[A-List] Two Bonkers Schools of Marxism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

For comic relief in these dark times, one can do worse than making
visits to the fringes of Marxism.  On one hand, WSWS says "If there
had ever been any real content to Iran's threats against Israel, the
assault on Gaza should have provided the casus belli" (at
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/mide-j14.shtml>),
suggesting that the Islamic Republic, which, contrary to WSWS as well
as the empire's propaganda, has never threatened Israel, should be
going to war against Israel over Gaza (now, that's the spirit of
solidarity with Jewish and Palestinian workers!).  On the other hand,
Workers' Liberty says that the anti-war demos in London against the
Israeli massacres in Gaza have actually been pro-war demos!  BTW, the
author of the WL article below had previously argued that "there is
good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear
capacity" though "[s]ocialists should not want that and can not
support it" (an astonishing statement appalling Moshé Machover, who
otherwise resides roughly on the same end of the Marxist spectrum
<http://www.labournet.net/events/0810/isiran1.html>). -- Yoshie

<http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/01/15/politics-demonstrations-against-israels-offensive-gaza>
The politics of the Gaza demonstrations
Submitted on 15 January, 2009 - 12:49

    * Islamism
    * Israel/Palestine
    * Solidarity 3/144, 15 January 2009

Author:
Sean Matgamna

Israel's offensive in Gaza is in the tradition of the US-British
slaughter of Iraqi conscript soldiers retreating from their occupation
of Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991. An American
soldier described that as "like shooting fish in a barrel". So in Gaza
now.

Israel has immense technical superiority over Hamas. And the Hamas
"fish" swim in the "waters" of a densely-packed civilian population.
At least a third of the casualties, maybe far more, have, inevitably,
been "civilians".

The demonstrations all over Britain since the Israeli offensive on
Gaza began on 27 December have been heavily fuelled by justified
outrage at the human cost to the Palestinians of what Israel is doing.

The disproportion between the damage being inflicted on Israel's
people and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians of Gaza makes it
seem beside the point that this is a two-sided war, that Hamas is
waging war on Israel too. The slaughter in Gaza cancels out awareness
of everything else.

The coverage in the press has focused heavily on the slaughter, on the
horror, and on the number of civilians being killed in Gaza. So have
the nightly images on the TV screens.

The Guardian and other media have done most of the work in conjuring
up the demonstrations; and the "left", especially the SWP, have done
much of the organising for the demonstrations.

But the politics of the demonstrations have been provided by the
Islamic chauvinists. In terms of its politics - support Hamas, support
Arab and Islamic war on Israel, conquer and destroy Israel - the big
demonstration on 10 January in London was an Arab or Islamic
chauvinist, or even a clerical-fascist, demonstration. Their slogans,
their politics, their programme, echoed and insisted upon by the
kitsch left, have provided the politics of the demonstrations,
drowning out everything else.

The clerical fascists have politically hegemonised the demonstrations
to an astonishing degree. These have not been peace demonstration, but
pro-war, and war-mongering, demonstrations - for Hamas's war, and for
a general Arab war on Israel.

Calls for a general Arab war on Israel have been the rhetorical
stock-in-trade of George Galloway back as far as the demonstrations
against the then-upcoming war on Iraq in 2002-3. On Saturday 10
January in Londo many placards portrayed Arab heads of state,
depicting them as traitors for not going to the aid of the
Palestinians.

In their political slogans and chants, the dominant forces on the
demonstrations have been not only against what Israel is doing in Gaza
now, but against Israel as such, against Israel's right to exist.
Opposition to the Gaza war, and outrage at it, only provide the
immediate justification for the settled politics of seeking the
root-and-branch extirpation of Israel and "Zionism".

Such politics have long been a central theme of "anti-war"
demonstrations, but my strong impression is that they are bolder,
cruder, and more explicit now than they have ever been.

On 10 January SWPers on loudhailers chanted: "Destroy Israel". The
chant "From the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free" - demanding
an Arab Palestine that includes pre-1967 Israel - was pretty
pervasive. Placards called for "Freedom for Palestine", which, for
Arab and Islamic chauvinists and kitsch-left alike, means Arab or
Muslim rule over all pre-1948 Palestine. It implies the elimination of
the Jewish state, and since that could be done only by first
conquering Israel, the killing of a large part of the population of
Israel.

Placards denouncing Arab leaders for not attacking Israel - amidst the
chants and other placards - meant more than just attacking Israel to
relieve the pressure on the people of Gaza.

