Socialist Sonnet No. 215: Bloody Bondi (2025)

   From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Bloody Bondi

There’s blood in the sand, sharks circle offshore.

An unridden surf is still surging in

Under an ascendant unflinching sun,

Rapacious gulls hover and dive and soar.

Beach bags wouldn’t have been packed with bandages,

Flip flops and sun block, but no tourniquets.

A day for standing down and being at ease

With the world awhile, away from its rages.

Folk gathered comfortably together,

Sharing a common weal for a few hours,

Unaware agents of much darker powers

Were preparing for a change in the weather.

How the day started! How the day finished!

With humanity, once more, diminished.

 

D. A.

Graphic Novel (2023)

Book Review from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Blood Got Mixed. Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. By Janet Biehl. PM Press. 2022. 246pp.

‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish for ‘West’) is the name given by Kurdish nationalists to an area of Northeast Syria largely inhabited by Kurds but also home to Arabs and Assyrian Christians. It is the western part of their aimed-at state of Kurdistan, incorporating areas from Iran in the east, through Iraq and Turkey to Syria in the west, where the majority population is Kurdish-speaking. It is a de facto independent region of Syria, always threatened but not controlled by Turkey and the Syrian government. Currently it is controlled by the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), a vanguard party led by Abdullah Ocalan.

In prison in Turkey (where he still is) Ocalan read and was impressed by the ‘communitarian’ ideas of American social theorist, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who was also the long-term partner of Janet Biehl, the author of this book, developed the idea that the basic unit of society should be a decentralised, face-to-face participatory democracy, which he called ‘municipalism’, practising ‘community support and solidarity’ as opposed to the way ‘capitalism has organised society for competition and manipulation’. The PKK adopted this policy for local decision-making while keeping a firm hand on major political decisions and its militia.

Biehl explains, in a chapter entitled ‘Why I’m Here’, how she first visited the region in 2014 and was attracted to it by its claim to be putting into practice Bookchin’s ‘communitarian’ vision. She carried on visiting the region, most recently in 2019, and it is on her personal experiences and knowledge of the region that she gained over her visits that much of this book is based.

The system of district and local councils there is often held up as a model of democratic co-operative organisation by those seeking an alternative both to authoritarian centralised rule and capitalist democracies of one kind or another. The region has since been subject to aggression, sometimes savage, as by Islamic State forces, and by the Turkish military, who have effectively taken over part of the region spreading death and destruction. Despite this, it survives as a kind of communitarian experiment, but constantly teetering on the edge and, as someone has put it, ‘trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers’.

Biehl has made a brave effort to make sense of this by producing what is termed a graphic novel (though it is not a novel in the normal sense of fiction or imagined reality) which seeks to represent, in art work, commentary and ‘word bubbles’, the history, social organisation and way of living of the multi-ethnic groups that co-exist and intermingle (hence the sub-title ‘Their Blood Got Mixed’) in this small border area. She does this in a way that displays her admiration for these people while at the same time not being afraid to show the downsides, often bloody, of the path they have taken. A selection of the titles of the 15 chapters into which the book is divided gives an idea of the areas she covers: Islamic State, A Place of Refugees, Women and Men, Economics, Security, Social Ecology, Democracy, Self-Administration.

Her book illustrates both some of the most disturbing things that have happened to the people of the region, part of which she refers to as ‘the long tortured history of Kurds in the Middle East’. But she also describes, with obvious enthusiasm, some of the most positive and optimistic sides of what she considers they have established. So while, for example, on the one hand a piece of her graphic art pictures an ISIS soldier saying ‘The Koran says it’s permitted to take non-Muslim women and girls captive and rape them’, on the other she vividly brings out the joy experienced by the city of Raqqa at being liberated from the terror of the IS caliphate. She also details the suffering of the region’s people when the Turkish army invaded parts of it in 2018 but at the same time waxes rather lyrical about its system of citizens’ assemblies, committees and regional councils and extols Ocalan’s call for ‘gender equality, a cooperative economy, and ethnic and religious inclusiveness’. Yet even the positive side is complex and she is at pains not to portray it without flaws. She expresses a certain degree of doubt about the claim she hears that ‘our revolution is ecological, stateless and of women’, and it is not hard for the reader to join with her in questioning this given that without exception the women we see in her pictures are wearing hijabs, refer to those who’ve died in the fighting there as ‘martyrs’ and seem steeped in religious belief. She also wonders about the reality of the claims that ‘leadership here gets no special treatment … everyone is a link in the chain’, and recognises that the Bookchin model of a decentralised ‘face-to-face democracy’ and ‘an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relations’ may not be being followed as closely as she would like it to be.

