THOSE MYTHOLOGICAL MEN AND THEIR SACRED, SUPERSONIC FLYING TEMPLES

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From this anxiety of imitation, it is a short step to seeking authenticity in texts from the past, even if one of those texts is itself a modern imitation. The effect is further magnified by a narrowly instrumental education, the shrinking of public debate, the subservience of media to business interests, the proliferation of social media, and an influential but alienated diaspora, especially in the United States, that seeks to find a glorious Hindu past that can be seen to have exceeded the very West upon which India’s recent success depends so heavily. When this past does not exist, it has to be created, often in less imaginative ways than the manner in which Sastry fashioned the V.S.

It has meant, for instance, the destruction of books with perspectives on ancient India that the Hindu right finds unpalatable. In 2001, when the Delhi University historian D.N. Jha wrote, in The Myth of the Holy Cow, that the ancient Vedic people were eaters of beef, he and his publisher were threatened, subjected to demonstrations, ritual book burnings, calls for the book to be banned, and a court order preventing its distribution. Jha’s work was based on extensive archaeological and textual evidence, and his argument itself is widely accepted by professional historians in India and abroad, but it went against the Hindu right’s insistence that beef-eating was an evil brought into the subcontinent by Muslims (a process it is determined to reverse by force, as in a recent ban in the state of Maharashtra that makes possession of beef punishable by a five-year jail term). Similarly, when University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger published The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2009, the campaign against it ran all the way from the United States to India, where the book’s publishers, Penguin India, after a four-year legal battle, agreed to an out-of-court settlement that involved withdrawing all copies of the book and pulping them. Among the arguments against the book in the lawsuit initiated by Dina Nath Batra, founder of a Hindu right-wing educational organization and author of textbooks depicting ancient glories, like television and cars, was that “your approach is that of a woman hungry of sex.”

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The Deep State: Germany, Immigration, and the National Socialist Underground

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A weakness of large parts of the “left” opposition and the radical Left becomes apparent: after the pogroms of the early ’90s many abandoned the working class as a revolutionary force. They could therefore only turn to “civil society” and thus ultimately the state as an ally against the Nazis. This ally supported fascist structures and helped to establish them, while at the same time it gave the left-wing opposition the opportunity to turn itself into a force supportive of the state. This fact paralyses many Antifa and other leftwing groups. Instead of naming the state’s role in the NSU complex, they focus on the investigation committees and the trial, they lose themselves in the details which are produced there. There were no significant movements on the streets when the NSU became public. All this allows the state apparatus to minimize the NSU – but many people still feel the horror.

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Thinking about Warlordism

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Nothing guts a thought so much as apologetic blahblahblah stuck at the beginning, letting all and sundry know that you can't stand by what you're about to say without establishing all your escape routes ahead of time. But there you go...

i've spent (wasted?) too many hours over the past week trying to put together some thoughts on warlordism. The basic problem i realized yesterday is that i have a bunch of nifty quotes explaining the concept, and a strong sense of how a warlordism should play out (at least in my imagination), but really not much more. For me, the exercise is abstract to the point that it's more like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle than any kind of sharing of political insights. & while nobody should have anything against the sin of Onan, intellectual masturbation on a blog seems a bit... unseemly...

Warlordism is an all too real problem in lots of people's lives, and as an easily-manipulable force (kind of like fire) it's a tool which has been used by the State all over the world, but as for me personally... i've never had to worry about it in any real intimate kind of way. Hells Angels, street gangs, and such have not been a factor i've had to navigate in my daily life, never mind parastates or rogue militias. This has a lot to do with class, a lot to do with gender, and probably something to do with nation, too.

So there's a flashing neon sign in my mind's eye screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP" -

- and i would, but -

the issue is that, clueless as i know i am, there seem to be a whole lot of folks at least as clueless as i who are putting forward ideas that not only boggle my mind, but make me worry. Not so much for the the folks putting forward these ideas today, but more about where those ideas are going to go and where they'll end up tomorrow.

What i'm talking about is this difference i seem to be sensing between insurrection and revolution. This idea that what we should be all about is destroying that which exists first, and either wait til later to worry about creating something new (the weak version of this argument) or else actively oppose the creation of anything new from our side, instead embracing the transience of any "free space" (the strong version).

In the past, i used to advocate this position too - i remember selling an anarchist newspaper on the street and having "regular" people repeatedly ask me a very sensible question: "What do you propose putting in place of the State?" And like a moron i'd say "I just trust people to be able to build their own communities and handle issues on their own once the State is driven out." Cute, but dumb.

But cut to the present. While they may or may not be intended literally, these lines from Tiqqun are representative of what many are thinking - and not only "insurrectionists":

Bodies aggregate. Breathe again. Conspire.
Whether such zones are condemned to be suppressed militarily really
does not matter. What matters, each time, is to preserve a sure escape
route.
And then re-aggregate
Elsewhere.
Later.

(How Is It To Be Done?, p.14)

This "it does not matter if you're suppressed militarily" is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, theme in a lot of rad left theory, and not just of the romantic-insurrectionist variety. It is there in focussing on "the attack" and ignoring the question of how to liberate territory, but i think in another form it was also there even in classical foco theory, where provoking military repression was integrated into guerilla strategy. And of course it's there is subconscious form in all those left currents which simply feel entitled to not think in military terms, as if military struggle were some condiment they could simply choose not to squeeze onto their burger. "Would you like armed struggle with that insurrection, sir?"

i think one part of the appeal of insurrectionist ideas is simply a realistic appraisal of what happened in the 20th century - where nobody managed to maintain liberated territory, where every revolution was either integrated into capitalism through economic/military defeat or by its own new State - and also an understandable reaction to the fact that with all the State's technology and material resources tying yourself (or your "war machine") to the defense of a specific piece of territory seems suicidal. Because while the enemy may be vulnerable anywhere, he is equally able to able to impose himself anywhere, and with force unprecedented in all of human history.

So in a very simple form, this constitutes a reflection of the times, an adaptation to the fact that

Sliding around the government pre-occupation with "more important" crises, moving and hiding amidst the chaotic clash of different players, the oppressed learned that in the physics of this new political universe we really can do much more than we thought we could - while others, don't forget, can do the same to us. (Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover, p. 172)

So in that sense the embrace of fluidity, anonymity and "zones of opacity" all represent a step forward. Nevertheless, Tiqqun's "does not really matter" line is maddening - military occupation is no fun for those who are stuck in an area, who were not in on the plan, who have no "escape route". We know that as in all "regular" wars, most of these casualties, these "third persons" - those who fail to make it out the escape hatch - will be women and children. As always.

But that's not what i want to zero in on. Rather, what i want to focus on is what else can happen in that "chaotic clash of different players", for Tiqqun and many others, for all their claims to have broken with the past, seem to still think that there are only two possibilities - the State takes an area, or else it's a liberated zone (tho of course they'd have a more poetic name for these alternatives). "Military occupation" will come in the form of the enemy we know, with its armies or cops. That's their assumption - and i think they're wrong. What i want to think about is something hinted at when Lee and Rover warned us that "others, don't forget, can do the same to us."

There is an organic tendency towards warlordism in communities that have tasted capitalism and patriarchy and colonialism. Even oppressed communities. Many years ago, in a form that probably seems dated to some of today's rebels, Butch Lee provided a useful definition of this term:

Warlordism is a society without any real civil government, a chaos where gangs and armies of armed men not only have a free run but are the only true authority. It's what you see in much of the Third World [...] or, increasingly, in New Afrika. Warlordism is created in the social vacuum when an oppressed people have thrown off colonialism or made direct colonial rule impossible, but do not yet have national liberation and effective self-rule. It is a natural form for neo-colonialism. 

And as explained by L.B. in their 1999 essay "Some Preliminary Notes on Class Structure" in the 8th Route Readers Club maozine:

Warlordism is a phenomenon that arises in times of social instability and transition, when the former methods of social control and "legitimate" state power have been weakened. It consists of groups of armed men who forcibly fill the power vacuum left by the weakness or withdrawal of the state's army or police forces. Although warlord groups may at times have popular support, they are inflexibly authoritarian formations, usually organized around personal military and nepotistic loyalty to a single leader.

Drive out "the oppressor" and its State and you don't necessarily have "freedom" or even a "secessionist constitutency" (to use some flowery term), all you're guaranteed is a power vacuum. Perhaps a community or society which had not been integrated into capitalism yet would be able to fill this vacuum organically with communism or matriarchy or anarchy, and things would proceed nicely... perhaps... but where do you know of such a society? More often than not, capitalism corrupted societies with missionaries and traders and patriarchy before conquering them militarily. But regardless, for us its a moot point, we certainly don't inhabit any such organically classless communities.

So what happens in a power vacuum? It gets filled. The 20th century overflows with examples of how bad things can get when we fill it - "real existing socialism", anyone? - but learning this doesn't mean we've solved the problem. Not nearly. And a blithe dismissal of the question is neither radical nor farsighted, it simply reveals the continuing appeal of naivete.

For some people at some points in their lives, "the attack" and the psychological liberation it sparks may be the real point of it all, communities and issues and casualties all being props in this essentially internal drama of self-liberation. This may be snotty of me to say, and i know this isn't where most are at, but it does seem to be a logical corollary to the obsession with violence and riots as ends-unto-themselves that one can find in some insurrectionist texts. It is worth remembering what Crimethinc stated in their critique of insurrectionism, namely that

Resistance to oppressors is praiseworthy in itself, but much resistance takes place in support of other authoritarian powers. This is all too familiar in other parts of the world, where illegal violence on the part of fascists, paramilitaries, gangs, drug cartels, mafias, and authoritarian revolutionary movements is an essential aspect of domination. Aspiring authoritarians often take the lead in attacking reigning authorities precisely in order to absorb and co-opt popular unrest. Rioting per se is not always liberating—Kristallnacht was a riot too. (Say You Want An Insurrection, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective)

And as Alex Gorrion notes in their extensive critique of the "Invisible Party":

Much of the antisocial violence in public space, violence which is romanticized in several Tiqqun texts, is not so much a rebellion as an autonomous attempt to impose hierarchies in miniature. It may well be that the majority of casualties in this global civil war are the bodies that have fallen in the civil war being fought within the ranks of the Imaginary Party. (A cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party)

This "autonomous attempt to impose hierarchies in miniature", when allowed to develop in a zone temporarily abandoned by the State, takes the form of warlordism. Rule by local mafia, by religious cultists, by the toughest guys on the block. Don't think Ursula K. LeGuin's The Disposessed, that's several stages away - our next chapter will look a lot more like Octavia Butler's Parable series.

