Re: Tony Cliff on the Muslim Brotherhood
On Aug 25, 2006, at 1:32 PM, www.leninology. blogspot.com wrote:
No, we won’t be “disavoying” him any time soon, or even
disinterring him for that matter - if you wanted a more
contemporary and fully worked out analysis of Political Islam that
was written while Cliff was still very much alive and active, you
could have had a look at Chris Harman’s “The Prophet and the
Proletariat”, which correctly describes Islamism as neither
progressive nor fascist, but a distinctive and unique kind of
politics:http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/index.htm
Thanks for this reference; very interesting. Some of what Harman
wrote is very relevant to Yoshie’s celebration of Ahmadinejad’s
“populism” http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch04.htm:
Radical Islam as a social movement
The class base of Islamism is similar to that of classical fascism
and of the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP, Shiv Sena and RSS in
India. All these movements have recruited from the white collar
middle class and students, as well as from the traditional commercial
and professional petty bourgeoisie. This, together with the hostility
of most Islamist movements to the left, women’s rights and secularism
has led many socialist and liberals to designate the movements as
fascist. But this is a mistake.
The petty bourgeois class base has not only been a characteristic of
fascism, it has also been a feature of Jacobinism, of Third World
nationalisms, of Maoist Stalinism, and Peronism. Petty bourgeois
movements only become fascist when they arise at a specific point in
the class struggle and play a particular role. This role is not just
to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie, but to exploit the bitterness they
feel at what an acute crisis of the system has done to them and so
turn them into organised thugs prepared to work for capital to tear
workers’ organisations apart.
That is why Mussolini’s and Hitler’s movements were fascist while,
say, Peron’s movement in Argentina was not. Even though Peron
borrowed some of the imagery of fascism, he took power in exceptional
circumstances which allowed him to buy off workers’ organisations
while using state intervention to divert the profits of the large
agrarian capitalists into industrial expansion. During his first six
years in office an specific set of circumstances allowed real wages
to rise by about 60 percent. This was the complete opposite to what
would have happened under a genuinely fascist regime. Yet the liberal
intelligentsia and the Argentine Communist Party were still capable
of referring to the regime as ‘Nazi Peronism’, in much the same way
that much of the left internationally refers to Islamism today. [50]
[…]
But if it is wrong to see the Islamist movements as ‘fascist’, it is
just as wrong to simply see them as ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘anti-
state’. They do not just fight against those classes and states that
exploit and dominate the mass of people. They also fight against
secularism, against women who refuse to abide by Islamic notions of
‘modesty’, against the left and, in important cases, against ethnic
or religious minorities. The Algerian Islamists established their
hold on the universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s by
organising ‘punitive raids’ against the left with the connivance of
the police, and the first person killed by them was not a state
official but a member of a Trotskyist organisation; another of their
actions was to denounce Hard Rock Magazine, homosexuality, drugs and
punk at the Islamic book fair in 1985; in the Algerian towns where
they are strongest, they do organise attacks on women who dare to
show a little of their skin; the first public demonstration of the
FIS in 1989 was in response to ‘feminist’ and ’secularist’
demonstrations against Islamist violence, of which women were the
main victims. [51] Its hostility is directed not just against the
state and foreign capital, but also against the more than 1 million
Algerian citizens who, through no fault of their own, have been
brought up with French as their first language, and the 10 percent of
the population who are Berber rather than Arabic speakers.
Similarly, in Egypt, the armed Islamic groups do murder secularists
and Islamists who disagree strongly with them; they do encourage
communal hatred by Muslims, including pogroms, against the 10 percent
of the population who happen to be Coptic Christians. In Iran the
Khomeini wing of Islamism did execute some 100 people for ’sexual
offences’ like homosexuality and adultery in 1979-81; they did sack
women from the legal system and organise gangs of thugs, the Iranian
Hezbollah, to attack unveiled women and to assault left wingers; and
they did kill thousands in the repression of the left Islamist
People’s Mujahedin. In Afghanistan the Islamist organisations which
waged a long and bloody war against the Russian occupation of their
country did turn their heavy weaponry on each other once the Russians
had left, reducing whole areas of Kabul to rubble.
