We are not Hezbullah
The current SWP clinch with political Islam is entirely impotent, and must be dropped.
The fact is that we are not Hezbullah, and to claim otherwise amounts to a dangerous and damaging conflation.
The major point here is political. Communism cannot offer ideological support to political Islam, without simultaenously effecting to castrate itself in the process. Political Islam ultimately holds to a universalist vision of society fundamentally hostile to Communist ideals.
Everybody with eyes can already see this, but the SWP would prefer not to talk about it, believing that dogmatic insistence on this issue would only effect to alienate allies at a crucial conjuncture, thus effecting to weaken the movement as whole.
This belief is mistaken. A movement is only as strong as its weakest component, and political Islam is a very weak component indeed. This is not only because the Islamist program is itself undesirable, but moreover because success in politics entirely depends on the clear articulation of the universal, and a party cannot provide such an articulation if it is eternally diverted by the interminable task of endlessly justifying a particular position.
This point holds especially true if the particular position in question is an opportunistic position, transparently in contradiction with the major ideological thrust of a party, for the reason that in such cases the particular becomes infernal and shatters universality itself.
This is the situation with the SWP support for Islamism, and the reason why the Stop the War coalition has so far proven toothless. In implicitly accepting the binary terms which Kapital has imposed upon it - the Enlightened West versus the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist - and then only tripping the switches on these two terms and flipping their valences, Stop the War leaves the libidinal circuit completely intact, and thus gurantees that finally nothing will stop.
Since 9/11 the European left has been lurching confusedly from crisis to crisis, and failing to develop any significant political momentum. The reason for this simple - it has been fighting the wrong war, and in the wrong way. Politically esnared within an analytic scenario of an imaginary force against a fantastic object, it has accordingly found itself incapable of delivering anything more than a hysterical moralistic critique, when what has been needed is a true political critique - subtle, cool and mature enough as to be able locate precisely the various, and very real social points, at which we are ourselves complicit in what we would attack. Only in this way can we seriously hope to stop anything at all.
The fact is that we are not Hezbullah, and to claim otherwise amounts to a dangerous and damaging conflation.
The major point here is political. Communism cannot offer ideological support to political Islam, without simultaenously effecting to castrate itself in the process. Political Islam ultimately holds to a universalist vision of society fundamentally hostile to Communist ideals.
Everybody with eyes can already see this, but the SWP would prefer not to talk about it, believing that dogmatic insistence on this issue would only effect to alienate allies at a crucial conjuncture, thus effecting to weaken the movement as whole.
This belief is mistaken. A movement is only as strong as its weakest component, and political Islam is a very weak component indeed. This is not only because the Islamist program is itself undesirable, but moreover because success in politics entirely depends on the clear articulation of the universal, and a party cannot provide such an articulation if it is eternally diverted by the interminable task of endlessly justifying a particular position.
This point holds especially true if the particular position in question is an opportunistic position, transparently in contradiction with the major ideological thrust of a party, for the reason that in such cases the particular becomes infernal and shatters universality itself.
This is the situation with the SWP support for Islamism, and the reason why the Stop the War coalition has so far proven toothless. In implicitly accepting the binary terms which Kapital has imposed upon it - the Enlightened West versus the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist - and then only tripping the switches on these two terms and flipping their valences, Stop the War leaves the libidinal circuit completely intact, and thus gurantees that finally nothing will stop.
Since 9/11 the European left has been lurching confusedly from crisis to crisis, and failing to develop any significant political momentum. The reason for this simple - it has been fighting the wrong war, and in the wrong way. Politically esnared within an analytic scenario of an imaginary force against a fantastic object, it has accordingly found itself incapable of delivering anything more than a hysterical moralistic critique, when what has been needed is a true political critique - subtle, cool and mature enough as to be able locate precisely the various, and very real social points, at which we are ourselves complicit in what we would attack. Only in this way can we seriously hope to stop anything at all.
14 Comments:
A thought-provoking piece - it prompted me to post on my own blog about Hezbollah and the socialist left's affiliation of themselves with this 'figure of resistance'.
I was wondering why you chose to illustrate the post with abstract paintings? Perhaps a naive question but I am interested to hear your answer.
(The link for that post is here, by the way.)
you are wrong.
