ISIS, the
jihadist forces that seek to establish an islamic Caliphate in the
territory of Iraq and El Sham, what in the West would be called the
Levant, have in recent days walked almost unopposed into several
major Iraqi cities, and are threatening to do the same with Baghdad.
These are the same forces that have been fighting with western
backing for the last few years in Syria. They are marked both by
their extreme brutality, and their desire to take the society over
which they rule even further back in time – to around the 13th
century – than other mediaevalist Islamic forces. In 2003, there
were essentially no jihadist forces in Iraq, today after the US and
UK war to depose Saddam Hussein, they are on the verge of taking over
a sizeable part of the country, as well as of Syria, and expanding
their reach within the region.
This
disaster for liberal interventionism comes on top of the other
disasters arising from liberal intervention. In Afghanistan, the
west supported Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda against the USSR, which
was attempting to build a secular state by its own typically
bureaucratic means. The US provided Bin Laden with the latest weapons
via Pakistan, and in the process helped build the Pakistani Taliban.
Not only is the Taliban now posed to take over again in Afghanistan,
as the US leaves, but it is carrying out daily attacks in Pakistan
too, where it is becoming increasingly likely to be able to take over
a nuclear armed state.
In Libya,
having obtained UN approval by the deceptive means of claiming only
to be seeking a no-fly zone, the US, UK and France bombed the hell
out of the country, and with their feudal gulf allies, supplied the
Libyan jihadis with weapons to overthrow Gaddafi. When the small
numbers of those forces were still unable to make much headway, the
imperialists and their feudal allies sent in their own special forces
to do the job for them. In a similar way that Trotsky described the
situation in Spain during the Civil War, where bourgeois politicians
were able to obtain the support of the Stalinists in a Popular Front,
whilst the actual Spanish bourgeoisie had deserted them, the Libyan
bourgeois politicians found support not only from western
imperialism, which had created them, but from sections of the Left.
These
sections of the Left, to the extent they had ever understood Marxist
analysis and principles, forgot them in their rush to support anything
that looked like a revolution. In their desperate attempts to put
themselves on the side of a revolution, they instead found themselves
in the role of “useful idiots” supporting a social
counter-revolution. First among equals amongst these useful idiots
was the AWL. It had two powerful forces attracting it in that
direction. Never slow to be on the side of anything that was being
promoted by US “Democratic Imperialism”, it could be relied upon
to support the attacks on Libya, and the feudal and jihadist forces
being used to carry them out. And, its politics determined by a
subjective moralism, whose categorical imperative is to oppose
anything that smacks of Bonapartism and authoritarianism, it
repeatedly finds itself placing itself in the camp of all sorts of
reactionary forces fighting those regimes.
Third
Campism of the sort that determines the politics of the AWL on the one hand, and the SWP on the other, as Trotsky pointed out, has nothing
to do with Marxism. Its actions are determined by nothing more than
petit-bourgeois moralism, dressed up in the language of kitsch
Marxism. It arose from the revulsion of petit-bourgeois moralists at
the reality of the deformed workers state in Russia, particularly
after it entered into the Stalin-Hitler Pact. To justify its
abandonment of the defence of that deformed workers state, it then
engaged in frantic attempts to theorise its actions on the basis of
pseudo-Marxist analysis of the class nature of the Soviet State, as
being either state capitalist or some form of new class state ruled
by a bureaucratic collectivist class, never before seen in history,
that somehow sprang form nowhere in the space of a few years to
become a ruling class; a concept, which in itself is quite alien to
Marx's method of analysis, and theory of historical materialism.
Its this
subjectivism and moralism that determines the politics and positions
adopted by third campist organisation such as the SWP and AWL. That
is why depending on the moral imperative – opposition to
Imperialism for the SWP, opposition to Bonapartism/authoritarianism
for the AWL – they end up on opposing sides of conflicts. But,
that same method leaves them driven into support for whichever
reactionary class camp represents the force on the ground fighting
their chosen corner. The SWP to oppose Israel, proclaim “We are
all Hizbollah now”, whereas the AWL declare that the feudal Gulf
monarchies were doing God's work in bringing bourgeois democracy to
Libya, and in terms that the SWP would be proud of, claimed that it
was inevitable that the jihadists would take the lead in the fight
against Gaddafi, after years of repression!
