Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism

NB: What enables someone who has been a communist all his life become an ultra-chauvinist overnight? What lies beneath the slippery nature of ideology, and what is the difference between political philosophy and ideology? Why do Leninist parties in power enforce single-party dictatorships? What is the communist understanding of law and justice – is it merely that might is right? Why are comrades averse to discussing these matters in a non-polemical conversation? Do they realise how much closer they are to Carl Schmitt than to Karl Marx? These are some of the questions (in my view) that are thrown up by this well-liked and timely essay by Kavita Krishnan; which has been translated into many world languages. DS

The Left’s advocacy for ‘multipolarity’ against a US-led unipolar order has, in effect, defended authoritarianism across the world. The Left must reflect on how its language enables such regimes

KAVITA KRISHNAN

Multipolarity is the compass orienting the Left’s understanding of international relations. All streams of the Left in India and globally have for long advocated for a multipolar world as opposed to a unipolar one dominated by the imperialist USA. At the same time, multipolarity has become the keystone of the shared language of global fascisms and authoritarianisms. It is a rallying cry for despots, that serves to dress up their war on democracy as a war on imperialism. The deployment of multipolarity to disguise and legitimise despotism is immeasurably enabled by the ringing endorsement by the global Left of multipolarity as a welcome expression of anti-imperialist democratisation of international relations.

By framing its response to political confrontations within or between nation states as a zero-sum option between endorsing multipolarity or unipolarity, the Left perpetuates a fiction that even at its best, was always misleading and inaccurate. But this fiction is positively dangerous today, serving solely as a narrative and dramatic device to cast fascists and authoritarians in flattering roles.

The unfortunate consequences of the Left’s commitment to a value-free multipolarity are illustrated very starkly in the case of its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The global and the Indian Left have legitimised and amplified (to varying degrees) Russian fascist discourse, by defending the invasion as a multipolar challenge to US-led unipolar imperialism.

The freedom to be fascist

On 30 September, while announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Russian President Vladimir Putin spelt out what multipolarity and democracy meant in his ideological framework. He defined multipolarity as freedom from the attempts by Western elites to establish their own ‘degraded’ values of democracy and human rights as universal values; values ‘alien’ to the vast majority of people in the West and elsewhere.

Putin’s rhetorical ploy was to declare that the concepts of a rules-based order, democracy, and justice are nothing more than ideological and imperialist impositions by the West, serving merely as pretexts to violate the sovereignty of other nations.

As Putin played to the justifiable outrage at the long list of crimes by Western countries – including colonialism, imperialism, invasions, occupations, genocides, and coups – it was easy to forget that his was not a speech demanding justice and reparations and an end to these crimes. In fact, by asserting the self-evident fact that the Western governments did not have “any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about democracy,” Putin skilfully cut people out of the equation.

People of the colonised nations are the ones who fought and continue to fight for freedom. People of the imperialist nations come on the streets to demand democracy and justice, and protest racism, wars, invasions, occupations committed by their own governments. But Putin was not supporting these people…

https://www.theindiaforum.in/amp/politics/multipolarity-mantra-authoritarianism

Kavita Krishnan is a Marxist feminist activist and author (Fearless Freedom, 2020).

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The Lady Vanishes

Militant capitalism, bad infinity, and the longing for total revolution

Rohini Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine / The Greatest Evil Is War

Madhavan Palat’s lecture on the Ukraine War: Regional History & Current Crisis

The search for new time – Ahimsa in an age of permanent war

Satyagraha – An answer to modern nihilism

Closing the Circle (Frontier, August 2012)

Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution

Achintya Barua remembers Ranajit Guha