This poses a challenge which i have not seen answered anywhere on the radical left, namely how to drive out the State and suppress organic tendencies towards warlordism all the while not erecting a new structure of exploitation or repression. A century ago German anarchist Gustav Landauer stated that "The new topia arises to save the utopia, but actually causes its demise," and insisted that this was unavoidable, part of an eternal historical cycle of moments of freedom alternating with ages of despair. Perhaps. This would seem to go along with insurrectionary pessimism regarding liberated territory.

But warlordism ups the ante, implying that even if no new "topia" is created to save the "utopia", that ambitious groups of men will come together to profit from an open field - and then just watch how quick utopia can become dystopia. Insurrectionism as it exists, i would suggest, is not nearly pessimistic enough.

While it is true that no one on the left has solved this problem, i actually think insurrectionist naivete is worse than many other approaches, because it seems ideologically predisposed to deny there even is a problem. As it exists at present, insurrectionary anarchist thought thinks away from how to deal with a power vacuum, because its an insurrectionist axiom that creating such vacuums is the entire point. Furthermore, the methods proposed - violence that is intended to be attractive to and imitated by people who do not necessarily have to be anarchists themselves or even aware of insurrectionist ideas - seem particularly fitted to a strategy that does not wish to see further than the first victorious battle with the State.

Just as capitalism has a "natural" ideological form - bourgeois democracy - which it tends towards even though it often fails to get there, warlordism also has a natural ideological form. And it isn't insurrectionary anarchism.

Fascism is warlordism's natural ideology. Not the fascism of the Third Reich, of mass society and the Volkswagen, but a fascism that still has place in its heart for an Auschwitz or a Kristallnacht. In their book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, authors Matthew Lyons and Chip Berlet pointed out that for many on the far right the goal of a decentralized "social totalitarianism" now held place of preference over the strong State commonly associated with their tradition. Social totalitarianism would be "administered mainly through local governments and private institutions such as the church and the family, rather than the classical fascist goal of a highly centralized nation-state." (249)

They observed:

While such decentralist policies may seem incompatible with full-blown fascism, we see them partly as defensive adaptations and partly as expressions of a new social totalitarianism. Industrial-era totalitarianism relied on the nation-state; in the era of outsourcing, deregulation, and global mobility, social totalitarianism looked to local authorities, private bodies (such as churches), and direct mass activism to enforce repressive control. (267)

Such "social totalitarianism" may be how the warlord's power appears in his own eyes, and those of his crew, his church, his business franchise. At "best" this might resemble a high-tech version of euro-feudalism, with a warrior caste living off of a subjugated populace - at worse it seems like a barely-updated version of those white invaders who settled beyond the borders of their colonial states, carrying out their own grassroots genocide off the books and on their own.

Again, Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower, gifts from the late Octavia Butler, may be helpful to see what is being talked about. But we don't need science fiction, such examples abound in this world, right now, and have for some time now. Warlordism is what both fed into and was suppressed by the Taliban in pre-911 Afghanistan. Warlordism is the Lords Resistance Army carrying out genocide in Uganda. Warlordism is Indigenous communities being temporarily abandoned to gangster elements, until people are so desperate that they welcome the colonial police back as the lesser of two evils. And warlordism can exist enmeshed in cities in the heart of the beast, without disrupting capitalism at all - as J. Sakai recounted some ten years ago:

The old Black industrial working class has been largely wiped out, and warlord armies and gangs given informal state permission to rule over much of the inner city at gunpoint. A few years ago i  went home with a comrade. When we got off the bus, all the passengers started walking home down the middle of the street. My friend explained that all the sidewalks were "owned" by one or another dope gang or dealer, reserved for their crew and customers.  You  walked in the street or you got taken down by a 9mm. While the new Black middle class takes itself out of the game, flees the old communities and disperses itself into the suburbs. Why would capitalists need fascism? (When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited)

Capitalism may not need fascism, but as i have said, fascism is the ideology warlordism tends towards. With its wild warrior ethos and its scorn for "feminine" bourgeois civility, warlordism has always been the social myth that traditional fascism has dangled before its men - both as an enticement and also as a threat aimed back on "their" women.

While insurrectionism may be at the opposite end of the political spectrum, no two forms of human thought are so unalike that they cannot be affected by one another. Subjectively fierce opponents of fascism can nevertheless produce and promote ideas that objectively are politically entangled with the far right.

Twenty years ago, former Klan chief Louis Beam popularized the concept of "leaderless resistance" within the North American far right. Beam explained at the time that he was in his turn drawing on an article written thirty years earlier by Colonel Ulius Louis Amoss:

the question arises "What method is left for those resisting state tyranny?" The answer comes from Col. Amoss who proposed the "Phantom Cell" mode of organization. Which he described as Leaderless Resistance. A system of organization that is based upon the cell organization, but does not have any central control or direction, that is in fact almost identical to the methods used by the Committees of Correspondence during the American Revolution. Utilizing the Leaderless Resistance concept, all individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization. 

The far right had the wind in its sails at that time, and some anarchists were so ignorant of history and mesmerized by a klansman promoting the autonomous affinity group model that they declared leaderless resistance to be "one of the most radical and revolutionary concepts ever imagined by a white man" ("Chiapas and Montana: Tierra Y Libertad", James Murray in Race Traitor #8, Winter 1998). While this was not a common view amongst anarchists, it was not completely isolated, either, and it resonated even with some of those who could not stomach Murray's proposed alliance with the far right. The naive faith that "collapse" or "chaos", the breakdown of federal or central state power, will naturally serve the interests of the oppressed is what i've been trying to call attention to in this post, dealing with insurrectionists who are really a young tendency today in 2010. But an anterior echo of this naive embrace of "ungovernability" can be found in Murray's musing from twelve years ago that,

The militias' grass-rooted nonorganization makes it impossible to believe they could agree amongst themselves long enough to ever set up any revolutionary government structure above the county level. All the better, we have no need to fear an(other) Aryan Republic. The militias will never overthrow the government in the vanguardist style. However, it is within the realm of possibility that they could very well make large portions of North America ungovernable. Whether one would favor such a nonstate of affairs depends to a large degree on how much one has to lose. The residents of Starr County, Texas, south central Los Angeles and north Idaho might agree it would be an improvement.

Needless to say, Murray's undifferentiated populations of "Starr County, Texas, south central Los Angeles and north Idaho" have no gender, no nation, no "race" or class divisions amongst themselves, or at least none worth mentioning. They're as anonymous, as identityless, as the ideal subjects (or nonsubjects, or "whatever singularities") of some insurrectionist texts. But we know that in real life such zones of "ungovernability" are not really ungoverned, they're just governed in a lawless, arbitrary manner, by whomever has the biggest guns and - more importantly - the most effective social organization - and this latter is often the product of collective identities and power.

There's an interesting point made in the recent Crimethinc retrospective, which provides an up-to-date corollary to Beam's aping of the affinity group form. They note that

Even fascists are trying to get in on decentralization and autonomy. In Europe, “Autonomous Nationalists” have appropriated radical aesthetics and formats, utilizing anticapitalist rhetoric and black bloc tactics. This is not simply a matter of our enemies attempting to disguise themselves as us, though it certainly muddies the waters: it also indicates an ideological split in fascist circles as the younger generation attempts to update its organizational models for the 21st century. Fascists in the US and elsewhere are engaged in the same project under the paradoxical banner of “National Anarchism”; if they succeed in persuading the general public that anarchism is a form of fascism, our prospects will be bleak indeed.


What does it mean if fascists, the foremost proponents of hierarchy, can employ the decentralized structures we pioneered? The 20th century taught us the consequences of using hierarchical means to pursue supposedly non-hierarchical ends. The 21st century may show us how supposedly non-hierarchical means can produce hierarchical ends. (Fighting in the new Terrain: What's Changed since the 20th Century, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective)

Such "using non-hierarchical means to produce hierarchical ends" is one way of looking at the kind of exploitation and oppression that can coexist with zones of crisis and with horizontal tactics of social disruption. If this is a spreading phenomenon, it's because old-style colonialism and imperialism tried to keep a finger in every pie, maximum penetration of every struggle, because if your nation-state wasn't be there, another would be. This was simply further enhanced in the Cold War era, when Soviet and Chinese imperialism went toe-to-toe with one another, and with the United States. But that was then - while national economies still exist, they're no longer the corporate homes they once were; production spans continents, and the old national reality of colonialism has given way to neo-colonialism. As capital has imagined itself unmoored from territory, so have the dreams of rebels left and right. As Butch Lee and Red Rover explained:

The previous capitalist world order was bi-polar, with everyone visible massed around opposing poles of oppressor vs. oppressed. It was colonialist vs. colonizer, white vs. black, invader vs. indigenous. But at it's essence, the growing chaos of the neo-colonial world order is that many different peoples - armed with conflicting capitalist agendas - have been loosed to fight it out. As transnational capitalism hides behind & backs first one side and then the other - or not - to indirectly use the chaos they see no class interest in containing. (Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, 161)

Or as L.B. explained,

Warlordism is on the rise today because neocolonialism is reshaping the global social order: breaking down national boundaries, "de-settlerizing" settler states, replacing colonial administration of the Third World with local neocolonial structures, raising up new middle classes in the periphery, etc.  ("Some Preliminary Notes on Class Structure" L.B.)

Viewed from the inside and from below, warlordism exhibits all the features of primitive accumulation, of new ambitious classes bootstrapping their own ascent through outright theft and murder. Their dream, of course, is not exodus from the system, but integration into capitalism on more favorable terms.

While warlordism is a particularly raw form of social control, it is actually just a local, mobile prototype of state power. Successful warlords can and do become the rulers of nation states. It is a relatively small step from neo-colonial warlord to neo-colonial dictator when imperialism decides it needs to regularize social life in a particular part of the world. For instance, the Taliban started as a warlord organization, but is now [written in 1999, pre-911! -ST] treated as a national government, praised by some capitalists for bringing commercial "stability" to Afghanistan.  ("Some Preliminary Notes on Class Structure" L.B.)

