Reports on Ends and Means in Campus Politics
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
POLITICS IS ABOUT ends and means—about the values that we pursue and the methods by which we pursue them. In a perfect world, there would be a perfect congruence between ends and means: our ends...
...Rather than engage in military aggression, those in authority should apprehend and charge those individuals believed to be directly responsible for the attacks and try them in a court of law in accordance with due process of international law...
...the harm that will come to ordinary Iraqi or Serbian or Afghan citizens as a result of intervention...
...What mattered was simply the expression of righteous indignation about what is wrong with the United States, as if September 11 hadn't really happened...
...The most notable thing about the Bloomington statement is its avoidance of political justice...
...The left, particularly the campus left—by which I mean "progressive" faculty and student groups, often centered around labor solidarity organizations and campus Green affiliates—has become moralistic rather than politically serious...
...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 37...
...This declaration was hardly unique...
...Some of its moralizing—about Chiapas, Palestine, and Iraq—continues the third worldism that plagued the New Left in its waning years...
...The other, more serious consequence of this moralizing tendency is the failure to think seriously about global politics...
...See http://www.gospan.org...
...military response—is simply defined as aggression...
...Most striking about the campus left's response to September 11 was its refusal to ask these questions...
...It supports redistributing wealth...
...legality is treated as having its own force, independent of any means of enforcement...
...military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response...
...But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand...
...This refusal is linked to a peculiar strain of pacifism, according to which any use of military force by the United States is viewed as aggression or militarism...
...policy and its likely consequences, but in a strikingly ineffective way...
...But these symbolic avowals are not an effective way of contending for political influence or power in the society in which these activists live...
...Only love leads to peace with justice, while hate takes us toward war and injustice...
...This was not an ordinary injustice...
...they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order...
...It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case...
...This was utterly predictable...
...Vicarious identifications with Subcommandante Marcos or starving Iraqi children allow left activists to express a genuine solidarity with the oppressed elsewhere that is surely legitimate in a globalizing age...
...It alienates those who are not true believers...
...Drafted by the Bloomington Peace Coalition, it opposed what was then an imminent war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda, and called for peace...
...And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power...
...The campus left offers no such account...
...Whatever one thinks about America's deficiencies, it must be acknowledged that a political praxis preoccupation with this is foolish and self-defeating...
...The history of left political thought in the twentieth century is a history of serious arguments about ends and means in politics, arguments about how to pursue the difficult work of achieving social justice in an unjust world...
...The campus left says what it thinks...
...As Global Exchange declared in its antiwar statement of September 11: "vengeance offers no relief...
...But it exhibits little interest in how and why so many Americans think differently...
...Similar statements were issued on college campuses across the country, by local student or faculty coalitions, the national Campus Greens, 91 1 peace.org, and the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition...
...These are important issues...
...To refuse to do this is to evade responsibility...
...Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies...
...It exaggerated the likely negative consequences of a military response, but failed to consider the consequences of failing 36 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS to act decisively against terrorism...
...A1-Qaeda did precisely this...
...and it is oblivious to the tradition of left thinking about ends and means...
...Charges like that lack intellectual or political merit...
...But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people...
...A military response to terrorist aggression is not in any obvious sense an act of aggression, unless any military response—or at least any U.S...
...Many left activists seem more able to identify with (idealized versions of) Iraqi or Afghan civilians than with American citizens, whether these are the people who perished in the Twin Towers or the rest of us who legitimately fear that we might be next...
...Be wary of violence...
...and to meet violence with violence breeds more rage and more senseless deaths...
...In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power...
...The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime—the Taliban—that rose to power through brutality and repression...
...There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system—the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel...
...But it should never be mistaken for a serious political commitment...
...In each case protesters have raised serious questions about U.S...
...because it is easier to denounce wrong than to take real responsibility for correcting it, easier to locate and to oppose a remote evil than to address a proximate difficulty...
...Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power...
...It is a sign of this left's alienation from the society in which it operates (the worst examples of this are statements of the Student Peace Action Coalition Network, which declare that "the United States Government is the world's greatest terror organization," and suggest that "homicidal psychopaths of the United States Government" engineered the World Trade Center attacks as a pretext for imperialist aggression...
...First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers—terrorism...