Placards equated Israel with Nazism, and what Israel is doing in Gaza
with the factory-organised systematic killing of Jews in Hitler-ruled
Europe. Placards about 60 years since the Nakba - though not many of
those - complemented the chants about "Palestine... from the river to
the sea" and pointed up their meaning.

The dominant theme, "stop the slaughter in Gaza", understandable in
the circumstances, could not - in the complete absence of any demands
that Hamas stop its war - but be for Hamas and Hamas's rocket-war on
Israel. Even the talk of "the massacre" subsumed Hamas into the
general population, and was one variant of solidarising with Hamas,
its rocket war, and its repressive clerical-fascist rule over the
people of Gaza.

Talk of "genocide" in Gaza implied an absolute equation of the people
of Gaza with Hamas, and absolute solidarity with Hamas.

Even the most visible Jews on the Saturday 10th demonstration -
Neturei Karta, a Jewish equivalent of Hamas, who for religious reasons
want to put an end to Israel - fitted into the general
clerical-fascist politics.

On the January 3rd demonstration, a group of political Islamists near
me, some with faces covered by scarves or balaclavas with only eye and
mouth holes, pointedly raised their fists and started to chant Allahu
Akhbar (God is great) as we passed the House of Commons.

Platform speakers on Saturday 10th nonsensically equated Israel -
pre-1967 Israel too - with apartheid, and told us that Israel could be
eliminated as apartheid white rule was in South Africa.

The "left" and the ex-left were heavily represented on the platform on
Saturday 10th. Andrew Murray of the Communist Party of Britain
(chairing), Tariq Ali (the rich "fun revolutionary" of long ago, all
suffused in a grey-white tinge as if he had been dug out of the
freezer, the ghost of anti-war demonstrations past!), Tony Benn,
George Galloway, and Jeremy Corbyn spoke. Lindsey German, convenor of
the Stop The War Coalition, wore a vivid red coat, but that was the
only thing red about either her or the platform.

No criticism of or even distancing from the Arab or Islamic chauvinism
or Islamic clerical-fascism of so much of the demonstration. Only
one-sided anti-war war-mongering - pro-Hamas; demanding, in different
degrees of boldness and clarity, the end of Israel. Craig Murray, a
former British diplomat, made the most clear-cut demand for the
rolling-back of 60 years of history and the elimination of Israel.

There was no criticism of the Arab and Islamic regimes other than for
their "treason" to the Palestinians in not making war on Israel. And
no reference whatsoever to the Israeli working class or to the idea
that (even if in the not-near future) the Arab and Israeli workers
should unite.

Thus, the "left" was entirely hegemonised by the politics, slogans,
and programme of Arab and Islamic chauvinism and, explicitly, of the
clerical fascists of political Islam.

The current demonstrations have had a six to seven year build-up,
during which that "left" has promoted the politics of Islamic
clerical-fascism, and even its organisations, the British Muslim
Initiative and the Muslim-Brotherhood front, Muslim Association of
Britain. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The "left", from outside the mainly-Muslim communities in Britain - it
is still very much outside: the evidence is that the SWP has gained
very few recruits from Muslim backgrounds from its half-decade of
accommodating to Islam and posing as the best "fighters for Muslims" -
has done all it can to push the youth of the Muslim communities behind
Islamist political and religious reaction. It has courted and promoted
the forces of political, social, and religious reaction within those
communities. Instead of organising anti-war movements on the basis of
secular, democratic, working-class, socialist politics, it has
organised an "anti-war" movement on the basis of the politics listed
above.

Instead of advocating and building working-class unity on ideas and
slogans such as "black and white - Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu,
atheist - unite and fight", kitsch-leftists have made themselves into
communalists, the best "fighters for Muslims". On the political basis
of Muslim communalism, no working-class unity could conceivably be
built.

Instead of helping the secularising, rebellious youth of the Muslim
communities to differentiate from their background, instead of using
the anti-war demonstrations to give them a focus broader than their
starting point, the kitsch-left has "related" to the communities as
such, and to the conservative and reactionary elements within them -
including clerical-fascists - and that has helped those right-wingers
to control, and the political-Islamist organisations to recruit, the
youth, including women.

It has to be said here that the flood-tide of world-wide political
Islam has worked and is working against separating large forces of
youth from Islamic reaction. The predominant form of "rebelliousness"
there seems to be against assimilating, "moderate" forces, and for
political-Islamist militancy.

