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Conversation on Modern Islamic Anarchism
September 21, 2023Islamic Anti-Authoritarianism against the Ulema-State Alliance
April 5, 2023
Abbas al-Musavi, The Battle of Karbala
The second part in a series on Islam, humanism, and anarchism. This review includes an alternate perspective by Jihad al-Haqq.
First published on The Commoner, 5 April 2023. Shared using Creative Commons license. Feel free to support The Commoner via their Patreon here
Building on my critical review of Mohamed Abdou’s Islam and Anarchism (2022), this article will focus on Ahmet T. Kuru’s Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment (2019). Here, I will concentrate on Kuru’s study of Islam, history, and politics, focusing on the scholar’s presentation of the anti-authoritarianism of the early Muslim world, and contemplating the origins and ongoing oppressiveness of the alliance between ulema (religious scholars) and State in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I will examine Kuru’s analysis of the “decline thesis” about the intellectual, economic, and political counter-revolutions that led Muslim society to become dominated by military and clerical elites toward the end of the Golden Age (c. 700–1300); briefly evaluate the author’s critique of post-colonial theory; and contemplate an anarcho-communist alternative to Kuru’s proposed liberal strategy, before concluding.
Perhaps ironically, Kuru may uncover more Islamic anti-authoritarianism than Abdou does in Islam and Anarchism. Marshaling numerous sources, Kuru clarifies that a degree of separation between religion and the State existed in Islam’s early period; that ‘Islam emphasizes the community, not the state’; and that ‘the history of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates was full of rebellions and oppression.’ In fact, the Umayyad dynasty, which followed the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661) that itself had succeeded the Prophet Muhammad after his death, generally lacked religious legitimation, given that its founders persecuted the Prophet’s family during the period known as the Second Fitna (680–692) [1]. Such sadism was especially evident at the momentous battle of Karbala (680), at the conclusion of which the victorious Umayyad Caliph Yazid I murdered the Imam Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet and son of the Rashidun Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib, together with most of his relatives [2]. Shi’ites mourn these killings of Hussein and his family during the month of Muharram, considered the second-holiest month of the Islamic calendar after Ramadan. Currently being observed by Muslims across the globe, Ramadan marks the first revelation of the Quran to Muhammad in Jabal al-Nour (‘the mountain of light’) in the year 610. (For an artistic representation of the latter event, see the featured painting from the Hamla-yi Haidari manuscript below.)
Politically speaking, early Muslims rejected despotism and majesty and emphasized the importance of the rule of law, such that ‘traditional Muslim[s were] suspicio[us] of Umayyad kingship’ [3]. Following the Mutazilites, the Iranian revolutionary Ali Shariati claimed the fatalist belief in ‘pre-determination,’ which was encouraged by the orthodox theologian Ashari, to have been ‘brought into being by the Umayyids’ [4]. Along similar lines, in the Quran it is written, ‘if one [group of believers] transgresses against the other, then fight against the transgressing group,’ while one of the Prophet Muhammad’s ahadith (sayings) declares that the “best jihad is to speak the truth before a tyrannical ruler’[5]. During the time of Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphs, hence, Islamic politics were rather progressive, for the nascent faith’s founders rejected both oppressive authority, whether exercised locally in Arabia or afar in the Byzantine Empire, and the injustice of the Brahmin caste system. In this vein, all founders of the four Sunni schools of law (fiqh), and some early Shi’ite imams, refused to serve the State. In retaliation, they were persecuted, imprisoned, and even killed [6].
During the Abbasid Caliphate, radical freethinkers such as the physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (c. 854–925) and Ibn Sina (980–1037) made breakthroughs in medical science, while the polymath Biruni (973–1048) advanced the field of astronomy, just as al-Razi and Biruni respectively criticized religion and imagined other planets. Mariam al-Astrulabi (950–?) invented the first complex astrolabe, which had important astronomical, navigational, and time-keeping applications. Plus, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom boasted a vast collection of translations of scholarly volumes into Arabic, and a number of hospitals were founded in MENA during the Abbasid and Mamluk dynasties. Farabi (c. 878–950) emphasized the philosophical importance of happiness, Ibn Bajja (c. 1095–1138) likewise stressed the centrality of contemplation, and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) made critical contributions to sociology through his insights into asabiyya, or group cohesion. Perceptively, Ibn Khaldun declared that the ‘decisions of the ruler […] deviate from what is right,’ while concurring with some of the most radical Kharijites in holding that the people would have no need for an imam, were they observant Muslims [7].
At the same time, Kuru explains that Islam’s Golden Age (c. 700–1300)—which allowed for the birth of a freer scholarly, political, and commercial atmosphere in the Muslim world, relative to Western Europe—was driven by a ‘bourgeois revolution’ of mercantile capitalism, to which Islam itself contributed [8]. With their private property and contracts ensured, as stipulated by the Quran and Prophet Muhammad’s Medina Charter (622–624), Muslim merchants could accumulate the capital with which to maintain financial, political, and intellectual independence from the State. Indeed, in contrast to the clerics who have served the authorities since the medieval congealing of the ulema-State, most Islamic scholars from this period worked in commerce, thus making possible their patronage of creative thinkers and scientists [9]. While the dynamism of dar al-Islam (the world’s Muslim regions)produced renowned intellectuals like al-Rawandi, al-Razi, Farabi, al-Ma’arri, Ibn Sina, Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Rushd, among others, freethinking in the West was simultaneously stifled by religious and military elites. In this light, Kuru insightfully compares Islam’s Golden Age to the subsequent European Renaissance, whose coming was indeed facilitated by scholarship from and trade with the Muslim world [10].
The Decline Thesis, and an Anarchist Alternative
Soon enough, however, the ‘[p]rogressive atmospheres’ created by Islam would yield to reaction [11]. With the proclamation in 1089 of a decree by the Abbasid Caliph Qadir outlining a strict Sunni orthodoxy that would exclude Mutazilites, Shi’ites, Sufis, and philosophers, the ulema-State alliance was forged. This joint enterprise created a stifling and stagnating bureaucratic atmosphere opposed to progress of all kinds. Internally, this shift was aided by the eclipse of commerce by conquest, looting, and the iqta system—a feudal mechanism whereby the State distributed lands to military lords and in turn expanded itself through taxes extracted from peasant labor. Additionally, the eleventh-century founding of Nizamiyya madrasas, which propagated Ashari fatalism and stressed memorization and authority-based learning, was decisive for this transformation. Externally, the violence and plundering carried out by Crusaders and Mongols against the Muslim world led to further marginalization of scholars and merchants on the one hand, and deeper legitimization of military and clerical elites on the other [12].
Through comparison, Kuru contemplates how this joint domination by ulema and State—characterized by bureaucratic despotism, State monopolies, and intellectual stagnation—mimics the backwardness of Europe’s feudal societies during the Dark and Middle Ages. Still, just as anti-intellectualism, clerical hegemony, and political authoritarianism are not inherent to Judaism, Christianity, or Western society, this reactionary partnership is not innate to Islam either, considering the remarkable scientific, mathematical, and medical progress made during Islam’s early period. Only later did the combination of Ghazali’s sectarianism, Ibn Taymiyya’s statist apologism, and the Shafi jurist Mawardi’s centralism result in the consolidation of Sunni orthodoxy and despotic rule. Indeed, Kuru traces the germ of this noxious ulema-State alliance to the political culture of the Persian Sasanian Empire (224–651), which prescribed joint rule by the clerics and authorities. In this sense, the ‘decline thesis’ about the fate of scholarship and freethinking in Muslim society cannot be explained by essentialist views that define Islam by its most reactionary and anti-intellectual forms [13].
More controversially, Kuru equally concludes that the violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment seen at present in many Muslim-majority countries cannot be explained solely by either post-colonial theory or a primary focus on Western (neo)colonialism. This is because post-colonial writers, like Islamists, discourage a critical analysis of the “ideologies, class relations, and economic conditions” of Muslim societies, leading them to overlook, and thus fail to challenge, the enduring presence of the ulema-State alliance [14]. In parallel, the caste system persists in post-colonial India, while “British and German scholars did not invent caste oppression,” as much as fascists across the globe have been inspired by it [15]. At the same time, according to the late Marxist scholar Mike Davis, European imperialism, combined with excess dryness and heat from the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, led to famines that killed between 30 and 60 million Africans, South Asians, Chinese, and Brazilians in the late nineteenth century. The Indian economist Utsa Patnaik estimates that British imperialism looted nearly $45 trillion from India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Currently, bureaucratic authoritarianism in MENA is financed by the mass-exploitation of fossil fuels, which finances the State’s repressive apparatus, hinders the independence of the workers and the bourgeoisie, and disincentivizes transitions to democracy [16]. Certainly, the West, which runs mostly on fossil fuels, and whose leaders collaborate with regional autocrats, is complicit with such oppression, whether we consider its long-standing support for the Saud dynasty (including President Biden’s legal shielding of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against accountability for his murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi), more recent ties with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the past alliance with the Pahlavi Shahs, or the love-hate relationships with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi. The US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, launched twenty years ago, killed and displaced similar numbers of people as Assad and Putin’s counter-revolution has over the past twelve years.
Overall, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment helps illuminate the religious, political, and economic dimensions of the legacy of the authoritarian State in MENA. Moving forward, Kuru’s proposed remedy to the interrelated and ongoing problems of authoritarianism and underdevelopment in Muslim-majority countries is political and economic liberalisation. The author makes such liberal prescriptions based on his historical analysis of the progressive nature of the bourgeoisie, especially as seen during the Golden Age of Islam and the European Renaissance. As an alternative, he mentions the possibility that the working classes could help democratize the Muslim world, but notes that they are not an organized force [17]. Moreover, in a 2021 report, ‘The Ulema-State Alliance,’ Kuru clarifies that he is no proponent of ‘stateless anarchy,’ as might be pursued by anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-communist strategies.
Yet, it is clear that empowering the bourgeoisie has its dangers: above all, global warming provides an especially stark reminder of the externalities, or ‘side-effects,’ of capitalism. Plus, at its most basic level, the owner’s accumulation of wealth depends on the rate of exploitation of the workers, who cannot refrain from alienated labor, out of fear of economic ruin for themselves and their loved ones. This is the horrid treadmill of production. As the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse recognized, capitalism is an inherently authoritarian, hierarchical system [18]. Although bourgeois rule may well allow for greater scientific, technical, and scholarly progress than feudal domination by clerical-military elites, whether in Europe, MENA, or beyond, the yields from potential advances in these fields could be considerably greater in a post-capitalist future. Science, ecology, and human health could benefit tremendously from the communization of knowledge, the overcoming of fossil fuels and economic growth, the abolition of patents and so-called ‘intellectual property rights,’ the socialization of work, and the creation of a global cooperative commonwealth. Considering how Western and Middle Eastern authorities conspire to eternally delay action on cutting carbon emissions as climate breakdown worsens, both Western and MENA societies would gain a great deal from anti-authoritarian socio-ecological transformation.
In sum, then, I reject both the ulema-State alliance and Kuru’s suggested alternative of capitalist hegemony—just as, in mid-nineteenth-century Imperial Russia, the anarchists Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin rebuked their colleague Vissarion Belinsky’s late turn from wielding utopian socialism against Tsarism to espousing the view that bourgeois leadership was necessary for Russia [19]. In our world, in the near future, regional and global alternatives to bourgeois-bureaucratic domination could be based in working-class and communal self-organization and self-management projects, running on wind, water, and solar energy. Such experiments would be made possible by the collective unionization of the world economy, and/or the creation of exilic, autonomous geographical zones. Despite the “utopian” nature of such ideas, in light of the profound obstacles inhibiting their realization, this would be a new Golden Age or Enlightenment of scientific and historical progress, whereby a conscious humanity neutralized the dangers of self-destruction through raging pandemics, global warming, genocide, and nuclear war.
Conclusion: For Anarcho-Communism
In closing, I express my dynamic appreciation for Kuru’s Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, which aptly contests both essentialist and post-colonialist explanations for the violence, anti-intellectualism, and autocratic rule seen today in many Muslim-majority societies. Kuru highlights the noxious work of the ulema-State alliance to impose Sunni and Shi’i orthodoxies; legitimize the authority of the despotic State; and reject scientific, technological, social, and economic progress. Keeping in mind the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker’s framing of anarchism as the “confluence” of socialism and liberalism, I welcome the author’s anti-authoritarian proposals to revisit the freethinking of the Golden Age of Islam and liberalise the Muslim world, but contest Kuru’s apparent pro-capitalist orientation. In this vein, the writer’s recommendations could be radicalized to converge with the “Idea” of a global anarcho-communist movement that rejects clerical and political hierarchies as well as capitalism, militarism, and patriarchy, in favor of degrowth, a worldwide commons, international solidarity, mutual aid, and working-class and communal self-management of economy and society.
Western Colonialism and Imperialism – Jihad al-Haqq
Whilst Kuru’s historical description of the ulema-state alliance usefully describes the historical oppressions of Muslim-majority nations, it does not explain their continued existence. Especially not in the face of the Arab Spring and, as Kuru himself cites, the vast popularity of democracy amongst Muslims (page xvi, preface). Indeed, a name search reveals that the term ‘Arab Spring’ is used only four times throughout the entire book—three of those times are in the citations section. It is stunning to have a book talking about Islam, authoritarianism, and democracy, without mentioning the momentous event of the Arab Spring. That is, the concept of the ‘ulema-state alliance’ is useful in describing the internal form of social oppression in Muslim-majority societies, but it does not explain why and how those forms continue to exist, which is primarily due to Western imperialism.
Ahmet Kuru’s discussion regarding the ulema-state alliance seems geared towards explaining the question of why Muslim-majority countries are less peaceful, less democratic, and less developed. The question is primarily a political-economic question, not a question of faith, and thus requires a political-economic answer, which he acknowledges. However, he contends that Western colonialism is not a primary material cause for the unrest and destitution in Muslim majority nations; rather, it is the ulema-state alliance. This is a strange argument, for several reasons.
Firstly, his criticism of postcolonial writers is a strawman. The main hypothesis of postcolonial writers is that oppression in Muslim majority nations, whatever form it takes (including the ulema-state alliance), is primarily financed and armed by Western powers and Gulf nations; it is to explain the prevention of democracy in Muslim-majority nations.
