16.06.2004

Political islam and surrogate nationalism

Ian Donovan replies to Mike McNair on why communists should support the insurgency in Iraq.

Mike Macnair's latest article replying to me in last week's paper is useful in that it allows one to go into more depth about the strategy Marxists should adopt over Iraq (Weekly Worker June 10).
However, Mike manages to produce a veritable pot-pourri of confusion, which rather undercuts his claim to some kind of profound Marxist analysis. He writes: "The point of Marxism is not to take 'morally correct' positions or to 'be on the right side'. We can do this without Marxism. The point of Marxism is to use objective analysis about economic and political dynamics to propose feasible ways forward for the working class and the oppressed" (emphasis in original).

This seemingly profound point in fact negates a great deal of the purpose of Marxism. Indeed, I would argue that only consistent democracy - which is synonymous with the historical materialist approach of Marxism in the epoch of mutating, but predatory, imperialism - allows socialists to consistently take "the right side" in a whole array of complex national struggles around the world. And of course, in order to propose "feasible ways forward" for the working class and the oppressed in general, it is of course elementary that one has to be on the "right side".

Whatever subtle point Mike is trying to make in characterising as "moralistic" my consistently democratic position on the unconditional right of the Arabic core of Iraq to self-determination (which is what is actually in dispute here), he actually does Marxism a complete disservice. Without a Marxist understanding of the national question, without consistent democracy, the fact is that sooner or later, no matter how well intentioned a vaguely leftwing individual or political current may subjectively be, they will inevitably find themselves on the 'wrong side': ie, complicit in oppression of one sort or another.

One of the most basic tenets of consistent democracy is solidarity with mass-based rebellions against occupation, national oppression and colonial rule when they actually occur. This is not a tactical question, nor is ensuring one's solidarity is directed at the right side a matter of vicarious tin-soldiery - as Mike tries to make out in his tortured attempt to equate my democratic policy with the views of the Spartacists regarding so-called 'military support' in various wars around the world. Their conception is completely separated from any recognisable democratic political content. Hence they sometimes end up on the wrong side in 'struggles' they are 'supporting'. The formulation of the complete separation between 'military' support and politics led them in 1999 to be able, for instance, to support the Serbian armed forces in Kosova 'fighting imperialism', without supposedly bearing any responsibility for the actions of those forces in oppressing and seeking to expel the oppressed Albanian majority in Kosova.

It also justified their 'military' defence of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait once it became clear that the imperialists were determined to reverse that foolish and reactionary action. In other words, the Spartacists' formulation of 'military support to', 'military defence of', etc, allows them to support, in the name of 'anti-imperialism', 'struggles' of oppressor states which in fact have in the real world an anti-democratic content, while at the same kind consoling themselves that they have no responsibility for the occupations of other peoples that they are 'militarily' supporting.
My positions have a habit of putting me on the opposite sides of the barricades from the Spartacists on these kinds of questions: for instance over their support for the oppressors of the Kosovars in the name of 'anti-imperialism'. If we are on the same side, it is fortuitous, at least over this kind of question. For Mike to even begin to make an equation between my views on Iraq and the Spartacists on 'military support', certain conceptions are necessary in his own political makeup. One has to be a belief that any struggle for Arab self-rule against colonialism (or the disguised form of colonialism Bush is trying to create in Iraq), if it takes place under the ideological sway of those religious-political tendencies that indisputably exercise great ideological influence in the muslim world today, can be equated (in terms of the negation of democracy) with colonial rule itself.

Logically from this standpoint, when there is a mass uprising in, say, Fallujah or Najaf, led either partially or in toto by radical islamic clerics, for Mike, it appears, socialists should take no side. At least, that is what should be inferred from the logic of his polemic against 'taking sides'. Though in fact pinning Mike down to one position or the other - should one take a side in these conflicts or not? - is rather like trying to pin down a glob of mercury. No sooner has Mike finished attacking the idea of 'taking sides' than he 'cautiously' signals his disagreement with the 'policy' of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq - that is, with the policy of not taking sides. Mike is so 'cautious' about expressing a position that his modus operandi seems to be to have no position. However, it is rather difficult to argue against someone who appears to have no position, and since many of Mike's actual arguments appear to support the kind of thing the WPCI argue - ie, a refusal to bloc with the insurgency - the bulk of my arguments are directed against that.