A socialist would add that society in the region continues to use a money economy, markets (even though called ‘cooperative markets’) and buying and selling, which are the very essence of the wider capitalist system, and so does not merit the title ‘revolutionary’. So even if the author sees it as a kind of haven attempting to practice ‘communitarian’ principles, it is nevertheless trapped within the capitalist system and forced to rely on ‘protection’ from outside by coercive state regimes at war with one another. Like all other attempts to ‘go it alone’ in the capitalist world, its survival is perilous to say the least.

Small-scale attempts at establishing anything even slightly different (eg, the abolition of money and trade and ‘free consumption’ in some Republican communities during the Spanish Civil War and the ‘horizontal’ social and economic organisation of the Zapatistas in 20th century Mexico) are ultimately likely to fail. For socialists, in fact, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Howard Moss

Shamima Begum, the Demon Bride (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Jihadi bride’ Shamima Begum and her fight for repatriation are back in the news. This time there appears to be evidence to suggest she and her two companions were trafficked, with various newspapers carrying the latest story. It may come as no particular surprise that Shamima and her two school friends Khadiza Sultana, now dead and Amira Abase, presumed dead, were recruited and helped with their journey from the UK via Turkey to Syria in February 2015. All the girls were between 15 and 16 years old.

A BBC online news article on 30 August reads ‘Shamima Begum and her two friends were smuggled into Syria by an intelligence agent for Canada’ (bbc.in/3h7Cbbd). In Reuters Europe (21 November) it says: ‘Likely a victim of child trafficking her lawyers also said that Begum and her friends entry into Syria was “facilitated” by a Canadian agent working for ISIS’ (reut.rs/3VUKFB7). It seems that the information for those articles comes from a claim made in the book The Secret History of Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj. Five Eyes is the network of intelligence sharing between Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This information may have been known as early as 2015.

There was a Reuters (Ankara) news article on 12 March 2015 by Tulay Karadeniz in which the writer states: A spy who worked for a country in the US-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State had helped three British girls to cross into Syria to join the militants has been caught, the Turkish Foreign minister said on Thursday’ (reut.rs/3iJGLN5). This information came only a month after the girls left the UK. The British public will have heard about this only recently.

Shamima is now 23 years old and is still languishing in a detention camp in Northern Syria. Her UK citizenship was revoked in March 2019 by the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The British government is not in theory allowed to deprive a British citizen of their citizenship if that is the only form of citizenship they have. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Arbitrary deprivation of nationality which means deliberately moving to make a citizen stateless is prohibited under these instruments’.

The UK government contended Shamima could apply for Bangladeshi citizenship as her parents were Bangladeshi nationals and as she was under 21 at the time she supposedly could automatically qualify for Bangladeshi citizenship. Bangladesh has continuously denied that possibility. In any case Shamima was born in the UK and has never even been to Bangladesh, her culture is British.

Shortly after arriving in Syria she was married to a Dutch fighter and convert to Islam and went on to have three children who all died young. Her youngest was born in a refugee camp and died within a month of a lung infection. The conditions in these camps were appalling, with temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius in summer and below freezing in the winter, bad sanitary conditions and almost non-existent healthcare.

Responding to the death of her last child in the camp Jeremy Hunt stated ‘Shamima knew when she made the decision to join Daesh she was going to a country where there was no embassy, no consular assistance, and I’m afraid those decisions awful though it is, they do have consequences’ (bbc.in/3iLmkzi). But how could a 15-year old have had any idea of what was in store for her when she left the UK?