He writes:
‘The anti-colonial approach has some power in explaining the problem of violence in certain Muslim countries. But Western colonization/occupation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for violence. It is not sufficient, as there have been non-Muslim and Muslim countries that were colonized or occupied but where many influential agents did not choose to use violence. Such leading figures as Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–98) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), for example, adopted a position of non-violence against British colonization in India. Western colonization/occupation is not a necessary condition either, because several non-Western countries and groups have fought each other for various reasons. The long list includes the Iran-Iraq War and recent civil wars in several Arab countries. In Turkey, violence has continued between the Turkish state and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) for more than three decades, regardless of whether Turkey was ruled by secularists or Islamists, and regardless of whether the PKK defended or renounced Marxist-Leninist ideology.’
He says that Western colonization and occupation is not a sufficient condition for the violence in Muslim-majority countries, since other countries under the same conditions did not choose to use violence. However, this flies in the face of the history of decolonial movements, since many other countries other than the Muslim-majority ones did choose violence as a method, while several Muslim-majority thinkers did and do advocate non-violence. Decolonization as a process in each country cannot be easily separated into a non-violent and violent category, such as in Indian decolonization being entirely non-violent and decolonization in Algeria being entirely violent, as you will find both non-violent and violent currents in each country advocating decolonization. Moreover, whether a decolonial process is more violent or not overwhelmingly depends on other socio-political factors: the British did not let go of India because they suddenly found enlightenment about the wrongdoing of their ways, and it would be difficult to say that Indian decolonization would not have turned more violent if the British had not ended up letting go of the Raj. We must also question the assumption that colonialism ended at all: there have been many convincing works that effectively argue that instead of colonisation ending, we have simply moved to another form of colonisation facilitated through nation states, rather than overt conquest. Parts of these works make very hard to dismiss cases, backed up by historical records, that show that much of the violence that exists in Global South countries, including Muslim-majority ones, is not due to internal cultural or social institutions, but due to the financing and arming of violent forces in the country. The existence of destitution can be directly linked to such Western-supported authoritarians in these societies.
The United States, for example, armed and supported the dictator Suharto in Indonesia, who is one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, against the popular Communist Party in Indonesia. The US is also one of Saudi Arabia’s greatest allies, with Saudi Arabia likely having the most institutionalized form of the ulema-state alliance. William Blum’s classic Killing Hope goes through many details of the various democracy movements throughout the world which the United States has crushed, including in Muslim-majority nations. Perhaps amazingly, the list of examples Kuru uses to support the argument that Western imperialism cannot be stated to be a necessary condition of violence do indeed have a traceable Western influence. Furthermore, the phenomenon of imperialism, which is separate from colonialism and the main focus of many postcolonial writers, does not seem to factor into his analysis.
Moreover, violence as a response to colonisation is almost a universal given—it is not the expression of culture anymore than a person being attacked and choosing to fight back is an expression of ideology. Revolutionary violence is a response to violence: the colonised are forced to be violent in response to the violence waged upon them, regardless of what culture they have, and all people have the right to violence for self-defense. For that, I do not think a detailed discussion is required.
The thesis which Kuru is attempting to argue here is that both revolutionary violence and internal violent structures are expressions of the same structures within Muslim-majority nations that cause more violence to happen. I do not believe this conclusion is tenable, since, on the one hand, revolutionary violence is waged defensively in response to colonialism, and on the other, the internal violence of current Muslim-majority nations do have a traceable Western influence: it would be difficult to argue that Iraq today would be as violent as it is if the United States had not diplomatically and militarily supported the rise of Saddam Hussein, and had not invaded Iraq in 2003. Both of these sorts of violence do not have the same social, political, and economic roots, and therefore cannot be classed as expressions of the same socio-cultural phenomenon.
Kuru’s answer to the continued existence of oppression in the Middle East is economic and political liberalisation; however, as demonstrated with the Arab Spring, the idea of political liberalisation will not be tolerated by the various monarchies and dictatorships of the Middle East, who are largely supported and armed by the United States. Furthermore, Kuru’s proposal of political and economic liberalisation is not really liberalisation—at the very least, not liberalisation if we understand “liberalisation” to mean liberating. He proposes the introduction of a new class of economic capitalist elites, which is hardly an improvement from the ulema-state alliance—never mind that Middle Eastern nations are already economically liberalised. While Kuru’s text is useful in discussing the form of historical oppressions, it reaches too far in its concluding theory regarding the continued existence of despotism in the Middle East.
Works Cited
Abdou, Mohamed 2022. Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances. London: Pluto.
Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hammond, Joseph 2013. “Anarchism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Eds. Gerhard Bowering et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 36–7.
Kuru, Ahmet T. 2019. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Malia, Martin 1961. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. New York: Universal Library.
Marcuse, Herbert 1968. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon Press.
Quran. Trans. Mustafa Khattab. Available online: https://quran.com. Accessed 13 August 2022.
Ramnath, Maia 2022. “The Other Aryan Supremacy.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, CA: AK Press. 210-69.
Shariati, Ali 2003. Religion vs. Religion. Trans. Laleh Bakhtiar. ABC International Group.
References
[1] Kuru 10-12, 71.
[2] Afary and Anderson.
[3] Kuru 89.
[4] Shariati 32; Kuru 95.
[5] Quran 49:9 (emphasis added); Abdou 201.
[6] Kuru 70-2, 88-9.
[7] Ibid 76-80, 131-2, 134, 139-41, 150; Hammond 36.
[8] Kuru 83-87.
[9] Quran 4:29; Abdou 116; Kuru 73.
[10] Kuru 93, 159-61.
[11] Ibid 116-7.
[12] Ibid 96-102, 126-7.
[13] Ibid xvi-xv, 96-7, 112-16, 146-7, 185-203, 227-235.
[14] Ibid 34, 234.
[15] Ramnath 254.
[16] Kuru 49-53.
[17] Ibid 55n107.
[18] Marcuse 9-11, 18-19.
[19] Malia 353-6.
Against Orthodoxy and Despotic Rule: A Review of Islam and Anarchism
January 20, 2023
Published on The Commoner, 20 January 2023
The project of advancing anarchist reinterpretations of history and religion is an intriguing and important one. Due to its emphasis on spontaneity, non-cooperation, simplicity, and harmony, Daoism is a religion with anarchist elements, while the Dharma taught by Buddhism is an egalitarian critique of caste, class, and hierarchy, according to the anarcho-communist Élisée Reclus. B. R. Ambedkar, architect of India’s constitution, similarly viewed Buddhism as seeking the annihilation of Brahminism, as crystallized in the Hindu caste system. Xinru Liu, author of Early Buddhist Society (2022), adds that a key part of Buddhism’s appeal has been its emphasis on care and well-being over statecraft and power.
Likewise, Guru Nanak, the visionary founder of Sikhism, proclaimed human equality through his advocacy of langar, a practice that simultaneously rejects caste while building community through shared meals. In parallel, many notable anarchists have been Jewish: for instance, Ida Mett, Aaron and Fanya Baron, Martin Buber, and Avraham Yehuda Heyn, and Murray Bookchin. The Judaic concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) is activist to the core. Plus, in The Foundations of Christianity (1908), Karl Kautsky highlights the radicalism of Jesus’ message, the communism of early Christianity, and the ongoing struggles of prophets, apostles, and teachers against clerical hierarchies and bureaucracies. Lev Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil preached Christian anarchism.
What, then, of Islam?
One way of answering this question would be to consider Mohamed Abdou’s Islam and Anarchism (2022). This long-anticipated study is based on the intriguing premises that Islam is not necessarily authoritarian or capitalist, and that anarchism is not necessarily anti-religious or anti-spiritual. To his credit, Abdou does well in highlighting the transhistorical importance of the Prophet Muhammad’s anti-racist ‘Farewell Address’ (632), and in citing humanistic verses from the Quran. These include ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion,’ and the idea that Allah made us ‘into peoples and tribes so that [we] may get to know one another,’ not abuse and oppress each other [1]. The author constructs an ‘anarcha-Islām’ that integrates orthodox Sunni Muslim thought with Indigenous and decolonial critiques of globalisation. He laments and criticizes the supportive role often played by diasporic Muslims in settler-colonial societies like the USA and Canada, through their putative affirmation of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Although he is a strong proponent of political Islam, Abdou also recognizes that trans-Atlantic slavery had its origin in Muslim-occupied Iberia, known as al-Andalus [2].
That being said, for better or worse, the overall trajectory of Abdou’s argument reflects the author’s orthodox Sunni bias. Even if Sunnis do comprise the vast majority of the world’s Muslim population—and thus, perhaps, a considerable part of Abdou’s intended audience—there is nonetheless a stunning lack of discussion in this book of Shi’ism (the second-largest branch of Islam) or Sufism (an Islamic form of mysticism practiced by both Sunni and Shi’ites). In a new review in Organise Magazine, Jay Fraser likewise highlights the author’s ‘odd choice,’ whereby ‘the Sufi tradition […] receives no mention whatsoever.’ Besides being intellectually misleading for a volume with such an expansive title as Islam and Anarchism, such omissions are alarming, as they convey an exclusionary message to the supercharged atmosphere of the Muslim world.
Islam and Anti-Authoritarianism
At the outset of his book, Abdou proposes that a properly Muslim anarchism should be constructed on the basis of the Quran, the ahadith (the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings),and the sunnah (Muhammad’s way of life) [3]. This is a paradoxically neo-orthodox Sunni approach that overlooks the contributions of both 1) Shi’ites, who place less stress on the sunnah, and 2) several anti-authoritarian and anarchistic Muslim thinkers, individual and collective, who emerged during and after Islam’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ (c. 700-1300). In this sense, although Abdou would follow the ‘venerable ancestors’ (al-salaf al-salih) from Islam’s earliest period, hedoes not discuss Abu Dharr al-Ghifari (?-652), one of the very first converts to Islam. Al-Ghifari was known for his socialist views, and revered by Shia as one of the ‘Four Companions’ of the fourth ‘Rightly Guided’ (Rashidun) caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib (559-661) [4].
Neither does the author examine the utopian radicalism of the sociologist Ali Shariati (1933-1977), who inspired the Iranian Revolution of 1979 against the U.S.-installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In writings and lectures, Shariati espoused a ‘red’ Shi’ism that celebrates insurgency and martyrdom, by contrasting this with the ‘black Shi’ism’ instituted by the Safavid dynasty (1501-1734), one of early modernity’s infamous ‘gunpowder empires,’ which forcibly converted most Iranians to Shi’ism while persecuting Sunnis and Sufis [5]. Despite their separation by sect, this is an unfortunate missed connection between Abdou and Shariati, in light of the similarity of their analysis of tawhid, or the allegiance to God as the sole authority (Malik al-mulk) mandated by Islam [6]. (Likewise, monotheistic loyalty is demanded by the Judeo-Christian First Commandment.)
Through his elucidation of ‘Anarcha-Islām,’ which ‘adopts and builds on traditional [Sunni] orthodox non-conformist Islamist thinkers,’ Abdou does consider the revolutionary potential of Shi’i eschatology—crystallized in the prophesized return of the twelfth imam (or Madhi), who is expected to herald world peace—as evidence of an ‘internalized messiah and savior complex’ [7]. It is in the first place paradoxical for an ostensible anarchist to so overlook messianism, and especially troubling when such a Shi’i tradition is ignored by a Sunni Muslim developing an anarcha-Islām. Still, while Abdou pays lip service to the criticism of Muslim clerics, he hardly mentions the theocracy imposed by the Shi’i ulema (religious scholars) who appropriated the mass-revolutionary movement against the Shah for themselves over four decades ago, having spearheaded the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) since 1981.
Even more, in a November 2022 podcast interview on ‘Coffee with Comrades,’ Abdou complains in passing about the ‘mobilization of gendered Islamophobia’ in Iran following the murder by the ‘Morality Police’ of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish woman, two months prior for rejecting imposed veiling. Presumably, this is in response to criticism of Islamic hijab by Westerners and Iranians alike, but he does not make clear his opinion of the ongoing youth- and women-led mass-protests that have rocked the country since then. By contrast, members of Asr Anarshism (‘The Age of Anarchism’), based in Iran and Afghanistan, stress in an upcoming interview on The Commoner that the ‘struggle with the clerical class […] constitutes a basic part of our class struggles’ [8].
Likewise, the late Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) openly viewed the IRI’s ulema as ‘clerical-fascist[s],’ while Shariati would have likely considered these opportunistic, obscurantist lynchers as part and parcel of the legacy of ‘black Shi’ism’ [9]. In parallel, the Sri Lankan trade unionist Rohini Hensman takes the IRI to task for its abuse of women, workers, the LGBT community, and religious and ethnic minorities, just as she denounces Iran and Russia’s ghastly interventions in Syria since 2011 to rescue Bashar al-Assad’s regime from being overthrown [10]. Abdou’s lack of commentary on Iran and Shi’ism in Islam and Anarchism is thus glaring.
Furthermore, in the conclusion to his book, Abdou questionably echoes the Kremlin’s propaganda by blaming the mass-displacement of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into Europe a decade ago exclusively on President Barack Obama’s use of force, presumably against Libya and the Islamic State (IS, or Da’esh)—with no mention of the substantial ‘push factors’ represented by the atrocious crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Syrian, Iranian, and Russian states [11]. Worse, in his interview on ‘Coffee with Comrades,’ the author finds himself in alignment with the neo-Nazi Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on Syria. Let us quote him at length:
‘It’s so easy for David Duke to come out and say, ‘Well, I’m against the war in Syria!’ Well, how about that: an anti-imperialist stance coming from a white supremacist? Right? Well, of course I don’t agree with him on much of anything else. […].
And again, this is where we have to be very intelligent and very smart. Of course, I feel for my Syrian kin. They are my own blood. But, if you ask me now with regards to Bashar al-Assad, I will say: keep him in power. Why? I’m able to distinguish between tactics and strategy. Unless you have an alternative to what would happen if Bashar was removed, let alone, what would you do with the State: please, please stay at home. Because what you will create is precisely a vacuum for Da’esh [the Islamic State]. You will create a vacuum for imperialism, for colonialism to seep in.’
