The left and ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’: the theory of accommodation

Submitted by Anon on 16 August, 2007 - 12:42 Author: Clive Bradley

In Manuel Puig’s novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men confront each other in a prison cell, somewhere in South America. One is a trashy movie-loving homosexual; the other a revolutionary, a guerrilla.

The book is concerned with the nature of liberation; Valentin, the political activist, learns that Molina, his cellmate, for whom at first he has nothing but contempt, deserves freedom and respect. Valentin is a terrorist, if you like, a member of a militant guerrilla organisation not unusual in the Latin America of the 1960s and 70s, influenced by the Cuban revolution and Che Guevara.

The methods of such guerrillaism, whether urban or rural “foco”, proved disastrous, provoking repression and resulting in the deaths of many revolutionary militants. But their “discourse” was one of freedom. Valentin has waged war on the military dictatorship of his unnamed country in the name of freedom; and so he is able to learn, locked in his prison cell, that his notion of freedom was too limited. Molina, in the name of love, sacrifices himself for Valentin’s cause. However distant they seem to be, Valentin and Molina are speaking, ultimately, the same language. They have the same aim.

You can imagine a version of The Kiss of the Spider Woman set in a jail perhaps in Egypt, in which one of 52 recently arrested gay men is confined with a member of Islamic Jihad. Perhaps, fictionally, by the end of it, the Islamist — let’s say he’s one of those responsible for the slaughter of tourists at Luxor a few years ago — has come to love his cellmate, as Valentin does. Or perhaps our Egyptian Molina finds himself ready to die for the Islamist cause. But such an ending involves quite a different kind of understanding than that in Puig’s novel. In this case there would be no fused, common language. Either “Molina” accepts that his sexuality is a crime against God, and the tourists with whom he has, no doubt, enjoyed liaisons in the past are “abominations” deserving death; or “Valentin” realises that the project to which he has devoted his life is wrong. There can be no cross-fertilisation, no rejuvenated, single concept of liberty, only a mortal clash of world views in which one or other must win.

It is this specific character of contemporary Islamism which Chris Harman fails utterly to register in The Prophet and the Proletariat. On the contrary, the gist of his argument is to see Islamism as no different, in essence, to other “contradictory”, “petty bourgeois” movements elsewhere in time and place. Against the views that Islamism is “automatically reactionary and ‘fascist’” and that it is “automatically anti-imperialist”, Harman argues that it is the product of “a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve”. He concludes that, politically, socialists need to be “with the state, never; with the fundamentalists, sometimes.”

Harman says that “the Islamists are not our allies” and “socialists cannot give support to” them. (p53). But we can’t “simply take an abstentionist, dismissive attitude to the Islamists”, because the “feeling of revolt” of those who suffer under world capitalism and who have turned to Islamism, “could be tapped for progressive purposes.” There is a lot of verbal ambiguity here (“not support” rather than “oppose”, “not allies” rather than “enemies”; who, after all, wants to be abstentionist? And what does “dismissive” mean?) Harman confuses an assessment of why sections of the “suffering classes” turn to Islamism with an analysis of the movements as such. His ambiguities hide behind an apparently rigorous Marxist study of social classes and “contradictions”.

To begin with, the dichotomy Harman presents, the two views of Islamism he sets out to attack, is not a fair one. It is true that many leftists in the Middle East from Stalinist or nationalist backgrounds, and intellectuals in the West, advocate support for “liberals” or the state against the Islamists. It is true that some commentators describe these movements as “fascist” without qualification. Fascism is, largely, a European phenomenon, in its full-blown sense, which (as Harman notes) aims to smash powerful working class movements. Islamism exists in countries without such movements.

But you can very well consider Islamism analogous to fascism without going on to ignore its differences with classical fascism and without supporting state repression against it. Instead of dealing with the substantial arguments about the important similarities between Islamist movements and fascism, with qualifications, Harman tries to discredit them by association with the political conclusion — support for state repression — which he suggests must follow from recognising those similarities. Islamist movements, which are organised political forces, are the enemies — the violent enemies, more often than not — of workers, trade unionists, socialists, feminists, women generally, non-Muslim minorities, oppressed nationalities, and so on. This is a fact. It is also a fact, increasingly, that they express their violent hostility through the mobilisation of a mass movement. It is, indeed, a mass movement with its own contradictions; socialists, with tactical skill, could hope to break individuals from these movements; and with success in building powerful workers’ organisations hope to influence the mass base of the Islamist groups and marginalise them.

But for the most part imagining ourselves, as Western socialists, as engaged in a tactical battle with the Islamists against a common enemy is a fantasy. Our first job is to “say what is”.

It is instructive to see what Harman means when he says that the Islamists are not “automatically anti-imperialist”. Analysing Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and Iran, he argues that being, fundamentally, petty bourgeois in nature, the Islamist movements are pulled in two directions. Essentially, one wing — representing conservative classes — is pulled into an accommodation with capital, imperialism, and so on. The other — representing other layers of the petty bourgeoisie, students for instance, and the poor — becomes dissatisfied with such accommodation. As far as it goes, this is true. But in attempting to subsume Islamism, effectively, into old-fashioned nationalism, Harman misses the point dramatically. Because even where Islamist groups take a “radical”, violently oppositionist stand, this does not demonstrate that their notion of anti-imperialism has anything in common with ours.(1)

Arguing for support for some Islamist actions, such as demonstrations against the Gulf War in 1991, Harman writes: “But even then we continue to disagree… on basic issues. We are for the right to criticise religion as well the right to practice it… We are against discrimination against Arab[ic] speakers by big business in countries like Algeria — but also against the Berber speakers and those… who have grown up speaking French… as well as defending Islamists against the state we will also be defending women, gays, Berbers or Copts against some Islamists.” (p 56).