What both
organisations have in common is that they are led into this kind of
popular frontist stance, because they have lost faith in the ability
for the working-class to provide the solutions itself. In their rush
to support something that looked like a revolution, they forgot, if
they ever understood, the basic Marxist lessons about the difference
between appearance and reality. They mistook electoralism and
parliamentarism for the reality of the balance of social forces. So,
they were happy to see the electoral victory of the bourgeois
politicians in Libya as the end of the story, even though it was clear
that the electoral victory meant nothing given that real political
power rested with the jihadist and other militias in the streets, who
had the weapons, the discipline, the organisation, and the
ideological drive to impose their will, in a way that the
petit-bourgeoisie that had simply voted for the bourgeois politicians
never had, even during the conflict against Gaddafi.
When the
fighting broke out in Syria, therefore, they made all of the same
mistakes, and now in Ukraine, they are making the same mistakes all
over again. Despondent at the working class organising to impose its
will, they instead look to other more powerful forces. In the
process, by placing themselves in to one of the opposing camps of the
bourgeoisie, rather than in the admittedly weak camp of the
working-class, they act only to store up greater problems for the
future.
For
centuries, the Hapsburg Empire was viewed with disdain both by the
other European Monarchies, and then in the 19th Century,
by the emerging bourgeois democratic regimes. But, as Rosdolsky
describes in his essay on the “Non-Historic Peoples”, they
were tolerated for one simple reason, which is that they performed a
useful function for Europe, in acting as a buffer against the
potential incursions of Islamic reaction from the Ottoman Empire. In
a sense, the Bonapartist regimes in the Middle East arose both
because of the existence of these reactionary, and frequently
antagonistic and schism ridden forces, and at the same time acted as
a means of keeping them in check.
The
societies over which these Bonapartist regimes ruled, were riven with
sectarian division, and a series of cross cutting cleavages, divided
not just horizontally on the basis of class and status, but
vertically on the basis of religion, sect, tribe, region, as well as
the other vertical divisions of gender and sexual orientation. These
multitude of vertical divisions prevented the formation in many cases
of strong class allegiances able to outweigh them. Given the
economic history of the region, as societies frequently dominated by
foreign powers, and with rent based economies dominated by revenues
determined by the extraction of oil, that favoured the continuation
of feudal type political regimes, rather than the development of
industrialised economies that required the development of bourgeois
democracy, it was inevitable that the major classes of bourgeois
society – the bourgeoisie and proletariat – would be weak. Its
no wonder that where that rent based nature of the economy is most
predominant – in the Gulf – is where feudal political regimes
continue to dominate.
The
inability of any class to be able to exert social hegemony, is the
prime condition for the state itself to rise above society, and that
is precisely what happened in many of the countries where some
measure of industrial development occurred. The brutality of many of
these regimes was a brutality whose material basis was the need to
suppress the ferocity of the social antagonisms that existed beneath, based upon these vertical cleavages.
In much the
same way that the Hapsburg's were looked on by their European peers
with disdain, but were tolerated because they acted to provide a
buffer against Islamic reaction, so the Bonapartist regimes fulfilled
a similar function. That the US has been at the forefront of
opposing those regimes, and, at the same time, funding and supporting
the development of the jihadists, that have provided the shock troops
of the assault, is also not surprising. The Middle East is a long way
from the US. Its main allies in the region, in the Gulf, are under no
immediate threat from the jihadists, and there is no suggestion that
the US sees any irony in supporting such undemocratic regimes, whilst
decrying others. In fact, the gulf states are the biggest backers of
the jihadist forces that do the work of fighting a proxy war for the
US in Libya, Syria etc.
In just the
same way that the US has created the conditions for the conflict in
Ukraine, by pushing the borders of NATO right up to those of Russia,
and by pumping, on its own admission, billions of dollars into the
coffers of Ukrainian forces it seeks to cultivate, so too the US, by
its actions in the Middle East, has pushed the forces of jihad right
up to the borders of the EU, and increasingly inside it too.
The Liberal
Interventionists and Third Campists have, by giving succour to these
reactionary forces, helped bring about the current state of affairs,
whereby 12th century social forces, armed with 21st
century weapons, now stand at the gates of Baghdad, on their way
through Istanbul to Vienna. Stopping them requires not a further
undeclared popular front with the forces of the bourgeoisie and
democratic imperialism, but an uncompromising commitment to building
the forces of the working class and socialism, and a defence of the
ideas on which that relies, along with an uncompromising battle
against the ideas of the reactionaries.
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