This position has a logic: to advise the Iraqi left (which by the way socialists do seek to both influence and learn from, as internationalists) to distribute material calling on the people of the cities where the US has lost control to engage in 'revolutionary defeatism' vis-à-vis the insurgent forces, and basically lay down their arms and give in to the coalition. In fact, the WPCI has even issued material attacking the insurgents in Najaf for endangering the civilian population by taking up arms in the city, where civilians live, risking retaliation by the occupying forces. Unfortunately, this is a reproach that could be directed at every urban insurgent movement in history - and especially against a leftist popular militia that would also seek to root itself primarily amongst the civilian population of the cities - that is, among the working class. That is the unfortunate consequence of a fundamentally wrong position on the role of imperialism and its nationalist/islamic opponents.

That is the logic of refusing to take sides in the face of a colonial uprising, to refuse partisanship between a mass-based insurgency and its colonial executioners. In my view, socialists should welcome the defeat suffered by the imperialist forces in Fallujah and Najaf, even though these may have been attenuated somewhat by the imperialists' negotiation of deals involving unreliable mediators and proxies. The fact that the imperialists no longer have a monopoly of power and armed force in some major cities in Iraq is a good thing. Based on one simple democratic principle - that the imperialist invasion forces have, in democratic terms, no right to be in Iraq at all, whereas the indigenous mass-based forces have every right, simply by virtue of their demonstrated mass support, which the imperialists have been forced to acknowledge by negotiating with them.

Even if these forces were in every other sense irremediably and utterly anti-democratic, that simple counterposition would still signify a qualitative difference in democratic terms between the two sides. For socialists to refuse to take sides when such a democratic question is posed, a question that impinges directly on the right to the Iraqi Arabic people to self-determine and rise up against their oppressors, would be to betray democracy and therefore betray socialism as well.
Mike's critique argues that this is an academic question, that there is some kind of absolute separation between the tasks of communists in Britain and communists in Iraq. I reject this. There is a division of labour between communists in Britain and communists in Iraq. For communists in Britain, an absolutely fundamental task is agitation, and practical agitation in so far as is possible, for the defeat of our own ruling class in Iraq. For communists in Iraq, conversely, the extremely difficult tasks that confront them involve seeking to contend for leadership of a people that is already beginning to engage in large-scale revolts against colonial/neo-colonial rule under the leadership of religious elements who history shows are likely to be treacherous and possibly murderous towards an independent working class movement. However, the contradiction is that the consciousness of the masses, their outrage at the oppression visited upon them, is at the present stage of development almost inevitably massively coloured by nationalist and radical religious sentiments (which are closely related). Mike, or the WCPI, can denounce that till they are blue in the face. Such denunciations will not change reality on the ground one iota.

Part of the internationalist duty of communists in Britain, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, is to speak bluntly about the ideological problems of communism in Iraq. If we believe there is a fundamental political problem with the politics of a communist organisation in Iraq, that acts to undercut or negate the potential appeal of communism to the religious- and/or nationalist-influenced masses who are struggling against occupation, then it is our duty to say so. The division of labour that exists between communists in Britain and Iraq, and the evident need for sensitivity in dealing with people facing dangers that we currently do not face in this country, cannot be allowed by default to perpetuate a political division.

We are duty-bound not to forego criticism of a political line that has major flaws. A key part of the struggle for the rebirth of communism as a real force in the world is the struggle for a consistently communist and revolutionary programmatic and ideological understanding that transcends national borders, and the barrier between advanced capitalist countries and those large parts of the world that capitalism forcibly keeps underdeveloped. In this sense, Mike's admonitions of me for criticising particularly the WPCI seem to me to smack of the kind of negation of internationalism that characterised 'official communism': 'How dare you criticise the Cubans, ANC, etc? They are the ones doing the fighting.' Not a good method.