This post has been removed by the author.
great blog, not because you have solved any major problem, or have been accurate and dead on, but because it is a reflection of what the left in the west is concerned with: iTSELF.
this whole argument about whether or not we should endorse Hezbollah smack of more rotting western narcissism than anything else. Who cares about OUR REAL SOCiALiST WORKER POSiTiON? because neither israel and its American hard-core worshippers nor the oppressed masses of the Muslim world gives a damn about our sound position anymore, and this time, they have all the reason to not care about us. What use there was to our dead-on position in the battlefields of southern Lebanon, when in fact it were the little missiles provided by Muslim brothers in iran and the local “way of life” that managed to resist israel’s onslaught, not our boring put-to-sleep slogans that cannot even convince us about our goals. As we marched symbolically against israel’s war crimes, oh sorry, israel AND Hezbollah’s war crimes, Hezbollah’s fighters were making their point across literally!
Hezbollah's victory in fact proves that Muslims and Arabs cannot afford to look for moral ethical leadership from us in the west. We are too absorbed about ourselves and how we see ourselves to even consider a tactical support of an unknown entity. Never mind the sheer ignorance involved in why is it that "the left" in the west doesn't know much about the Lebanese Hezbollah already.
Hezbollah have won a battle with israel, but unfortunately we in the west have long lost our battle with this entity in its war of propaganda with us through our corridors of news communication and education. We are defined through a historically biased pro israelI narrative that paints us as the liberator of “Jews as the oppressed people” and bind us to their fate through the Jewish state of israel. We sure know a lot about why israel needs to exist, even though we know it exercises racism and genocide on a regular basis. We know a lot about why israel is free to act the way it does. We demand the same kind of understanding from Arabs to no avail, failing to understand that others cannot be legally committed to our narrative. And as much as we demand the Muslim world to see israel the way we do, we forget to see the Muslim world, the way they want us to see it.
Why don't we know enough about Hezbollah? ask most “progressive persons" and, more or less, you hear the same thing about Hezbollah than you hear from CNN. We have not done our home work; we are too busy to reflect on ourselves. We care for israel by default, because we are israel. We created israel as a remedy for our mistaken past. We are too busy buying into israel and America’s narrative and the “way of life” to care about anybody else’s narrative or way of life.
I tell you a bit about this "monster" that we the cool lefties feel obliged not to support, even as OUR tax sponsored bullets and bombs rains on them.
in 2000, when Hezbollah took over the southern lebanon, they made a point of not closing down bars, liquor stores, and night clubs (not that there were many, but still). They also made a point of staying away from implementing islamic Law and they specifically announced that they do not plan to create an islamic government in lebanon or in the Southern part of the country. They explicitly denounced forced islamic dress code for women. Watch their TV station and you see a lot of not covered female anchors.
What makes you two convinced that Hezbollah cannot qualify for a left wing endorsement by our boring leftist SWP political party? (that consistently fails to be effective in British politics, let alone do much with its endorsement for Hezbollah or Lebanon) Hezbollah enjoys broad support among Muslim Marxists, and recently in latin America, there has been a lot of real tactical support for Hezbollah. Look no further than Chavez for this. Do they even need us? why can’t you see the the reverse possibility? that maybe in fact we the left in the west need their endorsement of our position? Only if we can be part of the global Muslim Arab struggle that we can find out role in transformation of the Western society? Why not start a dialogue with Hezbollah? if Chavez can talk to iran, why can’t we? Who is stopping us from knowing the islamic resistance? and who is stopping us from sharing our experiences with them? What if we can forge an alliance and teach them a few things while we are learning a few things too?
Western arrogance is not limited to neocons and israel. We in the "western left" are so damn full of it. The most important lesson from this war is that Hezbollah proved to Muslims AND to us in the west, that they basically do not need us to win and to put an end to israel's crimes.
At the end, it was clear that it's no longer important what we in the west are saying or doing. Muslims and the Arab world would have to find ways itself to stop this madness, because the west is just too busy with itself.
sorry both of you, I symbolically support Hezbollah not just because they resist, but because I believe in the complete failure of our philosophical imagination in the west. We in the western left like happy endings, perfect positions, for any non western concerned to be validated, it has to first pass through our acceptance filters, based on how it may involve our image that we beam across to ourselves.
