independent force of such negative characteristics. They come to be treated, generically, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described-in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs-should be transparent.

The effect of the tendency, however, is to denature what one is looking at when one looks at the horrors of the world: a massacre of innocents; a woman being beaten in a public place or hanged in a football stadium; a place in which a man can have his ears surgically removed or his tongue cut out, or be broken and destroyed, to be followed by the next such victim, and the next, in a continuous sequence of atrocity; or a place in which a parent can be forced to watch her child tortured and murdered in front of her; or a place in which a husband can be forced to watch his wife repeatedly raped; an "ethnic cleansing" or a genocide in progress, in which entire communities are pulled up by the roots and people are shot or hacked or starved to death by the thousands or the tens of thousands; mass graves opened to yield up their terrible story.

The list, as anyone knows who keeps reading when the overwhelming temptation is to look away, could be much extended. The items on it are moral and political realities in their own right. They need to be registered and fully recognized as such. To collapse them too quickly into their putative original causes, to refer them immediately, or refer from them, to other things that have preceded them is not to give them their due as the specific phenomena they are. The horrors, for those destroyed by them or enduring them, for those whose lives are torn and wrecked and filled with grief by them, are in a double sense reduced by this quick and easy reference back to something else, putatively their real cause or origin.

Furthermore, not all the contributory causes of such grim events are of the type that the section of the left under discussion here likes to invoke-that is, causes arising elsewhere, either geographically (in the United States) or societally (in the dynamics of capitalism). Moral and political evils of this order-and I make no apology for calling them that-can and generally do have causes that are more local in a spatial sense; and they are governed or influenced by political, ideological, and moral specificities every bit as real as the capitalist economy. Not everything is systemic, in the sense of being an effect of pressures or tendencies of economic provenance, whether from the global economy or from some more particular region of it. There are independent patterns of coercion and cruelty, both interpersonal and embedded within political structures; forms of authoritarian imposition; types of invasive assault and violence, at the micro-level and at the macro-level, involving large social forces.

IT IS NECESSARY to recognize the weight and causality of these things, both in trying to understand the world we live in and in critically applying the normative principles that guide our actions. There is a space of political and moral particularity that the reference back to capitalism or imperialism, and the reference sideways to the United States of America, cannot displace. Structures and procedures of authoritarian or dictatorial or out-and-out murderous rule are just what they are, and they differ-in ways that matter as much as anything in the social universe matters-from democratic institutions and procedures and the protections afforded to individual human beings by the rule of law. These differences have their own specific gravity, and it is mystifying why so many people worldwide, whose central values purport to be about the liberation of human beings from oppression, have seemed to give them so little weight, so little practical, choice-determining weight, in how they have aligned themselves politically in recent times.

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam's Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see "capitalism," "imperialism," "America," is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lthifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

TWO PERSONAL STORIES, before concluding. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a friend of mine, a longtime socialist of mature years and outlook, surprised me by his reaction. It was to express his revulsion, a revulsion widely and rightly felt about the brutalities that U.S. soldiers had perpetrated in that prison, in terms of the sickness, the depravity, of the system that had produced them. In saying this, he wasn't talking about the prison administration, or about the military chain of command, or about particular policies adopted by either. He was talking rather, in a wholly familiar way, about the one true and original cause of everything: the capitalist system. Well, in the end, no. This way of talking says too little, and it also says too much. Torture is not only about capitalism even when it is partly about capitalism, and sometimes it isn't about capitalism at all. It is late in the day to be having still to point this out.

The second story. Somewhat over a year ago I asked that my name be removed from the list of contributing editors to the Socialist Register. It was a departure without either anger or animus on my side or on the side of the two main editors, who both responded in a friendly and regretful spirit; and it was a step I had taken with some regret myself, because I have always held the Register in affection and regard, and I still have friends among those who edit and write for it. The step was an inevitable one for me, all the same. In the light of the concerns I have articulated in this essay, I looked at the contents list of the recent (post-9/11) volumes, to find that the Register was just not where I am. If one single thing can be cited as summing up the unease I would have felt had I not decided to make the break, it is this passage from the preface to the 2003 volume titled Fighting Identities:


Note the way in which identities seen here in negative terms are simply left as what they are on the American side of the global dualism, but assigned a benign and "understandable" source on the other side. The U.S. state is simply world capitalism; it is the embodiment of an "all too often chauvinist" identity. By inference and by contrast, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the like-"reactionary fundamentalist" identities-are for their part a response to the pain induced by oppression and exploitation. That is the normative shape of the world, in essence a moral bipolarity. Except that it isn't-not if the world is the real world, in which the politics of democracy differ importantly, irreducibly, from more regressive types of politics and systems of belief.

One last observation. I have written about the political dispositions of a significant segment of the left, some of it of Marxist persuasion or formation, and some of it not, although the latter also socialist and sharing with the Marxist part the same tendencies to practical reductionism and deficiency of moral imagination that I have here set out. I would suggest also, however, that within the international "peace" movement, as it flatters itself to be, there is an even wider constituency, not only not Marxist but not recognizably socialist either-liberals, radicals, greens, anarchists, and other progressives of one kind and another-which exhibits variants of the same double tendency I have diagnosed: on the one hand, the practical reductionism by which the wrongs of the world are lightly referred back to their alleged causes, whether in U.S. foreign policy, or economic hardship, or grievance, or whatever; on the other hand, a disinclination or refusal to acknowledge in their full magnitude and moral significance the political evils for which other states, organizations, and movements are responsible.

This wider constituency has not been my subject here, and I will not attempt to account for it at length. I offer merely this conjecture. There is a looser, progressivist, and (so to say) "sociologizing" variant of the themes I have focused on above, whereby wrongdoing in the world, and much worse than wrongdoing, has nearly always to be seen as somehow redeemable by reference to background social conditions-which may then be taken as alleviating the scale of the wrongs, or the worse-than-wrongs, in question. (I say "nearly" always, because the forever blameworthy are excluded from this explanatory indulgence.) You only have to attend for a few weeks to the left-liberal press and the traffic on the opinion and letters pages there in order to find this wider constituency, most of it unattached to Marxist doctrine of any kind, yet very attached to the thematic couple that has been the subject of this essay. There is, of course, another way of characterizing its outlook. It is Manichaean: everything bad in the world drains away from one side of it toward the other.

Norman Geras is professor emeritus in politics at the University of Manchester. His books include The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust and Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. His blog is at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/

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