Abdou here affirms a cold, dehumanizing, and statist illogic that is entirely in keeping with the phenomenon of the pseudo-anti-imperialist defense of ‘anti-Western’ autocracies like Syria, Russia, China, and Iran [12]. In reality, in the first place, both openly anti-Assad rebels and TEV-DEM in Rojava have presented alternatives to the Ba’athist jackboots, and the Free Syrian Army and YPG/SDF forces have fought Da’esh. The YPG/SDF continue to do so, despite facing a new threat of destruction at the hands of the Turkish State and the regime axis. Beyond this, does Abdou believe Russia’s military intervention in Syria since 2015 somehow not to have been imperialist? Millions of displaced Syrians would likely disagree with the idea. We can recommend For Sama, about the fall of Aleppo in 2016, as documentary evidence of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war crimes.
According to Leila al-Shami and Shon Meckfessel, ‘[m]any fascists take Russia’s backing of Assad as reason enough to support him,’ and the global far right is even heartened and inspired by the regime-axis’s ultraviolence and unmitigated cruelty [13]. Indeed, in this vein, for over a decade, Russian State media and their fascist and ‘tankie’ (neo-Stalinist) enthusiasts have blamed the West for problems perpetrated by the Kremlin and its allies themselves—from mass-refugee flows from Syria to genocide in Ukraine. It is therefore disturbing to see Abdou betray anarchism and internationalism by not only reiterating deadly disinformation, but also by openly endorsing Assad’s tyranny.
Sufism and the Ulema-State Alliance
Although Sunni orthodoxy, jihadist revivalism, institutionalized Shi’ism, and secular autocracies are undoubtedly oppressive, Sufism has been misrepresented by many Orientalists as negating these stifling forces. In reality, while some Sufis have ‘preached antiauthoritarian ideas,’ Sufism is not necessarily progressive [14]. Although the Persian thinker Ghazali (1058-1111, above) resigned from teaching at an orthodox madrasa in 1095 to preach Sufism and condemn political authority—only to return to teaching at a similar madrasa late in life—he played a key role in legitimizing the toxic alliance between ulema (religious scholars) and State. Moreover, by affirming mysticism, asceticism, and irrationalism, Sufi sheikhs have often re-entrenched spiritual and sociopolitical hierarchies [15].
Actually, the Janissary shock-troops of the Ottoman Empire belonged to the Bektashi Sufi Order, and the autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is reported to be part of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. Furthermore, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703-1762), who inspired the founders of the Deobandi school of Islam—a variant of which the Taliban has imposed on Afghanistan twice through terror—was a Sufi master. On the other hand, so were Nizamuddin Auliya (1238-1325), who advocated a Sufism critical of class divisions and despotism; Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdallah (1844-1885), a Nubian warrior and self-proclaimed Mahdi who spearheaded a jihad against the Ottomans, Egyptians, and British in Sudan; and Imam Shamil (1797-1871), an Avar chieftain who led anti-colonial resistance to Russian conquest of the Caucasus for decades.
In his compelling study of comparative politics, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment (2019), Ahmet Kuru provides important insights into the historical trajectory of the Muslim world, vis-à-vis Western Europe. He shows how an alliance between the State and ulema was adopted by the Seljuk Empire in the eleventh century, and then inherited and upheld by the Mamluk, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, prior to European colonization. Its noxious legacy undoubtedly persists to this day, not only in theocratic autocracies like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), but also in ostensibly secular military dictatorships, such as Syria and Egypt, and electoral autocracies like Turkey. This is despite past top-down efforts to secularize and modernize Islamic society by breaking up the power of the ulema, as Sultan Mahmud II, the Young Ottomans, the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) sought to do during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [16]—notwithstanding the chauvinism and genocidal violence of these Turkish leaders, echoes of which resonate in Azerbaijani attacks on Armenia in September 2022.
In the remainder of the first part of this article, I will review Abdou’s account of anarcha-Islām. The second part will focus on Kuru’s arguments about Islam, history, and politics, tracing the anti-authoritarianism of early Islam, and contemplating the origins and ongoing despotism of the ulema-State alliance.
Abdou’s Islam and Anarchism
In his book, Abdou mixes post-anarchism (an ideology combining post-modernism, post-structuralism, and nihilism) with Islamic revivalism to yield “anarcha-Islām,” a framework which rejects liberalism, secularism, human rights, and democracy almost as forms of taqut, or idolatry [17]. His study thus bears the distinct imprints of the thought of Egyptian jihadist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), whom he regards as a ‘non-conformist militant conservativ[e]’ [18] (Notably, Qutb has inspired al-Qaeda and the Islamic State). In keeping with the Qutbist view that all existing societies are jahili, or equivalent to the ostensible ‘state of ignorance’ in Arabia before the rise of Islam, Abdou laments and denounces the Saudi ruling family’s commercialization of Mecca and Medina, and makes comments that are not unsympathetic toward the egoist Max Stirner, plus Muhammad Atta and other terrorists [19]. He describes the U.S. as a ‘Crusading society.’
Abdou endorses researcher Milad Dokhanchi’s view of decolonization as ‘detaqutization’ (the iconoclastic destruction of idolatry, or taqut) and condemns the ‘homonationalist and colonial/imperial enforcement of queer rights (marriage, pride) […]’ [20]. Even the mere concept that ‘queer rights are human rights’ is irretrievably imperialist for him [21]. Moreover, he focuses more on violence than social transformation through working-class self-organization—in keeping with an insurrectionist orientation [22]. In sum, the author himself confesses to being an ‘anti-militaristic militant jihādi’ [23].
Through his conventional reliance on the Quran and ahadith and his parallel avowal of anarchic ijtihad (‘independent reasoning’), Abdou mixes the rationalism of Abu Hanifa (699-767) and the Hanafi school of jurisprudence with the orthodox literalism of Shafii (767-820) and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the ‘patron saint’ of traditionalists who, together with Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), pushed for the ulema-State alliance [24].(By comparison, the Taliban has implemented a combination of the Deobandi school, a branch of the Hanafi tradition founded in British-occupied India in the nineteenth century, and Hanbalism, due to heavy influence from Gulf petro-tyrants.)
Considering the apparent risks involved in legitimizing religious fundamentalism, it is unfortunate that Abdou omits discussion of Muslim philosophers like the proto-feminist Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198) and only mentions the Mutazilites—the first Islamic theologians, who espoused liberal-humanist views—and the anarchistic Kharijites in passing [25]. The Kharijites, who arose in the First Islamic Civil War (656-661), rejected the authority of the early Umayyad dynasty (661-750 CE), and even assassinated Ali ibn Abi Talib, the last Rashidun caliph. Some Kharijites rejected the need for an imam altogether [26]. In turn, the Mutazilites advocated reason and moral objectivism, while questioning the theological reliance on ahadith and divine commands. This is despite the mihna, or inquisition, imposed by the caliph Mamun from 833-851 to propagate Mutazila doctrine.
In his book, Abdou goes so far as to claim that ‘anti-authoritarianism [is] inherent to Islām’ [27]. Yet, he omits several important considerations here. For instance, he dismisses that the religion’s name literally translates to ‘surrender’ or ‘submission,’ and ignores that the Quran mandates obedience to ‘those in authority’ [28]. Implicitly channeling the fatalism of the orthodox Sunni theologian Ashari (873-935) over the free will championed by the scholar Taftazani (1322-1390?), Abdou proclaims that ‘[n]othing belongs to our species, including our health, nor is what we “possess” a product of our will or our own “making”’ [29]. The ascetic, anti-humanist, and potentially authoritarian implications of this view are almost palpable: Abdou here asserts that neither our life nor our health is our own, and that we have little to no agency.
Against such mystifications, in God and the State (1882), Mikhail Bakunin describes how organised religion blesses hierarchical authority, while in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach contests the idea that religious directives are divine in origin, showing that they are instead human projections made for socio-political ends. According to the Persian iconoclast and atheist Ibn al-Rawandi (872-911), in this vein, prophets are akin to sorcerers, God is a human creation, and neither the Quran nor the idea of an afterlife in Paradise is anything special. Therefore, although Abdou claims to disavow authoritarian methods throughout his book, it is unclear how a fundamentalist belief in the divine authority of the Quran can be reasonably maintained without mandating a particularly orthodox approach to religion and politics.
Furthermore, Abdou presents his puzzling view that Islam is anti-capitalist, just as he affirms the faith’s emphasis on property, banking, charity, and market competition—most of which are fundamentally bourgeois institutions [30]. The French historian Fernand Braudel is more blunt: ‘anything in western capitalism of imported origin undoubtedly came from Islam’ [31]. Indeed, Kuru observes that ‘the Prophet Muhammad and many of his close companions themselves were merchants,’ and that the name of the Prophet’s tribe, Quraysh, is itself ‘derived from trade (taqrish)’ [32]. Economic historian Jared Rubin adds that ‘[t]he Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries […] provided security and a unifying language and religion under which trade blossomed.’ Baghdad during the Abbasid dynasty (750-1258) was a riverine commercial hub, with each of its four gates ‘leading outward to the major trading routes’ [33]. In this sense, Islam may have influenced Protestantism, not only due to certain Muslims’ critiques of political authority resonating in the Protestant Reformation, but also due to the two faiths mandating similar work ethics and fixations on profit [34]. That being said, ‘unlike Jesus, Muhammad commanded armies and administered public money’ [35].
Abdou avoids all of this in his presentation of anarcha-Islam. While such lacunae may be convenient, to consider them is to complicate the idea of coherently mixing orthodox Islam with the revolutionary anti-capitalist philosophy of anarchism [36].
As further evidence of Abdou’s confused approach, the author engages early on in outright historical denialism regarding Muslim conquests during the seventh and eighth centuries, which involved widespread erasure of Indigenous peoples, but later block-quotes the poet Tamim al-Barghouti, who contradicts him by referring to these as ‘expansionary wars’ [37]. In one breath, Abdou praises the pedophile apologist Hakim Bey as an ‘influential anarchist theorist,’ and in the next, he asserts that truth regimes are different in ‘the East and Islām,’ compared to the West [38]. Such claims are consistent with the post-modern denial of reality. In Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005), Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson convincingly show the risks of this very approach, considering how Michel Foucault’s belief that Iranian Shi’ites had a different ‘regime of truth’ from Westerners led this philosopher not only to uncritically support Khomeinism, but also to legitimize its newfound ulema-State alliance in the eyes of the world [39]. Unfortunately, Abdou’s perspective on the Syrian regime is not dissimilar.
Meanwhile, the author avows Muslim queerness with reference to bathhouse (hammam) cultures and the Maqamat of al-Hariri (see above). He could also have incorporated the hadith al-shabb, which conveys the Prophet’s encounter with God in the beauty of a young man; quoted some of the homoerotic ghazals written by Persian poets like Rumi (1207-1273), Sa’adi (c. 1213-1292), and Hafez (c. 1325-1390); or considered the complaints of Crusaders about the normalization of same-sex bonds in Muslim society [40]. Indeed, the bisexual German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe viewed the meditative recitation of the ‘99 Names’ of God (al-asma al-husna) as a ‘litany of praise and glory’ [41]. Even so, Abdou does not acknowledge or critique the existence of homophobic and lesbophobic ahadith, much less contemplate how the Quranic tale of the Prophet Lut associates gay desire with male rape, thus closing off the possibility of same-sex mawaddah (or love and compassion) [42]. Instead, he cites an article from 2013 on the role of Islam in the treatment of mental illness, which explicitly perpetuates the reactionary view of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, without comment or condemnation [43]!
In contrast, researcher Aisya Aymanee Zaharin deftly elaborates a progressive revisionist account of queerness in Islam that is critical of social conservatism and heteronationalism among Muslims, particularly in the wake of European colonialism and the Wahhabist reaction, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Zaharin builds her case from the vantage point of an essentialist belief in the naturalness of same-sex attraction, the importance of human dignity and affection within Islam, and supportive Quranic verses mentioning how Allah has ‘created for you spouses from among yourselves so that you may find comfort in them. And He has placed between you compassion and mercy’ [44].
Overall, Abdou endorses the classic shortcomings of post-colonialism and post-left anarchism in his conclusion. Here, he simultaneously provides an overwhelmingly exogenous explanation for the rise in Islamic-fundamentalist movements, denounces the ‘destructive legacy of liberalism,’ condemns Democrats’ ‘obsession’ with Donald Trump, and provides discursive cover for Assad and Putin’s crimes [45]. His downplaying of the dangers posed by Trump is clearly outdated and ill-advised. Although Abdou is right to criticize certain factors external to MENA, such as Western militarism and imperialism, he does not convincingly explain how anarcha-Islam can overcome existing authoritarianism and prevent its future resurgence, whilst simultaneously committing itself to the authority of a particular theology. Indeed, Abdou at times prioritises fundamentalism over progressivism and libertarian socialism—thus proving anarchist scholar Maia Ramnath’s point that the ‘same matrix […] of neoliberal global capitalism […] provides the stimulus for both left and right reactions’ [46].
Conclusion
In closing, I would not recommend Abdou’s Islam and Anarchism very highly, principally because the author’s vision of ‘anarcha-Islām’ is exclusive rather than cosmopolitan, in keeping with post-modern, anti-humanist, and sectarian trends emanating from MENA and the West. In his own words, as we have seen, Abdou is a ‘militant jihādi’ [47]. Besides preaching revivalist, neo-orthodox Sunni Islam, he uses a primarily post-colonial perspective to critique settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and Western imperialism. There is no question that these are real ills that must be contested, but the post-colonial framing espoused by Abdou crucially overlooks internal authoritarian social dynamics while facilitating the avowal of the orthodoxies he affirms. This problem also extends to South Asia and its diaspora, as Hindu-nationalist sanghis have taken advantage of the naïveté of many Western progressives to normalize Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fascist rule [48]. Still, authoritarian rule does not appear to be Abdou’s goal, and his efforts to produce a non-authoritarian vision of Islam are at times noteworthy. A question this review poses is how, in mental and material terms, can adherence to an exclusive doctrine produce an anti-authoritarian world?