We are so busy seeing ourselves that we have become blinded to what we do have in front of us collectively. The wall maybe in Palestine, but the real wall is what the western civilization faces as it rots in the cesspool of a technologically advanced narcissist barbarism it has become.
Wake up lipstick Communists of the Anglo Saxon world! we are not the solution to the world’s problems, in fact if anything we are much more part of the problem. Like what Nasrallah said to the SaudI Egyptian and Jordanian rulers, (by the way, how often you have tried to read hezbollah’s statements and interviews in the past few weeks? how often you have been forced to read israel’s official position?) If you cannot support us, at least remain silence and be a good quiet person. If you cannot support the resistance, then stay dormant, because we are strong enough to fight this on our own, as long as you are not directly helping the enemy.
this 33 day war and its consequences can be seen as a clue to the coming age. Just like this war proved, the solution to humanity is not going to come out of the west, not even from the leftists. It just won't and now we have the proof. Either Hezbollah and the rest of the Muslim Arab world have to find a universal for all (or form one new universality with the rest of those who understand the centrality of their struggle). Or else this is the end of humanity and our barbarism would prevail as fake humanity, so long as we are only looking at ourselves and ourselves only.
You symbolically support Hezbullah, you say - but what does this symbolic support really amount to - and in any case, from where precisely are you symbolically supporting them?
Am I supposed to applaud the gesture of applauding the handsome fighters of Hezbullah from the relative safety and comfort of the west, as if this was not the essence of narcissism - real strength coursing through the primitive veins of the other elsewhere, whereas here in the West we have only anomie?
It is all very well to decry the paucity of Western Socialist imagination - in fact, this is what, in my own narcisstic and pathetic way, I believed that I myself was doing - but what exactly is your tactical thinking here, spurring on you to this tactical support? Is your idea that, subsequent to their defeat of Israel, Hezbullah are now going to be able to generate enough ideological traction to make serious headway in the West as well? In other words - do you really think that Hezbullah are capable of solving the pressing problems of world capitalism - both in the core as well as in the periphery? You may be able to convince me, but right now I doubt it
Daniel, the SWP's slogan is "Solidarity with the Lebanese resistance", not "We are all Hizbollah". Our position vis-a-vis Hizbollah is the same as we have towards any national liberation movement, namely critical but unconditional support.
For a more detailed exposition of the party's position regarding Hizbollah, see the following article from one of our Beirut comrades:
Can Hizbollah unite Lebanon?
Also see Anne Ashford in the current SW.
Mo also posted this comment twice on my post. I have responded to it here.
Bat, thanks for commenting. I would affirm solidarity with the Lebanese resistance as well.
But tell me this, why does Lenin have the Hezbullah flag up at the tomb? This seems crazy to me, since it allows for easy rhetorical dismissal - enabling certain malicious people to paint the SWP as opportunist crackpots without too much difficulty.
Understand, I personally do not believe this or wish to affirm it. My interest in these matters rather is purely strategic, and in the spirit of friendship - I support the SWP, I only want it to be more rhetorically effective!
Incidentally, thank you for the links, though as it so happens, I have already read them. In any case, two further questions:
1. "Critical but unconditional support" - what does this phrase mean, exactly? It seems to me like the only kind of support the SWP is capable of offering Hezbullah is ideological support, and this precisely the point where critique would deploy itself. Or is there is another form of support, namely moral support, which you are alluding to here?
2. I see Nasrallah stating the following position in his interview with Evrensel "So long as we respect your beliefs, and you respect ours, there is no imperialist power we cannot defeat!"
In your opinion, what does this statement imply as regards a putative socialist critique of political Islamism.
"Unconditional support" - I don't believe such a thing is possible. There may be no moral outrage under the sun that Hezbollah could commit that would cause the SWP to withdraw its support (not that I find their fighting against the IDF to be in any sense morally outrageous - quite the other way around), but they could surely be politically compromised in other ways (going into a "peace process" and coming out of the other end as Israel's proxy enforcers in the region, say - and yes, I know this is staggeringly unlikely...). There are always conditions.
As for "critical", it seems to me that you might as well say "ironic". What's the use of criticism that is entirely disconnected from any possibility of conditioning the basic political stance?
Well put, though I don't share your support for the SWP.
We owe to the SWP critical but unconditional support...
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