Tuesday 24 November 2015

The real origins of ISIS.


A reader has chided this blog for adopting an out of date and simplistic view of ISIS in particular, and of Islamic fundamentalism in general. (See 'War on France', 16 November.) Imperialism's role in the Middle East, according to the reader's view, does not wholly or even mainly explain fundamentalism's emergence and its significant impact on world politics today.

The specific origins of ISIS and the unrolling of its etymology are detailed on many sites (see for example the 'Independent' 14 June 2014.) However, from the point of view of political analyses it is perhaps more tempting to start from the US President's assertion that ISIS emerged, albeit as an unwelcome consequence, from the US led Iraq invasion. But this statement could certainly lead to crude misjudgments. The modern resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism (its origins are in the late 19th century) predates the Iraq invasion and first surfaces, in terms of its global impact, from two events, the Iranian revolution and then the Mujaheddin's successful war, sponsored by the US, against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, 1979 - 89.

The USSR's defeat in Afghanistan was a progenitor of the unraveling of the Soviet Union. And it is common ground among commentators and political historians today to see the collapse of the Soviet Union as the final moment, if not the cause, of the slow motion car-crash of radical Arab nationalism that had been the dominant political form of insurgency against western imperialist powers in the Middle East from 1949 until the end of the 1970s. (The highpoint of Arab socialist-nationalism was best summed up by the brief United Arab Republic 1958 - 61 - a unification of Egypt and Syria until a Syrian coup brought it down.)  After Nasser, both Quaddafi in Libya and the Palestinian fight for nationhood started from the previous Egyptian model. The long term corruption and degeneration of the Libyan regime and the failure of the Palestinian leadership that had been schooled and supported by the USSR, meant that Nasser's 1950s victory against France and Britain was never enlarged into a cross Arabic 'solution', and the Palestinian cause never became, in practice, the prime cause of all the Arab nations. Instead, Arab nationalism, despite the brief unity between Syria and Egypt, remained stillborn.

As a result, from the late 1950s the US, aided and abetted by the British, installed and then continued to consolidate a series of pro-western regimes (including the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as well as in Israel) across the region. So by the time the USSR collapsed there was no longer any Arab based, independent, radical and autonomous, mass political current, to give expression to the aspirations of one of the most downtrodden and badly ruled sections of the world's population.

In the absence of a nationalist/socialist perspective, and following the defeat of the US in Vietnam, the revolt against the domination of imperialist power and its local regimes finally found a way to erupt in Iran under the banner of Islam - as the only available means to express independence from the West. Meanwhile the Mujaheddin, fellow Muslims (albeit for some, members of the wrong sect) in Afghanistan, had started the long journey which would 'bring down' an 'evil empire' in the East.

The final collapse of the USSR stunned the world. The US century was announced. 'History' had apparently ended, and a third world guerrilla army (albeit with access to enormous funds) had defeated one of the monoliths of the 20th century - which - together with the Sunni Islamic victory in Iran, attracted most of the Middle East's attention. It is therefore no surprise that this world shaking event, coupled with the complete failure of the nationalist/socialist project, inspired a new cadre of leaders in the Middle East to return to the fantasy of the glory days of the Islamic Medieval Empire for their inspiration.

All this is relatively familiar ground. But the criticism of the reader remains unanswered. The absence of something, in this case a political current promoting Arab nationalism and socialism, does not explain what is it that comes to fill that absence or why that new force is seemingly so successful.

First though, the calumny promoted by Western 'Arabists', that the whole fundamentalist mobilisation in the Middle East is simply a return to the factional and sectarian wars equivalent to the wars of the Western European Reformation in the 16th and 17th century, should be challenged. The current divisions in Islam politically speaking are nothing to do with deep scholarly argument. In the modern world they are the factional response to a leadership crisis - both at the level of rulers of states and their influence, and at the level of the competition to build mass movements on the streets.

The key to this leadership crisis is how a mass movement can best be built and for what. Al-Qaeda, led by rich sons of a dispossessed western caste, understood their role in terms of the drama of violent political action, inspired by a God like figurehead, against the de facto Western domination of the holy centre of Islam. ISIS has such leaders but has moved beyond the Al-Qaeda model in favour of the creation of a physical and geographical base that is deliberately hostile and belligerent to all surrounding political entities. From this pole ISIS seeks to create an international mass movement with an equally polarising perspective where the world joins the army of the blessed or is annihilated.

In other words Sunni and Shiah hostility may exercise the ruling families in Iran or Saudi Arabia and may be used as a means to an end by ISIS, but ISIS has killed a virtually equal number of Shiah and Sunni Muslims, and many more of each branch of Islam than western Christians or Atheists. It is in no way parallel to the early modern European experience. It is not one sect taking on all the other local sects for dominance of its branch of Islam. It has a global purpose. It is a global phenomena emerging from its regional context. Its purpose is to change the whole world or to die trying.

ISIS has its own Sunni - Wahhabi version of Islam and, for example, uses Saudi books in its schools - but its main philosophy, and recruiting sergeant, is its continuous references to 'the End Times' which fill ISIS propaganda. It is particularly aimed at foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today (Iraq and Syria) lend credibility, ISIS claims, to the prophecies in the Quran. ISIS has stoked this apocalyptic fire. For Bin Laden's generation the apocalypse was not the point. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and local tyranny than against the unbelievers. Today, apocalyptic recruiting makes much more sense. (See William McCant 'The ISIS Apocalypse ...')

And the 'end of days' has a particular potency in the world of 2015.