Whereas Abdou focuses on challenging and defeating Western hegemony, he avoids mention of the ills propagated by states other than the USA, the European Union, and their allies. Indeed, the disinformation he advances in the conclusion about Assad and Putin’s lack of responsibility for atrocious crimes against humanity in Syria is one with post-colonialists’ downplaying of Russian imperialism, especially in Ukraine. His outright ‘strategic’ support for Assad and lack of sympathy for the women’s protests in Iran, as revealed in the aforementioned podcast interview, typify pseudo-anti-imperialism. Beyond this, the author’s post-anarchist views inform his denial about the expansionism practiced by Islam’s early adherents, and his omissions about the close historical relationship between the new faith and commerce. It is apparent how far his anti-rationalist perspective is from that of the Mutazilites, al-Rawandi, and Ibn Rushd.
The Reality of a Diverse Islam and Diverse Anarchism – Jihad al-Haqq
While Abdou acknowledges the diversity of Islam, this is not reflected in the epistemology he attempts to write. Indeed, like the breadth and width of anarchist beliefs—from anarcha-feminism to egoist anarchism—any weaving together of Islamic belief and anarchism must respect that anarchist beliefs should be able to be built on the many different kinds of Islam that are practiced: Sunnism, Shi’ism, Isma’ilism, and so forth. This is something Abdou should have made clear. The mission of his work was to tie together Islam and anarchism in only one of its possible iterations, in the same way any anarchist proposing a future anarchist society in some theoretical work must concede that such a theoretical work only proposes how one anarchist society might look. This view is correct regardless of anarchist considerations: anthropologically, it is a basic truth that the religions practiced worldwide have many variations (much the same that languages have many variations over certain populations), that are themselves greatly affected by sociological factors, such as socio-economic status, existing power structures within a society, political beliefs, and so on.
Mohamed Abdou did mention this in the last chapter:
‘After all, as the Qur’ān emphasizes: “There is no Coercion in Religion,” and acknowledges: “And had thy Lord willed, all those who are on the earth would have believed all together. Wouldst thou compel people till they become believers?”20 There is no concept of favoritism in Islām. In the Creator’s sight the “best” are the tribes and nations that maintain social justice, egalitarian relations, and ethical and political conduct towards others and nonhuman life. The Qur’ān states: “Not all people are alike”…’
In other places, he reaffirmed the existing diversity of Islamic belief, but did not take it in the direction I hoped.
Ultimately, I fear that because of this precise consideration, Abdou’s project may have been doomed from the start. The synthesis of Islam and anarchism is up to the individual, and such syntheses might go on to become socially popular. Indeed, one of Abdou’s major pillars is that of “ijtihad,” that is, independent reasoning—even if one did not take ijtihad into account, Islam regardless would be diverse politically. The best a work like this can do is to point out anarchistic considerations in developing an interpretation of Islam that is anti-state, anti-capitalist, and so forth; but not establish an anarcha-Islam in its own right. The aim of this work ought to be like a commentary, not a second Qur’an. Nevertheless, it is, in the grand scheme of things, worthy of consideration for both praise and criticism.
Works Cited
Abdou, Mohamed 2022. Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances. London: Pluto.
Achcar, Gilbert 2009. The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Ahmad, Aijaz 1998. “Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty.” Social Scientist, vol. 26, no. 9/10. 3-25.
al-Shami, Leila and Shon Meckfessel 2022. “Why Does the US Far Right Love Bashar al-Assad?” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, Calif: AK Press. 192–209.
Asr Anarshism 2022. Forthcoming interview. The Commoner (https://www.thecommoner.org.uk).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2010. West-East Divan. Trans. Martin Bidney. Albany: State University of New York.
Haarman, Ulrich 1978. “Abu Dharr: Muhammad’s Revolutionary Companion.” Muslim World, vol. 68, issue 4. 285–9.
Hammond, Joseph 2013. “Anarchism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Eds. Gerhard Bowering et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 36–7.
Hensman, Rohini 2018. Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Kuru, Ahmet T. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lewinstein, Keith 2013. “Kharijis.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Eds. Gerhard Bowering et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 294–5.
Quran. Trans. Mustafa Khattab. Available online: https://quran.com. Accessed 13 August 2022.
Ramnath, Maia 2022. “The Other Aryan Supremacy.” ¡No Pasarán! Ed. Shane Burley. Chico, CA: AK Press. 210-69.
Rubin, Jared 2013. “Trade and commerce.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Eds. Gerhard Bowering et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 552–4.
Shariati, Ali 2003. Religion vs. Religion. Trans. Laleh Bakhtiar. ABC International Group.
Williams, Wesley 2002. “Aspects of the Creed of Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal: A Study of Anthropomorphism in Early Islamic Discourse.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 34, no. 3. 441–463.
Zaharin, Aisya Aymanee M. 2022. “Reconsidering Homosexual Unification in Islam: A Revisionist Analysis of Post-Colonialism, Constructivism and Essentialism.” Religions 13:702. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13080702.
[1] Abdou 115; Quran 2:256, 49:13 (emphasis added).
[2] Abdou 138.
[3] Ibid vii, 14.
[4] Haarman.
[5] Shariati; Kuru 181.
[6] Abdou 10-11, 84; Shariati 26-7.
[7] Abdou 101, 127-46.
[8] Asr Anarshism, forthcoming interview in The Commoner.
[9] Ahmad.
[10] Hensman 119-50.
[11] Abdou 231-2; Hensman.
[12] Hensman.
[13] al-Shami and Meckfessel 198, 208.
[14] Hammond 36.
[15] Kuru 40-2, 48, 103-112, 143-5.
[16] Ibid 216-30.
[17] Abdou 5-8, 32-3, 75, 226.
[18] Ibid 23.
[19] Kuru 25-6; Abdou 168-9, 175, 181.
[20] Abdou 41, 74-5.
[21] Ibid 81.
[22] Ibid 188-220.
[23] Ibid 209 (emphasis in original).
[24] Kuru 17-18, 94-5, 202, 227; Williams 442.
[25] Abdou 17-18.
[26] Lewinstein.
[27] Abdou 207, 228.
[28] Quran 4:59.
[29] Kuru 129; Abdou 149.
[30] Abdou 147-64.
[31] Quoted at Kuru 159.
[32] Kuru 80-1.
[33] Rubin 553.
[34] Ibid 81n86, 200.
[35] Kuru 94.
[36] Abdou 13.
[37] Abdou 47, 123-4, 195.
[38] Ibid 30, 54-5.
[39] Afary and Anderson 50.
[40] Williams 443-8; Zaharin 3, 9.
[41] Goethe 201.
[42] Zaharin 4-8.
[43] Abdou 97, 271n84.
[44] Zaharin 12-17 (emphasis added); Quran 30:21-2.
[45] Abdou 230-2.
[46] Achcar 104–8; Ramnath 244.
[47] Abdou 209 (emphasis in original).
[48] Ramnath.
Realism, Egalitarianism, and Internationalism
October 11, 2021
These are my comments, presented on October 9, 2021, at the Ninth Biennial International Herbert Marcuse conference, on the panel “The Responsibility to Protect in the Twenty-First Century.” My co-panelist was Bill Weinberg.
Welcome to our round-table. We will focus on ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ethiopia and Syria, and present anti-authoritarian views on the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (or R2P). Just as the genocides perpetrated in the 1990’s in Bosnia and Rwanda did, so ongoing radical violations of international humanitarian law raise the controversial questions of R2P and humanitarian intervention today.
In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, since November 2020, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has overseen a genocidal counter-insurgent campaign against not only the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whom his administration has designated a “terrorist organization,” but also against the civilian population of the region, provoking mass-famine and -displacement. In parallel, Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies have drowned the Syrian Revolution in blood: over the past decade, up to a million Syrians have been killed (Salahi). Undoubtedly, such crimes follow from the authoritarian illogic of State sovereignty and the “non-intervention principle” in international society, both of which form part of what the critical sociologist Max Weber described as the “Iron Cage” of capitalist modernity (Wheeler and Bellamy 563).
In this presentation, I will begin by analyzing the political and intellectual support provided by many of the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists to the Allied war effort against Nazism, and consider the “neither Washington-nor Moscow” approach taken by most of these thinkers during the subsequent Cold War. I will then compare these concepts to anarchist ideals of internationalism. In place of the conspiracism, denialism, and anti-humanism that animates so much of what passes for “left” commentary on global issues of war, exploitation, and domination in our time, I will propose egalitarianism, (literary) realism, and anti-authoritarianism as important value principles for left internationalism. Lastly, I will consider the implications of such a position for the responsibility to protect (R2P) in the face of gross human-rights violations today.
The Frankfurt School, World War II, and the Cold War
As we know, most (but not all) of the Frankfurt-School theorists were German Jews who had to flee their homes in the early 1930’s, as the Weimar Republic collapsed and Adolf Hitler seized power. Most resettled in New York, where director Max Horkheimer had arranged for the Institute for Social Research to be relocated to Columbia University. Theodor W. Adorno and Franz Neumann initially moved to England, where the Fabian socialists Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney, and Harold Laski had arranged for a London office to be opened for the Institute. Uniquely among the critical theorists, Walter Benjamin did not survive his bid to cross the Pyrenees Mountains in September 1940 and pass through Francoist Spain to reach Lisbon, where he was to take a steamer to New York and reunite with his comrades.
Once the relationship between Horkheimer and Marcuse soured in the early 1940’s, when Max suddenly announced he would partner with Adorno on Dialectic of Enlightenment, after having indicated to Herbert that he would be his co-writer—and encouraging him to move with his family across country to join Horkheimer in Los Angeles—Marcuse began working on philosophical studies of social change with Neumann, as well as his own investigations into Nazism. These included “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” (1941), “State and Individual under National Socialism” (1941), and “The New German Mentality” (1942). When Neumann joined the U.S. wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in 1942, Marcuse was not far behind. Together with fellow exile Otto Kirchheimer, the trio proposed a radical de-Nazification program for the post-war U.S. administration to implement, but it was duly ignored. After the OSS demobilized at the end of the war, Marcuse went on to work at the State Department until 1951, at which time he entered academia. Two decades later, when the equivalent of today’s ‘anti-imperialist’ critics used Marcuse’s tenure at the OSS to question his radical credentials, the critical theorist proudly defended his work there, noting that “the war then was a war against fascism and […] consequently, I haven’t the slightest reason for being ashamed of having assisted in it” (Marcuse and Popper 59). After all, we must not forget that World War II, besides being an inter-imperialist war with global dimensions, was also a people’s war against foreign occupation, totalitarian dictatorship, and genocidal oppression, both in Europe and Asia (Price).
After the Allied victory, at the birth of the Cold War, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to what by then had become West Germany, while Marcuse remained in the U.S. to research and teach at different universities. After serving the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal as researcher for the chief prosecutor, Neumann died tragically in a car accident in Switzerland in 1954. Generally speaking, over time and space, the critical theorists maintained their anti-authoritarian critique of both Western capitalism and Stalinist totalitarianism, in keeping with the third-campist, Trotskyist slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow.” Nonetheless, Horkheimer slipped up, as we will see.
Marcuse wrote Soviet Marxism (1958) as one of the first critical treatments of the USSR from within the Marxist tradition, and in One-Dimensional Man (1964), he condemns the mobilization of stifling conformity on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He was a fierce critic of U.S. government policy toward Castro’s Cuba, and of the Vietnam War, as well as a supporter of the May 1968 uprising in France, “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia (1968), and the Vietnamese and Chinese Revolutions (Sethness Castro). The same could not be said of Horkheimer, who took a turn for the worse toward life’s end by resisting calls for the Institute to condemn the Vietnam War, celebrating “German-American Friendship Week” in 1967, and going so far as to support the U.S. war on Vietnam as an ostensible means of checking the propagation of Maoist political movements (Jay 13-16, 352-353n30).
Internationalist Principles: Egalitarianism, (Literary) Realism, and Anti-Authoritarianism
Along these lines, Rancière’s political theory emphasizes the equal capacity everyone has to intervene in politics, while the literary realist style featured by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in such art-works as “Sevastopol Sketches” (1855), The Cossacks (1863), and War and Peace (1869) condemns the militarism practiced by States in a highly tragic and humanist light. Especially in the protest novel War and Peace, Tolstoy conveys his critique of inter-imperialist war, toxic masculinity, heterosexism, autocratic domination, and class exploitation. Such realism is effectively humanism. Rather than function to rationalize State abuses (in keeping with the “realist” school of international-relations theory), it remains true to Adorno’s concern for the “unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed” through atrocities (Adorno 365).
Historically, anarchist internationalism has involved coordination of and support for self-organized, autonomous movements of peasants and workers. This strategy has been used by anarchists of collectivist, syndicalist, and communist persuasions in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), otherwise known as the First International; the Anarchist St. Imier International; the Anti-Authoritarian International; and the International Workers’ Association (IWA-AIT), which continues organizing to this day (Graham). Anarchist internationalists have also supported armed struggle against oppression across borders in many different contexts, such as the nineteenth-century Polish uprisings against Tsarist domination; the Paris Commune of 1871; the popular Cuban struggle against Spanish and U.S. imperialism; the Mexican, Russian, and Spanish Revolutions; the French Resistance to Nazi occupation; both the Algerian independence movement, as well as those French soldiers who deserted their posts during the Algerian War (1954-1962); the neo-Zapatista struggle for indigenous autonomy (1994-present); and the Syrian and Rojava Revolutions of the past decade (Cappelletti; Porter).
On the one hand, in stark contrast to Marxist-Leninists, anti-authoritarian internationalists have typically striven to remain distant from “anti-imperialist,” national-socialist, and/or state-capitalist regimes, such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or the People’s Republic of China. That being said, Noam Chomsky effectively supported the Khmer Rouge, who in the late 1970’s killed millions in just three and a half years, before hailing its ouster by the Vietnamese after the fact as a striking example of humanitarian intervention.1 However much Chomsky’s contrarian approach has harmed the left’s relationship to real-life atrocities, inspiring the denialism of today, it should be taken as anomalous among anti-authoritarians (Anthony; Chomsky). On the other hand, anarchists have also generally maintained our independence from liberal Western governments, although the track records of the German theorist Rudolf Rocker—who abandoned anarcho-syndicalism for what he called “libertarian revisionism” at life’s end—and of the French unionist Georges Sorel—who proposed a marriage of revolutionary syndicalism with ultra-nationalism as a strategy to destroy bourgeois society, but instead ended up inspiring Fascism—provide important lessons in this sense, for both reformists and revolutionaries (Bernardini 7; Sternhell).
Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Today
Solidarist international society theory proposes that, regardless of questions of legality, there is a moral duty to forcibly intervene in “situations of extreme humanitarian emergency,” whether owing to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity (Wheeler and Bellamy 559). Humanitarian intervention, in this sense, can be viewed as a delayed reaction on the part of global society to its guilt over the horrors of the Holocaust and WWII. At the 2005 UN World Summit, 170 States formally adopted the legal doctrine of R2P, which stipulates “collective action […] through the Security Council, […] should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” As such, R2P doctrine is a combination of solidarism and geopolitical (but not literary) realism: while a “incomplete and poorly defined concept,” it at least establishes a minimum standard against atrocious human-rights violations (Nahlawi). Non-compliance in this sense could then trigger a multi-lateral intervention designed to use proportional force to compel a halt to such crimes.
At the same time, the State actors that would be intervening are required to have humanitarian rather than strategic motivations for their effective violation of the otherwise overriding sovereignty principle—thus excluding the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from being instances of “R2P.” In reality, R2P is understood as an exception to the fundamental principles of the UN charter, which ban the use of force between States. As a result, humanitarian intervention is reserved for “extraordinary oppression, not the day-to-day variety” (R. J. Vincent, cited in Wheeler and Bellamy 561). Even so, this begs the question of why poverty, patriarchy, and exploitation should be normalized as acceptable in this framing that claims to oppose ultra-violence. The confused answer would likely have to do with diplomacy and respect for value pluralism; after all, even in the rare instances on which it would be considered and operationalized, R2P is suppose to be based on “incrementalism and gradualism in the application of force,” rather than “defeat of a state.” Moreover, to limit the application of R2P to the whims of UN Security Council members hampers its potential, as these States are by definition often involved in the very atrocities that require redress. They rightly fear that any legal precedent for humanitarian intervention could be used against them (Wheeler and Bellamy 563, 570). For this reason, Yasmine Nahlawi champions the “Uniting for Peace” doctrine as an alternative, whereby the UN General Assembly can take up questions of R2P when the Security Council refuses or otherwise fails to do so (Nahlawi).
Humanitarian intervention can be forcible or consensual, violent or non-violent. Nicholas Wheeler and Alex Bellamy view “non-forcible humanitarian intervention,” like the work of Médecins Sans Frontières, as a “progressive manifestation of the globalization of world politics” (576). No doubt there. Yet, in the face of mass-atrocities being committed today in Syria and Tigray, pacific forms of intervention may serve more as band-aids than help to address the State oppression perpetuating human agony. For instance, “[t]he conflict in Syria has caused one of the largest humanitarian crises since World War 2” (Jabbour et al.). This is arguably due to global conformity with the principle of non-intervention, even and especially on the so-called “left,” particularly in the traumatic wake of the Iraq invasion. Paradoxically, then, the oppressive concept of sovereignty is being used by Assad, Putin, and their backers to shield accountability for the mass-atrocities they have carried out (Sibai). “Thus Hitler demands the right to practice mass murder in the name of the principle of sovereignty under international law, which tolerates any act of violence in another country,” write Horkheimer and Adorno (Adorno and Horkheimer 2003: 414). But perhaps, short of a global anarchist revolution, this dynamic should work the other way around: in other words, sovereignty could be canceled, in light of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (Wheeler and Bellamy 561).
Applying principles of egalitarianism, literary realism, and anti-authoritarianism to left internationalism in the twenty-first century has a great creative potential. While we cannot entirely predict how this proposal might play out, support for R2P and humanitarian intervention could justifiably form part of the program. Of course, the idea that anarchists should compromise with the State, even on a question so pressing as international fascist atrocities, has a dire history: see the fate of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.2 This risk of compromise and self-contradiction must, however, be balanced against the risk of violating one’s internationalism and even humanity, by ignoring and/or guarding silence about ultra-violence and other extreme forms of oppression happening elsewhere in the world.
Naturally, these do not have to be the only two options. For instance, in Rojava, volunteers have joined the International Freedom Battalion, echoing the fighters in the International Brigades who participated in the Spanish Civil War. I personally agree with the Afghan-American professor Zaher Wahab that UN peacekeepers should have intervened as US-NATO forces left Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from taking over, as it has. Moreover, though flawed, the UN humanitarian intervention in Bosnia in the 1990’s prevented the extermination of the Bosniak Muslims at the hands of Serbian ultra-nationalists, and a similar analysis could be made of the 2014 intervention by the U.S. and the PKK in Iraq’s Sinjar Mountains to rescue Yezidis from Islamic State forces.
Undoubtedly, these are all controversial questions. My perspective is that anti-authoritarian principles of egalitarianism, (literary) realism, and humanism represent much-needed “infusions” for left internationalism; that the responsibility to protect is direly needed to address political violence across the globe, whether in Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir, Ethiopia, Burma/Myanmar, China, or elsewhere; and that political radicals should reconsider their commitment, in many cases, to bourgeois principles of non-intervention. Let’s discuss.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Anthony, Andrew 2010. “Lost in Cambodia.” Guardian, 9 January.
Bernardini, David 2021. “A different antifascism. An analysis of the Rise of Nazism as seen by anarchists during the Weimar period.” History of European Ideas. DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2021.1963629.
Cappelletti, Ángel 2017. Anarchism in Latin America. Trans. Gabriel Palmer-Fernández. Chico, Calif.: AK Press.
Chomsky, Noam 1993-4. “Humanitarian Intervention.” Boston Review. Available online: https://chomsky.info/199401__02. Accessed 6 October 2021.
Graham, Robert 2015. We Do Not Fear Anarchy; We Invoke It. Oakland: AK Press.
Jabbour, Samer et al. 2021. “10 years of the Syrian conflict: a time to act and not merely to remember.” The Lancet, vol. 397, issue 10281. P1245-8.
Jay, Martin 1973. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1985. Always Coming Home. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Marcuse, Herbert and Karl Popper 1976. Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation. Ed. A.T. Ferguson. Chicago: New University Press.
May, Todd 2008. The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Nahlawi, Yasmine 2020. The Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria. London: Routledge.
Porter, David 2011. Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria. Oakland: AK Press.
Price, Wayne 2015. “The Meaning of World War II—An Anarchist View.” The Anarchist Library. Available online: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-the-meaning-of-world-war-ii-an-anarchist-view. Accessed 6 October 2021.
Salahi, Amr 2020. “Will we ever really know how many people have died in Syria since 2011?” The New Arab, 28 January. Available online: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2020/1/28/how-many-people-have-died-in-syria-since-2011. Accessed 28 January 2020.
Sethness Castro, Javier 2016. Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. Leiden: Brill.
Sibai, Leila 2018. “How international law helps Assad and Putin.” Al-Jumhuriya, 22 May. Available online: https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/-how-international-law-helps-assad-and-putin. Accessed 6 October 2021.
Sternhell, Ze’ev 1994. The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution.. Trans. David Maisel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wheeler, Nicholas J. and Alex J. Bellamy 2005. “Humanitarian intervention in world politics.” The Globalization of World Politics, 3rd Edition. Eds. John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 555-78.
Yalom, Irvin D. 1980. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
Notes
1As a side-note, China and the West condemned the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as serving the aims of Soviet imperialism (Wheeler and Bellamy 563).
2Of course, we cannot blame the outcome of the Civil War on the CNT-FAI.
On Syria, Fascism, Authoritarianism, and Hong Kong: Upcoming Panels and Film Screening at the 2019 International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference and Left Coast Forum
September 17, 2019Please find below an announcement of upcoming panels and a film screening I am helping to organize and will be participating in at the 2019 International Herbert Marcuse Society conference and the Left Coast Forum. Hope to see you at either conference, or both!
At the eighth biennial International Herbert Marcuse Society conference, “Critical Theory in Dark Times: The Prospects for Liberation in the Shadow of the Radical Right,” to be held at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB):
Syria, the Eros Effect, and Pseudo-Anti-Imperialism (Saturday, October 12, 2019, 8:30-10am)
Lara El Kateb, “Local Councils in Syria: Formations and Limitations”
Javier Sethness, “Eros and Thanatos in the Syrian Revolution”
Rohini Hensman, “Syria: Freedom and solidarity versus pseudo-anti-imperialism”
Terry Burke, “Syria Disinformation Targeting the Left”
Wagner, Bakunin, and Antisemitic Propaganda: Then and Now (Saturday, October 12, 2019, 2:45-4:15pm)
María Castro, “Feminism, Anti-Feminism, and Anti-Capitalism in Wagner’s Ring”
Javier Sethness, “Wagner and Bakunin’s ‘Dangerous Minds’ Amid Fascist Resurgence Today”
Bill Weinberg, “Ilhan Omar, Antisemitism and Propaganda”
Also, at the third annual Left Coast Forum, to be held at Occidental College in Los Angeles:
Sunday, 13 October 2019, 9:30 a.m.-12p.m. Film screening of No. 1 Chung Ying Street (2018).
This film compares the 1967 Hong Kong Leftist Riot with the ongoing the Mainland China-Hong Kong conflict. Discussion to follow with the director (to be confirmed)
And on Sunday, 13 October 2019, 1-2:15 p.m. Today’s Challenges for the Left: Stopping Fascism Globally and Standing against Authoritarian Regimes – Rocio Lopez and myself
Accountability for Assad’s Murder of Marie Colvin: A Precedent for Justice?
February 6, 2019
On Thursday, January 31, a U.S. judge found the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad responsible for the targeted assassination of U.S. journalist Marie Colvin in Homs in 2012. A reporter for The Sunday Times, Colvin had been covering the regime’s besiegement of the Baba Amr district of Homs, whose population had rebelled against Assad’s rule as part of the Revolution which had begun in the southern city of Der’aa in March 2011. Though evacuated with other internationals and journalists within days of her arrival as a precautionary measure in light of a threatened regime offensive, Colvin returned with the French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik and British photographer Paul Conroy to the improvised community media center from where they had been reporting. As Conroy describes, he, Colvin, and Ochlik believed that, by reporting on the regime’s besiegement of Baba Amr, they could affect world opinion and bring relief to civilians under fire. It was from Baba Amr that Colvin courageously went live on CNN, the BBC, ITN News, and Channel 4 News, on February 21, 2012, to belie the Assad regime’s fabrications that its assault on the district was exclusively targeting so-called “terrorists.” It was for this reason that the regime killed her, the very next morning after the broadcast. They triangulated her location via her cell signal due to Colvin’s bravery in broadcasting the devastating truth to the world, murdering her and Ochlik in a targeted artillery strike. As judge Amy Jackson observes in her ruling, Colvin was “specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country.”
Colvin’s remarkable story is told in two recent films: Under the Wire and A Private War. I will not here be discussing Under the Wire, which is brilliantly reviewed by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in the New York Review of Books here. Instead, I will offer some comments about A Private War, a 2018 dramatization of Colvin’s life, directed by Matthew Heineman and written by Marie Brenner and Arash Amel.
Though Colvin covered armed conflicts for three decades, in A Private War, we follow her in her later assignments to war zones in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It is amidst covering Sri Lanka’s civil war that Colvin suffers a disfiguring injury, leading her to wear a distinctive eye-patch over her left orbit. While there is little sense in the film that Colvin had an anti-imperialist critique of U.S. participation in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the film depicts her dynamic and increasingly humanist approach to journalism, culminating in her martyrdom in Homs in February 2012. During the Libya segment, which takes place shortly after the outbreak of protests against Mua’mmar al-Qaddafi, we see Colvin outright interviewing the autocrat. Though Colvin never had the chance to question Assad—she was no Vanessa Beeley, a neo-fascist propagandist, but rather the Syrian despot’s direct victim—we get the sense that the writers and director are here channeling Assad’s specter through Colvin’s interaction with Qaddafi, given their similarities, from political authoritarianism to inter-personal repulsiveness and sexism, and their common opportunistic use of nationalist, ‘socialist,’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric to legitimize their crimes. It follows logically that both Qaddafi and Assad would present essentially all opposition to their rule as “al-Qaeda” and/or “terrorists,” as they have.
These myriad problematic and questionable characteristics notwithstanding, and regardless of prior close collaboration on the part of both Assad and Qaddafi with imperialism—including intelligence-sharing and the torture of “suspects of interests” to the U.S.—both figures have enjoyed considerable support from “left” pseudo-anti-imperialists, campists, and neo-Stalinists since the Arab uprisings challenged their rule, beginning in 2011. These Stalinist-campists go so far as to praise Assad and his allies for preventing the collapse of his regime, thus avoiding the “Libya model.” Among other claims, they often argue that the chaos resulting from Qaddafi’s overthrow and murder led to the creation of slave markets for Black Africans: and while we certainly should not deny the spread of conditions of slavery after Qaddafi’s fall, neither should we overlook the widespread pre-existing slave markets enabled by the dictator’s racist regime or the mass-detention system for African migrants traversing Libya en route to Europe, a project for which Qaddafi was compensated billions by the European Union. The autocrat knowingly played on neo-colonial and white-supremacist anxieties, promising that he would ‘protect’ Europe from the putative “risk of turning black from illegal immigration,” and even “turn[ing] into Africa [sic].”1
In an ultimately suicidal conciliatory gesture, Qaddafi abandoned his weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programs just months after the invasion of Iraq—though it was not until late 2016 that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed the destruction of the last of Libya’s chemical-weapons stockpile. This is to say nothing of the extraction contracts he negotiated with Western energy corporations after the U.S. government subsequently lifted sanctions against his regime in 2004. By the time of his fall in late 2011, ConocoPhillips and Marathon had invested close to $1.5 billion in the country, whereas Hess and Occidental corporations had bought “rights” to several oil fields, such that, by 2008, the labor appropriated by U.S. companies paradoxically accounted for close to one-third of daily oil production in Libya.
Whereas Qaddafi’s regime was defeated through the combination of a popular rebellion aided by NATO intervention and his person summarily executed, Assad’s tyranny still reigns—unfortunately for Syrians, the region, and the world. Indeed, Qaddafi’s fate has signaled to Assad and Kim Jong-Un not to give up their weapons of mass destruction, despite the terms of the Syrian regime’s fraudulent disarmament overseen by the OPCW a year after the August 2013 Ghouta sarin massacre which killed over one thousand Syrians. In Assad’s case, Qaddafi’s destiny no doubt has influenced the Syrian tyrant not to hesitate to use chemical weapons for tactical advantage, or the sheer purpose of terror and collective punishment of civilian populations who reject his rule.