What makes a girl not yet 16 willingly leave her home, travel to Syria to marry a man she had not even met? Is it romantic notions of marriage and children of her own, a life away from the boredom and monotony of Bethnal Green, or the seduction of going to help her religious compatriots in the face of perceived injustice and alienation, or was it just an ill-thought-out teenage adventure? Shamima maintains she was just a housewife looking after the house and children and said she was assured they (Isis) would take care of her and she would have a perfect family life, but whether she was just a housewife as she claimed or she allegedly sewed explosives into suicide bombers’ vests we probably will never know.

The hypocrisy of accepting that girls of the same age and older were trafficked and abused in the Jeffrey Epstein case but not for Shamima and her even more unfortunate school friends is striking. She has been vilified and demonised in the press, and the British public seemed to be in agreement with her being made stateless. Could it be that women are traditionally regarded as the caring nurturing sex and Shamima was an abomination, or was she made the scapegoat, an example of the government showing it was doing something, picking on the easy target of a young girl?

Since the fall of the Caliphate, the international community was faced with dealing with more than 52,000 ‘foreigners’ stranded in Syria. Thousands returned to their respective countries independently and unmonitored and thousands of others were repatriated to some, including women facing arrest and imprisonment. Out of more than 400 former fighters believed to be back in Britain only about 40 (in 2019) have been prosecuted, most have been placed in rehabilitation schemes. It not as easy for women and children to make their way back home.

The Guardian (26 November 2020) reported that 35 children and 15 British women were being held in barbaric conditions at a camp in Northern Syria. A report by the Rights and Security International charity described conditions as inhumane and degrading, unsafe environments, physical violence common and psychological trauma. Children living in the camps suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and hypothermia with the effect on these children of starting the whole cycle of alienation again. You have to wonder what kind of society turns a blind eye to deliberately causing suffering to women and children, somehow making them responsible for nationalism and war.

The Shamima Begum situation brings up so many issues. The fact that the government can take away what we consider fundamental rights but which turn out to be mere privileges which can be given or taken away arbitrarily. What constitutes a danger to security and the state, your political beliefs, like being a communist in McCarthy’s America? What constitutes an illegal organisation, one that is contrary to the status quo? The misogyny of not only the Islamic fighters wanting what could be described as ‘comfort women’ and the attitude of the British government towards making an example of a young girl. Islamophobia and nationalism rearing its ugly head, seeing them as the savages, fanatics, the ‘other’, dividing workers with god on both sides. The state’s lackeys, the media, constantly pushing the official narrative, hiding news from the public, guiding our opinion to suit the state agenda. We have no idea what is ‘fake news’ anymore.

The world is divided with constantly changing borders, constant wars. The arms industry is the second biggest industry in the world. How many other Shamimas are out there? It does not have to be like this, we could live in a borderless, stateless moneyless society where we co-operate rather than compete. All it takes is a little imagination and the belief that we humans are not the greedy aggressive creatures we are told we are. We are family after all.

Carla D.

Info War (2021)

Book Review from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi, Richard Nil, Donna Mulhearn. Massachusetts Press, 2019.

In 2016, the city of Fallujah in Iraq, with a population of around a third of a million, was utterly destroyed. It was the third time that it had been under sustained military assault as a consequence of the United States’ invasion of that country. This book looks not at the military tactical ‘war porn’ side of these pacifications, but at the human cost, and the ways in which power was inflicted on that city.

A large chunk of the book is spent defending the right of the population of Fallujah to take up arms in resistance to the invading forces. It also spends some time distancing them from the fighters of ISIS (according to the authors, although ISIS fighters were present for the third battle of Fallujah, they had interposed themselves in the conflict, rather than the Fallujans particularly seeking to join the cause of the Islamists).

Some of the details of how the US fought in Fallujah are instructive. The first battle of Fallujah was shaped by classic counter-insurgency problems. The US had laid siege to the city, creating the prospect of a humanitarian disaster (they also blamed insurgents for using the civilians as human shields, despite the fact that the US themselves had locked them in). Pictures beamed around the world meant the battle was one of propaganda as much as bullets.

