[News] 'It prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon' - Part 2

[Anti-Imperialist News]

'It prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon': Vijay Prashad on 
the Arab revolt (Part II)

Tuesday, 01 February 2011
http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/154/39/

This is the concluding part of our interview with Vijay Prashad, a 
prominent Marxist scholar who teaches at Trinity College, 
Connecticut. To read the first part, 
<http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/153/39/>please click here. His 
recent book, <http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/39/39/>The Darker 
Nations, was chosen as the Best Nonfiction book by the Asian American 
Writers' Workshop in 2008 and it won the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award in 2009.
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Pothik Ghosh (PG): Why is it that most attempts in the Perso-Arabic 
world to conceptualise what Gramsci called the "national-popular" 
have come from radical left-nationalist intellectuals such as Edward 
Said rather than Marxists? How should or could the peculiarity of the 
Saidian theoretical enterprise of the national-popular inform and 
enrich working-class practice in West Asia?

Vijay Prashad (VP): Strictly speaking, Gramsci's "national-popular" 
is the emergence of the mass through urban collective action, with 
the rural bursting through, and then being guided by the Jacobin (his 
word for an organised political force). The mass might drift into 
a-political action or passivity, Gramsci wrote, without the guidance 
of that Jacobin force. In today's times, there is a tendency to hear 
about something like the Jacobin and shiver in fear that the energy 
of the "multitude" will be usurped by the Jacobin, that the authentic 
politics of the street will be taken over by the Organisation. It is 
in essence a misreading of anarchistic politics that this sort of 
fear has taken hold. I do not believe that anarchism is pure 
disorder; for those who believe this I propose a reading of Errico 
Malatesta's "Anarchy and Organisation." Of course, for those on the 
Marxist side of the ledger, Gramsci's comments are our bread and 
butter. There is a need for the national-popular to be articulated 
through mass protest and the Jacobin canals. There is not so much 
that divides the Black and the Red.

It is not the case that only Edward Said has dealt with the 
national-popular in the Arab world. Take the case of Lebanon, where 
it is the Marxist historian (and eminent journalist) Fawaz Trabulsi 
who has written a remarkably informative account of the thwarted 
national-popular, with the emergence of Hezbollah. To my mind, 
Trabulsi's is the best account of the Lebanese problem. It must be 
read widely to better understand the national dilemmas and the 
national-popular potentialities. My own interest in the Arab 
predicament was partly drawn by the work of people from an earlier 
generation like the writer and PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani, who was 
assassinated in 1972. In the context of this new Arab Revolt, I 
recommend Kanafani's pamphlet The 1936-37 Revolt in Palestine, a 
model for how to theorise the national-popular through the material 
of a revolt. These are role models for those who want to do detailed 
work on the Arab potential. The contingent is important, no doubt, 
but so too are the broad structures that need to be unearthed and developed.

PG: Lebanese-French Marxist Gilbert Achcar writes in his 
'<http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1132>Eleven 
Theses on the Current Resurgence of Islamic Fundamentalism': "What is 
an elementary democratic task elsewhere - separation of religion and 
state - is so radical in Muslim countries, especially the Middle 
East, that even the "dictatorship of the proletariat" will find it a 
difficult task to complete. It is beyond the scope of other classes." 
Does the 'Jasmine' Revolution portend a change for the better on that 
score? If not, how, in your view, should the working class forces in 
the region go about their business of shaping an effective 
ideological idiom that is rooted in local culture and yet articulates 
a question that is fundamentally global?

VP: We tend to exaggerate the authority of the clerics, or at least 
to treat it as natural, as eternal. Certainly, since the 1970s, 
clericalism has had the upper hand in the domain of the 
national-popular. In the Arab world, this has everything to do with 
the calcification of the secular regimes of the 1950s (the new states 
formed out of the export of Nasserism: from Egypt to Iraq), the 
deterioration of the Third World Project (especially the fractures in 
OPEC that opened up in the summer of 1990 and led to the Iraqi 
invasion of Kuwait), and the promotion and funding of the advance 
guard of the Islamism through the World Muslim League (by the Saudis. 
The WML's impact can be seen from Chechnya to Pakistan, and in parts 
of Indonesia).

