Socialist Register 2003 Preface

Abstract

We decided to devote this, the 39th volume of the Socialist Register, to the theme of 'fighting identities' in mid-2000, a year before September 11, 2001. The volume is thus not about terrorism, or the 'war on terrorism', but it is about the conflicts and contradictions of which the attacks on New York and Washington DC were epiphanic. It is surely clear that the dangerous possibilities that flow from those terrible events can only be averted if the underlying relationships that gave rise to them are first fore-grounded and understood. The 'fighting identities' we are concerned with reflect two closely linked global realities. One is the dual role of the American state as both the manager of a world capitalist order (a role it alone can play) and as the embodiment of the American national interest--and an all too often chauvinist identity. The other reality is the way particularist and exclusivist identities are so often a response to something universal, i.e. the pain felt by victims of oppression and exploitation everywhere. Even reactionary fundamentalist identities may be seen as distorted and perverse responses of this kind, in the vacuum created by the defeat of rational and progressive alternatives.