Some of Mike's points justifying this refusal to take sides on a key democratic question are evidently contradictory to reality. For instance, he writes of myself: "He selects from the communist programme the single issue of anti-colonialism and defeatism in relation to imperialist military adventures. He then rewrites reality to make it seem that the 'nationalists' are on the road to military victory and hence that the only principled course of action is a 'theory of the offensive' approach to this single issue: the Iraqi communists must 'critically bloc with the insurgency'. The wish has become the father of the analysis, just as in the ideas of the 'left communists' of 1918-20. His suggestion that the communists must 'critically bloc with the insurgency', if it had any practical meaning, would have to be a call for (to give an example used by Lenin in Leftwing communism) 5,000 to launch a military assault on 50,000."

This is nonsense. There is no suggestion in any of my articles that communists should engage in any adventurist actions, throw "5,000" into battle against "50,000" or act in consonance with any 'theory of the offensive'. In fact, I would oppose needlessly endangering comrades' lives through adventurist actions. It has to be said, however, that Iraq today is one of those situations where, if comrades are not armed, other forces will not leave them alone and in peace anyway. The question is rather: if our comrades have guns in a situation where they probably have no choice about whether to have guns, which therefore have to point somewhere, where should these guns be pointed? Tactical questions as to how to carry out a strategic orientation are always separated by practicality from questions of what that orientation should be. For consistent democrats, in a situation of colonial occupation, that orientation should be to struggle alongside the mass of the people who are currently influenced by nationalist or islamist currents, against the occupation.
Mike engages in similar demagogy when he lectures that "The immediate overthrow of the British and US states is not on the agenda. Equally, a simple outright military defeat of the imperialists in Iraq is absolutely impossible. It is excluded by the military relationship of forces. What is possible is a political-military defeat of the imperialists through a convergence of an Iraqi national movement with a mass anti-war movement in the occupying powers, exploiting the contradictions within the imperialist camp to force the imperialists to retreat."

Of course, it is true that a defeat purely in military terms for the imperialists is impossible. But of course, no-one, except for Mike himself (while attributing this to others), is posing armed opposition to the invasion in simply military terms. What is needed is a political-military defeat of imperialism. There is self-evidently a need for a political strategy; the question in dispute is what that strategy should be. Mike's strategy seems to me to be that the Iraqi left should refuse to engage in armed actions against the occupying forces in alliance with the existing insurgents, even when such armed actions demonstrably enjoy mass support, because armed struggle will enable the neo-conservative wing of US imperialism to portray such opposition as inspired by al Qa'eda.

For Mike what we should be doing is seeking to 'exploit the contradictions' in the American ruling class, presumably by giving virtually uncritical support to the strategy of the WCPI, who may well have been capable of organising sections of unemployed workers in the early period of the occupation, taking advantage of the illusion of 'liberation' initially generated, but who have now been completely overshadowed by the overriding issue in an enslaved and conquered nation - the occupation itself, and resistance to it. For Mike, this 'political strategy' will result in the defeat of the neocons by the more rational elements of the United States, and as a result lead to the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

There is, however, only one problem with this analysis. To put it bluntly, it is not the activities of the WCPI in organising demonstrations over unemployment or even women's rights which have pushed the Bush administration into crisis over Iraq. It is the large numbers of GIs being killed and maimed by roadside bombs and ambushes, and the defeats at the hands of insurgents in Fallujah and Najaf: in other words the quagmire that is fundamentally the product of the insurgency is what has led to splits in the US ruling class. Without that resistance, Bush would have been triumphant, and would indeed likely have gone on to carry out more of the neocons' programme. Instead of being in a quagmire in Iraq, without that resistance the US might now be ratcheting up the preparations for an invasion of Syria, or Iran, or wherever.