...They are unmentioned because to broach them is to enter a terrain that the campus left is unwilling to enter—the terrain of violence, a realm of complex choices and dirty hands...
...Although they often expressed genuine horror about the terrorism, they focused their energy not on the legitimate fear and outrage of American citizens but rather on the evils of the American government and its widely supported response to the terror...
...But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11...
...It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose— to kill people and to create terror and havoc...
...The campus left is rightly interested in the ills of global capitalism...
...But politically it seems limited to two options: expressions of "solidarity" with certain oppressed groups—Palestinians but not Syrians, Afghan civilians (though not those who welcome liberation from the Taliban), but not Bosnians or Kosovars or Rwandans—and automatic opposition to American foreign policy in the name of anti-imperialism...
...And this, alas, is the only world that exists...
...Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg LukAcs, and Antonio Gramsci—and also John Dewey, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus...
...Projects such as the Green Party engage with electoral politics, locally and nationally, in order to win public office and achieve political objectives...
...None of these points withstands serious scrutiny...
...and the cycle of violence that is likely to ensue...
...What is striking about much of the political discussion on the left today is its failure to 32 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS engage this earlier tradition of argument...
...As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked...
...Some of it—about globalization and sweatshops— is new and in some ways promising (see my "Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement," Dissent, Fall 2001...
...the problem of hegemony and the limits of mass politics...
...This is not because of any "disloyalty...
...The ease with which the campus left responded to September 11 by rehearsing an alltoofamiliar narrative of American militarism and imperialism is not simply disturbing...
...In the best of all imaginable worlds, it might be possible to defeat al-Qaeda without using force and without dealing with corrupt regimes and political forces like the Northern Alliance...
...It simply makes them different...
...Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment...
...On this view military action of any kind is figured as "aggression" or "vengeance...
...Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought...
...And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence...
...but it is accompanied by a refusal to think in political terms about the realities of states, international institutions, violence, and power...
...To compare the debates within the left about the two world wars or the Spanish Civil War with the predictable "anti-militarism" of today's campus left is to compare a discourse that was serious about political power with a discourse that is not...
...but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters...
...WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics...
...Marx's vision of the "riddle of history solved" and Engels's vision of the "withering away of the state" were two canonical expressions of the belief in an end-state in which perfect justice could be achieved once and for all...
...it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways...
...Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not...
...The economic discourse of the campus left is a universalist discourse of human needs and workers rights...
...government has often supported terrorism...
...It is because of a debilitating moralism...
...As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Bloomington...
...It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong...
...Justice, however, most assuredly is a political goal...
...And, finally, while "healing" is surely a legitimate moral goal, it is not clear that it is a political goal...
...The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends...
...In a perfect world, there would be a perfect congruence between ends and means: our ends would always be achievable through means that were fully consistent with them...
...To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about...
...To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality...
...But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong...
...A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice...
...the role of violence in class struggle...
...Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world...
...it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant...
...This aversion to violence is understandable and in some ways laudable...
...To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility...
...What is one to do...
...And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate...
...Such a world of absolute justice lies beyond politics...
...What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice...
...But then there would be no need to pursue just ends, for these would already be realized...
...Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important...
...Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil...
...This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime...
...And it is not that political democracy is derided...
...it is in tension with a commitment to human emancipation (is there no cause for which it is justifiable to fight...
...Like many antiwar texts, it calls for "social justice abroad...
...It is the core of politics...
...The left has historically been burdened by the image of such a world...
...America's use of violence has caused much harm in the world, from Southeast Asia to Central and Latin America to Africa...
...ACASE IN POINT 1S a petition circulated on the campus of Indiana University within days of September 11...
...Many of these arguments were foolish, many of their conclusions were specious, and many of the actions followed from them were barbaric...
...Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left—that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends...
...rather it will harm innocent people and further the cycle of violence...
...It is assumed that U.S...
...But criminal and retributive justice, protection against terrorist violence, or the political enforcement of the minimal conditions of global civility—these are unmentioned...
...And it undermines political effectiveness...
...rhetoric, which denounces terrorism even though the U.S...
...retaliation can never guarantee healing...
...This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic...
...He writes regularly for Dissent, and his most recent book is Democracy in Dark Times...
...To be politically responsible is to engage this world and to consider the choices that it presents...