Indeed,

The rise of warlordism does not imply loss of control by imperialism--far from it. It reflects, instead, adoption of a different type of control, overall more sophisticated than the old colonialism's relatively-static micro-management of the colonial world. Imperialism is learning that it is much more efficient, and profitable, to let local and regional forces compete for control of markets, for resources and for imperialist approval. There's nothing like "grass roots" initiative by local oppressors to expedite the extraction of profit. And warlords, grounded in the details of local conditions, have proven their effectiveness in breaking down "obsolete" regimes, or repressing radical activity. ("Some Preliminary Notes on Class Structure" L.B.)

Catch that - from one point of view (that of its victims), warlordism is a "particularly raw form of social control". But from the point of view of imperialism, of Shell Oil or Blackwater/Xe or the IMF, warlordism is a "more sophisticated" way to extract profit from a world that can no longer be micromanaged.

That newer elements of fascist ideology parallel some of the recent developments in anarchist thought is of course provocative. i can just imagine what turds like Morris Dees would make of this. But rather than suggest any underlying unity between insurrectionists and the "social totalitarianism" of the far right, i think what is revealed are organic attempts by both traditions to grapple with changes in the relationship between capitalism, nation-states, and territory. The fact that people on our side are also thinking this way is good, but the fact that they remain so deeply mired in naive romanticism is a serious deficiency. & as i said before, it worries me.

These notes and this blog post have been fairly choppy, and have relied mainly on quotes drawing attention - perhaps repetitively - to the relationship between neocolonialism, fascism and warlordism. i have failed to include nearly enough real-life examples, and as i said at the beginning, this discussion (on my part, as i believe on the part of most insurrectionists) is divorced from much personal experience. Nevertheless, if you've made it this far (and i'm sure most haven't!) hopefully the above observations, and related texts, will provide some basis for further discussion.

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Michael Novick Responds to Kali Akuno and Don Hamerquist

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Just a quick heads up that Michael Novick has written a brief response to Don Hamerquist's Thinking and Acting in Real Time in the Real World. It is up on the excellent Three Way Fight blog, at http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/03/michael-novick-responds-to-thinking-and.html

Just to recap, Michael is the editor of Turning The Tide, publication of People Against Racist Terror. The pieces he is responding to were both recommended by yours truly last year:

• Navigating the Storm: A Strategic Orientation for Confronting the Advance of Reaction and National Oppression in the "Obama" Era by Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grossroots Movement. This text, written in October and drawing on observations by Mike Davis, deals heavily with the Obama presidency that was being prepared for at that time. i have reservations (again) with the programmatic aspects Akuno suggests, but the text is worth reading as it helps to frame some of the subsequent discussion:
• Navigating the Storm: Reprise, also by Kali Akuno. A useful reappraisal of his initial Navigating the Storm piece, again with a focus on the Obama presidency and class dynamics within the united states that may make it less useful for those of us outside of the u.s.- nevertheless, definitely worth reading.
• Thinking and Acting in Real Time and A Real World by Don Hammerquist. An excellent survey of the field before us, Hammerquist discusses Akuno's Navigating the Storm piece and also texts by the Midnight Notes collective and Adam Hanieh of Left Turn magazine.

 All worth checking out...

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Fundamentalism, Capitalism and Assumptions of the Outmoded

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Two laboratory assistants worked in the genetic research lab
at Tehran’s Royan Institute, a jewel of Iran’s science program.

Not to give readers the wrong impression, but the Revolutionary Communist Party (usa) has a useful response to the International Socialists' line on Islamophobia on their Revolution dot com website: U.S. Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism... and the need for another way.

i say "useful" and that's a quality i'm appreciating more and more in reading certain things. The idea isn't that i necessarily agree with a piece, or don't even have specific strong disagreements - it's simply that an article or essay that spells out a position clearly, explaining how conclusions were arrived at and the author's train of thought is... well... useful. If only in giving you something to sink your teeth into and agree or disagree with.

Specifically, in regards to this key position by RCP head honcho Bob Avakian:

What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.

While i agree with Bob's conclusion - that siding with either of these poles means strengthening both - i question the terms by which he describes these protagonists.

For one, the relationship between McWorld and McCrusade - if one wants to use those terms - could itself be examined in some depth, showing splits and differences. While Bush and the neo-cons may be seen as the leaders of McCrusade, the borders of McWorld are unclear. Is someone logging in to check out Youtube in Kabul joining McWorld? What if they are logging in to check out the latest video uploads from the Iraqi Resistance? And what if they steal a few minutes after that to check out their fave xxx website?

But leaving aside that question, i am still not convinced that right-wing religious movements in the Third World represent "outmoded classes" defending feudalism. Or perhaps i should ask, has anybody told these guys that they're outmoded yet?

i think this description - shared by many people critical of right-wing anti-imperialism - implies a certain shyness regarding what capitalism is, what patriarchy is, what imperialism is. Historically, the implication is that for all its sins, capitalism represented a "step forward" for feudal Europe, and as such undermined an "outmoded" patriarchal superstitions. We've been brought up with tales of Galileo and Darwin, of a conflict between a hidebound Church and forward thinking scientist-entrepreneurs, and so we have this assumption that theocrats and vulgar patriarchs are somehow opposed to "progress", are defending the "past", and as such must - in the contemporary Third World as in Enlightenment europe - represent "outmoded" classes. Classes which, as Sunsara Taylor explains, "represent old ruling strata in these societies." (my emphasis)

Within europe though, i am thoroughly unconvinced that this was the case. First of all, capitalism in europe incorporated both the cultural and economic profits of the witch-hunt, feeding on the massacre of european women which occurred under the aegis of the supposedly "outmoded" church. Furthermore, as Sylvia Federici has detailed in her book Caliban and the Witch, the rise of mercantilist capitalism involved the violent suppression of popular culture and a real war against women. It was "progressive" european capitalism which resembled the kind of cultural totalitarianism today associated with "outmoded" fundamentalism. Because all these constraints, all this repression, all this destruction of people's culture, were necessary parts of the creation and regimentation of a dependable and exploitable working class.

(While i have not looked into it enough, i can say that a similar process seems to have played out here in Quebec as late as the 19th century, where the suppression/co-optation of popular insurrection was followed by a period of rapid industrialization which coincided precisely with the rise of a vicious and ultra-authoritarian Roman Catholicism, one which has subsequently and incorrectly been described as an inheritance from before the British invasion. But more on that another day!)

First off i remain unconvinced that groups and regimes as diverse as the FIS, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Islamic Republic or Iran and the Taliban all represent the same class forces. There seems to be a real mix there, one which should not be glossed over just because we don't like any of these folks.

Secondly, are all of the classes and political programmes represented by these groups "outmoded" and backwards-looking? As i described above, i think many people feel that once you've proven that these organizations incorporate superstition and patriarchal repression into their programme, you've made that case. But as i have argued, this position is overly simplistic and glosses over the sympathetic relationship between capitalist economic development and cultural and patriarchal repression. It remains willfully blind to the possibility that within this fundamentalist potpourri there may be currents which represent - at one and the same time - both heightened patriarchal repression and a forward-looking programme of capitalist development.

In the end those who believe that fundamentalism can only be regressive teeter on a tightrope, always at risk of falling to one side - conceding that Group X is forward looking and thus must not be so bad after all - or to another - regretfully concluding that imperialism must be playing a positive role as it is opposing the outmoded Group X. Many are those who have fallen.

Much of the "left" statements defending the Islamic Republic of Iran fall into the first category. It is enough to show that Iran has an impressive nuclear programme, a lot of women graduating from university, a commitment to science and industry... and suddenly Khomeini-ist fascism is reduced to a cultural episode, the brutal repression of the working class is a necessary sacrifice for an "anti-imperialist" State, anti-semitism is a hallmark of militancy and dead queers are an uninteresting diversion exaggerated by unprincipled imperialists.

Similarly, for those who fall into the second category it is enough to show that the united states and israel are fighting against this or that right-wing gang to not only prettify imperialism, but capitalism itself. The next stage along that path is the argument that the left and anti-colonial movements are intrinsically anti-semitic and authoritarian. In Germany this error has reached a point that an "anti-german" tendency has lined up to support Bush's war on the Middle East, accusing all who oppose imperial carnage as belonging to the lineage of fascism.

More needs to be said about this, but first more needs to be thought! These are just some sleepy and unfinished observations that i wanted to get out there, perhaps as a reference to some future study. i will be trying to come back to it all soon enough...

Anti-German "anti-fascists" hold
banner calling for solidarity with Israel

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Two Ways of Looking at Fascism

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Matthew Lyons has a new essay up: Two Way of Looking at Fascism.

You're encouraged to check it out... if i didn't have a busy day you know i'd be spending the next few hours writing up some thoughts, but seeing as i am busy i'll leave that to you...

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Two Arrested in Montreal for Carrying Out Racist Anti-Jewish Attacks

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Azim Ibragimov, left, and Omar Bulphred face nine charges for carrying out anti-Semitic attacks in Montreal over the past six months

i missed this news item when i was out of town last week: two men have been arrested for carrying out anti-Semitic attacks in Snowdon/Cote-des-Neiges area in Montreal.

Here is the article:

Pair denied bail
Men charged with crimes targeting city's Jewish community

The Gazette
Friday, April 13, 2007
Sue Montgomery
and Paul Cherry

Two Montreal men have been accused of a raft of attacks against the city’s Jewish community, including the firebombing of a Snowdon community centre that police are treating as a hate-related crime.

Omar Bulphred, 21, and Azim Ibragimov, 23, appeared briefly in Quebec Court on Friday to be arraigned on charges stemming from incidents that began last fall. Both were denied bail.

The case is due back in court on Monday, at which time a date could be set for a bail hearing.

In addition to their alleged roles in a rash of firebombings, the two are accused of conspiring to commit kidnapping and armed robbery. But it’s not known who or what their potential victims were.

The pair were arrested Thursday morning and questioned. The investigation did not turn up links to any terrorist or hate groups, said Constable Christian Emond, of the Montreal police fraud and arson squad.

“What we can say is that the crimes are hate-related, however,” he said.

“The evidence we’ve accumulated will be brought out in a trial and it will be up to a judge to use this to impose a stiffer sentence” if there is a conviction.

“We deem it to be hate-related because the proof we have indicates the motivation was there.”

Each man is charged with conspiracy to commit armed robbery, conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to forcibly confine someone. Those crimes are alleged to have taken place between March 30 and April 8.

They also face charges of possession of an explosive in connection with the Sept. 2 firebombing of Skver-Toldos Orthodox Jewish Boys School in Outremont.