We “disagree”, “defend against”… The language here is all as if fictional SWP members in Algeria or Egypt are engaged in some united front with confused reformists, or some version of the Anti-Nazi League. When Algerian women who won’t wear the veil are gunned down by passing Islamists on motorcycles, are we merely “disagreeing”? When supporters of the Iranian Islamic Republican Party abroad used thuggery against leftist opponents, were we merely “disagreeing”? Perhaps Harman has in mind people, mainly youth, in Britain who are influenced by Islamism, and the pamphlet is aimed at engaging with them. Whether this is a method which succeed strikes me as questionable.

Harman’s anxiety to understand the social discontents feeding Islamist movements is laudable. But not if it means a failure to understand the concrete reality of these movements in relation to actual, currently existing, real progressive forces, or to see their reactionary programme merely as something to argue with them about (over Turkish coffee in the suq, no doubt).

Harman’s one comment on Hamas, for example, is to remind us of “the arguments [in Hamas]… about whether or not they should compromise with Arafat’s rump Palestinian administration — and therefore indirectly with Israel…” (p 54) “Compromise” with Israel, for Harman, is the symbol of capitulation; as long as Hamas does not compromise, it is expressing genuinely radical aspirations. The nature and consequences of its political programme are less important than the fact of its “militancy” and refusal to “compromise”.

In other words, when Harman says the Islamists are “not automatically anti-imperialist”, he means that while some (bad) Islamists are not anti-imperialist, other (better) ones are. The task of socialists, therefore, is to sort out which Islamists are anti-imperialists and which are not. The substance and nature of their anti-imperialism is a secondary matter.

These movements plainly — nobody is seeking to deny it — articulate social grievances of the masses, the dispossessed poor, layers of students and petty bourgeois, and so on. But they are not merely expressing “progressive” struggles with a reactionary programme, which is Harman’s train of thought. They have channelled struggles which could, under some circumstances, be progressive, in a reactionary direction, mobilised them in a reactionary movement. Anti-imperialism without a democratic programme, without freedom for women, and national minorities, without the space for the working class to develop its own ideas and organisations, this is not inconsistent and limited; in the world as it is today, it is not anti-imperialism at all.

Harman’s analysis enormously downgrades the role played in the formation of the Islamic Republic by the old exploiters, who had suffered under the Shah’s land reforms, the bazaari merchants (though he mentions this), and the mosques who had been taxed by the state, and the extent to which, therefore, the revolution in the first place brought together social forces with quite contradictory aims. Of course the Islamic Republic was not merely this: but the dominant social and political forces represented by Khomeini were traditional ones, mobilising a popular base, and of course in the contemporary world having no choice but to “be capitalist” once in power.

It also downplays the practical, as opposed to abstract-strategic, failures of the Iranian left. Khomeini mobilised a mass movement physically to destroy the left. Harman refers to this but seems to draw no conclusion from it other than a descriptive one. The problem for the left was that it didn’t recognise that this mass movement was its homicidal enemy until it was too late. Perhaps even if they had, they would have been too weak to defeat it. But it was not only the government in which the left had illusions. The violent attacks on them took them by surprise. Harman underrates the problem presented by the Islamists “on the street”, imagining it is all a matter of how to win them over, since they and the left share a common anti-imperialist objective (although in their case inconsistently). The Iranian revolution shows that the problem was rather more severe than that.

Harman refers to the impasse in Middle Eastern societies, the failures of post-war nationalism, such as Nasserism. He explains the rise of Islamism as a consequence of the social crisis in which this political history is embedded. But he fails to answer the question why an alternative to such failed ideologies and movements would be sought in radical Islam, rather than something else. If it was simply the weight of religion in these cultures, it would be a mystery that nationalisms which were fundamentally secular had emerged at all, now to be increasingly eclipsed. He does refer to the consequences of capitalism on traditional societies, exacerbated by global trends in the world system more recently. But he does not adequately register the fact that the defeat of popular movements, especially in Iran but also elsewhere, has played a vital role.

And what is missing from Harman’s account is any sense that the growth of the Islamist movements is any cause for alarm. On the contrary, the gist of his case is that since they are “contradictory”, sometimes progressive, and express a “feeling of revolt” that could be mobilised for progressive ends, the rise of the Islamists is an opportunity rather than a threat. Sure, they have some unpleasant ideas we “disagree with” and would “defend” various people against, but if the workers’ movement can move in the region, it will all be all right. This view, of course, informs the SWP’s recent agitation on the war in Afghanistan — that imperialism is the only enemy, not “fundamentalism”, and so on. This pamphlet was written in 1999; but one assumes that were it written now, its main argument would be that the upsurge in Islamism provoked by imperialism was only to be expected, and still not much to worry about. For any sane socialist, on the other hand, the prospect, for instance, of Islamists coming to power in Pakistan is worth worrying about very much indeed.

The rise of Islamism is depressing and dangerous, from a socialist point of view. However “contradictory”, there can be little doubt that the Islamists will be an anti-working class force where the working class does move. We don’t have to guess about this. It was proved in Iran.

From Worker's Liberty Vol2, No 2. March 2002

Notes

1. Harman piles on further confusion by referring to the Iranian People’s Mujaheddin, who by 1979 were Marxist-influenced, as if they are part of the same phenomenon as the regime they later took up arms against. They were not. While it is right to distinguish different kinds of Islamism (some of which are moderate; there is a type of Islamism running through Arab nationalism from its inception, although mutedly), it is not helpful to throw into the discussion examples which can only obscure the issue, and the movements, at hand.

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