13.08.2015
One shameful U-turn after another
In the name of the ‘next stage of the revolution’, reports Yassamine Mather, the SWP and its co-thinkers are once again backing the Muslim Brotherhood
In the midst of continuing conflict in the Middle East, and in the week that saw the first major secular, anti-corruption protests in Iraq,1 the latest news from Egypt on the formation of a front between the Muslim Brotherhood and Revolutionary Socialists has raised criticism in that country and beyond.
According to the Middle East Monitor website, in an article dated July 30,
The Muslim Brotherhood has praised the invitation by the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt to form a revolutionary front to stand against the military coup and end military rule. The movement regards this step as a point in the socialists’ favour and called for its immediate implementation with the formation of the new front before the protests planned to commemorate the anniversary of the massacres in Rabaa Al-Adawiya and Al-Nahda Squares two years ago.2
I have not found any details on the political proposals that will form the basis of the front’s policies. However, RS’s original call for a front on July 17 has come under attack in Egypt. For those of us on the Iranian left who read with anger the often banal and misleading analyses of the Socialist Workers Party and other UK revolutionary groups concerning the ‘mistakes’ of the Iranian left (accused in the blanket fashion of Stalinism) for supporting the religious movement in 1979 in opposition to the shah’s dictatorship, the news of the SWP’s co-thinkers calling for a front with the Muslim Brotherhood is both amusing and infuriating.
First, let us see how we got here. RS’s own explanation refers to some of the history, but by omitting significant facts it tries to put a positive gloss on the many U-turns the organisation has taken since the early days of the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising. Of course, there is nothing wrong with adopting tactics in alliance with non-proletarian forces under specific conditions: the problem lies in the absence of any theoretical justification for contradictory positions, the absence of any guiding principles. Given the balance of forces and the current weakness of the left, the problem with such ‘fronts’ is the tendency to accept bourgeois hegemony over them. The confusion such U-turns must cause amongst the group’s supporters and activities, as well as those outside the organisation, cannot but damage the left.
The movementist approach to events in Tahrir Square meant that RS, keen to be part of the uprising, took the approach of ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’, refusing to expose the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and its connections with Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states in its daily publicity. Yes, the occasional article referred to the group’s conservative Islamism, but the economic relations between MB and Gulf capitalism did not merit a mention.
Any casual student of Egyptian contemporary history will know that the Muslim Brotherhood played a significant role in attacking communists, in opposing workers’ protests during the rule of the Egyptian monarchy. In the early 1950s the nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser found no common ground with the Islamists and refused pressure to form an alliance. Throughout the 1970s the fact that they were able to operate under Anwar el-Sadat was due to the role they played against the left. At a time when the secular, leftwing opposition was under attack, MB was attacking communists on university campuses. During Hosni Mubarak’s presidency it did not face the kind of repression imposed on the left and the supporters of the working class: its continued role in mosques and religious schools was tolerated partly because of its financial connections with Middle Eastern capital, and partly because MB did not present a major threat.
SWP and Iran left
Back in 1989 SWP leader and principal theorist Alex Callinicos wrote:
The left throughout the Middle East is bankrupt - above all because of the influence of Stalinism, which encouraged, for example, the Palestinian resistance to put its faith in ‘progressive’ Arab regimes rather than in the workers and peasants of the region. Consequently, in country after country Islamic fundamentalism has filled the vacuum, appealing especially to the urban poor as an apparently radical anti-imperialist ideology.3
Phil Marshall, writing in International Socialism, commented in this way, with particular reference to Iran:
This avoids facing the brute facts imposed by Stalinism: that, as in the Arab world, the left in Iran had no ‘social revolutionary line’, having abandoned the notion of independent working class activity. Despite the fact of repression, the Iranian guerrillas had an enormous potential audience, one they self-consciously dismissed. It was only after 25 years of retreat by secular radicals that Khomeini and his supporters, hitherto largely confined to the ulema and the bazaar, were able to make their breakthrough into the urban poor, the professionals and even into sections of the working class, giving the Islamists their chance to coopt the revolutionary movement ...
There is now a real opportunity for revolutionary Marxists to point the way forward. Everywhere Islamism has failed to deliver. The Egyptian Gama’a Islamiyya, a mass organisation in the 1970s, has been all but wiped out as an active force in the country’s major cities. The Algerian FIS is involved in a civil war, in which its armed groups do no more than imitate the substitutionism which cost Iran’s guerrillas mass support. In Palestine, Hamas seeks deals in the hope of sharing power in Fatah’s ‘Arafat Istan’.4
All this was forgotten by 2001. Occasional criticism of Islamism was limited to responses to liberal-type objections, as opposed to a thorough critique of the class character of Islamists and their bourgeois alliances, which brought them into direct conflict with the working class in the Middle East and worldwide.
It is true that nationalist and Ba’athist Arab regimes gained prominence during the cold war, benefiting from financial and political support from the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that ‘official communist’ parties, some with considerable working class support, were instructed by Moscow to either dissolve or join with the Ba’athists. And after the collapse of the eastern bloc, nationalist bureaucrats at the head of these states became semi-dynastic dictators (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad) and authoritarian supporters of the neoliberal agenda - vanguards of ‘economic restructuring’, the privatisation of state-owned assets often enriched their close allies.
However, the reality is that Islamists also benefited from free-market economic liberalisation, whether in power or in opposition. Rulers such as Saddam, Assad, Gaddafi and Mubarak, who imposed repressive measures on the working class, generally left the Islamists alone. That is why they survived and, in the absence of any other opposition, their support increased - not because the Middle Eastern left, thousands of whom were killed by Islamists, were ‘Stalinists’.