In fact, even when Islamists put the stress on ‘anti-imperialism’,
they more often than not let imperialism off the hook. For
imperialism today is not usually the direct rule of Western states
over parts of the Third World, but rather a world system of
independent capitalist classes (`private’ and state), integrated into
a single world market. Some ruling classes have greater power than
others and so are able to impose their own bargaining terms through
their control over access to trade, the banking system or on
occasions crude force. These ruling classes stand at the top of a
pinnacle of exploitation, but those just below are the ruling classes
of poorer countries, rooted in the individual national economies,
also gaining from the system, increasingly linking themselves into
the dominant multinational networks and buying into the economies of
the advanced world, even if on occasion they lash out at those above
them.
The suffering of the great mass of people cannot simply be blamed on
the great imperialist powers and their agencies like the World Bank
and the IMF. It is also a result of the enthusiastic participation in
exploitation of the lesser capitalists and their states. It is these
who actually implement the policies that impoverish people and wreck
their lives. And it is these who use the police and the prisons to
crush those who try to resist.
[…]
Khomeini adopted radical themes… At times he sounded more radical
than the Marxists. But while adopting radical themes he remained
staunchly committed to the preservation of middle class property.
This form of middle class radicalism made him akin to Latin American
populists, especially the Peronists. [53]
And Abrahamian goes on to say:
By ‘populism’ I mean a movement of the propertied middle class that
mobilises the lower classes, especially the urban poor, with radical
rhetoric directed against imperialism, foreign capitalism, and the
political establishment… Populist movements promise to drastically
raise the standard of living and make the country fully independent
of outside powers. Even more important in attacking the status quo
with radical rhetoric, they intentionally stop short of threatening
the petty bourgeoisie and the whole principle of private property.
Populist movements thus, inevitably, emphasise the importance, not of
economicsocial revolution, but of cultural, national and political
reconstruction. [54]
Such movements tend to confuse matters by moving from any real
struggle against imperialism to a purely ideological struggle against
what they see as its cultural effects. ‘Cultural imperialism’, rather
than material exploitation, is identified as the source of everything
that is wrong. The fight is then not directed against forces really
involved in impoverishing people, but rather against those who speak
‘foreign’ languages, accept ‘alien’ religions or reject allegedly
‘traditional’ lifestyles. This is very convenient for certain
sections of local capital who find it easy to practice the
‘indigenous culture’, at least in public. It is also of direct
material interest to sections of the middle class who can advance
their own careers by purging others from their jobs. But it limits
the dangers such movements present to imperialism as a system.
Islamism, then, both mobilises popular bitterness and paralyses it;
both builds up people’s feelings that something must be done and
directs those feelings into blind alleys; both destabilises the state
and limits the real struggle against the state.
The contradictory character of Islamism follows from the class base
of its core cadres. The petty bourgeoisie as a class cannot follow a
consistent, independent policy of its own. This has always been true
of the traditional petty bourgeoisie-the small shopkeepers, traders
and self employed professionals. They have always been caught between
a conservative hankering for security that looks to the past and a
hope that they individually will gain from radical change. It is just
as true of the impoverished new middle class-or the even more
impoverished would-be new middle class of unemployed ex-students-in
the less economically advanced countries today. They can hanker after
an allegedly golden past. They can see their futures as tied up with
general social advance through revolutionary change. Or they can
blame the frustration of their aspirations on other sections of the
population who have got an ‘unfair’ grip on middle class jobs: the
religious and ethnic minorities, those with a different language,
women working in an ‘untraditional’ way.
[…]
Islamism began to dominate among the very layers of students and
young people who had once looked to the left: in Algeria, for
instance, ‘Khomeini began to be regarded by layers of young people as
Mao and Guevara once had been’. [56] Support for the Islamist
movements went from strength to strength as they seemed to offer
immanent and radical change. The leaders of the Islamist movements
were triumphant.
Yet the contradictions in Islamism did not go away, and expressed
themselves forcefully in the decade that followed. Far from being an
unstoppable force, Islamism has, in fact, been subject to its own
internal pressures which, repeatedly, have made its followers turn on
one another. Just as the history of Stalinism in the Middle East in
the 1940s and 1950s was one of failure, betrayals, splits and
repression, so has the history of Islamism been in the 1980s and 1990s.