At the beginning of the 20th century Lenin described imperialism as 'the highest stage of capitalism.' This idea got tangled up with the notion developed by Marx that social and economic systems continue to dominate when they continue to develop the productive forces. They falter when they reach the end of their potency in that regard. The subsequent combination of these two ideas often resulted in cast iron 'scientific' predictions about the inevitable fall of capitalism. And, in the middle of WW1 or the Great Depression the idea of the imminent collapse of capitalism was a great succour to many - and so the leaders who promoted this idea (like Kautsky) tended to receive a lot of support.

Instead capitalism survived, as did imperialism. And many thinkers and leaders in the West, the East and the South would claim today that capitalism is permanently revolutionising itself, and is therefore constantly capable of reorganising the productive forces of the planet. The process may be brutal. It may be profit driven. But China and other members of the BRIC, with the intendent reduction in absolute global poverty, are the latest demonstration of the constant emergence of novelty in the capitalist system of production.

At the same time the 'old' imperialism has been pushed back, militarily defeated in the case of India or more latterly SE Asia. The West still dominates the world economically, but the West's influence is reducing, dramatically. Western Imperialism's grip on the world (compared with most of the 20th century for example) seems to be progressively slipping.  So; we have the continued advance of the capitalist system at the same time as the continued decline of imperialism, which was supposedly capitalism's highest stage.

From the oppressed of the world's point of view however, this pleasant scenario seems deeply flawed. There is of course a connection between the weakening of Western imperialism and the tremendous growth of several of the major ex-colonial countries in the world. It starts from the fact that millions in the colonial part of the planet spent decades and their blood on an enormous scale to push the imperialists back. And there is no doubt that poverty was reduced when Western nations were no longer able to organise their own interests in these colonies and dependencies at the point of a bayonet. But the response to this weakening of global capitalism's political and military structures was not the renovation and renewal of its technological and productive forces. The ex-colonies could now have their own industrial revolutions. They could allow capitalist economics in; in the shape of the great multi-national companies while sharing their profits and technologies for the first time - a completely impossible state of affairs under the previous dispensation. And what commodity could they sell in return? Labour.

Globalisation is the capitalist system's response to the weakening of western imperialism. Globalisation, and even the new means of communication, are not at all the renovation of capitalism, not the renewal of technique and of all of the other productive forces. They are the expansion of the 'traditional' imperialist market, with its dependence on finance and the banks as the core or dynamo of the system, (as Lenin described) to the biggest ex-colonies. Imperialism has turned out to be the 'highest stage of capitalism' by virtue of ... the partial defeat of the imperialists!

This is the opposite picture to the idealised notion that capitalism has overcome its contradictions. The decline of capitalism's political and military global reach stands in stark contrast to its apparent economic success. And a moment's reflection about the nature of this economic 'success story' is enough to realise that our present dominant economic and social system is less able than ever to resolve the major problems our society faces. (By way of comparison consider the approach of the capitalist world and its leaders in 19th century Britain or in the 20th century US.) From global warming to economic and social polarisation, to the almost total absence of genuinely new technologies which expand the productivity of labour, the decline of invention and the failure of the 'electronic and digital revolution' to transform production, as opposed to the increased exploitation and concentration of labour in the creation of new and inessential or labour monitoring products, the absolute 'investment strike' by capital in the field of new forms of production - all these describe an economic system that is motoring down. And that of course is what is happening, first in the most developed countries.

The decline of imperialism and the gradual degeneration of global capitalism is, of course, reflected politically - most dramatically - in those places which focus the world's contradictions, like the modern Middle East. Western imperialsm failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, failed in its project for a two state solution for the Palestinians, failed to defend the 'Arab Spring', is now bombing two Middle East countries and is likely to have to ally with Russia (and Assad) simply to gain some sort of stasis. Western populations are full of fear and open to any 'solution' to make the Syrian problem 'go away.'

This is the context for the emergence of apocalyptic and reactionary projects. It is the material base for irrational movements that are based on the belief of the coming end of the world. The strength of their appeal lies in the increasing barberism of daily life in countries like Syria or Iraq, now almost completely ruined by the West. Once this is seen as the cockpit, the meaning, the centre of the world, then the 'great conflict' between the saved and their enemies can begin. There are many parallel developments, even in the US, where the traditional Republican right has been transformed by a populist millenarianism which is also stowing away its machine guns and counting down the days - as well as promoting a racist, religious bigot, or two, for Republican President.

Reactionary populist movements are the sign of the breakdown of capitalist and imperialist 'rationality', or 'common sense.' When social systems began to labour and groan in face of the mounting contradictions of their world in past history, large sections of the population comforted themselves with ideas that the world would soon end. Christianity largely served that purpose as the Roman Empire fell. The ragged collapse of Fueudalism across Europe saw the same sublime madness break out of the insecurities of daily life and the toppling of the old world. The English Revolution of the 1640s produced similar ideas and organisations.

Today, when we understand that the world can only be turned to the better by the conscious action of the billions who inhabit it, where, since 1789, humanity has been struggling to find a rational and moral way to run society in the interests of the majority; succeeding here and there, driven back, leaving this question of question still to be resolved; those who have only seen the collapse and apparent failure of such rationalist purpose are still angry and still feel crushed. They also act, in their rage, and in their imagination such a world that they are in cannot possibly continue to exist,

The emergence of organisations like ISIS is a response to the weakning grip of Western Imperialism including its grip on its client regimes. It is also a response to the weakening world where the dominant social and economic system seems to have betrayed the future and polarised humanity. It uses the grandious and empty fantasy of the past to rationalise its own dead-end purposes. It is not simply a product of a 'hammering' by Western imperialists, nor the decline and defeat of the 1917 revolution and its sway across the world. Ultimately its flirtation with death and the final trump is but another torrid reflection of an economy, a politics, a society that has no answers and which seems to be shaking and cracking apart.

No comments:

Post a Comment