This can be illustrated by the fact that as part of the second attack coalition forces took control of the hospital, because they considered the staff there to be ‘terrorist sympathisers’ who put out claims of casualty numbers that conflicted with the coalition’s own announcements. Uncontrolled journalists were barred from the zone. They were determined not to lose the image war a second time.

The book spends a great deal of time discussing information warfare, and the supposed firewall between the psyops and info war that US forces use abroad, as compared to the image management they use at home. Given that they specifically chose to treat independent journalists as a war enemy, it is interesting to note that that was precisely the tactic later adopted by the Trump regime as part of its propaganda operations. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the skills and techniques of info war are unlikely to be brought home, especially when the info warriors get demobbed. They note that one Associated Press photographer ended up being held for two years for unstated ‘security’ reasons.

The second battle involved intense bombardment and house to house fighting. Although civilians had been warned to leave, and many did, it’s thought around 50,000 remained, caught in the crossfire. The authors note that the US soldiers themselves didn’t know much about who they were fighting and why, they simply went into the meat grinder, where many died.

After the second battle, the city was in a ruined state, riven with resentment. The largely Sunni city soon became embroiled in the factional tensions the US (and to an extent Iran) were fomenting in Iraq as part of the ongoing struggle for control of the country post-invasion.

As US forces drew down, the Fallujans rebelled again, and this time their struggle was caught up in the battle against ISIS. It was the turn of the Iraqi government to lay siege to the city, and once again, civilians were forced out into camps, and bullets and bombs laid waste to whatever hadn’t been destroyed in previous assaults.

The clearances of the city, the disruption of services – water, electricity, medicine – were a health crisis within a war. The book deals also with the potential fact that the war has led to ongoing health crises, of high infant mortality, birth defects and cancers. The book is even-handed over the precise cause of these observed trends, but clear that they do exist, and must surely be chalked up to the horrors of modern war being inflicted on that delicate system that is modern urban living.

Pik Smeet

Material World: Proxy warring in Syria (2020)

The Material World Column from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Socialist Standard focused upon Turkey’s policy to grab a share of the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields. Turkey, once called the ‘sick man of Europe’, is endeavouring to confirm its role as a regional power. In the chaos of Syria, Turkey has been an active participant.

Recently there have been incidents where Turkish troops suffered numerous casualties caused by the Syrian government, which led to Turkey retaliating.

It was clear that working people in Syria started the uprising against the Assad regime because of the lack of freedom and social justice, the prevailing corruption and discrimination. Life for the majority was dismal with low incomes, a rising cost of living, homelessness, and unemployment, which all served to spark Syria’s ‘Arab Spring’. However, foreign powers and various Islamic jihadists became involved and changed the direction of the people’s uprising. The popular protests were diverted by neighbouring rulers into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey with the support of the US and Western nations on one side with Assad’s government, Iran and Russia on the other. The Syrian civil war proceeded to develop into a series of sieges.

Way back at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, Turkish authorities facilitated the involvement of the Islamists by permitting the infiltration of jihadists into Syria via its borders. It also allowed commandeered oil that financed ISIS/ISIL operations to be transported through Turkey to be sold on the world market.

As the Syrian situation escalated it resulted in the mass movement of refugees, with Turkey hosting millions of displaced Syrians fleeing for safety. Turkey is also the route for refugees to reach Europe and it entered into an agreement with the EU to stem the flow of refugees. These desperate and vulnerable people have now become political pawns used by Turkey with Greece now ignoring international law and slamming the doors shut in the faces of refugees.

At first the Kurdish independence movement tried a third way in that it would side neither with the regime nor with the opposition. It would defend itself, but it would not wage war. Starting in mid-2012, various places in the Kurdish areas were one by one freed from Assad control. When Kurdish separatists created an autonomous region, Rojava, this was seen as a direct threat to the rule of Turkey and it led to a direct invasion of Syria to neutralise the PYG/PKK (Kurdish People’s Protection Units/Kurdistan Workers’ Party). It meant a military stand-off with the US who inserted its forces within the Kurds’ defences to assist the Kurds in combating the Islamist terrorists. This ended when Trump re-deployed US forces to secure Syria’s oil fields and it left Turkey along with Syrian mercenaries with a free rein to launch an assault against the Kurds who quickly then looked to the Syrian government and its Russian mercenaries for protection.