If one goes back and looks at the period when the Third World Project 
and Nasserism were dominant, what you'd find is clerical 
intellectuals in the midst of an ideological battle against Marxism 
(mainly), at the same time as they borrowed from Bolshevik techniques 
of party building to amass their own organisational strength. I wrote 
about this in New Left Review 
("<http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2746>Sadrist Stratagems," in 
2008) where I catalogued the intellectual work of Baqir al-Sadr, with 
his Iqtisaduna, a critique of Capital Vol. 1. Baqir's al Da'wah 
al-Islamiyah was modeled on the Iraqi Communist Party, then dominant 
in the Shia slums of Baghdad. If you go farther East along this 
tendency, you will run into Haji Misbach, an Indonesian cleric, also 
known as Red Haji, who confronted the dynamic Indonesian Communist 
Party with his own brand of Islamic Communism. Like Baqir, Misbach 
was perplexed by the popularity of the CP in his society. He wanted 
to find a way to bring the spiritual to socialism. These are all 
precursors of Ali Shariati, the great Iranian thinker who was 
influenced by the Third World Project, and by Marxism, but once more 
wanted to bring the spiritual into it. For all these thinkers, the 
problem was quite the opposite to what it is today: the workers 
seemed ascendant, driven by the science of secular socialism. It 
terrified them, as much as we are assaulted by the rise of the 
clerics over the last few decades.

It is also not the case that the religious is more difficult to 
expunge in the Arab lands, or that Islam is more intractable than 
other faiths. If one turns toward India, or turns toward the United 
States, it is clear that the religious domain is often very reluctant 
to wither away. It was equally hard to push it away in the USSR. This 
is not just a question of religion, or Islam, but of cultural change 
in general. Cultural change from below is slow-moving, excruciating. 
Cultural change from above is much faster, the tempo clearer. It has 
to do with who controls the cultural institutions, but also with the 
depth of cultural resources. Religion emerges over the millenia as a 
shelter from the turmoil of life, and it enters so deeply into the 
social life of people that it cannot be so easy to remove its 
tentacles. Of course Islam might be harder to walk away from, given 
that it, unlike say Brahmanism or Catholicism, has a much finer edge 
to its egalitarianism. This is what propelled it from a minor Arabian 
religion to Andalucia and China within fifty years of its emergence.

I would say one more thing on this: since the Utopian horizon of 
socialism is in eclipse, why should someone risk their lives in 
struggle for it? The idea of the inevitability of socialism inspired 
generations to give themselves over to the creation of the Jacobin 
force. Religion has an unshakable eschatology, which secular politics 
absent Utopia lacks. No wonder that religion has inspired action, 
even if destructive rather than revolutionary, whereas secular 
politics is less inspirational these days.

The Arab Revolt of 2011 prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon. 
That is why it has moved from Tunisia to Jordan. Ben Ali's departure 
set the new horizon. It is what the youth hold onto. If he can be 
made to flee, why not Mubarak, why not Abdullah II, and if the 
remanants of the Saudi Voice of the Vanguard decide to blow off the 
cobwebs and get to the streets, then the repellent Abdullah of Saudi 
(whose idea of political reform was to bring in his son-in-law into 
the Education ministry!).

PG: Does not the ongoing 'Jasmine' Revolution explode the myth of a 
postcolonial, anti-imperialist Third World, which is precisely what 
you deal with and kind of theoretically anticipate in your book The 
Darker Nations? If that is so, what is the new programmatic direction 
that the anti-imperialist struggle must now take?

VP: My book, The Darker Nations, provided the history of the collapse 
of the Third World Project. This collapse begins to be visible by the 
early 1980s. The roots are there in the defeat of the New 
International Economic Order (NIEO) process (that opens in the UN in 
1973), in the break-down of solidarity in OPEC, in the exhaustion of 
the import-substitution industrialisation model, and in the narrowing 
of political freedoms in the Global South. The "assassination" of the 
Project comes through the debt crisis (1982 in Mexico opens the door) 
and through the reconfiguration of the international order by the 
late 1980s with the disapperance of the USSR, and the push for 
primacy by the US (the salvo was fired in Iraq in 1991, when the US 
pushed out the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and ignored an attempt by the 
USSR to mediate on behalf of Saddam Hussein). US primacy by the early 
1990s throws salt on the wound of the Third World Project.

My interest in the book was to seek out the dialectics of freedom 
that would emerge out of the corpse of the Third World Project. What 
is left in it to be revived, and what are the social forces capable 
of building a new revolutionary horizon? The other side of history 
opens up with La Caracazo, the rebellion in Caracas in 1989 that 
prefigures the emergence of Chavez. By the way, in 2009, a Brookings 
survey found that Chavez was the most popular world leader in the 
Middle East! Where is Chavez of Arabia, we asked, but were not 
confident. In 2007, in his 
"<http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2695>Jottings on the 
Conjuncture," Perry Anderson bemoaned the paralysis on the Arab 
Street. The mutterings existed, and indeed the insurgency in Iraq 
showed that the will was there. Protests in Western Sahara and in 
Lebanon had become commonplace. But these did not say what the 
Tunisians said, which was that they, like the Bolivarians, were 
prepared to stake themselves for an alternative pathway into the 
future. From Caracas to Cairo, the expressway of Freedom is being paved.

