<html>
<body>
<font size=4><b>'It prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon': Vijay
Prashad on the Arab revolt (Part II) <br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>Tuesday, 01 February 2011<br>
<a href="http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/154/39/" eudora="autourl">
http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/154/39/</a> <br><br>
<b>This is the concluding part of our interview with <u>Vijay
Prashad</u>, a prominent Marxist scholar who teaches at Trinity College,
Connecticut. To read the first part,
<a href="http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/153/39/">please click
here</a>. His recent book,
<a href="http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/39/39/"><i>The Darker
Nations</a>, </i>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. </b> <br>
<b>
*******************************************************************<br>
<br>
Pothik Ghosh (PG):</b> <b><i>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?
</i></b> <br><br>
<b>Vijay Prashad (VP):</b> Strictly speaking, Gramsci's
"national-popular" is the emergence of the mass through
<i>urban</i> 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 <i>a</i>-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.<br><br>
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 <i>The 1936-37
Revolt in Palestine</i>, 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.<br><br>
<b>PG:</b> <b><i>Lebanese-French Marxist Gilbert Achcar writes in his
'<a href="http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1132">
Eleven Theses on the Current Resurgence of Islamic Fundamentalism'</a>:
"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? <br><br>
</i>VP:</b> 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).<br><br>
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 <i>New Left
Review</i>
("<a href="http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2746">Sadrist
Stratagems</a>," in 2008) where I catalogued the intellectual work
of Baqir al-Sadr, with his <i>Iqtisaduna</i>, a critique of <i>Capital
Vol. 1</i>. 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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!).<br><br>
<b>PG: <i>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 <u>The Darker
Nations</u>? If that is so, what is the new programmatic direction that
the anti-imperialist struggle must now take?</i></b>
<br><br>
<b>VP:</b> My book, <i>The Darker Nations</i>, 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.<br><br>
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
<i>La</i> <i>Caracazo</i>, 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
"<a href="http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2695">Jottings on the
Conjuncture</a>," 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
By the way, this other side of history will form the final chapter of
<b><i>The Poorer Nations</i></b>, which I am now putting together, and
which should be done by the Summer of 2011.<br><br>
<b>PG:</b> <b><i>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?</i></b> <br><br>
<b>VP:</b> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://pd.cpim.org/2007/0325/03252007_west%20asia.htm">an
anti-imperialist meeting in Delhi</a>. 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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>