I think it is a profoundly good thing that the Bush administration has got into this kind of hot water; it has had enormous benefits in terms of thwarting the neocons' programme, and in the real world has done far more in terms of staving off US aggression than any number of appeals to the 'rational' wing of US imperialism. In that sense, notwithstanding their own politics, the insurgents have done a real service for the world working class. A political strategy to fight against the imperialist depredation of Iraq must involve critically but unconditionally solidarising with those actually fighting the imperialist presence, and using exposures - eg, over things like Abu Ghraib - to publicise the barbarity of the imperialist occupation, mobilise mass, militant opposition to that occupation at home: political strikes, mass civil disobedience and even more radical measures, providing they are not adventurist actions of a few individuals, but rather linked to a mass movement.

It is that which will bring about more decisive splits in the ruling class, as a wing of it seeks to get out of Iraq at virtually any price, as a means of (hopefully) avoiding 'chaos' at home. That should be our political strategy, not one of advising Iraqis to refrain from armed resistance to occupation to help the Democrats win the US presidential elections and hopefully (some hope!) take the troops out, which is the popular front strategy Mike is implicitly advocating.

Mike's analysis of islamism and its roots is also badly flawed and reeks of the kind of 'moralism' he accuses me of. He opines: "Ian's response simply fails to treat islamist and jihadi tendencies on their own terms or to engage with their religio-political ideas as political ideas. Instead, the nearest approach to a political characterisation of them he offers is as merely an ideological form of nationalism. It should be utterly obvious from the Iranian and Afghan experiences, as well as the politics of islamism and jihadism in other muslim countries, that this is a grossly inadequate analysis. Ian's patronising refusal to engage with the islamists' politics reflects the fact that he is blinded by the moralistic politics of 'taking sides'."

Marxists have not generally analysed either religious or nationalist movements by treating them "on their own terms" or 'engaging with their ideas as ideas'. Marxists engage with such movements not in terms of the reactionary and often fantastic nature of their formal ideas, but by looking beyond such surface phenomena to analyse what such forces really represent in social and political terms. The mass influence of political islam of various kinds in the Middle East cannot remotely be explained by looking at the ideas of political islamists; while these are actually sometimes very sophisticated - in other incarnations simply crude and brutal - nevertheless political islam is an ideological form for actual social and political forces, not something that can be 'explained' in the 'terms' of its formal ideological beliefs.

What is crucial for explaining the mass influence and origin of political islam in this region is the actual social and political history of the Middle East. This in my view is linked to the material nature of the Middle East as the location of this planet's (or to the imperialists 'their' planet's) most important strategic energy reserves. And, relatedly, to the predatory activities of Zionist Israel in the Middle East.

What has conditioned the rise of political islam in the Middle East over the last half century or more, is the deliberate humiliation, destruction and at times even armed overthrow, of regimes that were simply assertively nationalist. The neo-colonial activities of imperialism in other parts of the world - in Asia, in Latin America and in Africa, for instance - have generally been devoted to forestalling political developments that were considered to be communistic. Imperialism in these other parts of the world has tolerated, and at times encouraged, nationalist regimes, providing they were anti-communist and committed to the maintenance of capital, and has generally not felt assertive non-communistic nationalist movements to be a threat.

In the Middle East, however, for reasons closely connected to the central importance of the region's natural reserves, imperialism has not even been able to tolerate assertive nationalist regimes that would not cause it to bat an eyelid when they occur elsewhere. The methods that it uses against perceived 'communist' threats elsewhere have been routinely employed to humiliate and destabilise any assertive nationalist regime that dares to be uppity and talk back to the imperialist masters of the world. The history is long - Mossadeq's basically liberal nationalist regime in Iran, which engaged in an oil nationalisation for reasons of national capitalist development, overthrown in a Pinochet-type coup organised by the CIA. Nasser's regime in Egypt, attacked first by Britain, France and Israel in 1956 (on that occasion they had to bow to the US when it objected to this flexing of muscles in a region of the world it increasingly coveted). The humiliation of Nasser by Israel alone a decade later, this time with United States support: this sealed the alliance between Israel and the US. The repeated US-backed Israeli wars on its neighbours, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon - and, of course, the Palestinians - all aimed at crushing, not any 'communist' threat, but rather any moderately assertive Arab nationalism.
The many decades of dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians, an atrocity just as grotesque in degree as, if different in form from, South African apartheid. But of course, the difference between Israel and South Africa is that South Africa under apartheid was kept at arms length and was (often hypocritically) treated as a pariah by the mainstream imperialist states. Whereas Israel enjoys actual moral authority (albeit receding) in the west, massive, open support from US imperialism, and in reality little real criticism from elsewhere, for virtually every humiliation and degradation it inflicts on the Arab peoples. Occasionally it gets ticked off for going too far, but that is all the criticism amounts to.