Even so, much could have been done. Instead the kitsch-left committed
political hara-kiri, coloured itself Islamic green - and helped ensure
the domination of conservative, reactionary, Islamic-chauvinist
politics in the Muslim communities.

Two seemingly contradictory things dominated the demonstration. The
politics of Islamic chauvinism and clerical fascism gave it its
political character - an Islamic chauvinist demonstration in which the
forces of the kitsch-left sunk their identity, rather as the crazily
ultra-left Stalinist German Communist Party in the two or three years
before Hitler came to power sunk its own identity into fascist-led
concerns with "liberating" Germany from the Treaty of Versailles.

And... it was a heavily a-political demonstration. A large part of the
demonstrators, perhaps the majority, have not sifted through the
politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, considered the options, studied
the implications of slogans, and made deliberate choices, but react
"raw" to the horrors of the Israeli offensive in Gaza and take the
slogans, ideas, and programmes stamped on the demonstrations by the
Islamists and their "left" allies as things given.

For instance, "Freedom for Palestine", for many of the marchers, does
not mean that they understand what the slogan means to those who raise
it: Arab rule over all pre-1948 Palestine, slightly encoded. "Free
Palestine", to such people, probably means freedom for the
Palestinian-majority areas - Gaza and the West Bank.

The predominance of clerical-fascism on the demonstrations is in part
a result of this political underdevelopment. The precondition for it -
for making people who react "raw" into demonstration-fodder for
clerical-fascism - is the politics of the kitsch left vis-a-vis
political Islam.

The demonstrations have also been undisguisedly anti-semitic, more so
than ever. Placards equating Zionism and Nazism and about Israel's
"Holocaust" all have implications way beyond Israeli politics and
Israel itself. Calls for a boycott of Israeli goods, understandable
enough on the face of it, were pretty much central. The main argument
against such a boycott is that it is an indiscriminate weapon against
all Israelis, and that it would quickly become a targeting of Jews
everywhere, in Britain too. A small event on 10 January illustrated
the point: a Starbucks café was attacked by some of the demonstrators
seemingly because some people thought that it is owned by Jews.

The 10 January demonstration shows that political Islam now has a
serious political presence in Britain. Nor can socialists and
secularists draw comfort from the experience in the first half of the
20th century when superstition-riddled Jewish communities quickly
assimilated and generated large-scale left-wing commitment by
secularising Jews. The heavy political-Islamist politicisation of the
Muslim communities is not something specific to Britain, nor is it
simply a movement of oppressed people.

The Muslim communities are part of a world-wide movement which
includes states and some of the richest people on earth (in Saudi
Arabia, etc.) This world-wide movement is, in political terms, very
reactionary. It is not likely that it will soon shed its present
reactionary character.

The serious left has to find ways of supporting the Muslim communities
against racism, discrimination, and social exclusion, without
accommodating politically or socially to their reactionary traits, and
without falling into the suicidal idiocy of pandering to Islamic
clerical-fascism. Involvement of Muslim workers and youth in the
labour movement, combined with militant labour-movement commitment to
defending the communities against racism and discrimination, is our
chief method here.

Our keynote politics have to be of the type of "black and white, unite
and fight", not the adaptive Islamic communalism that has reigned on
the left for the last decade. Within that general approach we must
fight Islamic clerical-fascism and help its opponents in the Muslim
communities.

The kitsch-left has a lot to answer for over the last decade. There is
no way of measuring exactly what could have been done to wean sections
of Muslim youth away from political Islam, but if the "left" - in the
first place the SWP - had maintained a principled working-class
socialist, internationalist, secularist stand, and combined that with
defending Muslims against racism and discrimination, for sure more
people of Muslim background could have been won to socialism. The
clerical fascists would not have had the virtually unchallenged
political ride they have had, and still have.

It has to be said here that the flood-tide of world-wide political
Islam has worked and is working against separating large forces of
youth from Islamic reaction. The predominant form of "rebelliousness"
there seems to be against assimilating, "moderate" forces, and for
political-Islamist militancy.

Even so, much could have been done. Instead the kitsch-left committed
political hara-kiri, coloured itself Islamic green - and did its best
to help ensure the domination of conservative, reactionary,
Islamic-chauvinist politics in the Muslim communities.

It has done everything it can to boost Islamic clerical fascism,
promote it, and render it politically respectable in the labour
movement. We are probably far from seeing the full consequences of the
politicisation of sections of the Muslim communities under
clerical-fascist hegemony that has taken place and continues now.