The Baba Amr district of Homs in March 2011. (AFP/Shaam News Network)
The film’s concluding chapter in Syria is very moving. The scene is Homs, Syria’s third-largest city by population, following Aleppo and Damascus. After having repudiated Assad’s oppressiveness as the Syrian Revolution spread in early 2011, the people of Homs together with Free Syrian Army units liberated the western district of Baba Amr from regime control. It was here that Colvin arrived with her colleagues in February 2012 during a retaliatory regime offensive on Baba Amr. There, Colvin bore witness to many tragic scenes, including the acute bereavement of a father whose son, being no older than three or four years of age, is killed in the assault. She is also also depicted interviewing a young mother taking refuge with her infant daughter in the “widows’ basement,” under fire from the regime’s ill-named Republican Guard. Colvin’s final tweet reads:
“In Baba Amr. Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by & I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless. As well as cold!”
As Rohini Hensman points out correctly in Indefensible (2018), there is no moral difference between this oppressed Syrian mother and a similarly brutalized Palestinian woman who is besieged by Israel.2 Neither is there is a morally relevant difference between this suffering Syrian child, and a suffering Palestinian child. Therefore, these scenes in the film serve a very critical function in allowing for the possibility that the audience will recognize the confused thinking which many Western pseudo-anti-imperialists advance: namely, that Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is horrific and must be ended immediately, but that Assad’s subjugation of Syrians is less problematic, because his regime is supposedly ‘anti-imperialist’ in orientation. For viewers who are not enmeshed in such ideological thinking, these scenes will likely speak to them on a humanist level, and therefore may serve the progressive function of illuminating the Assad regime’s brutality—a necessary prerequisite for demanding justice for the dictator’s vast crimes.
The cries of the bereaved father whom Colvin encounters—”!یا الله,” Ya Allah! (meaning “Oh God”)—recall the young Karl Marx’s critique of religious suffering as the “expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”3 In thusly calling on Allah—who in Islam is believed to represent the qualities of mercy, peace, justice, love, and equity, among others—this Syrian man critiques Assad’s blasphemous violation of these ideal human qualities, as well as the international order’s complicity in the destruction of the country by the regime and his allies.
Watching A Private War, one may feel a great sense of gratitude and respect for those who risk their lives to report on atrocities from conflict zones, so that the world at least knows about war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the atrocious reprisals to which dissidents and their perceived supporters are subjected by fascist regimes, simply for the “crime” of organizing to overthrow dictatorship and oppression. In light of the fate of Syria over the past nearly eight years, and thinking of the fierce discursive struggle regarding happenings there, especially that advanced by “left” conspiracist thinkers who deny Assad’s crimes, it is unclear that mere coverage of the horrors of war will ensure justice or accountability. Moreover, amidst the mass-extermination experienced in Syria since 2011, it would appear that, to focus on the fate of one person—much less a white Westerner—would seem questionable. Yet the regime has murdered numerous international people of conscience, besides Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik: the anarchist Omar Aziz, who inspired the revolutionary model of the Local Coordinating Councils (LCC’s); Dr. Abbas Khan, a British orthopedic surgeon killed in a Damascus prison in late 2013 for volunteering to assist injured Syrian civilians; and the young Syrian-American Leila Shweikani, whom the regime assassinated in late 2016 for rendering aid to civilians in a hospital in Eastern Ghouta—to name just a few.
So the universal can arguably be seen in the particular: that is to say, one can find an illumination of the essential authoritarianism and injustice of capitalism and dictatorship reflected in the contemplation of several individual cases, whether they be martyred U.S. or French journalists, Syrian or Palestinian civilians, or international aid workers.
Following the recent devastation caused by Storm Norma in the Levant, we see that Syrian refugees and internally displaced people are still very much at risk, both in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria proper. The lives of infants and young children are threatened; many have perished due to storm conditions near Deir-Ez-Zor. Amidst the recent moves made to rehabilitate the Assad Regime on a regional level—given the reopening in late December of Bahrain and UAE’s embassies in Damascus, Jordan’s invitation for the Syrian regime to attend the Inter-Arab Parliamentary Union meeting in March, and the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir’s recent in-person meeting with Assad in Damascus, which took place just days before the start of the ongoing uprising in Sudan—taken together with the regime’s consolidation of territorial control, there is a definite need for accountability and political resistance to such atrocities. To help alleviate suffering, in the U.S., within the electoral sphere, we can advocate for the implementation of the “Caesar” bill—so named for the Syrian army defector who provided systematic photographic evidence of the mass-extermination of detainees held by regime forces—and for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, at least, we can help support the fundraiser for Med Global, which is providing emergency shelter and other life-saving treatments across the border in Lebanon.
“No justice without accountability.”
1 Emphasis added.
2 Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 284.
3 Emphasis in original.
On “International Human Rights Day,” New SOHR Report Unveils the Death of 560,000 People in Syria since March 2011
December 14, 2018
In a new report published for “International Human Rights Day,” December 10th, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) announced an updated death-toll of 560,000 people in Syria since the beginning of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, which has demanded equality, justice, freedom, and democracy.
Previous estimates of the total losses in Syria had ranged from 360,000-400,000 people.
According to the SOHR, these casualties include the following:
Courtesy Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
Civilian casualties:
111330 Syrians including 20819 children under the age of eighteen and 13084 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
Syrian fighters in the ranks of the rebel and Islamic factions and the Syria Democratic Forces and other factions, movements and organizations: 63561
Defected of the regime forces: 2619
Number of persons who were killed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces: 65048
Fighters of NDF and gunmen loyal to the Syrian regime: 50296
Fighters of the Lebanese Hezbollah: 1675
Gunmen of non-Syrian nationalities loyal to the regime forces of the Shiite community: 8049
Fighters of the Islamic factions, Fateh al-Sham Front “Nusra Front formerly”, the “Islamic State” organization, the Islamic Turkestan Party, Jund al-Aqsa organization, Jund al-Sham, al-Khadra’a Battalion, Jund al-Sham al-Shishan, and Islamic movements of Arab and North African nationalities: 65108
Unidentified documented by pictures and videos: 279
The total number of civilian casualties is 111330; and it is distributed below according to party that caused the death:
By forces of Bashar al-Assad and their loyal gunmen of Syrian and non-Syrian nationalities: 43575 civilian casualties, and they are: 27171 men, 10166 children under the age of eighteen and 6238 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By raids of Bashar al-Assad’s regime warplanes and helicopter 25581 civilian casualties, and they are: 16196 men, 5742 children under the age of eighteen and 3643 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
Casualties in detention centers and prisons of the regime 16063 civilian casualties, they 15874 men and young men, 125 children under the age of eighteen, and 64 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By Russian rocket and air strikes 7988, they are 4853 men and young men, 1936 children under the age of eighteen and 1199 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By bombing by warplanes of the International Coalition 3709 Syrian civilians, they are 2080 men, 992 children under the age of eighteen and 687 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By bombing and shelling by the Turkish forces and warplanes 836 civilian casualties, they are 539 men and young men, 181 children under the age of eighteen and 116 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By the Turkish Jandarma 415 civilian casualties, they are 303 men and young men, 75 children under the age of eighteen and 37 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By the opposition factions 7807 civilian casualties, they are 5894 men, 1185 children under the age of eighteen and 728 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
By the “Islamic State” Organization 5356 civilian casualties, they are 4517 men, 467 children under the age of eighteen and 372 citizen women over the age of eighteen.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights indicates that this statistic does not include the 88000 citizens who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the observatory got the information about their death during the period of their detention, It also doesn’t include the fate of more than 5200 abducted civilians and fighters in the prisons the “Islamic State” organization, in addition to that, it does not include also the fate of more than 4700 prisoners and missing of the regime forces and militiamen loyal to them, and more than 2000 kidnapped by the rebel and Islamic factions, the “Islamic State” organization and Fateh al-Sham Front (Jabhat Al-Nusra earlier) on charges of the loyalty to the regime.
Also the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates the real number of who were killed to be about 90 thousand persons more than the numbers that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was able to document, due to the extreme secrecy on the number of casualties by the fighting parties, and due to presence of information about civilians casualties the Observatory was unable to document their death, because of the difficulty of reaching some remote areas in Syria.
Also the continued military operations, shelling and explosions have injured more than 2 million Syrian citizens with different injuries and permanent disabilities, while about 12 million other citizens including hundreds of thousands of children and hundreds of thousands of citizen women were displaced between the refuge and the displacement areas, also the infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and private and public property have been destroyed greatly.
After 93 months watering the Syrian soil with blood, and the continuation of killing on this land, the world and the International Community have no excuses to delay the international move, to end the death, the killing, the destruction and the displacement in the Syrian territory, to give the chance to the people of this nation to have a chance to live and re-build their country and to return their homes or the ruins in their cities, towns and villages, and there are no pretexts or excuses can stand in front of the International Courts to prevent the criminals and the murderers to be punished, with the exception of being those who are responsible for the administration of justice, evade from applying it, as we in the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights will continue our calls for the international parties and the UN Security Council to move and to refer the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court, so that the killers of the Syrian people, their instigators and their commanders are punished, and to and to stop killing and give the chance to the Syrian people to reach the state they dream, the state of justice, democracy, freedom and equality and that guarantees their rights.
If the International Community and its justice were present from the beginning, and if they were serious in helping the Syrian people to reach what they look forward, in reaching the state of justice, democracy, freedom and equality, as the Syrian people do not ask for much, they only demanded their dignity, but the International Community turned a revolution has precious goals, to a war between it and extremist organizations, and facilitated their way to spread, thus, they killed all the dreams of the Syrian people, it also reached that some of those who are responsible for the solution in Syria, to silence or bless the displacement in Syria, under the umbrella of “reconciliation and truces”, and it was only a participation by them in the crimes that are committed against humanity in Syria, and we at the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and despite of the killing threats we received from the all parties and all killers in Syria, and from parties participated in killing Syrian people, do not and will never stop what we started of monitoring, documenting and publishing all violations and crimes committed against the Syrian people and against the humanity, and the war crimes that are still being committed in Syria, even it costs our lives.
Barrel bombs over Saraqeb, by Bill Bragg
What Were Stalin’s Real Crimes? Critique of “A Marxist-Leninist Perspective” on Stalin (Part II/III)
November 15, 2018
The meaning of forced collectivization: an irrigation project in Fergana, Eastern Kazakhstan, 1935 (courtesy David Goldfrank)
“It is in the nature of ideological politics […] that the real content of the ideology […] which originally had brought about the ‘idea’ […] is devoured by the logic with which the ‘idea’ is carried out.”
– Hannah Arendt1
What’s the biggest problem with the “criticisms” of Stalin raised by the “Proles of the Round Table”? That they are so disingenuous and anemic. One of the three critiques raised—about Spain—in fact isn’t critical of Stalin, while we’ve seen (in part I) how the “criticism” on deportations is entirely misleading. A related question might be to ask how it looks for two presumably white U.S. Americans to criticize Stalin for some (1-2%) of his deportations of ethnic Germans, but not to do so when it comes to the dictator’s mass-deportations of Muslims, Buddhists, and other indigenous peoples. At least Mao Zedong judged Stalin as being “30 percent wrong and 70 percent right.”2 For Jeremy and Justin, though, Stalin appears to have been at least 90%, if not 95%, right. Maybe we can soon expect the “Proles of the Round Table” Patreon to begin selling wearables proclaiming that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”
Besides the aforementioned Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the May Days, and the mass-deportations of ethnic minorities, let’s now consider five of Stalin’s real crimes.