Each faces one count of damage to property by fire or explosion after a car parked on de l’Authion Ave. in the city’s Mercier district was firebombed Sept. 12.

As well, the two are alleged to have uttered death threats against a member of the Jewish community, and to have threatened to burn, destroy or damage property belonging to the Jewish community.

The most recent attack occurred on April 3, the first day of Passover, when a firebomb exploded at the YM-YWHA Ben Weider Jewish Community Centre, also known as the Snowdon Y. Employees called police at 11:15 p.m. after they heard an explosion at the facility’s main entrance on Westbury Ave. No one was injured and there was no damage to the building.

In the case of the Sept. 2 school firebombing, video surveillance cameras showed a masked man throwing a Molotov cocktail through the front door. The resulting fire was brought under control quickly. Damage to the building was minimal.

During their probe of the firebombings, investigators uncovered a conspiracy to commit armed robbery and to kidnap someone, Emond said.

“Of course, the investigators did everything they could to abort that plan as soon as possible,” he said.

The investigation began after the firebombing at the school. Seven days later, Montreal police came across a letter linked to that attack.

“The person who wrote the letter had intimate details of the firebombing,” Emond said. “Obviously, the person who wrote it was tied to the crime.

“We can’t say exactly how the letter was discovered. What we can say is that the information was not made public at that time because was it was deemed important that we keep it to ourselves. In the long run, it proved to be the right decision. It helped us a lot in determining who the suspects were.”

At the Sept. 12 car bombing, police found another letter at the scene that helped investigators link that incident to the attack at the school.

While probing this month’s firebombing at the Snowdon Y, investigators pieced everything together.

“The evidence and clues investigators were able to gather pointed to all three incidents were caused by the same individuals,” Emond said.

He said he could not divulge how long the men were considered suspects.

Crown prosecutor Gianni Cuffaro wouldn’t say much about the case Friday, except that the investigation continues.

Alexandre Bergevin, the lawyer for the two accused, said police used wiretaps to close in on his clients.

“Other than that, I have very little information about the evidence,” Bergevin said in an interview. “I wasn’t even allowed to meet with them at the courthouse, so won’t see them until sometime over the weekend.”

Jeffrey Boro, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said police told him the two suspects are Canadian-born Muslims of Russian descent.

“That makes it very disconcerting for those who live here,” he said. “We’re raising people here with such hatred in their hearts for people they’ve never met or had anything to do with.”

He said police had informed the CJC they’d found material during the investigation that suggested the crimes were motivated by hate toward Jewish people.

Sarah Elgazzar, of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, expressed dismay the accused are Muslims and hoped that fact wouldn’t increase the animosity between the Jewish and Muslim communities in Montreal.

“Religiously speaking, Jews and Muslims should be so close,” she said. “Sure, there are differences, and there are problems in other parts of the world, but that doesn’t justify these kinds of attacks.

“Most Muslims would never even think of doing something like that; it’s horrible.”

It is unclear if the two are also being charged with the neo-nazi graffiti that has gone up in the area over the past year or so. In January 2007 swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were spraypainted in Russian on the Snowdon Y and the Jewish Community Centre. A year earlier - in January 2006 - similar Russian-language graffiti had gone up in the area, pointing people towards the Russian National Socialist Organization. Cote-des-Neiges and Snowdon is home to many people from the former Soviet Union - both Jewish and non-Jewish - who immigrated over the past sixteen years.

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Nazis at Caledonia

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While most of the people who have demonstrated against the Six Nations Reclamation outside Caledonia are your run of the mill settler chauvinists, content to believe the oh-so-convenient racist myth that this land all belongs to them, there have also been some fascists and neo-nazis spotted.

The relationship between settler chauvinism, white supremacism, and fascism is a fluid one, and while it would be a serious mistake to view all racists as being actual fascists, in times of political crisis its a transition which can happen very quickly indeed.

Here are two videos shot at recent racist settler demonstrations, in which the fascists can be spotted. Gotta love the dude explaining that the National Alliance is just a "free speech" organization!

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[Italy] Terraces and Peripheries: Left snobbery and the radical right

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The following is an interesting article about the influence of far right ideology on the Italian working class. I’m reposting it here (i first spotted it on the aut-op-sy list) as the dynamic described by Quadrelli is not limited to the European scene. In North America too, despite some differences from the European class structure, the rise of the far right can be traced to the left’s disconnection from the working class.

The person who posted this to aut-op-sy explains that “The text appears in German translation in issue 77 of 'Wildcat', although it's not online yet as it's still the current issue. It was written by Emilio Quadrelli, a Genova-based researcher who has spent years insisting (from first-hand experience on many levels) on the inseparability of developments in the class structure of work, prison, 'crime' and political insurrection. (The original Italian text doesn't seem to be online anywhere; if anyone wants it please contact the English translator at .)”

A note from Sketchy Thoughts: i believe most of us here in North America would use the term “suburbs” rather than peripheries.

Terraces & peripheries. Left snobbery & the radical right

If anyone still had any doubts much has happened to dispel them. Many of the terraces of the Italian football stadiums are controlled to an increasing degree by the radical right. This is a fact. And it is necessary to start from here to attack, politically and not morally, a phenomenon which has been spreading for some time in metropolitan peripheries and which only becomes worthy of attention when it gains heavy media visibility. Only in the presence of swastikas, celtic crosses or explicit holocaust references dominating stadiums are many people stupefied, as if they were in a remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and they forget at least a thing or two.

First, they [i.e. the fans associated with the radical right] don't come from the moon, they also have a social life outside the stadiums, lived quite coherently with the 'values' expressed on the terraces. In other words, adherence to the nazi 'lifestyle' is not something purely symbolic and extemporaneous, adopted in a framework where carnival prevails, but a total and in many cases totalizing 'lifestyle', with effects on everyday life. The second thing is the consent and legitimation which – without any kind of forcing, it should be noted – they can claim across areas which cannot necessarily be reductively described as belonging to the world of the radical right.

To speak only of the Roman situation, it is worth recalling the 'dead boy' derby match. This spurious story was circulated by some hardcore fringe fans, regarded by the 'experts' as marginal, isolated from the rest of the crowd, but it immediately became the unquestionable truth for the whole stadium. Essentially the story accused the security forces of killing a young boy during the baton charge that preceded the match. The denial by senior officers and by the highest municipal authorities met with a long deafening, chorus of 'shame, shame' (from Lazio and Roma fans alike), which left little room for interpretation and showed that, when it came to choosing between the institutional truth and the illegitimate truth of 'small groups' of 'unruly fans' the whole stadium showed little doubt about which side it was on. And this is only one of many episodes which could be cited. Posing a few questions, then, seems legitimate to say the least.

As they are not aliens, the 'stadium extremists' do not come from outer space, they inhabit urban areas which are not particularly hard to identify: the peripheries. For the left, this should pose a problem. Why have the traditional urban environments of the left suddenly become the ideal breeding grounds for the radical right? Why are the 'culture' and the 'lifestyle' of 'fascist subversion' able to become hegemonic to a large extent in the stadiums and, to a lesser extent, in the peripheries? Perhaps there are 'deep' explanations that require particularly acute insight, but, even when restricted to the 'surface', it is possible to say something. Passing through any periphery, we enter into a desolate panorama which, to put it bluntly, confirms the lack of interest and the unattractiveness of these territories which, a bit hurriedly in the wake of the latest sociologisms, have been assigned to the world of non-places. The prosaic fact that millions of people live there is regarded at best as a mere nuisance, a simple residue or the undesired collateral effect of the postmodern era. But what is so unpresentable about the inhabitants of the peripheries? What faults mark them like the indelible mark of original sin? Plenty to tell the truth. If they work they do low-status manual jobs; 'productive' or 'unproductive' is not a difference that matters very much. For the most part, moreover, when they don't work, instead of contributing to the oh-so-fashionable world of 'post-work' they plunge into the prosaic condition of the unemployed, revealing once more, if that were necessary, the '20th century' residue they always carry with them. But they don't stop there, dated and unpresentable though these conditions already are. In more than a few cases they devote themselves to illegal activities. And once again in this case they show little sign of participating in the contemporary world. Instead of dedicating themselves to illegal practices which are at least respectable as trends, such as computer piracy, they steal, rob, deal drugs, etc. In a word, they don't manage to be cognitive or immaterial in anything, not even in crime. And when, as often happens, together with a few other million individuals they put on a 'blue collar' and every day confront Capital on the terrain of the 'working day', perhaps imagining themselves still to have, if not an historic role then at least a social one, the latest new philosopher rushes to tell them they should stop worrying because, although maybe they haven't noticed, in reality they no longer exist. Not only that: it's often explained that the search for a strong identity is historically obsolete and, objectively speaking, a reactionary operation, because it inhibits the subversive element which, perhaps in spite of itself, the global capitalist era has put into circulation: the age of the individual. But playing as an individual requires the possibility of being one. A dimension which to large swathes of the population can only be denied.

In the global era, as in any other great transformation, if someone wins, someone else can only lose. If many, through still a minority, are enabled by the opportunities global capitalism offers to free themselves from all restrictions (although as Carosone would say, this opportunity almost always depends on mummy's purse) and to assume the light identity of the free individual in the free market, for most life's expectations look quite different. Their destiny can only be that of the perpetually marginal. And that is the only plaintive 'identity' permitted to them.

What does the right offer these masses without history and without future? Not much, to tell the truth. It offers them a collective glue, which, unfashionable as it may be, is still something. Above all it offers them an enemy. The elites, who can regard with cynical and ironic detachment the hold which the conceptual pairing 'friend/enemy' has on the world, are the sole exception: for the majority, those excluded from the gilded world of individuals, the enemy continues to be the indispensable element able to define the 'strong' borders of friendship. To put it simply, the radical right directs the hate of the peripheries towards something 'concrete'. It offers an identity and a hope. In essence, they say: if we are reduced to this today, it is their fault, the inhabitants of the 'centre', who have the money, the means and the power and use it against us. But we will not submit any more. We exist and they will have to take notice soon.