...the hypocrisy of official U.S...
...Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world...
...Equally absent is critical thinking about why citizens of liberal democratic states—including most workers and the poor—value liberal democracy and subscribe to what Jurgen Habermas has called "constitutional patriotism": a patriotic identification with the democratic state because of the civil, political, and social rights it defends...
...Terrorism can only be stopped...
...In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong...
...it is often a form of complicity in injusDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 35 AFTERSHOCKS Lice...
...harm to innocents, whether substantial or marginal, intended or unintended, is absolutely proscribed...
...The problem of ends and means in politics was often handled poorly, but it was nonetheless taken seriously, even if so many on the left failed to think clearly about the proper relationship between their perfectionist visions and their often Machiavellian strategies...
...In addition, the 34 • DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS destructive capacities of modern warfare— which jeopardize the civilian/combatant distinction, and introduce the possibility of enormous ecological devastation—make war under any circumstances something to be feared...
...2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness...
...Hardly anyone was paying attention, but they alienated anyone who was...
...BUT WHAT is absent is a sober reckoning with the preoccupations and opinions of the vast majority of Americans, who are not drawn to vocal denunciations of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization and who do not believe that the discourse of "anti-imperialism" speaks to their lives...
...and, most revealingly, "healing" is treated as the principal goal of any legitimate response...
...and the relationship between class struggle and war...
...It is to say that power is not reducible to morality...
...It was an extraordinary injustice...
...It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means—perhaps the dangerous means—we have to employ in order to oppose it...
...The so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" was the product of a real learning experience that should not be forgotten...
...Such a stance may indicate a sincere refusal of unsavory choices...
...It is not that conspiratorial or antidemocratic means are promoted...
...These questions preoccupied Karl Kautsky, V.I...
...It declared: "Retaliation will not lead to healing...
...One consequence of this tendency is a failure to worry about methods of securing political support through democratic means or to recognize the distinctive value of democracy itself...
...This unpragmatic approach has become a hallmark of post–cold war left commentary, from the Gulf War protests of 1991, to the denunciation of the 1999 U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo, to the current post–September 11 antiwar movement...
...In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect...
...And that is my point...
...and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions...
...Its appeals to "international law" were naïve...
...the consequences of parliamentary versus revolutionary strategies of social change...
...This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere...
...It is virtually impossible either to "apprehend" and prosecute terrorists or to put an end to terrorist networks without the use of military force, for the "criminals" in question are not law-abiding citizens but mass murderers, and there are no police to "arrest" them...
...This is why, from the standpoint of politics— as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand...
...While any justifiable military response should certainly be governed by just-war principles, the criterion of absolute harm avoidance would rule out the possibility of any military response...
...It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion...
...in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work...
...But what characterizes much campus left discourse is a substitution of moral rhetoric about evil policies or institutions for a sober consideration of what might improve or replace them, how the improvement might be achieved, and what the likely costs, as well as the benefits, are of any reasonable strategy...
...Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil...
...Ordinary injustice can be remedied...
...And yet the left's reflexive hostility toward violence in the international domain is strange...
...Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power...
...Proceed with caution...
...The "peace" demonstrations organized across the country within a few days of the September 11 attacks—in which local Green Party activists often played a crucial role—were, whatever else they were, a sign of their organizers' lack of judgment and common sense...
...Centered around but not reducible to classical Marxism, this tradition has focused on such questions as the relations of class, party, and state...
...On the contrary, the means employed tend to be preeminently democratic—petitions, demonstrations, marches, boycotts, corporate campaigns, vigorous public criticism...
...But they typically are raised by left critics not to promote real debate about practical alternatives, but to avoid such a debate or to trump it...
...The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life...
...Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing...
...The predictable consequences did DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 33 AFTERSHOCKS not matter...
...No civilized person should approach the topic of war with anything other than great trepidation...
...It is inconsistent with avowals of "materialism" and evocations of "struggle," especially on the part of those many who are not pacifists...
...But the left has also developed a concurrent tradition of serious strategic thinking about politics...
...It promotes arrogance...
...That does not make the other injustices unimportant...
...the tension between ends and means would not exist...
...But in this world it is not possible...
...They sound a few key themes: the broader context of grievances that supposedly explains why Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Osama bin Laden have done what they have done...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