It is in these conditions, where ordinary, bourgeois secular-modernising nationalism has palpably failed, that sections of the masses in the Middle East have turned to a surrogate that appears to them to have more chance of achieving similar (essentially bourgeois) aims. Forms of political religion that look to the Arab and Turkish islamic empires, or caliphates, that constituted a very impressive civilisation in the region in the period immediately preceding the rise of European capitalism, have provided the inspiration for an alternative form of national assertiveness, that takes the form of islamic revivalism. It is that which explained the mass appeal of Khomeinism in Iran in the 1970s and 80s, and the growth of political islam in general - whether sunni or shia - in the Middle East region, in the Arab world and those non-Arab territories that exist in the cultural-religious orbit of the Arab world.

This development has, of course, in its turn been exploited by imperialism; indeed it has cynically manipulated elements of it and produced particularly virulent strains as cold war auxiliaries that have at times turned on their creator - al Qa'eda springs to mind. But actually, the political explanation for the influence of islamic-revivalist trends over the masses in the Middle East region stems from the cynical, deliberate and sustained humiliation, over many decades, of the elementary and more conventional national aspirations of the Arab and Arab-influenced peoples of that region. The humiliation of these national projects has produced instead a surrogate form of Arab-muslim assertiveness that in its psychological roots is at bottom national - and which we know today as political islam.

Mike accuses me of "moralism". But in reality, it is he who is engaging in moralism with his statements about Iran: "… small bosses and exploiters can be as exploitative and oppressive as big ones and sometimes more so. Equally, if I am mugged by some local teenager, it is not much consolation to be told that the mafiosi are much bigger criminals. The Iranian islamic revolution was undoubtedly a defeat for the policy of US imperialism. It was also and equally undoubtedly a defeat for the Iranian workers and oppressed, and, in fact, worsened the class relation of forces on a world scale."

Of course, much of this is true. But what does it explain about why such "small bosses and exploiters" have such mass support in the Middle East today? Nothing, in my view. It simply equates to damning the Arab masses for the dead end they have been driven into by decades of imperialist political oppression. Refusing to solidarise with people who rise up against the ultimate expression of that humiliation - the colonial occupation of Iraq - does nothing to break the masses from illusions in clerics and islamism.

What it does is make the western far left appear indifferent to the suffering of Arabs and muslims - the Alliance for Workers' Liberty is an extreme example of this. And those Iraqi leftists who adopt variants of this kind of politics, who equate islamic movements with imperialism and at best refuse to support such colonial uprisings, at worst being prepared to countenance inviting in the troops of the UN who for a decade starved, sanctioned and bombed the Iraqi people, inevitably will appear to the masses as an alien formation linked to the privileged, social-chauvinist left of the imperialist countries. And that is no fate for an Iraqi communist - Mike does the WCPI comrades no favours for not telling them the truth about the political errors they are making, and the dubious pro-Zionist elements they are mistakenly allying themselves with.

Incidentally, as a final point, Mike recommends reading the material of the ICP Central Command and its 'front' organisation, Iraqi Democrats against Occupation (www.idao.org). If is worth noting that this website contains much more sympathetic coverage of the April uprisings in Iraq than one gets from the WCPI. The material available is fragmentary, of course, and one cannot make a definitive judgement on the basis of what has so far been published. But it seems that on the Iraqi left there are signs that an alternative to the collaborationism of the 'official' ICP and the sterile, misguided third-campism of the WCPI may be coming into being.
If so, this would certainly be a very welcome development for the Iraqi and international working class.