History is always moved by an 'us' which is counterposed to a 'them'; it never escapes from this dimension. The radical right, on the peripheries, concocts a tailor-made 'us' which in some way is able to turn hate into an identity and a project. Certainly it can be objected that all this is laughable and grotesque, but it must always be borne in mind that choices are made on the basis of what is concretely available. And on the peripheries there do not seem to be any alternatives. Through no merit of its own, simply because it has no rivals, the radical right unexpectedly finds itself in a monopoly on the peripheries. It is well known that, for a long time, the left has abandoned friend/enemy rhetoric, opting for 'visions of the world' where the philosophy of 'benevolence' prevails. Moreover, having without qualms adopted the cause of individuals, the left cannot help but show itself to be distant from the anonymous masses of the peripheries. A snobbish attitude which, however confusedly, the anonymous masses perceive. These worlds receive very little attention, aside from small realities where political militants have been unafraid of contamination with the 'base instincts of the people', as in the case of the Livorno football fans, who are regarded by the left as pure folklore. And what is true of the terraces is even more true of the gyms, another instance where the nazi 'lifestyle' has easily achieved a kind of hegemony. In this case too, an ill-concealed intellectualism has consigned these worlds to the realm of 'bare life', which everyone knows there is no reason to take any notice of. A space which the radical right has not done much to occupy, and on which it would be worth the effort to work, even just to investigate.

In its renunciation of everything, the left has ended up regarding it as inappropriate to maintain any kind of organic link with the 'people', who by definition are not (and never have been) very presentable in sophisticated settings, whether economic or intellectual. The result, as everyone who takes the trouble to do the least work on the ground will easily find out, is quite depressing. In the peripheries, the left is perceived, without too many fine distinctions, as one of the various faces of the 'centre', people who come from outside, who live a gilded life out there (or so it seems) in the world of inclusion, of individuals, of post-work and post-something, but who have nothing to do with those for whom every day is a struggle.

This impression is not far from the truth if, for example, we take a look at the isolation in which the revolt in the French peripheries was left last autumn. The biggest and most powerful insurgency from below of the age of global capitalism, at least in the West, was instantly liquidated by the left, when it wasn't stigmatized as a pure cry of pain and desperation from the beggars of the République. That said, despite the far from idyllic situation, a lot of people are taking notice of the urgency and the need to return to occupy the proper spaces of the left and of antifascism. If from this point of view the Livorno fans can be regarded as the reality which has best been able to guarantee a militant and antifascist presence within the stadiums (and not just there), other realities, though objectively smaller, nonetheless exist, and in the present climate this is by no means insignificant. At the end of this summary, perhaps what it makes sense to propose is that experiences like these be socialized across a wider network, so that they become the common property of all those realities (in a minority but still present in a large part of the world discussed here) for whose existence antifascism and class struggle for socialism continues to be an indispensable reference point.

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Anti-Semitism & The Revolutionary Right

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The revolutionary white right in North America is built on two beliefs: that white people form an objective biological group superior to all others, and that as a collectivity whites are in a state of perpetual competition with all others. The Hobbesian vision of nature, in which all are at war with all, is brought to a different level where “races,” not individuals, vie in permanent and total conflict.



These “facts” do not sit well with a third dogma held by the revolutionary white right, namely that whites are an oppressed and exploited group, who have gotten the raw end of the deal and suffer from “reverse discrimination” in almost all aspects of American life. This third tenet, the myth of the oppressed white man, was largely underdeveloped a hundred years ago. The U.S. power structure had a far more ambiguous relationship to groups like the Klan back then, and fascism – which is a radical and revolutionary movement from the right – had yet to enter the game. Whites not only benefited from the structural oppression of Blacks, but they had no compunction in admitting this and insisting that this was the way things were supposed to be.

Things have changed over the past century, and today the myth of the oppressed white man is one of the white right’s favourite sales pitches.

All of which sits uneasily together. After all, if whites are superior to other races, how did these others manage to get the upper hand? If nobody disputes that whites used to be in charge, how did these superior rulers lose their grip? It all kind of goes against that “survival of the fittest” bs they’re so into…

Under neo-colonialism the less powerful whites lose some of the privileges they were previously guaranteed. The class interests of a growing number of white people diverge more and more from those of the ruling class. The revolutionary right, not the left, is the most dynamic force organizing amongst downwardly-mobile whites. As the ruling class and the racist right move further apart, the question as to how the supposedly superior white man could be losing more and more ground becomes more and more pressing.

There is a need for a worthy opponent in the conscious racist’s mental universe. An ideology based on ethnic pedigree needs a racial villain. A white racist ideology, in a white supremacist society where the far right remains oppositional, and has a downwardly mobile class perspective, needs an elusive opponent, one who can wear a disguise and hide their origins.

Enter the Jews.

Reading their literature, it becomes clear that in the eyes of North American fascists, Jews are enemy #1. This did not use to be the case – prior to the 1970s Blacks were the racist right’s chief enemy. With the triumph of neo-colonialism as a world strategy of the ruling class, and the subsequent formal decolonization of two thirds of the planet, anti-Semitism came to the fore. This process saw the rise of clearly oppositional phenomena like the bonehead movement amongst white working class youth and the nazification of the racist right, officially acknowledged by the Klan as the dawn of a new era (the so-called “Fifth Era” of the KKK).

Today the grandchildren of European immigrants who may themselves have been the targets of nativist hostility can be found within the ranks of the revolutionary white right, and are just as eager to identify with the myth of the oppressed white man as their WASP comrades. These whites identify Jews as the bad pseudo-white guys, the ones responsible for the new harsher realities of the neo-colonial age, the loss of yesterday’s white pride and the fall from white grace.

Unlike anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Slavic and other racisms which used to be trumpeted by the far right, but which have melted away as these groups have been integrated into the mainstream of white America, anti-Semitism within the far right has increased as Jews have become more closely integrated into white America. To use the concept i put forward in my previous post on ideological racism: as popular anti-Semitism has decreased and any structural anti-Semitism has disappeared, ideological anti-Semitism has become more and more important within the ranks of the revolutionary right-wing.

In the world of the revolutionary right, Jews are not just another ethnic group. As spelled out by Hitler in a very different context, Jews are an evil master race to rival the good “Aryan” master race. They are literally the anti-Aryans. Actually gentile bad guys ranging from Mikail Gorbachev to Queen Elizabeth to Bill Gates are “outed” as being Jewish. Even Adolf Hitler has been accused of being Jewish by Christian Identity stalwart Jack Mohr, which of course got Mohr accused of being Jewish by other Identity groups, for as the Christian Separatist Church Society puts it: “it is common knowledge among Christians that the straight nosed Jew is the first one to call the hook nosed Jews the real Jews in an attempt to conceal his own identity.”

In the theories of the revolutionary right, Jews emerge as a plasticene ethnic group. Disquieting evidence that racist theories do not hold water – i.e. a white power structure NOT looking after the white masses, a society where power is in the hands of an absolute minority of super-rich white people who are not oppressed, an absolute majority of white people who remain indifferent or hostile to the revolutionary racists’ agenda – all of this is explained away by use of the Jewish trump card. The white power structure and super-rich are transformed into a Jewish ruling class which is screwing the white masses, using “straight nosed Jews” to lead astray even those who have recognized their enemy in the “hook nosed Jew.”

There have been other equally flexible and reality-defying devices used by the far right. Specifically, theories surrounding the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, and more recently the Reptilian/Draconian extra-terrestrials, also known as the “greys,” all seem ludicrous unless you actually accept the premise that they are true, at which point they become both irrefutable and essential to understanding everything in human history and contemporary events. These conspiracy theories are all shaped by the questions of their day, for like true plasticene they fill whatever mold they are pushed into. Coming out of a specific intellectual tradition, that of European reaction and then fascism, they build upon each other, and their different aspects are interchangeable. This explains how certain members of the Patriot movement could “abandon” anti-Semitism (which previously explained everything) while keeping their entire worldview intact: the name they gave to their plasticene changed from “Jews” to “Illuminati” or “Bilderbergers,” but the plasticene remained the same.

These conspiracy theories answer questions that the rational parts of far right ideology cannot, and as such their logic and details can only be explained by these shortcomings, not by surveying any historical evidence or using normal means of logical deduction. That’s why conspiracy theories, while amusing (who didn’t like the X-Files?), are such an unsound basis for any coherent or rational analysis.

As a plasticene ethnic group, there are no limits to how useful “the Jews” can be to those who adopt anti-Semitism as an ideological device. In a country like Poland, with a Jewish population of only 10,000 in 1990, anti-Semitism remains a key element to far right groups. Even in Japan, with a Jewish population of 600 and no significant historical Jewish presence or history of anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories about Jews have been adopted by many fascist and far right groups. As one J.P. Sartre put it many years ago, “If the Jew did not exit, the Anti-Semite would invent him.”

Given these precedents, it seems likely that anti-Semitism will continue regardless of any historical events unrelated to the far right itself. Even the complete extermination of every last Jew would not staunch this wound, for the belief in “Jewish conspiracies” would still make at least as much sense as current UFO conspiracies, which obviously bear no relationship to the actual population of Martians!

Likewise, it is ludicrous to suggest that any resolution to the problem of Zionist crimes being committed in Palestine would cause the far right to reject anti-Semitism. Like, since when was the far right so opposed to colonialism and the oppression of Arabs? While the fascists may oppose Israel, they do so despite Zionist atrocities, which if anything approximate those which the fascists dream of inflicting on “their own” subject peoples. Indeed, principled left opposition to Israel is based largely on the same values which lead us to reject fascist solutions; and non-Jewish fascist support for Israel – extremely rare as it may be – is predicated on this approval of ethnic slaughter.

I might even go so far as to say that the revolutionary white right pretends to be pro-Palestinian because Jews are overwhelmingly pro-Zionist today, but were Jews to overwhelmingly reject Zionism the radical right would most likely start holding “Solidarity with Israel” marches!

What do you think?

Categories: anti-semitism, fascism, racism

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Three Forms of Racism?

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I have been thinking about racism and anti-fascist activism recently. I have about five Word documents going with various thoughts about this, so i hope to be able to make them semi-coherent and post them over the next little while. At the moment, they’re pretty incoherent, but i’m hoping that by posting this first one, and hopefully getting some feedback, the ideas will come together…



“Normal” racisms, in our day and age, have various dimensions. According to most observers they can be separated into two species: personal prejudice and structural oppression.

Personal prejudice is easy enough for everyone to pick up on, as it’s the most open and explicit form the cancer takes. From jokes and stereotypes which degrade, pigeonhole or simply make ludicrous this ethnic group or the other, to angry klansmen vowing to “kill the mud people,” you figure you’ll know it when you see it.

