half-baked analogizing about opposition to the Iraq War and thinking about covid politics
It does what it say on the tin! I read another paper by the international law scholar and Marxist theorist Robert Knox and wanted to jot down some thoughts. The paper’s here: https://www.academia.edu/64028197/International_law_politics_and_opposition_to_the_Iraq_War It’s great, I recommend it, do yourself a favor and read it! (And while a lot of my own responses are probly lackluster don’t blame Knox for that!)
The paper has a lot to say about opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, specifically how that opposition tended to emphasize that the invasion was illegal. That emphasis, the paper argues, had apparently beneficial short term effects tied with major down sides. The upside is basically that because illegality is agreed to be objectionable by a great many people, the ‘this is illegal!’ frame allowed a large number of people of diverse views to gather without having to be troubled by their differences or to spend much real time addressing them. That is already itself a downside as well, in that the focus on illegality meant there was less deliberation and transformative effect for participants in the movement (that’s my gloss on the paper, to be fair). Furthermore, the illegality frame itself baked in a politics of implicitly embracing the liberal order prior to the invasion, and precluded deeper accounts and structural criticisms of the causes of the war and the social re-organization needed to produce a war-free world. That frame also ended up creating resources to legitimate other military actions - if the problem is illegal military action, well, then no need to pay attention to or oppose legal military actions! - and as the invasion became the occupation it was harder to criticize the latter on terms of (il)legality. In addition, that frame tended to displace arguments from structural criticisms and the morality of the war and so on into technical disputes about what is and isn’t legal - lawyers’ terrain: the emphasis on legality ultimately ceded a significant amount of authority to experts. The paper sums up a lot of this by saying that one result is that in embracing an emphasis on the illegality of the invasion, the antiwar movement became far less able to tie its actions as tactics into a larger strategy focused on anything beyond its immediate objectives, which is what defines a strategy as such. It also makes a point somewhere that thinking in terms of international law specifically ended up making the antiwar movement inadvertently think too much like a state - international law being all about states and their interactions.
Like I say, it’s a good paper and I recommend it. It also speaks to me, as someone who marched a lot against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The reason I’m writing about it here though is that I was struck reading it by some analogous patterns in relation to the covid pandemic at least as it unfolded in the US. I think early on there was a sense that Trump was bungling things through a mix of incompetence and maliciousness, and Biden ran in part on a platform of better mitigations. There was also an early-ish period where the official pandemic response was a solidaristic one. That’s loosely analogous to the moment when there was some legal opposition to war within international law, technically speaking (Knox’s work is very good on showing the limits of that opposition - the law was never so anti-war as all that - as well as why orienting around the law and legality/illegality is bad for social movements). The nominal orientation of international law against war is something like the state’s nominal orientation toward the well-being of the population: the orientation is thin and largely circumstantial, just real enough to promote some mistaken overestimation of the liberal legal order’s capacity - and actual commitment - to preventing war and pandemics. The reality is that the legal order is artifact of a disaster-genic set of social relations (capitalism fosters war and pandemic disease) and takes those disasters as givens to be organized in specific ways rather than as something to really prevent.
With regard to the pandemic, many of us were in effect won over - I for on walked into the pandemic not realizing I had already been won over - to an undue faith in the capitalist state (again analogous, roughly, to many of us in the early 2000s thinking ‘invading is ILLEGAL’ would do more than it turns out it would really do to check the system-generated war mongers). One effect of this, I think, was that many of us started from the version of solidaristic response organized by the state early on - we significantly borrowed our politics from the state, so to speak, in at least three senses. One is that we tried to encourage what the state seemed initially to be doing - encourage masking, encourage vaccination, ask for a set of policies, etc. Another is that many people oriented, as the state did - and as the state set us to do - toward each other, in a context of relative polarization within US political culture: fucking anti-vaxers! basket of deplorables! and so on, which in turn soon became a means for the Biden administration to rhetorically deflect its own responsibilities: ‘it’s out of our hands guys, many of the populace are just malignant dipshits, sorry’ kinda thing. Another is that there wasn’t much of a left force putting out an analysis of what was happening and why, beyond small voices in relative isolation. Some of this is just down to the left being in a bad way for a while, but some of this, I think, is down to a lot of the left not doing some of that analysis, in part because as I said for a while we could borrow our politics from the state response.
I think this is, again only roughly, analogous to the focus on the illegality of the invasion of Iraq: emphasis on illegality fostered mobilization (similar to how state action around various pandemic-mitigating behaviors fostered some of those behaviors) and at the same time it meant the movement did less and had to do less projecting of a clear analysis of what was happening and what to do about beyond yelling ‘don’t!’ at the government. Borrowing politics from the state meant less projection of a clear political analysis and development thereof outside some heroic efforts by small and underresourced individuals, and it also meant less of a holistic approach to understanding the disaster. (To grind one of my favorite axes, a major overriding priority of the National Labor Relations Act is to tie unions’ hands outside of contract negotiation, as part of fostering a labor movement that won’t disrupt capital accumulation. This is part of why the labor movement’s hands were significantly tied on the pandemic as workplace safety issue, and why it doesn’t seem to have become much of a matter even considered for action - spend enough time with hands tied and one begins to imagine one’s hands as naturally tied. This is hardly the only piece of the puzzle of the pandemic clusterfuck but it’s one piece, one that a holistic account of how this nightmare is artifact of capitalist social relations as they actually exist would address.)
