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

[peter waterman]

Yoshie:

I am not myself sure whether Saral Sarkar breaks new ground here either. I
just thought it would do no harm to raise again the problem for the Left
of the rise of religious right and particularly fundamentalist parties and
movements.

Off the top of my head, it seems to me Marxists or Communists have had two
problems in dealing with religion. One is due to the reproduction of
religious ideas and practices within Communism, eg in Russia, where
Russian Orthodox Christianity was traded in for Russian Orthodox
Communism. The other is the Modernism that Communism has shared with
Liberalism, though often in more extreme form (an exception might be
France where the Revolution gave rise to a secular bourgeois
fundamentalism, which today describes Muslim headscarfs as veils).

Marxists and other socialists in the Arab/Muslim world customarily
identified themselves with secularism, nationalism, industrialism,
rationalism and proletarian-vanguardism. As a package these have failed to
deliver a decent life to the peoples of that world area. (I leave out of
account here the political compromises the Left often made with the
Nassers or Husseins of this world area). I have witnessed, with sympathy,
the frustration of a veteran Marxist and labour activist at the Islamist
take-over of what he and the Left had always considered their natural
constituency ('the workers', 'the people'). He referred to them as 'dirty
fascists', which I considered hardly adequate to the case.

In Russia, the replacement of Russian Orthodox Communism by Neo-Liberal
Barbarism, has led many back to Russian Orthodox Christianity. I met up
with some of them a year or so ago in Russia. Given the Faith, the
Hierarchy, the Ritual, the Icons of both, they seem to have had little
trouble in the passage from the one to the other.

So, as Saral suggests, developing a sophisticated understanding of and
attitude toward mass conservative or fundamentalist religious belief
remains a major task for the Left.

Peter W.

PS. The Left in Latin America is not so hot on democracy and same-sex
marriage (plus divorce, homosexuality in general, feminism, abortion) as
your piece might be taken to suggest. Depends on the country and the
culture - and the strength of new social movements with a sophisticated
understanding of diversity.


-- 
Peter Waterman
Jacob vd Doesstr 28
2518xn The Hague
Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)70 3631539
Mob: +31 (0)60 1753 1257
Emb: p.waterman at inter.nl.net
Emb: pwaterman at gmail.com


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
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