The growth
of the Islamic State (formerly ISIS or ISIL) in Iraq and Syria has
led to the British government saying that it would try to prevent
British jihadists going to Iraq or Syria. Now that it appears that a
British jihadist was responsible for the murder of US journalist,
James Foley, those sentiments have been strengthened. But,
socialists should oppose any such action by the British state.
The reasons
for opposing any such ban by the British state is the same as that we
have for opposing bans on other fascists by that state. In other
words, it is being proposed against fascists today, but tomorrow it
will be used against workers and socialists. We cannot place any
faith in the capitalist, nor sow any illusions in the minds of
workers that this state is in any sense neutral between the interests
of capital and labour. Our interests are not the same as those of
capital and its state, and we have to rely on our own strength to
pursue workers interests as against those of capital.
In fact,
rather than supporting the British state in imposing such bans, the
international labour movement should itself learn some lessons from
the jihadists where they appear to be in advance of the workers
movement.
For example,
the jihadists take their ideology seriously enough that they not only
present themselves as being united into a single whole by that
ideology, wherever they live, but they act on that basis too. Where,
for much of the labour movement, the slogan “Workers of the
World Unite”, is nothing more than that, a slogan to be tagged
on the the bottom of books and pamphlets, for the jihadists, the
equivalent is repeatedly put into practice, as fighters go to
wherever they see their brothers engaged in such a struggle.
Similarly,
although socialists talk about the workers having no country, and
profess their internationalism, their politics is continually
delineated along national boundaries, as the current Scottish
referendum indicates, and phrased in nationalistic terms such as the
demand for “Nationalisation”. By contrast the jihadists by their
actions make clear that for them these lines on a map really do have
no significance, in a way that has not been true for the workers'
movement since the time of the International Brigade.
Rather than
allowing the state to place limits on such acts of solidarity, the
workers movement should learn from them, and begin to build its own
international solidarity, its own means of providing real physical
support for workers in struggle, wherever in the world they are,
irrespective of lines drawn on a map.
That does
not in any means involve us supporting the politics or actions of the
jihadists, any more than it means supporting the politics or actions
of other fascists, when we oppose state bans against them. It means
we do not allow the capitalist state to present itself as neutral, we
do not allow it to introduce measures or gain powers that it will use
effectively against us.
And both in
the case of fascists and the jihadists it is clear why that is the
case. In the past, when the workers movement has been very strong,
and posed a threat to capital, the state has had no compunction
against allowing these kinds of forces to be used against the
workers, to break up its meetings, to attack strikes and so on. On
the contrary, the state has frequently in the past provided
assistance to the fascists in doing precisely that. It uses versions
of that tactic all the time. In the North of Ireland during the
1970's and 80's, the state as well as carrying out its own murder of
Republicans, also provided information and support for Protestant
paramilitaries to carry out attacks against not only Republican
fighters, but also against civilians such as solicitors acting to
defend Republicans.
Most
recently, the capitalist state as well as acting itself to bomb
Libya, provided weapons and resources to the jihadists to fight
Gaddafi, as it had done before in providing support for Bin laden in
Afghanistan, or indeed, as it has been doing over the last three
years in arming the jihadists in Syria.
It did the
same thing in providing weapons and support for the fascists of the
Kosovan Liberation Army, so that they could incite ethnic conflict
with Kosovan Serbs. It has done the same thing in supporting
fascists in Ukraine. The capitalist state does this all the time,
using such forces as useful idiots to fight its immediate enemies,
and then turning on those useful idiots themselves, using their
existence as a means of justifying a further strengthening of the
state itself.
A similar
thing occurs in Israel and Gaza. On the one hand, the Israeli state
uses the threat of Hamas, and other terrorists to strengthen its own
position. On the other, organisations like Hamas use the massively
excessive response of Israel to justify their own existence and
methods. Israel's attacks on Gaza are wholly indefensible. At the
same time the rocket attacks by Hamas as a response are wholly
ineffective. Yet, for Hamas, they are effective, precisely because
they provoke that over-reaction by Israel, and thereby feed the
sentiment that Hamas needs to justify its existence and message. It
acts to prevent any possibility of Palestinian workers uniting with
Israeli workers, and thereby working towards a solution to meet their
joint interests as workers as against the interests of capital, or
the interests of their immediate oppressors. It does so by
presenting the workers living on the other side of a line drawn on a
map as being their real enemy, rather than that enemy being their own
state.
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