1. “Socialism in One Country”: Stalinist Ideology
His revision, together with fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, of the tradition of socialist internationalism to the reactionary, ultra-nationalist idea of “socialism in one country.” Stalin and Bukharin arrived at this conclusion to compete against Lev Trotsky’s rival concept of “permanent revolution,” which calls first for a European and then global federation of socialist republics. This Stalinist doctrine, which demanded that the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy be considered first within the Third International (or Comintern), can explain both the General Secretary’s demand to crush the anarchists in Spain in 1937 and his effective facilitation of Hitler’s rise to power by means of the disastrous Comintern policy that considered the social-democratic (that is, non-Stalinist) opposition to Hitler to be “social-fascist.” The General Secretary would only reverse course and endorse a “Popular Front” strategy after Hitler had taken power.3 Stalinist ultra-nationalism finds contemporary purchase among neo-fascist, national-Bolshevik movements, whereas—perhaps ironically—the Comintern doctrine on “social fascism” has echoes today among ultra-leftists disdainful of coalition-building with more moderate political forces (e.g., as in the 2016 U.S. presidential election). Moreover, Stalin’s preference for “socialism in one country” can help us understand the Soviet Union’s continued sale of petroleum to Mussolini following this fascist’s military invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935.4 Within this same vein, and anticipating the affinity of today’s neo-Stalinists for campist “analyses” of international relations, Moscow variously supported the feudalist Guo Min Dang (GMD) in China, the Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Afghan King Amanullah Khan, and Ibn al-Sa’ud (founder of Saudi Arabia) during this time on the grounds that these leaders staunchly opposed the West, despite their great distance from any kind of socialist paradigm.5
Courtesy Voline, The Unknown Revolution
2. Stalinist Imperialism
His “Great-Russian” chauvinism, as manifested in his brutally imperialist policies toward ethnic minorities—particularly the deportations of Muslims (as mentioned above in part I)—and other subject-peoples of the former Tsarist empire, whose colonial project Stalin enthusiastically embraced. Though Georgian by origin (his birth name was Ioseb Jughashvili), Stalin (whose Russian nom de guerre means “man of steel”) was “the most ‘Russian’ of the early leaders” who advanced not only “socialism in one country,’ but […] a socialism built on a predominantly Russian foundation.”6 According to Dunayevskaya, Stalin’s “national arrogance” was “as rabid as that of any Tsarist official.”7 In contrast to his mentor and supervisor Vladimir I. Lenin, who at least formally supported the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities of the Tsarist empire while greatly violating this principle in practice, Stalin was openly imperialist on the national question: according to the terms of this relationship, the colonies were to be “plundered for raw materials and food to serve the industrialisation of Russia.”8 It therefore remains clear that, under the Soviet Union, “Russia was not a nation state but an empire, an ideological state. Any definition as a nation-state would probably have excluded at least the non-Slavs, and certainly the Muslims.”9 Accordingly, the official history taught in Stalin’s USSR rehabilitated the mythical Tsarist narrative that the Russian “Empire had brought progress and civilisation to backward peoples.”10
Ethnographic map of the former Soviet Union. Date unknown
In Georgia, a former Tsarist-era colony located in the Caucasus Mountains, the social-democratic Menshevik Party declared independence in 1918 to found the Georgian Democratic Republic, otherwise known as the Georgian Commune, wherein parliamentary democracy and a relatively collaborative relationship among the peasantry, proletariat, and political leadership lasted for three years, until Stalin and his fellow Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized a Red Army invasion in 1921 which crushed this courageous experiment in democratic socialism. The errant ex-colony of Georgia was thus forcibly reincorporated into the ex-Tsarist Empire—by then, the “Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic,” part of the Soviet Union.11 Besides Georgia, this “Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic” would include Azerbaijan and Armenia, which had also been occupied by the Red Army in 1920.12
In the Muslim-majority provinces of Central Asia, otherwise known as Turkestan, the poorest region of the former Tsarist Empire, Lenin and Stalin sided with the interests of the Russian settlers against the Muslim peasantry.13 In Orientalist fashion, the Bolsheviks considered Central Asia’s “Muslims as culturally backward, not really suitable to be communists and needing to be kept under a kind of tutelage.”14 Yet in light of the sustained Basmachi revolt waged by Muslim guerrillas against Soviet imperialism in the first decade after October 1917, Stalin also recognized the significant threat these colonized Muslims could pose to the Soviet Union—hence his active discouragement of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism by means of cutting off the USSR’s Muslims “subjects,” many of them ethnically and linguistically Turkic, from the rest of the Ummah (Islamic global brotherhood or community) abroad. An early 1930’s law punishing unauthorized exit from the USSR made observation of hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, quite impossible.15 The expulsion from the Communist Party (1923) and subsequent imprisonment (1928) of the Volga Tatar Sultan Galiev, a pan-Islamist “national-communist” who envisioned organizing the Turkic Muslims into a fighting force against Western imperialism, followed a similar logic.16
In the Stalinist conception, the numerous subject-peoples of the Soviet Union could be classified hierarchically according to their “stage of development,” as based on their mode of production and whether or not they had a written language, such that supposedly more ‘advanced’ peoples would qualify as ‘nations’ that were granted the status of “Soviet Socialist Republic” (SSR), whereas “less developed” peoples would be granted “Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics” (ASSR), while those without written languages would be placed in “Autonomous Regions” (AR), or “National Territories” (NT). In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, there existed 14 SSR’s, 20 ASSR’s, 8 AR’s, and 10 NT’s in the USSR.17
Map of Soviet administrative subdivisions, 1989. Notice the numerous ASSR subdivisions in Central Asia
This systematic atomization of oppressed nationalities followed Stalin’s “principle of the dual bridgehead,” whereby the State would favor those minorities that could assist the USSR in expanding its reach while repressing other minorities whose existence could serve as a “fifth column” for the USSR’s rivals. In part I of this critique, we saw how this rationale played out in Stalin’s mass-deportations: the General Secretary felt justified in forcibly transferring the Turkic Muslim Meskhetian people, among others, because they were supposedly too close to the Turkish State headed by Kemal Atatürk. Furthermore, this principle can be gleaned in the Soviet Communist Party’s initial favoring of Uzbeks over Tajiks beginning in 1924, followed by a 180° shift in perspective upon the overthrow of Afghanistan’s King Amanullah (a Pashtun) by Bacha-i Saqqao, a Tajik, in 1928—leading to the proclamation of the Tajikistan SSR in 1929.18 The capital city of Dushanbe was subsequently renamed as “Stalinabad.”19 In addition, whereas the Communist Party favored its own Kurdish minority, some of whom included refugees, because it could use them in the future as pawns against Iran and Turkey, it had refused to support Kurdish and Turkmen rebellions abroad against Turkey and Iran in 1925. Above all, Stalin’s nationalities policy achieved its greatest “success” in its complex partition of Turkestan by means of the drawing-up of borders that were defined along ethno-nationalist lines: just look at the region’s current borders (see map above), which are based on those concluded by Stalin’s regime. In thus pitting Central Asia’s mosaic of different ethno-linguistic groups against each other, Stalin definitively laid the pan-Islamist specter to rest.20 Dunayevskaya’s observation here seems apt: it was in Stalin’s “attitude to the many [oppressed] nationalities” that the General Secretary’s “passion for bossing came out in full bloom.”21
A Soviet mosaic in Karaghandy, Kazakhstan (Courtesy The Guardian)
Stalin’s imperialist assertion of power over Central Asia, which imposed the collectivization of cattle herds and the nationalization of bazaars and caravans managed by indigenous peoples while promoting Russian settlements, resulted in famine and revolt.22 It involved a high-modernist assault on Islam in the name of emancipating women and remaking traditional patriarchal Turkic social relations, as we shall examine in more detail in the third part of this response.
Regarding Ukraine, see the section on Jeremy and Justin’s Holodomor denial in the third part of this response. Briefly, Jeremy’s Russian-chauvinist attitude toward all matters Ukrainian comes through at a fundamental linguistical level when he refers to Ukraine as “the Ukraine.” This formulation, like the Russian «на Украине» (“in the Ukraine”), is an imperialist way of referring to the country, which is not just a colony of Russia or the Soviet Union (as in, “the Ukrain[ian province]”). The proper way is to refer just to Ukraine, as in the Russian equivalent «в Украине» (“in Ukraine”).
Such attitudes are shared by Ó Séaghdha, who falsely claims Ukraine today to be a “bastion of the far right and neo-Nazism,” just as Justin compares “Ukrainian nationalists” to the U.S.-based Proud Boys. One’s mind is boggled: as of July 2018, the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party had only 6 seats, or 1.3%, in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, while in both rounds of elections held in 2014, Svoboda and Right Sector alike gained less than 5% of the vote.23 In fact, Ukraine has held its first major LGBT Pride marches following the Euromaidan protests which overthrew the Putin-affiliated President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Meanwhile, by focusing on the supposedly ‘fascist’ Ukrainians,24 Ó Séaghdha and his guests deny the global reach of Putin’s neo-Nazism, from his 2014 occupation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine and his subsequent mass-detention of Crimean Tatar Muslims, including in psychiatric hospitals, to his regime’s criminalization of homosexuality, decriminalization of domestic violence, and genocidal intervention in support of the Assad Regime in Syria—to say nothing of his mutual affinities for the Trump Regime. How ironic is this misrepresentation, then, considering that Ukraine was the “centerpiece of Hitler’s vision of Lebensraum.”25
A typically socialist-realist depiction of a collective farm celebration, by Arkady Plastov (1937): presumably, this is how neo-Stalinists and ‘Marxist-Leninists’ idealize the outcomes of forcible collectivization in the Soviet Union.
3. Stalinist State-Capitalism
His advocacy and implementation of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, whereby the basic relationship of exploitation between capital and labor persisted after the Russian Revolution, with the difference that capital in this case was managed and expanded by the Communist Party bureaucracy rather than the private capitalist class.26 Upheld by the Army and police, the Soviet economy reduced workers to mere slaves: during the existence of the USSR, workers could not regulate, choose, or control their overseers and administrators, much less anticipate not having any, as through anarcho-syndicalist organization, or autogestion (самоуправление). In the USSR,
“[t]he State [wa]s [the worker’s] only employer. Instead of having thousands of ‘choices,’ as is the case in the nations where private capitalism prevails, in the U.S.S.R. (the U.S.C.R. [Union of State-Capitalist Republics: Voline]) the worker ha[d] only one. Any change of employer [wa]s impossible there.”27
Following the Revolution, “[f]or the Russian workers, […] nothing had changed; they were merely faced by another set of bosses, politicians and indoctrinators.”28
Peasants under Stalin were similarly reduced to serfs, particularly during and following the forced collectivization process that began in 1928. Continuing with the precedent of the Bolshevik policy of “War Communism,” which had involved considerable extraction of grain and the conscription of young men from the peasantry, Stalin declared war on the countryside, expropriating all lands held by these peasants and concentrating these into kolkhozi, or “collective possessions,” and sovkhozi, or State farms, which were to be worked by the peasants in the interests of the State.29 This nationalization did not discriminate between “rich” peasant, or kulak, and poor—in contrast to the misleading presentation Jeremy and Justin make of Stalin’s forcible collectivization campaign. The “Proles of the Round Table” deceptively explain the emergence of the “kulaks” by referring to the Tsarist Interior Minister Peter Stolypin’s land reforms of 1906, while saying nothing about Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” of 1921, which formally reintroduced private property. They also completely misrepresent Stalin’s collectivization policy, which proceeded at the points of bayonets, as a natural outgrowth of the traditional peasant commune (mir or obshchina), which had resisted the Tsarist State for centuries. In fact, it was arguably through Stalinist forcible collectivization that the Russian countryside fell under the control for the first time.30 As peasant resistance to this “total reordering of a rural civilization from the top down” mounted, including an estimated 13,000 “mass disturbances” just in 1930, Stalin’s regime resorted to atrocious counter-insurgent tactics to bring the countryside to heel, including mass-executions, reprisals, and the resulting famines of 1931-1933 in Ukraine, South Russia, and Kazakhstan.31 The Stalinist regime conveniently expanded the definition of exactly who was a “kulak” from a class-based to a political definition, such that even poor peasants who opposed forcible collectivization could be labeled “kulaks” and deported to Siberia, the Far North, and Central Asia, as about 1.8 million peasants were in 1930-1931. As during the numerous other episodes of mass-deportations devised by Stalin, mortality rates among “dekulakized” peasants were high.32
Puzzlingly, the “Proles of the Round Table” claim this collectivization to have been “extremely successful” in providing “stability” by the mid-1930’s, the resistance of at least 120 million peasants to the Terror campaign and the “excess mortality” of between 6 and 13 million people such Terror caused during this period notwithstanding. By precisely which standards can this campaign have said to have been “successful”? The historian Catherine Evtuhov observes: “From any humane perspective, the terrible costs were far greater than the rewards.”33 In contrast, Jeremy and Justin either do not recognize the brutality of the Stalinist regime’s campaign, or they simply explain away mass-death during collectivization as resulting from natural disasters—thus ‘naturalizing’ the Soviet regime’s contributions to famines—and/or “kulak resistance.” By so easily dismissing mass-death, they imply that the millions of poor peasants who were destroyed as a result of forcible collectivization deserved such a fate.
Jeremy and Justin are very insistent on arguing that the deaths associated with collectivization were “not due” to Stalin’s policies—against both logic and evidence. They have nothing to say about Stalin’s reconstitution in 1932 of the Tsarist-era internal-passport system, or propiska, in order to tightly control the movements of the Soviet peasantry and proletariat during forced collectivization. Upon its proclamation in December 1932, such “passportization” was effected and mandated in “towns, urban settlements, district centers, and Machine and Tractor Stations, within 100-kilometer radiuses around certain large towns, in frontier zones, on building sites and state farms”: it thus openly revoked the freedom of movement of the majority of the Soviet population, including peasants and ethnic minorities.34 With this in mind, it would appear that the “Proles of the Round Table” do not to want to concede the possibility—and reality—that Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign involved the oppression and dispossession of many poor peasants, whether these were insurgents against whom the State retaliated for defending their communities against Stalinist incursion or simply peasants whom the parasitic bureaucracy considered mere objects of exploitation and either killed outright or left to die during forcible collectivization—thus reflecting the extent to which internal colonialism characterized the Stalinist State.35
Indeed, Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign followed a very clearly state-capitalist rationale, both requiring and (once established) providing mass-labor inputs. Based on the economic theory of Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Stalin’s massive State project to centralize the peasantry so as to more deeply exploit it represented the phase of “primitive socialist accumulation” that was considered as necessary to finance a rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. In parallel to the colonization of the New World, the enslavement of Africans, and the enclosure of the commons by which capitalism arose as a historical mode of production,36 Preobrazhensky essentially argued that the Soviet State must exploit the peasants and use the surplus value extracted from them to accelerate the growth of capital and industry.37 This brutally mechanistic logic, which has served as the model for similar industrialization processes in countries led by Stalinist bureaucracies such as Maoist China and Ethiopia under the Derg,38 openly exhibits Marxist-Leninism’s fundamental bias against the peasantry, whether “kulak” or otherwise. Such bias was clearly on display on Ó Séaghdha’s podcast, given the embarrassing side-comments about “comrades cuddling” during the horrors of forced collectivization, and Jeremy and Justin’s astonishing conclusion that this collectivization which took the lives of millions of poor peasants had been “extremely successful.” These Stalinists thus appear to have no class analysis of the peasantry, instead considering them all as reactionaries and “capitalists” whose oppression and destruction signifies progress. They malign the peasants and laugh over their corpses while saying nothing about the conditions of “second serfdom”—represented by barshchina (State labor requirements), extraction, and low pay—that formed the basis of Stalinist industrialization.39
Within Soviet class society, according to Voline (writing in 1947), there existed approximately 10 million privileged workers, peasants, functionaries, Bolshevik Party members, police, and soldiers (comprising approximately 6% of the population of the USSR/USCR), as against 160 million effectively enslaved workers and peasants (or 94% of the USSR/USCR’s population).40 The basic structure of the Soviet Union, on Paul Mattick’s account, was “a centrally-directed social order for the perpetuation of the capitalistic divorce of the workers from the means of production and the consequent restoration of Russia as a competing imperialist power.”41 This ‘total State’ “resembled an army in terms of rank and discipline,” and atop it all “lived Stalin, moving between his Kremlin apartment and his heavily guarded dachas. He and his cronies indulged themselves night after night, in between issuing commands and execution orders, feasting and toasting in the manner of gangland chiefs.”42
The meaning of forcible collectivization: child labor on an irrigation project in Fergana, Eastern Kazakhstan, 1935 (courtesy David Goldfrank)
4. The GULAG Slave-Labor Camp System
“The deaths of the conquered are necessary for the conqueror’s peace of mind.” – Chinggis Khan: a phrase of which Stalin was fond (Evtuhov 676)
His regime’s founding (in 1930), mass-expansion, and vast utilization of the GULAG slave-labor camp system, known officially as the “State Camp Administration,” which played a central role in the General Secretary’s “Great Purge,” otherwise known as his “Terror.” These purges served the goal of “ensur[ing] the survival of the regime and Stalin’s position as its supreme leader” by eliminating the remaining “General Staff of the [Russian] Revolution” as well as the workers, peasants, and intellectuals who resisted Stalin’s state-capitalist plans.43 The General Secretary’s insistence on obedience, his paranoid vengefulness, his equation of any kind of opposition with treason, and the fear felt by Communists that the Soviet Union was militarily encircled, particularly in light of a newly remilitarized and fascist Germany, can help explain the Terror, which involved the arrest of at least 1.5 million people, the deportation of a half-million to camps, and the execution of hundreds of thousands. The total camp population reached 2.5 million in 1950.44
As Yevgenia Semënovna Ginzburg’s memoir Journey into the Whirlwind attests to, the GULAG system was designed in such a way as to partially recoup the financial losses involved in the mass-imprisonments which followed from Stalin’s Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: instead of summarily being executed or idly rotting away in prison, many detainees were forced to work for the State with little to no material compensation. Ginzburg shows as well that political prisoners suffered greater discrimination in access to health services, nutritional intake, shelter, and types of labor performed in the GULAG, relative to other convict groups: the ‘politicals’ were always assigned hard labor. Many GULAG prisoners died performing slave-labor, whether clearing forests or constructing railroads: such was the fate of numerous enslaved prisoners forced to construct the Moscow-Volga Canal from 1932-1937.45 Within the Magadan camp located in Eastern Siberia where Ginzburg was held, the discrepancy between the housing conditions of Hut No. 8, a “freezing cold” “wild animals’ den” where the female political prisoners lived, and the abodes of those convicted for lesser offenses, in which lived individuals with “healthy complexions and lively faces” enjoying “blankets in check patterns” and “pillows with hemstitched linen covers,” clearly illustrates the discrimination.46 This same dynamic seems to explain the contrast in appearance—and physical comfort—among the female slave-labor teams assigned to the Kilometer 7 work site: the “peasant women” “had managed to keep their own coarse scarves” and some of the “ordinary criminals” had sheepskin coats, while the political prisoners “had not a rag of [their own]” and wore footwear which was “full of holes [and] let in the snow.”47 Ginzburg’s fellow inmate Olga was therefore right to anticipate that Stalin’s regime would expand the use of “hard-labor camps” in the wake of the downfall of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov in 1939, especially considering that the majority of those imprisoned by Stalin were of prime working age.48
In a reflection of the maxims of Stalinist state-capitalism, Ginzburg reports that the slave-labor system to which she was subjected in the GULAG would dole out food only in proportion to the output that a given team would achieve. For teams like hers comprised of intellectuals and ex-Party officials who lacked experience with manual labor, then, this dynamic would result in a downward spiral of production—and welfare, since they were unable to achieve a basic threshold for production which would allow them access to the very food they needed to maintain and increase production in the future.49 Yet slave-laborers were sometimes provided with food relief if mortality rates were deemed ‘excessive.’50 Ginzburg’s memoirs thus suggest that, as far as political prisoners were concerned, the GULAG system was designed to torment such ‘politicals’ by maintaining them at a minimal level of sustenance, rather than starving or otherwise killing them outright.
