26.02.2004

Opportunist wrongs

Party notes

Banning the hijab in France’s state schools has nothing whatsoever to do with defending vulnerable young women, upholding the values of 1789 or combating religious obscurantism. It is islamophobia pure and simple; and that demands an unambiguous, principled and vigorous response from the organised left.

Communists are for the right to wear the hijab and by the same measure the right not to wear it: a voluntary discarding of the veil - because of what it symbolises in the way of women’s subordination to men, etc - is of course something we positively wish to bring about. However, that can never be achieved by a law imposed from above. What is required is full involvement in the ongoing struggle for extreme democracy, female equality and working class self-liberation.

President Jacques Chirac and his rightwing UMP government pursue an overtly anti-working class and thoroughly obnoxious agenda. Theirs is the tradition of imperial France, Vichy and general Charles de Gaulle. And in that conservative spirit a fifth of schools will continue to be run by the catholic church (and receive generous state subsidies and tax breaks). Chirac is certainly no “prisoner of the left”. A laughable promise made by the French Socialist Party, Parti Communiste Français and Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire - and co-thinkers in Britain such as Alan Thornett of the International Socialist Group - when they excitedly urged voters to support Chirac in preference to Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National during the 2002 presidential elections.

Chirac and his government are cynically demonising France’s five million muslims - an oppressed minority which is overwhelmingly working class, often poor and disproportionately unemployed. The hope is to rally patriotic France and outflank Le Pen: he poisonously bemoans the “promotion of islam in our country”. By taking the lead against islam Chirac calculates that he can stem or reverse the growth of the FN.

Shades of the Dreyfus case. In 1894 captain Alfred Dreyfus - a member of the army’s general staff and from a wealthy background of Alsatian jewish textile manufacturers - was found guilty of high treason by a court martial. Secret plans had been conveyed to Germany. He was imprisoned on Devil’s Island and kept in severe solitary confinement. The charges against Dreyfus were baseless; nevertheless his case excused a tidal wave of patriotic anti-semitism. The archbishop of Paris acted as the patron of the anti-Dreyfusards. There were anti-jewish demonstrations, riots and even an attempted ultra-rightist coup. Dreyfus - white-haired and physically broken - finally received a presidential pardon in 1899.

Whether or not Chirac captures FN votes remains to be seen. However, one thing is for sure - the influence of islamic fundamentalists will be strengthened. They will demand separate muslim schools for girls, for example. The main blame for this lies with the abject failure of the left.

Frankly the left in France - with a few honourable exceptions - has shown itself to be deeply compromised by chauvinism, economism and thus islamophobia. The SP, PCF, LCR, Lutte Ouvrière - all of them. Instead of treating seriously the hijab ban, the left has either passively wrung its hands or actually sided with the government. Shades of Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde - respectively the right and left leaders of French socialism - who disgracefully issued a joint manifesto telling the working class to stay aloof from both sides in the Dreyfus case.

By contrast, here, on the other side of the English Channel, the left has not been too bad on this question - with a few dishonourable exceptions. Eg, till February 19 the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and its fortnightly paper Solidarity maintained a cowardly evasiveness and is reportedly still rent by divisions. Mark Sandell has resigned from the executive committee in protest, while Sean Matgamna remains sulking in his tent.

Unfortunately the majority of the left in Britain suffers not from islamophobia: rather from a distinct softness towards islam. This is particularly so with the Socialist Workers Party, which appears to view pan-islamism as a strategic ally against imperialism in general and New Labour in particular.

Abroad that explains the SWP’s apologetics for Iran’s Khomeini movement, the Taliban in Afghanistan, FIS in Algeria and refusal to condemn the murderous September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington carried out by Al Qa’eda. At home that explains the attempt to fashion Respect so that it can include the Muslim Association of Britain as partners and the attendant temptation to water down or discard awkward principles. Notoriously at Marxism 2003 Lindsey German urged her comrades not to regard women’s and gay rights as “shibboleths”.

