[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Religion and left impotence, by Saral Sarkar

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Saral Sarkar quotes Joost Kircz as saying: "The left cannot offer any
alternative to the young people influenced by Islam."  If that is the
case, isn't it because the left cannot offer any alternative to the
young people uninfluenced by Islam either?  It's not as if the left
were making great progress among non-Muslims.  As a matter of fact,
Latin America and Nepal are just about the only exceptions.

And these exceptions are also very partial ones.  What the left-wing
governments of Latin America and the Maoist-led government of Nepal
(which is in crisis with the Maoist prime minister's resignation after
the NC president's reinstatement of the chief of army staff dismissed
by the prime minister) present are programs of national democratic
development, in some cases populist ones of extracting more resource
rents from multinational capital and redistributing them more
equitably (as in the cases of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador), in
other cases essentially neoliberal ones (as in the cases of Brazil and
Chile).  If that's all leftists offer, it's not fundamentally
different from what Islamists offer in terms of _political economy_
(the main difference between Latin American socialists and Islamists
currently lies in the former's respect for civil liberties and
acceptance of same-sex sex).

That the left has no fundamental politico-economic alternative doesn't
mean, though, all Islamic movements are on the offensive everywhere in
the predominantly Islamic world.  Some of the examples mentioned by
Sarkar have already been largely neutralized (through repression,
cooptation, and amnesty) by the governments they sought to challenge:
e.g., Chechens and the FIS.  Islamic movements rise and fall for the
same reasons that other movements (whether they are nationalist,
socialist, or whatever) rise and fall.  Conversely, Islamic movements
and governments that have staying power endure for the same reasons
that non-Islamic movements and governments do.  Leftists would do well
to look at those (historical-material) reasons (for their rise and
fall in some cases and endurance in other cases).  I recommend, for
instance, Joel Beinin's study "Political Islam and the New Global
Economy: The Political Economy of Islamist Social Movements in Egypt
and Turkey" <http://stanford.edu/dept/france-stanford/Conferences/Islam/Beinin.pdf>
as a very useful example of how to study Islamic movements in
historical materialist fashion.

Analysis is one thing, and politics is another thing, though.  Even if
we understand all varieties of Islamic movements to our satisfaction,
that doesn't mean that there's anything leftists can actually do in
the short term, though in a few cases better understanding of the
phenomena in question should give leftists better tools to deal with
them.  The Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance, are a
problem for leftists, but I doubt there's anything leftists could do
about them in the short term even if we understood them better.  Much
of the areas where the Taliban are strong must be largely no-go areas
for leftists.  Centuries of underdevelopment have their consequences.

Yoshie