On a more positive note, Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought “hope [to] the [inmates of the GULAG] camps,” inspiring both the June 1953 workers’ uprising against Stalinism, which not only overthrew State power in several cities and work-sites in East Germany but also involved workers’ liberation of prisons and concentration camps, and the unprecedented strike by political prisoners at the Vorkuta slave-labor camp which followed just two weeks later.51 Dunayevskaya comments in a manner that remains completely germane today that both of these episodes represented an “unmistakable affirmative” response to the question of whether humanity can “achieve freedom out of the totalitarianism of our age.”52
5. Assassination of Trotsky
“What specific characteristics in a man enable him to become the receptacle and the executor of class impulses from an alien class[…]?” – Raya Dunayevskaya53
His ordering of the assassination of Lev Trotsky, as carried out by the Spanish NKVD agent Ramón Mercader in Trotsky’s residence in Coyoacán, Mexico, in August 1940. Whereas there is little love lost between us and the “Old Man,” as Trotsky was known, given his status as the butcher of the Kronstadt Commune, the would-be executioner of Nestor Makhno, an advocate of the militarization of labor, and an apologist for State slavery54—still, Stalin’s brazen attempts to assassinate him in Mexico City not once but twice remain shocking in their brutality to this day. They may well have inspired the commission of similar atrocities on the part of the C.I.A.,55 the Israeli Mossad, and even Mohammed bin Salman’s recent murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
First, on May 24, 1940, the Mexican surrealist and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros led an assassination-squad in an assault on Trotsky’s fortified family residence, which the exiled Bolshevik leader had been granted by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had afforded him asylum and personal protection. Mercader represented Stalin’s back-up plan. Having adopted an elaborate “deep-cover” false identity as “Jacques Mornard,” a Belgian aristocrat unconcerned with political questions, Mercader had seduced and used Sylvia Ageloff, herself a leftist Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn connected through her sisters to Trotsky, for two years to get close enough to facilitate both assassination attempts. While the complicity of “Jacques” in the first plot remained undetected, this was only possible because Siqueiros’ team captured and murdered Trotsky’s young American security guard Robert Sheldon Harte, whom Mercader knew and also used to gain access to Trotsky’s residence in the early morning of May 24. Yet a combination of luck; quick-thinking by Natalia Sedova, Trotsky’s wife, who isolated and shielded her partner’s body from the would-be assassin’s bullets; and the imprecise strategy to kill Trotsky that morning ensured his survival.56 Nevertheless, following a dry-run to assassinate Trotsky in his study using an ice-pick on the pretext of discussing a political article he had begun to write, Mercader invited himself back to Trotsky’s residence on the hot summer day of August 20, 1940, to discuss some revisions he had supposedly made to improve the same article. Concealing his ice-pick under a heavy raincoat, Mercader provoked Natalia Sedova’s suspicions about his presentation:
“Yes, you don’t look well. Not well at all. Why are you wearing your hat and raincoat? You never wear a hat, and the sun is shining.”57
Nevertheless, despite Natalia Sedova and Trotsky’s own intuitive misgivings, this Stalinist agent did ‘succeed’ in assassinating the exiled Bolshevik that day—precisely by burying an ice-pick into Trotsky’s head from behind, as the “Old Man” was distracted turning the page while reading the very essay Mercader had brought him:
“The moment was rehearsed. Wait until he finishes the first page, [NKVD officer] Eitington had coached. Wait until he is turning the page, when he will be most distracted.”58
What a fitting allegory for Leninism and Stalinism: conflict-resolution according to the principle of “might makes right.”59 Trotsky’s fate also openly displays Stalin’s anti-Semitism: in so ruthlessly murdering his primary political rival, a world-renowned Bolshevik leader and Jewish dissident,60 in Coyoacán, which lies approximately 6,000 miles (or 10,000 kilometers) from Moscow—after having exploited Sylvia Ageloff, a fellow Jewish intellectual, to gain access to the desired target—the “Man of Steel” flaunts his attitude toward the relationship between Jews and his false “Revolution.” Mercader’s assassination of Trotsky therefore illuminates the clear continuities between Stalin and the bourgeoisie, in terms of their shared instrumentalization of human life, and the “full-circle” development of the Russian Revolution, proving Voline’s point that “Lenin, Trotsky, and their colleagues [as Stalin’s predecessors] were never revolutionaries. They were only rather brutal reformers, and like all reformers and politicians, always had recourse to the old bourgeois methods, in dealing with both internal and military problems.”61
Notes
1Arendt 472.
2Elliott Liu, Maoism and the Chinese Revolution (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 68).
3Evtuhov 697-698.
4Henry Wolfe, The Imperial Soviets (New York: Doubleday, 1940).
5Alfred Meyer, Communism (New York: Random House, 1984), 92-93.
6E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 195-196.
7Dunayevskaya 318.
8Hensman 36.
9Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 52.
10Hensman 53-60.
11Eric Lee, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (London, Zed Books, 2017). See a review here.
12Ibid 160-166.
13Roy 50-51, 83.
14Ibid 50.
15Evtuhov 692.
16Roy 45-46, 52-53, 66.
17Ibid 64-65.
18Roy 67.
19Evtuhov 692.
20Roy 46, 68, 73.
21Dunayevskaya 318.
22Evtuhov 689-690.
23Hensman 88-89.
24This line is disturbingly close to that of the neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, who welcomed Russia’s 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine by calling for “genocide… of the race of Ukrainian bastards [sic].” Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Chico, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 233.
25Plokhy 259.
26Wayne Price, Anarchism and Socialism: Reformism or Revolution? 3rd ed. (Edmonton, Alberta: Thoughtcrime, 2010), 186-189; Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Role of Bolshevik Ideology in the Birth of the Bureaucracy,” in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 282.
27Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975), 359-361.
28Paul Mattick, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 271.
29Voline 372-375.
30Evtuhov 670.
31Ibid 668; Voline 374.
32Evtuhov 668-669.
33Ibid 670.
34For a translation of the text of the December, 1932 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, see M. Matthews, Soviet Government: a Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policy, J. Cape, 1974, 74-77.
35Hensman 34-35; Plokhy 249-250.
36Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: London, 1976), 873-904.
37Evtuhov 642.
38Jason W. Clay and Bonnie K. Holcomb, Politics and Famine in Ethiopia (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival, 1985).
39Evtuhov 685.
40Voline 380, 388.
41Mattick 264.
42Evtuhov 688, 730.
43Plokhy 255; Dunayevskaya 320.
44Evtuhov 671, 676, 693, 730.
45Ibid 675, 688.
46Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967), 366, 368.
47Ibid 402.
48Ibid 258.
49Ibid 405-406.
50Ibid 415.
51Dunayaevskaya 325-329.
52Ibid 327-329.
53Ibid 317.
54Ida Mett, “The Kronstadt Commune,” in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 185-190; Voline 592-600; Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control (London: Solidarity, 1970).
55Arendt xxn4.
56John P. Davidson, The Obedient Assassin (Harrison, NY: Delphinium Books, 2014), 48, 193-199.
57Ibid 274.
58Ibid 276.
59Voline 374.
60A dissident relative to Stalinism in power, that is, but not relative to anarchism or libertarian communism.
61Voline 431-432 (emphasis added).
“Radical Realism for Climate Justice: A Civil Society Response to the Challenge of Limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C” by Lili Fuhr
October 15, 2018
In light of the urgent findings of the new report published last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on avoiding an 1.5°C increase in average global temperatures beyond pre-industrial levels, I very highly recommend reading some of the excellent articles compiled here by Lili Fuhr from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Foundation) on organizing strategies for keeping our planet safe from overheating and avoiding attendant extinction:
A Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production by Oil Change International shows that the carbon embedded in already producing fossil fuel reserves will take us beyond agreed climate limits. Yet companies and governments continue to invest in and approve vast exploration and expansion of oil, coal and gas. This chapter explores the urgency and opportunity for fossil fuel producers to begin a just and equitable managed decline of fossil fuel production in line with the Paris Agreement goals.
Another Energy is Possible by Sean Sweeney, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) argues that the political fight for social ownership and democratic control of energy lies at the heart of the struggle to address climate change. Along with a complete break with investor-focused neoliberal policy, this “two shift solution” will allow us to address some of the major obstacles to reducing energy demand and decarbonizing supply. “Energy democracy” must address the need for system-level transformations that go beyond energy sovereignty and self-determination.
Zero Waste Circular Economy A Systemic Game-Changer to Climate Change by Mariel Vilella, Zero Waste Europe explains and puts numbers to how the transformation of our consumption and production system into a zero waste circular economy provides the potential for emission reductions far beyond what is considered in the waste sector. Ground-breaking experiences in cities and communities around the world are already showing that these solutions can be implemented today, with immediate results.
Degrowth – A Sober Vision of Limiting Warming to 1.5°C by Mladen Domazet, Institute for Political Ecology in Zagreb, Croatia, reports from a precarious, but climate-stabilized year 2100 to show how a planet of over 7 billion people found diversification and flourishing at many levels of natural, individual and community existence, and turned away from the tipping points of catastrophic climate change and ecosystem collapse. That world is brought to life by shedding the myths of the pre-degrowth era – the main myth being that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is viable while maintaining economic activities focused on growth.
System Change on a Deadline. Organizing Lessons from Canada’s Leap Manifesto by The Leap by Avi Lewis, Katie McKenna and Rajiv Sicora of The Leap recounts how intersectional coalitions can create inspiring, detailed pictures of the world we need, and deploy them to shift the goalposts of what is considered politically possible. They draw on the Leap story to explore how coalition-building can break down traditional “issue silos”, which too often restrict the scope and impact of social justice activism.
La Via Campesina in Action for Climate Justice by La Via Campesina in Action for Climate Justice by the international peasants movement La Via Campesina highlights how industrialized agriculture and the corporate food system are at the center of the climate crisis and block pathways to a 1.5°C world. In their contribution, La Via Campesina outline key aspects of system change in agriculture towards peasant agro-ecology and give concrete experiences of organized resistance and alternatives that are already making change happen.
Re-Greening the Earth: Protecting the Climate through Ecosystem Restoration by Christoph Thies, Greenpeace Germany calls to mind that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and the destruction of forests and peatlands contribute to global warming and dangerous climate change. His chapter makes the case for ecosystem restoration: Growing forests and recovering peatlands can sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and protect both climate and biodiversity. This can make untested and potentially risky climate technologies unnecessary – if emissions from burning fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions are phased out fast enough.
Modelling 1.5°C-Compliant Mitigation Scenarios Without Carbon Dioxide Removal by Christian Holz, Carleton University and Climate Equity Reference Project (CERP) reviews recent studies that demonstrate that it is still possible to achieve 1.5°C without relying on speculative and potentially deleterious technologies. This can be done if national climate pledges are increased substantially in all countries immediately, international support for climate action in developing countries is scaled up, and mitigation options not commonly included in mainstream climate models are pursued.
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 