Structural oppression is a more sophisticated thing, and in the age of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice it’s granted a degree of camouflage. Not enough to make it invisible, but enough so that if you really don’t want to see it you can pretend you don’t. Plausible deniability. But you really have to have some gall to pretend – i mean, just look at Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: that was not (for the most part) “personal prejudice,” that was structural racism. That is why lobotomized commentators on CNN had so much trouble with the deal about “Is it because they’re Black or is it because they’re poor?”

Even without Katrina, the economic symptoms of structural racism in the USA are obvious – a Black unemployment rate twice that of whites, a Black poverty rate three times as high, and a median Black family income $17,000 less per year than for the vaunted whites – never mind the fact that this 12% of the U.S. population accounts for 48% of the prison population and 42% of those living on death row.

The mechanisms of structural oppression can exist in the complete absence of personal prejudice, that’s what it means to say that this setup is structural. It is a system of social stratification which reproduces itself from one day to the next, and will continue to do so as long as nobody figures out how to short-circuit it. In fact, for many middle and upper class people, the absence of personal prejudice merely serves of obfuscate structural oppression, to confuse the issue and allow con-artists to look you in the eye and swear they’re not racist, so you have nothing to complain about.

Structural racism and personal prejudice are both serious problems. While the former may have a higher body count, and may in some ways be responsible for the latter, they are both worth struggling against. I say this in disagreement with those of my comrades who feel all energies must be used against structural racism, and in equal disagreement with those right-wing anti-racists who feel the problem begins and ends with personal attitudes.

Finally, I would like to suggest that there is also a third, often-overlooked, strain of racism. Potentially separate from personal feelings, and independent from actual social structure, i refer to this third strain as “ideological racism.”

Unlike structural racism and personal prejudice, ideological racism is not very visible today, though it has deep roots within mainstream science and history, and is often fueled by personal animus.

Ideological racism is most significant in terms of the revolutionary right, for it is their banner. Clearly, the role of racism in groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Church of the Creator and their ilk, goes far beyond personal prejudice, regardless of what may motivate their freshest recruits. A look at their literature shows that racism serves a similar purpose for these groups as patriarchy does for the women’s movement and class does for classical Marxism. It may, amongst other things, motivate personal prejudice and (to the degree that their political activities bear fruit) it may lead to heightened structural oppression, but its true value for these movements is that it serves as a guide to all of human history, a philosophical blueprint for how people should treat each other, for sexual relations and musical tastes and religious beliefs. It is their principle contradiction, the mental glue that holds their movement together, the theoretical underpinning of their worldview. Thus, debates within these circles as to whether to worship Jesus Christ the Christian or Odin and Thor of Norse mythology, whether to tolerate or eradicate homosexuals, to support global U.S. hegemony or oppose it, and so on ad nauseum, refer to the mythologies of race as the basis for each position.

This is not to say that racial “facts” determine the course of the radical right; the advantage to letting a pseudoscience guide one’s movement is that even more so that the Bible, Talmud or Koran, everything can be interpreted any way you want. I would argue that class interests, a patriarchal agenda and personal prejudice determine the political trajectory of the revolutionary right, but to try and understand this without appreciating the role of racist ideology is to willfully ignore the matrix within which these factors are played out; it would be much like trying to explain the Iraqi Resistance or the Vatican without any reference to Islam or Roman Catholicism.

Ideological racism is almost a litmus test to see who would surpass the limits of what Canadian sociologist Stanley Barrett termed the fringe right, passing into what he called the “radical right.” (i prefer the term “revolutionary right”: these people definitely want a revolution, but i don’t feel they are very radical at all.) Even when it is not essential to a group, it often serves as a reliable marker of how “radical” a revolutionary right-wing organization is.

I point this out because a few years back i was involved in a very acrimonious dispute with some folks, a dispute that led me (slowly) to think this out. At the time, i was told that if a form of racism did not exist as structural racism, then it did not really exist. Structural racism – i.e. the embedding of racist dynamics within the economy or State – was to be the defining characteristic of all racism, and (logically) the limit to our anti-racism.

I would argue that ideological racism carries the seeds of structural racism and personal prejudice. To the degree that the revolutionary right fails, then these seeds won’t grow, and as unrealized potential will amount to nothing. But to the degree that the revolutionary right succeeds, these seeds will grow into new mechanisms of racist oppression. So ideological racism is a threat. Not simply because some fuck-up who has just finished reading propaganda from the National Socialist Movement may be dangerous if you bump into them in a dark alley, but more importantly because it has the potential to create new mechanisms of racist oppression.

To sum up, i would argue that ideological racism also constitutes an aspect of contemporary racism, and as such it underlines the need for an anti-racism without limits.

Categories: anti-fascism, fascism, racism

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Caliban and the Witch [Part Two of Four]

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Caliban and the Witch
Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation
(Sylvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004)

reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

Here is the second part of my four-part review of Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch - the best book i read in 2006.

Please note that a tidier and shorter version of this review is appearing in the journal Upping the Anti (#2) in December 2005.
(for information on Upping the Anti please visit the Autonomy and Solidarity website.)

If you are just joining us, you may prefer to start with the First Installment which you can view here.

(The third and fourth parts can be viewed here.)

Please also note that the entire review is now up on the Kersplebedeb website in html and pdf format!

Enter Capitalism

“Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power […] Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.” [13]


The term “counter-revolution” should be explained, as it might be understood as a reactionary offensive to restore or maintain the status quo. In actual fact, most counter-revolutions do not do this, rather they re-organize society in a new and more brutal way; like Nazism or the Taliban, what we are really talking about is a revolution from the right.


These analogies are chosen with care, for Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries bears a striking similarity to fascist and fundamentalist societies in our own time. Repression and control were the watchwords of the day, in fact modern medicine, psychology, demographics and the social sciences all developed at this time in a grand effort to learn how to make people “fit” into the straitjacket of capitalist relations.


As in Hitler’s Germany and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the metaphysical nature of the human being herself was re-conceptualized: it was at this time that intellectuals separated the body from the mind (or conscience, or soul), leaving it a fleshy machine to be governed by either the disciplined individual or the State. Feelings like lust, hunger, anger and fatigue were all blamed on this “mindless” body, now described as a rebellious subject that needed to be tamed. As it came to be more and more repressed, those outside the realm of formal production – children, women, colonial subjects and people living outside of capitalism – all came to be associated with an ever-more wild, earthy, sexual and “natural” carnality. Patriarchal capitalism’sfetishes for Black and female bodies are ascribed to this process: “For the definition of blackness and femaleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the exclusion of women in Europe and women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of their exploitation.”[14]


The idea of a “mind/body dichotomy” being part of capitalist relations had a certain currency in feminist and anarchist circles back in the 1980s, and Mies referred to it as a “colonizing division,”[15] though without any of the explanatory rigor found here. Over the past twenty years it has never been completely abandoned, but has found itself increasingly left to the practitioners of post-modernist mumbo jumbo, relegated to the margins of most serious political analysis.[16] In plain language and without recourse to spiritual or flakey concepts Federici convincingly explains how this self-alienation resulted from the brutality and violence of early capitalism.


At the same time as individuals were now supposed to be disciplined and deny themselves any “unproductive” pleasures, popular culture was also being attacked by the new capitalist intelligentsia. People had previously had a communal culture that was rich in games, folklore and ritual, and this now had to be suppressed or radically re-crafted: “taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse.”[17] Magical beliefs and superstitions, which often encouraged the belief that one might “get something for nothing,” were also attacked: “How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel and others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be carefully avoided?”[18]


This suppression of people’s bodies and culture was the more sophisticated side of capitalist “progress,” but Federici also describes the many ways in which people were forced off of their land, including the Enclosures,the fencing off of common land which peasants depended on for their survival. Yet even once they were landless, too many preferred to take their chances in the teeming counter-culture of vagabonds, beggars and rebels than work for a wage. This led to “the introduction of ‘bloody laws’ against vagabonds, intended to bind workers to the jobs imposed on them, as once the serfs had been bound to the land, and the multiplication of executions.”[19]

You can view the first installment of this review here and you can read the third installment (which comes next) here.

Footnotes

13] Federici, pp. 21-22. [back to text]

14] Federici, p. 200. [back to text]

15] Mies, p. 210. [back to text]

16] I would qualify this by acknowledging that the concept has retained slightly more currency in the queer and feminist movements, and remains central to the anti-psych movement, though these movements are perhaps also less firmly entrenched in the left now than they were twenty years ago. [back to text]

17] Federici, pp. 136-137. [back to text]

18] Federici, p.142. [back to text]

19] Federici, p. 136. [back to text]

Categories: anti-psych, autonomous-marxism, body-politics, book-review, caliban-and-the-witch, capitalism, europe, fascism, history, sexuality

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Thinking About Iran

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Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? by Suroosh Irfani, Zed Books London 1983.

I’ve had Iran on my mind for the past few weeks. It’s beginning to bother me.

At first, it was because i was reading this book Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? by Suroosh Irfani. Next, it was because i was trying to write a little summary of the book for you all. And then, doing some more reading about Iran on the internet, checking out a couple of old pamphlets from the OIPFG (aka the Fedayeen, the Marxist-Leninist guerilla which fought the Shah and was then massacred by the Islamic right), doing some more reading on the internet, i realized there were entire dimensions just glossed over by Irfani. And so now, finally, it’s because i’ve been trying to write up a larger summary/review for you all. (See how devoted i am?)



Now the problem is that i don’t know a whole lot about Iran or Islam, and so it’s difficult to be sure that i’ve understood all the implications and inferences in what i’ve read. Not that i’d mind if this ignorance was just between my, myself and i… but there’s nothing like writing on the internet to make one aware of one’s standards.

After having spent too much time in front of my computer trying to summarize all of this, i kind of feel like my brain has been boiled in a pot of veggies for several hours – stewed and not very sharp.

So… a new approach. This is not a review or a summary of Irfani’s book, rather just me demanding closure by letting you know what i’ve found of interest, what i think of what i’ve read, and why i think it matters.

Please be forewarned: i write from a position of (relative) ignorance!

First Off: The Book
Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? was written by Suroosh Irfani and published by Zed Books in 1983. Just a few years had passed since the Islamic Revolution had kicked imperialism in the teeth, and even less time had passed since said same Revolution had kicked the Left in the teeth. (Or should i say massacred the Left, buried it, and pissed on its grave?)