Socialist Worker editor Chris Harman once solemnly pledged that, when we “find ourselves on the same side as the islamists”, the SWP would “argue strongly with them” - not only over their “attitude towards women and minorities”, but for the need to overthrow “class relations” (C Harman The prophet and the proletariat London 1999, p56). This has gone by the board. Instead of strong arguments there is the weakness of accommodation. And in the attempt to belittle its differences with islam the SWP is now doctoring history.

An example is Dave Crouch’s generally useful article, ‘Bolsheviks and islam: religious rights’, which is promoted with the strap-line, “Socialists can learn from how the Bolsheviks approached the muslims of the Russian empire” (Socialist Review December 2003).

The comrade begins unproblematically, outlining a few pertinent facts. The overthrow of tsarism in 1917 radicalised Russia’s 16 million muslims, “who demanded religious freedom and national rights”, and on May 1 1917 the first all-Russian congress of muslims took place in Moscow. After heated debates the congress voted for women’s rights, “making Russia’s muslims the first in the world to free women from the restrictions typical of islamic societies of that period”. At the same time, conservative muslim leaders were “hostile to revolutionary change”.

What lessons do the Bolsheviks teach? Under the first subhead, ‘Atheism’, the comrade tells us: “Marxism is a materialist world view and so is thoroughly atheist. But, because it understands religion to have roots in oppression and alienation, Marxist political parties don’t demand that their members or supporters are atheists too. So atheism was never included in the Bolsheviks’ programme.”

They welcomed leftwing muslims into their ranks. Leon Trotsky is quoted as saying that in some of the eastern republics as many as 15% percent of members were “believers in islam”. Trotsky called them “raw revolutionary recruits who come knocking on our door”. Indeed, comrade Crouch reckons that in some parts of central Asia, muslim membership of the Communist Party reached as high as 70% in the early 1920s.

Comrade Crouch is being economical with the truth. The Bolsheviks did not require party members to be atheists - that is right. Their programme did, however, include a section on religion. By the way, the very idea of adopting a programme is fearfully dismissed by the SWP leadership and neither Socialist Worker’s ‘Where we stand’ column nor the SWP constitution contain any mention of religion.

For Bolshevism religion is both a refuge from alienation and a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. Therefore religion should be declared a private matter as far as the state is concerned. Religious discrimination is wholly intolerable. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess their own religion and the party should carefully avoid anything that would upset the feelings of believers. As a basic component of political freedom there must be the “separation of the church from the state and of the school from the church”.

However, Crouch fails to mention the Bolshevik’s call for extensive scientific propaganda aimed at overcoming “religious prejudices” (eg, in the 1918 programme). Nor does he refer to the party’s attitude towards its own members and their beliefs. Hardly oversights, especially when one considers the SWP’s drive to court islam and gain muslim recruits.

In this context let us turn to Lenin. He states that, so far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, “religion is not a private matter” (my emphasis). As the party opposes “every religious bamboozling”, the ideological struggle against religion cannot be “a private affair” for members, but is the concern of “the whole party, the whole of the proletariat” (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, pp84-85).

While the programme contains neither the demand for party members to be atheists nor a ban on recruiting believers, it is “based entirely on the scientific, and moreover materialist, world outlook”. An “explanation” of the programme necessarily exposes the “true historical and economic roots of the religious fog”. The programme therefore implicitly “includes propaganda of atheism” (ibid p86).

Naturally Lenin warns against the danger of elevating the religious question to the first rank. Religion cannot be overcome through “purely propaganda methods”. Religion is sustained by class society and it can only be finally overcome through ending class society. Unitedly fighting for paradise on earth “is more important to us than the unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven” (ibid p87).

That is why the Bolsheviks did not include any demand that all members immediately free themselves from religious superstition. The Bolsheviks were convinced that the class struggle would educate and enlighten far better than any number of atheistic tracts. Towards that end they tirelessly strove against the hate-mongering and splitting tactics of the Black Hundreds - akin to today’s BNP, FN, etc - and the tsarist state’s discriminatory laws and attacks on religious minorities.