Emphasis on legality and the war displaced some political and moral questions into a terrain of expert interpretations, sometimes expressed in a kind of alt-expertise as people try to learn enough about international law to be able to make various claims. (Something similar is happening now around the Trump administration, to some degree, I think, with some people thinking we need to know ins and outs of legal matters as part of judging the administration’s actions, and similar happened with regard to the massacre in Gaza - as if that atrocity’s legality has any bearing on how urgent is the need to stop that slaughter.) There’s a roughly analogous displacement regarding covid in terms of expertise, as if we all need to know The Science and as if The Science is politically conclusive somehow, which at least partially defers to experts on political questions. This is very much where I’ve been personally and to some extent still am, for what it’s worth. Obviously knowing what’s really happening in terms of numbers of infections and so on, and in terms of the actual health harms caused by infection and how those harms in large numbers help contribute to a picture of the social situation, that all matters a great deal. But it matters for informing a meaningful response from below, rather than being itself constructive of or constituting such a response. The facts don’t speak for themselves. They seemed to at one point because the state was speaking through them in relatively (and only relatively) solidaristic fashion, until it wasn’t anymore.
I think those missteps were understandable as this novel nightmare unfolded, but one effect was that we weren’t set up for turns involved in that unfolding. The valorization of scientific experts meant that the increasing relative silence of many such experts spoke volumes and the minimization of the pandemic by some such experts (tempted to say ‘so-called’ but the point is they played the social role of experts) did as well. It also meant that many of us were accidentally accustomed to doing the politics in passing through the medium of - that is, dealing with political matters of the pandemic as embedded or dissolved within - technical accounts of the empirical facts of the matter: are cases rising or falling, etc, as if there’s a clear line of amount of harm that triggers some clear response, rather than that line, that response, and the set of elements of social life fostering the catastrophe all being significantly a matter to work out politically (in analysis and eventually in action informed by that analysis).
One other thought, another analogy. I think the opposition of international law to war wasn’t exactly real let alone robust (I think that’s a fair if awkward paraphrase of one part of Knox’s argument - I can’t do it justice, if it interests you then I recommend the paper, if it sounds offbase then assume that’s a problem of my paraphrase rather than the paper itself), but it was understandable why people appealed to that in a moment when the Bush 2 administration was more willing than usual to be flagrant about defying the law, as opposed to more typical times when the law provides a pathway, however circuitous, to war. Anyway, one way to characterize the appeal to legality is as an example of Raymond Williams called residual culture, meaning taking up something that was previously part of the dominant culture and trying to use it for purposes alternative or oppositional to the present dominant culture. To some extent we might call that politicized nostalgia. I’m not sure I’m right about that regarding the war and opposition to it, but with regard to the pandemic, well...
I still mask at work because pre-pandemic I got sick several times a year from students and colleagues and since I started masking, I don’t. I do feel some downsides to masking interpersonally (I don’t like feeling like a weirdo and whatnot, and having differences of values and outlook be that directly front and center) and that sucks, but to me its just a simple cost/benefit and risk/reward matter: why would I be willing to get sick more often at a job where the pay is flat and mediocre, the benefits keep getting worse each year, and workload keeps rising, let alone sick with an illness that has the risks of longterm effects that covid has?
I mention that to get to telling you that I have a printout on my door of an old MTA graphic of two people masking and it says something like ‘I protect you, you protect me.’ That’s a bit from where the dominant culture was at for a moment and I hold onto it, that’s Williams’s residual, and to some extent this is an example of lack of robust independent covid politics, I’m still borrowing from the state here to a degree, and it doesn’t convince really - it convinced more when the dominant culture was in a different place so that the slogan and graphic wasn’t residual.
I also think at the time it was hard to tell the difference between being in an alternative/oppositional position and being aligned with one tendency within the dominant culture against another. (The dominant culture is always in an argument with itself.)
It occurs to me now that there’s probably something similar going on with Trump and some versions of opposition to fascism, related a bit to what I was going on about the other day on here. There is or was a dominant culture conception of fascism tied to a dominant culture repertoire of political actions (vote and donate to Democrats, mostly) which is different from a left oppositional conception and political repertoire, but it can be hard to tell them apart sometimes (or, they dissolve into each other sometimes, and more often in a way that contains the left than opens real political opportunities for the left). This isn’t unique, I think, but probly a perennial type of problem, albeit one I suspect is amplified right now because the left is in disarray.