Irfani’s is a fine book. I recommend it, but don’t leave your critical faculties at home. He was obviously close to the Islamic Left, and has nothing but good things to say about the Mujahedin, the progressive Moslem guerillas who helped to drive the Shah out of power. If you keep a sack of skepticism on hand as you read, and if you’re willing to read more in order to flesh out the picture, this is not a big problem.

The book deals with three related but separate subjects. The first is the history of Iran since the 1890s. Well actually, that’s not true: Irfani deals very specifically just with the history of rebellions against the monarchy – the Qusar dynasty and then the Pahlavi dynasty, both of which functioned as agents of imperialism (Russian and British, and then American).

Neither the Iranian people, nor the Iranian left, nor Islam, are presented as monolithic entities. There have been divisions based on ideology, on class, and also on plain old personal ambition and greed. Nevertheless, one could say that the monarchy consistently represented the interests of the imperialists, the clergy was overwhelmingly opposed to progressive reforms (i.e. equal rights for women and religious minorities, freedom of the press, etc.), the “Communists” were opportunistic and obsequiously tied to Soviet foreign policy, the “national bourgeoisie” (if that is how one wants to view people like Mosaddeq) was impotent. I’m painting with broad strokes here, but this is the impression Irfani gives.

The next strand of the book deals with progressive Islam, which emerges out of this unpromising situation, opposing both the “formalist clergy” and the imperialist modernizers. To be clear: this was not a watered down version of regular Islam, but was rather a militant and revolutionary kind of “liberation theology,” which (in theory at least) supported equal rights for women, national and religious minorities, freedom to organize, freedom of the press… all the while wrapping it up in a very militant anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology.

A necessary personal admission: i have a kind of visceral attraction/fascination with religious revolutionaries. I concede that it may be a dead end, i acknowledge that they may even be “objectively reactionary”… but i also find the way in which struggle is conceptualized in terms of other-worldy absolutes and eternal truths to be attractive. Call it the sci-fi geek in me, blame the Roman Catholic school i went to as a kid, point the finger at Philip K. Dick… it’s just how i feel. (Not necessarily how i think!)

For this reason, i found the discussions of revolutionary Islamic thought, as elaborated most notably by Ali Shariati (radical left-wing Islam’s chief intellectual until he was murdered by the Shah’s secret police in 1977), to be very interesting. Discussion of the value of fighting for what’s right even if you know you’re going to lose, the way in which monotheism was interpreted as a rejection of earthly idols and authorities, the way in which revolution was conceived as an ongoing eternal struggle…

For instance: “Whenever and wherever a liberated person has refused to submit to despotism and its attempts for distorting supreme values, and has preferred death to a dehumanized, purposeless existence under a monstrous regime and inhuman social system, it is a response to Hosein’s call. Wherever there is struggle for liberation, Hosein is present on the battlefield.” (Ali Shariati, quoted on p.132) (Hosein was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad)

Or else: “After every revolution, a group of opportunists stick themselves to the revolution. This causes the revolution to deviate from its path. However, this in itself is a factor in the evolution of the revolution, and the revolution becomes a continuous affair.” (Ayatollah Taleqani, quoted on p. 143)

i find a lot of this worthwhile, and i also find that it bears more than a passing similarity to some of the more appealing communist and anarchist ideas. You can come to similar conclusions without believing in God. (Shit, you can learn some of this just from watching a good spaghetti western…) So for me, the chapters about this Islamic liberation theology were well worth reading, though if you’re not interested in religious stuff it may be less interesting.

The final, climactic, section of Revolutionary Islam in Iran book deals with the Iranian Revolution. Irfani implies that it was largely through the guerilla attacks of the Mujahedin (which was based on Shariati’s ideas) and Marxist-Leninist OIPFG that the regime was pushed past the point of no return. He discusses the OIPFG briefly, and has nothing but nice things to say about them, but the book (and clearly his sympathies) is with the Mujahedin.

Attention is paid to how the brutal methods by which the Shah attempted to snuff out the guerillas. Both the Mujahedin and Fedayeen started small, and suffered incredible persecution and violence. Their family members were arrested and tortured before their eyes – even infants were abused in front of their parents. Women were gang-raped day after day, week after week, year after year, in the Shah’s interrogation dungeons. His secret police, SAVAK, earned such a reputation for their brutal interrogation techniques that they gave lessons to thugs from other imperialist outposts. They even invented their own tools, such as a gigantic human toaster which literally burnt the victim’s flesh off as they were questioned.

The regime reacted to popular demonstrations and protests with violence. A cycle was established, or so it seems, whereby protests would be met with bullets, and then this would lead to larger protests and greater repression… the situation continued to escalate, but in the people’s favour.

What was the relationship between “the people” – that amorphous mysterious mass – and then guerillas? Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of details given. I mean, “the people” are presented as being sympathetic to the guerillas and hostile to the regime, all the more so as word of the Shah’s brutal torture methods began to get out. But there is very little discussion of the mechanics of how (or if) the guerillas related to different sections of the population, and there is little discussion of revolutionary activity outside of the guerilla. Maybe that’s because there was none, but i find that hard to believe.

The Shah fled on February 5th, 1979, but the regime puttered on. The United States was eager to keep things under control, hoping to avoid a civil war. The army and secret police were loyal to the State, and were in the midst of negotiations with Khomeini about an “orderly transition” when suddenly Air Force cadets mutinied, using their weapons against the army. Within hours thousands of people had taken to the streets, and the Mujahedin and Fedayeen seized the moment, launching an all-out assault on the Shah’s army, completely destroying it within a matter of days.

So, to repeat the one of the most important factoids from this book: Khomeini did not make the Revolution, rather as the decisive insurrection broke out he was busy trying to negotiate with the imperialists.

Now, when describing what happened next, Irfani gives a play by play of how a small right-wing group – the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) – hijacked the Revolution. First off, Irfani seems to imply that Khomeini (who enjoyed great prestige amongst the masses, but had been living in exile for decades) might have gone to the left or to the right – “the IRP was created shortly after the monarchy was overthrown and had campaigned for projecting itself as the only Islamic group loyal to Khomeini and the Revolution.” (p.182) Irfani makes it sound as if the Ayatollah was up for grabs, or didn’t have his own intentions. Again, i know little about all of this, so it is possible – but i doubt it. Rather, this seems to be a way to avoid facing the fact that Khomeini had these fascistic proclivities beforehand, which would be awkward seeing as the Mujahedin (and OIPFG) had accepted (and praised) him for years as a symbol of the struggle against the Shah.

This point aside (remember, i told you to keep some skepticism on hand) Irfani gives an interesting account of how Khomeini and the Islamic right-wing basically allied themselves with those very same “formalist clergy” and even with remnants of the Shah’s regime, including the secret police. Reading the chapter “The Runaway Revolution” (just 16 pages long, but the best 16 pages in the book – someone should turn it into a pamphlet) one gets reminded of Orwell’s Animal Farm, or else what happened in the Soviet Union.

Irfani goes over the story, step by step, of how Khomeini and the IRP took over the State, eventually declaring war on the left. I must admit that it gets a bit confusing here, as the story collapses into what (at the time of publication) was the recent past, and so the details begin to overwhelm the narrative. But one gets the gist of it.

My criticism of how Irfani deals with these events is that he does so very much in a top-down manner, following organizations and leading political personalities but paying little attention to the broader population. After having read about “the people” demonstrating for the Fedayeen and Mujahedin, about how “the people” saw the guerillas as the true revolutionaries, one is left wondering where these “other people” came from, the ones who were suddenly forming gangs and street armies to attack the left. I mean, it wasn’t some aging theocrats out there swinging clubs over their heads, but masses (though maybe not the masses) of people.

This is not so dissimilar to his approach to the pre-revolutionary struggle, and it is unfortunate – although this is not a general history of Iran or even the Iranian revolution, but rather a focused account of left-wing Islam in Iran, i would guess that this could be discussed in terms of numbers beyond Ali Shariati, a few radical left-wing clerics and one guerilla organization. Or maybe not; again, i’m writing based on my hunches and guesses, not on any great knowledge…

Other Sources
As i mentioned above, i also made use of some other sources when trying to contextualize what Irfani was writing about.

I read a couple of old OIPFG pamphlets, but they were written in the early 70s, and can’t be blamed for not having crystal balls.

I did find a number of interesting Trotskyist analyses on the internet. Chris Harman –of Tony Cliff’s SWP/ISO tendency – wrote an essay The Prophet and the Proletariat; he does a nice job of fleshing out some details Irfani glossed over, about what “the Revolution” meant to the oppressed:

[I]n the months after the revolution Khomeini was no more able to impose a single authority over the revolutionary upheaval than anyone else. In the cities various local committees (Komitehs) exercised de facto power. The universities were in the hands of the left and the Mojahedin. In the factories shoras (factory councils) fought for control with management, often forcing out those associated with the Shah’s regime and taking over the organisation of production
themselves. In the regions inhabited by ethnic minorities – Kurdistan in the north west and Khuzistan in the Arab speaking south west – movements began to fight for self determination.

Or, to quote from an interview with former OIPFG member (and current anarchist) Payman Piedar:

every sector of the Iranian society was so thirsty for the so-called new founded "freedom" that they won through their own self-organization. Workers started the Shoura ("soviet" or "council") movement in many factories and even the peasants of the ethnic Turkaman minority (in the Northern region) organized themselves in the same fashion. Women held a major demonstration demanding the right to refuse wearing the religious attire (forceful covering of their body).
Students held lively debates and started organizing themselves into various leftwing groupings. The Kurds (the largest and most radical ethnic minority) immediately created their autonomous zone of control (either through the bourgeois Democratic Party of Kurdistan, or The Komole, a leftwing
petite-bourgeois organization with a strong pro-worker/peasant tendency), with their Armed Pishmarge (namely "self-sacrificing guerrilla") ready to shed their blood to defend their territory.

In other words, people trying to wrest some control over their own lives. Attempts at self-management. Popular anti-capitalism. Collective self-liberation. Good stuff!

But as Piedar explains, Khomeini and the IRP recuperated and neutralized this upsurge:

unfortunately none of the above mass organizations lasted more than a few months. The counter-revolution established their various reactionary armed organizations, namely the Pasdaran Enghelab (so-called "Guardian of the Revolution"), Basij (an armed youth formation), and worst of all The Hezbolaah Party (you could call them the fascist brigade, or "Falange"), and immediately started to smash, break up, and in the case of the Turkamans, carry out vicious executions. In Kurdistan a massive bombardment of their camps took away all the progressive gains that the masses had made for themselves. And, of course, the regime started to create its own "Islamic Shouras", "Islamic women associations" and "Islamic student associations" (which was the extension of the previous pro-Khomeni student organization that was already active prior to his return to Iran).