The Bolivarians are at a much more advanced stage. They have been 
able to stave off counter-revolution, and even though still in peril, 
they are able to leverage their oil wealth into some very interesting 
experiments toward socialism. It is going to be imperative to prove 
for our Egyptian and Arab friends that the path out of Ben Ali and 
Mubarak does not lead to Paris and New York, but to Caracas and La 
Paz. The programme of socialist construction is being tentatively 
written (with lots of errors, of course). We have to nudge in that 
direction, and against the idea of liberty as the value above 
egalitarianism and socialism. There are few explicitly 
anti-imperialist slogans in the air at this time.

By the way, this other side of history will form the final chapter of 
The Poorer Nations, which I am now putting together, and which should 
be done by the Summer of 2011.

PG: The 'Muslim Question' has rightly been one of the key 
preoccupations of the Indian Left in all its variegated multiplicity. 
Yet it has consistently failed to frame and articulate it as a 
question having a transformative potential. What lessons must the 
Indian Left - which has in large measure centered its articulation of 
the 'Muslim Question' on solidarity with the Islamicised 
anti-Americanism of the Perso-Arabic peoples - draw from the current 
upsurges that would enable it to overcome its failing on that score?

VP: To get to the heart of the issue of the 'Muslim Question,' one 
has to understand the theory of alliance formation. In today's world, 
the principal contradiction, the Large Contradiction, is between 
Imperialism and Humanity. The social force of imperialism seeks to 
thwart the humanity of the planet by creating political rules for 
economic theft (the preservation of intellectual property for the 
Multi-national corporations, the allowance of subsidies in the North 
and not in the South, the enforcement of debt contracts for the 
South, but not for the international banks), and if these rules are 
broken, by military power. Imperialism is the principal problem in 
our planet, for our humanity.

The Lesser Contradiction is between the Left and the Reactionaries, 
who are not identical to imperialism. Indian Hindutva, American 
Evangelicalism and Zionism are all reactionary, but not part of the 
Lesser Contradiction. Those forms of Reaction are ensconced in the 
Larger Contradiction, since they are handmaidens of imperialism. What 
I refer to as the Reactionaries of the Lesser Contradiction are 
organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and 
so on. I indicate the Muslim groups not from an anti-Islamic point of 
view, but because, as I just mentioned, most of the other Reactionary 
religious formations are inside the essence of imperialism (they are 
joined there by the official clerics of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt). 
These other groups are antagonistic to imperialism, and are from this 
standpoint able to capture the sentiments and politics of the people 
who are anti-imperialist nationalists. We are divided from them, but 
not against them in the same way as we are against Imperialism. To 
make these two contradictions the same is to fall into the liberal 
error of equivalence. We need to retain their separation.

That said, it is important to always offer a scrupulous and 
forthright critique of their shortcomings and their social 
degeneration. In 2007, the Communist Parties in India held 
<http://pd.cpim.org/2007/0325/03252007_west%20asia.htm>an 
anti-imperialist meeting in Delhi. A Hezbollah representative (I 
think it was Ali Fayyad) came for it. At the plenary, Aijaz Ahmad lit 
into Fayyad regarding Hezbollah's position on women's rights. It is 
just what should be done. By all means form tactical alliances, if 
need be, but don't let them get away with silence on the issues that 
matter to us, on social equality, on economic policy, on political 
rights. Even the Lesser Contradiction needs to be pushed and prodded. 
It has virulence at its finger tips. That has to be scorched. Clara 
Zetkin warned that the emergence of fascism can be laid partly on the 
failure of the workers and their Jacobin to move toward revolution 
effectively enough. Part of that effectiveness is to challenge those 
in the Lesser Contradiction, who are equally willing in certain 
circumstances to turn against the Left and become the footsoldiers of fascism.

In the 1980s, Hezbollah mercilessly killed cadre of the Lebanese 
Communist Party. Over the past three decades, relationships have 
mellowed and the much weaker LCP now works with Hezbollah in various 
ways. The LCP sees Hezbollah as "a party of resistance," as it were. 
Part of the Lesser Contradiction. That has to be the attitude in the 
short-term. The LCP seeks out elements who are not fully given over 
to Dawa, the hardened Islamic militants in Hezbollah. There is 
another side that is more nationalist than Islamist. They are to be 
cultivated. There is also a part of Hezbollah that is perfectly 
comfortable with neo-liberalism, privatisation of the commons and so 
on. They too lean toward the Larger Contradiction. One has to be 
supple, forge a way ahead, be assertive in unity, find a way out of 
the weakness and reconstruct a left pole. A weak left with the 
national-popular in the hands of the "Islamist" parties: that is the context.






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