The Arab Spring was a direct consequence of despair resulting from the economic situation; anger at repressive measures imposed by Arab dictators; frustration with their impotence over the Palestinian issue; despair resulting from the defeat of Ba’athism in Iraq, seen by many Arabs as an insult to their national and regional Arab pride.
Retrograde
In these circumstances, more than 30 years after the Iranian revolution, the creation of illusions in political Islam, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, was a far more retrograde step than those for which the Iranian left stands accused by comrades Marshall and Callinicos. To be fair, even the ‘official communist’ Tudeh did not go as far as RS in its praise of Islamist leaders. Immediately after the election as Egyptian president of Mohamed Mursi in 2012, RS issued the following statement:
The victory of Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, is a great achievement in pushing back this counterrevolution and pushing back this coup d’etat. For now, this is a real victory for the Egyptian masses and a real victory for the Egyptian revolution.5
If ‘critical’ support for MB during the mass demonstrations of 2011 could be summed up as a mistake, calling for a Mursi victory in 2012 was a betrayal. It was in contradiction to RS’s own misgivings expressed before the presidential election, when its support for Mursi was to be conditional on four points, including “the formation of a government across the whole political spectrum”, the approval of “a law on trade union freedoms which clearly supports the pluralism and independence of the workers’ movement in contrast to the draft law proposed by the Brotherhood to the People’s Assembly” and a “constitution which guarantees social justice, the right to free, quality healthcare and education, the right to strike, demonstrate and organise peaceful sit-ins, the public and private rights of all citizens, and the genuine representation of women, the Copts, working people and the youth in the Constituent Assembly”.6
The Brotherhood’s success in forming the government should not have been interpreted as proof of the popularity of political Islam: rather a reflection of the weakness of other political forces. Before Mursi’s election, the Islamic group regularly attacked RS in its publications . The newspaper of the Brotherhood’s electoral wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, ran a front-page piece accusing the Revolutionary Socialists of inciting violence and being paid agents of the CIA (a standard tactic used by Islamists to slander the left). A powerful group of Islamist industrial and commercial leaders, headed by multi-millionaires, were given the task of overseeing economic planning, public administration, health and education. In cooperation with the private sector there was to be ‘control of the public debt’, restrictions on public spending, measures to ‘strengthen competition’ and the raising of the ceiling for tax exemptions.
The most damaging part of MB’s economic policy was its attitude towards poverty. It was a top-down approach, relying on charity rather than legislating for better wages and more rights for workers. MB had embarked on far-reaching charity work, often with funds originating in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. Distributing food parcels paid for by Saudi Arabia might work during an election campaign. However, in a country of 70 million, where almost a third of the population live below the official poverty line, institutionalised charity was not going to be a sustainable option.
None of this was exposed by RS: in its support for workers’ protests RS’s reductionist attitude resulted at best in activism; at worst in appeals to the MB government to adhere to the ‘spirit of the uprising’. During his presidency Mursi became a hate figure after he labelled all those who opposed him agents of foreign powers. In his last speech before the army stepped in he lamented: “How can the best of leaders make major achievements in such a poisonous atmosphere?”
By the summer of 2013 there had been major protests against MB in working class districts, in factories and on the streets. The July military coup - just like the one in 2011, when the armed forces had intervened to depose Mubarak - had one aim: to put an end to the revolutionary process. The longer the protests continued, the stronger the fear of genuine revolution.
‘Next stage’
How did RS react to this? According to Geert van Langendonck, the Christian Science Monitor’s reporter in the Middle East, “Egyptian activists have rallied around the military since it ousted Mohamed Mursi ... even the Revolutionary Socialists supported the coup.”7 Apparently there were lone voices warning the left not to trust the army and, as van Langendonck explained, “this coup was not a response to protests, but it was simply pre-planned and organised by the military, some opposition leaders and supported by different government establishments, including the police”.
However, RS and the SWP declared the military coup to be the “next stage” of the Egyptian revolution. They clearly did not expect the kind of repression that followed. And now, two years later there is yet another switch: the proposal for a front with MB, against the army. So has MB changed its policies? Has it severed its links with Saudi Arabia, with Qatar and other Persian Gulf countries? Has it ended its commitment to ‘responsible’ pro-capitalism? The answer to all these questions is negative.
Having outlined these successive U-turns, I should also emphasise that there is also one constant: the desire to work within a popular front, irrespective of who has hegemony.
Egypt is not the exception here. It is not just Sunni Islamists the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency consider worthy of support. We all remember the SWP’s statements in support of Iran’s Islamic Republic, where forced gender-change operations were alleged to demonstrate a tolerance of homosexuality by the Shia state. Such attitudes were being expressed not during the popular protests of the late 1970s, when a minority, pro-Moscow section of the Iranian left was deluded by the popularity of political Islam, but within recent years, decades after those statements from the likes of Alex Callinicos condemned the Iranian left for its popular frontism.
Just to put the record straight, the overwhelming majority of the Iranian left did not support the Islamist movement before or after the 1979 revolution. No groups apart from Tudeh and the Fedayeen Majority supported the Khomeini leadership. Even during the Iran-Iraq war, when the majority of UK and US Trotskyist groups sided with Iran’s Islamic Republic as a ‘victim of an imperialist war’ (waged by Saddam on behalf of the United States), the Iranian left took a far more radical position, considering the conflict to be a reactionary war and calling on workers to turn it into a class war. As a result, tens of thousands of Marxists were arrested, thousands were executed, a generation of working class activists was decimated.
So next time SWP feels like lecturing the Middle Eastern left, let us remind Callinicos and co of how the IST has behaved in Egypt.
yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.co.uk
Notes
3. A Callinicos Marxism and the national question London 1989, p18.
4. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/marshall.htm.
5. Revolutionary Socialists founding member Sameh Naguib, quoted in Socialist Worker (US), July 9 2012.