Harman presents some details about the social base behind this takeover:

What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class – both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class – in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power. The secret of its success was its ability to enable those who followed it at every level of society to combine religious enthusiasm with personal advance. Someone who had been an assistant manager in a foreign owned company could now run it under state control and feel he was fulfilling his religious duty to serve the community (umma); someone who had lived in deep poverty among the lumpen proletariat could now achieve both material security and a sense of self achievement by leading a hizbollah gang in its attempts to purify society of “indecency” and the “infidel Communists”.

The opportunities open to those who opted for the Khomeini line were enormous. The flight from the country of local and foreign managers and technicians during the early months of revolutionary upheaval had created 130,000 positions to be filled. The purging of “non-Islamic” managers, functionaries and army officers added enormously to the total.

Another Trotskyist group with some interesting things on their website is Workers Liberty, based in the UK (i know nothing else of this group, if anyone wants to fill me in). On their site they have this essay Islamism and the left in the Iranian revolution, by a member of Workers' Left Unity Iran and of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (again, i know nothing about these groups, though i am guessing they’re some kind of trots). While i don’t agree with him 100%, the author draws some excellent “lessons” from what happened in Iran. The most important (in my opinion) being that a regime can be anti-imperialist and reactionary at the same time:

The revolution threw out one of imperialism's most trusted allies, and gendarme, in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. The counter-revolution that rode on the back of the revolution, even if its success was oiled by the scheming of Western governments, upset the carefully laid imperialist jigsaw in the region. The West, and in particular the USA lost a close ally. It took another decade and two wars to re-establish Pax Americana.

The Soviet bloc was openly ecstatic. The Iranian revolution had broken the chain of 'containing' states encircling the Soviet block at its most crucial link. The [Stalinist] Tudeh party, always a microphone for the Soviet Union's foreign ministry, had from the revolutionary days endorsed Khomeini. But the Tudeh Party had little support on the ground. It had to win the largest left organisation in Iran, the Organisation of People's Fadai' [OIPFG], if its policies were to be actualised. The Fadai', now a large nation-wide organisation, was suffering from theoretical paralysis. In the intellectual apparatus of the left 'reaction' and 'revolution' were opposites. To combine them was an absolute contradiction. The Fadai's deeply ingrained populism told it that a regime coming out of a popular revolution which had toppled the monarchical dictatorship, and was being opposed by every imperialist power, must be progressive. Its eyes, however, told it different.

Any lingering doubts were cast aside when the rulers of the Islamic Republic consummated their anti-imperialist rhetoric by the charade of the US embassy occupation. This and Iraq's invasion of Iran split the left right down the middle. The Tudeh Party used the authority of 'brother' parties to break the will of the Fadai'. The process was assisted by the fact that internationally the left in all its hues, all but a tiny faction, had hailed the Iranian revolution and counselled support for the counter-revolutionary regime that had defeated the revolution. The Fadai' split. A Majority fell into line behind Tudeh and Khomeini. The Minority became fodder for Khomeini's repressive machinery.

No Rose Coloured Glasses Please
As i mentioned above, Irfani is clearly sympathetic to the Mujahedin. His book provides a very useful overview of the group, its ideology, and how it related to the Revolution. However, there is another side to all of this.

The Mujahedin was insufficiently critical of Khomeini one might say, but that would be something of an understatement. The initial support that the Ayatollah enjoyed from the Left was what allowed him to consolidate his power.

For instance, Harman quotes Ervand Abrahamian’s book The Iranian Mojahedin:

[The Mujahedin s]crupulously adhered to a policy of avoiding confrontations with the clerical shadow government. In late February [1979] when the Fedayeen organised a demonstration of over 80,000 at Tehran university demanding land reform, the end of press censorship and the dissolution of the armed forces, the Mojahedin stayed away. And early in March, when Western educated women celebrated international women’s day by demonstrating against Khomeini’s decrees abrogating the Family Protection Law, enforcing the use of the veil in government offices, and pushing the “less impartial gender” from the judiciary, the Mojahedin warned that “imperialism was exploiting such divisive issues”. In late March when zealous club wielders attacked the offices of the anti-clerical paper Ayandegan, the Mojahedin said nothing. They opposed a boycott of the referendum over the Islamic republic and Kurdish struggle for autonomy. If the nation did not remain united behind Imam Khomeini, the Mojahedin emphasised, the imperialists would be tempted to repeat their 1953 performance [referring to the coup against Mosaddeq].

The importance of this passive support for Khomeini’s emerging regime is explained in Julius Leicht’s Who are the People's Mujahedin of Iran?:

Far from representing an alternative to their clerical opponents of today, they served them as a left-wing fig leaf— until the clerics felt strong enough to take action against the Mujahedin.

[…]

Following a secret meeting of Mujahedin leader Masud Rajavi with Khomeini in February 1979, the Mujahedin generally condemned any resistance to the clergy and its henchmen and thugs up until November of that year, justifying this by claiming that such resistance only played into the hands of imperialism. And they let their radical image be used by the clergy without raising any objection—something the mullahs urgently needed, since most of them had, at best, taken a cowardly, if not openly supportive stance towards the Shah.

Ayatollah Beheshti, for instance, the infamous supreme judge and close collaborator of Khomeini's, stated at this time: "The Islamic Revolution rested on three pillars: Imam Khomeini, Ali Shariati and the Mujahedin organization.” The media controlled by the clergy reported day in and day out on the heroic deeds and martyrs of the People's Mujahedin. Universities and high schools were named after them, governorships and other high-up government positions were given to their sympathizers. In return, the People's Mujahedin provided cover for "our Great Father Khomeini, the leader of the struggle against the monarchy", while Khomeini's people took over control of the army, the police, the judiciary, the state-run media and, not least of all, the extensive property of the Shah.

Although Khomeini's followers carried out the campaign for
a referendum on the constitution of the Islamic Republic in December 1979 and the presidential elections in January 1980 with the methods of terror and intimidation, the People's Mujahedin declared that they "would always support the progressive clergy and, in particular, His Highness, the Great Khomeini". They boycotted the referendum, but contested the presidential and subsequent parliamentary elections with their own candidates. Although the Hizbollah strong-arm squads attacked them with increasing brutality and Khomeini let loose tirades obviously aimed at the People's Mujahedin against "hypocrites" who "confused Islam with Marxism" and were "worse than infidels", the Mujahedin continued to refer to him as the "beloved father" who had "liberated Iran from the monarchy and US imperialism".

When the Mujahedin finally did break with Khomeini, and try and fight back, it was too late. In 1980 they staged a series of demonstrations, culminating in 500,000 people who marched against Khomeini on June 20th – but it was suppressed by the Khomeini’s new government – fifty people were killed, and the new regime survived as strong as ever.

It is also worth mentioning, although it is somewhat outside of the scope of “what went wrong in 1979”, that over the past 25 years the Mujahedin has formed a “National Resistance Council” and slid further to the right. Today, according to Leicht:

they echo imperialist propaganda against the existing Iranian regime—that it endangers Western interests through the construction of "weapons of mass destruction", the "exportation of fundamentalism and terrorism" and "opposition to the Israeli-Arab peace process". In the "platform of the National Resistance Council" (NRC) the following words are written: "The economic policy of the NRC is based on free market economy and the acknowledgement of national capitalism and the bazaar, private and personal property and investments .... The NRC considers the extension of relations to industrial nations to be essential for the reconstruction of the future Iran."

Again, not in a position to judge the honesty of any of these analyses, though i’ve found nothing that really contradicts any of them…

Revolution and Reaction and Women
Finally, i should point out that Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? pays scarce attention to the role of “the woman question” within Iranian history, and the Islamic Revolution. When discussing clerical opposition to progressive reforms, Irfani does note that this was often because of their attachment to sexist social relations, but he doesn’t explain why.

This is unfortunate, but it’s so common it often passes unnoticed. Opposition to land reform, or relations with foreign powers, or new economic developments… these are all assumed to call for investigation, explanation, and analysis. But when it comes to keeping women in a subservient position, or increasing their exploitation, this is taken to be such an obvious and “natural” position that no explanation is necessary.

I am not saying that i have the answers to this– indeed, there are none to be found in Irfani’s book – but that doesn’t mean the question does not loom, whether spoken aloud or not: why is it on the question of women’s rights and freedoms that the “formalist clergy” repeatedly broke with the “progressive movements”. Today, why is the Islamic Republic mainly known for the restrictions it has placed no women, and the brutally violent way in which these restrictions are enforced?

Just to be clear, i don’t think that the answers to these questions would be the kind of cliché you get on CNN or Fox either. Women in Iran were actors too, not just passive victims. For instance, i was reading an interview with Mansureh Ettehadieh, a feminist academic in Tehran; she was asked about the Revolution’s effect on women, and she answered:

it was Imam Khomeini who specified that they didn't need their husbands permission to go to [Friday night] prayers. And another thing, you see, is that with this hedjab, we're supposed to live in a better society. We're supposed to be immune now, and protected. So those families who wouldn't permit their daughters to go to university now let them do their studies. Families are actually proud of their daughters going to university. This is important. I've always quoted Imam Khomeini as saying, 'the hedjab is your freedom'. And a lot of people would argue 'what kind of freedom is this? You know, you've got to wear that unbecoming veil' and so on. Many women who are emigrants would despise what I'm saying, but it's true. For a lot of girls, all this has meant freedom.

Do i buy this? Do i approve of uniforms as a way of claiming freedom? Of course not, but my point is that there are issues and dynamics here worth discussing. The State is an instrument of oppression, but so is the family, and at times your husband may be worst than the local government or religious official… so having the Ayatollah announce that (for the first time ever) you can go out to this important social event without your husband’s permission is not nothing. And i think it’s necessary to understand how so many men and women were won over to support Khomeini.

Lessons Learned
I have my reasons for being interested what went wrong in 1979, how the Revolution ended up so different from how most of the revolutionaries had expected. In fact, i think there are definite lessons to be learned, in terms of Third World struggles and religious liberation movements, but also in terms of the secular metropolitan left here in the First World.

But i’m not going to discuss these lessons today!

A teaser? Yes. You’ll just have to wait!

Categories: anti-imperialism, armed-struggle, book-review, fascism, iran, islam, liberation-theology, revolution

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