Added to this complex situation is the current Syrian regime’s advance to retake the last rebel-held territory in the country, the province of Idlib which is under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate. Turkey is backing these anti-Assad rebels. This has brought Syria and Turkey into direct conflict and created a possible confrontation with Russia. If the Syrian government is victorious, there will be a new flight of refugees fleeing towards the safety of Turkey increasing the refugee burden Turkey already carries.

But Turkish military expansionism has not stopped the UK from selling Turkey weaponry. The UK has licensed sales of military equipment to Turkey worth more than £1bn since 2013, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, principally aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades, small arms and ammunition. Leading armament manufacturers BAE Systems and TAI were awarded with an Open General Export Licence that makes the flow of weapons to Turkey easier. It wasn’t until October 2019 that the UK government halted new sales of weapons to Turkey while still honouring existing arms contracts.

In fact the world’s arms traders – the ‘merchants of death’ – are literally making a killing out of this war, with those in Turkey and Russia being able to test their weapons under battlefield conditions.

ALJO

The Fall of Rojava (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amid the horror of the Syrian civil war it had seemed that there was one shining beacon of hope. In the north of Syria Kurdish militants, inspired by the political thought of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, filled the vacuum when the Assadist forces abandoned most of the Kurdish regions, and were combatting and defeating the seemingly unstoppable Islamic State.

The nature of the new regime being created under the protection of the YPG/PYG was greatly attractive to leftists and anarchists. Ocalan in prison had been influenced by the writing of Murray Bookchin and other anarchist-inspired writers and this had shifted the PKK and its allied Kurdish parties away from a rigid and military Stalinism towards a polity which stressed mutualism and participatory democracy.

The vision of this communitarian experiment becoming flesh in the villages and towns of Syrian Kurdistan in the teeth of Islamist obscurantism and Turkish militarist assault galvanised solidarity. Recruits came from all over the world to embattled ‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish word for ‘west’ as the western part of the wider region, spanning several countries, inhabited by Kurds). One volunteer unit renamed themselves the Bob Crow Brigade after the British rail union leader.

At the time voices urging a certain caution tended to be drowned out or were silenced by the sheer enormity and barbarity of the opposition that the Kurdish forces faced. For socialists, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Rojava, trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers, either faced extinction or acceded to this logic and took its own place as a junior partner to one or other of the great military powers. Becoming the armed fist of the US effort against ISIS must have seemed a sure bet; arms, advisors and money poured in, at a time when the democratic Syrian opposition was being starved of support and the rebel cities were being pounded into rubble by Assad and his Russian allies. 

The abandonment of Rojava to Turkey by Trump’s Twitter diplomacy led to an almost ritualised ‘changing of the guard’, as Russian troops took over on patrol where US special forces had been just days before. But this masked a more brutal exchange as Kurdish forces abandoned Syrian villages to Assadist forces and the brutal Mukhabarat secret police.

With America’s betrayal and Turkey threatening its very existence, it is unsurprising that the nascent state of Rojava would be drawn to the siren call of Putin’s Russia. The alliance with Assad may shock a few of their Western cheerleaders, but nationalism, however it justifies itself ideologically, will always be first and foremost a movement for the establishment and defence of a nation within a capitalist world system; Rojava’s principles would always take a second place to this.

D.W.

Voice From the Back: Hungry kids in the USA (2015)

The Voice From The Back column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hungry kids in the USA

Poverty is usually associated with countries in Africa and Asia not the highly developed USA, but here are the facts. ‘about 16 million kids relied on the US government supplemental nutrition assistance program according to census bureau data released Wednesday, up from 15.6 million a year earlier’ (Huffington Post, 28 January). Capitalism is a world-wide system and it has world-wide problems.


Kobani carnage

‘The Kurdish forces’ unexpected victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable in their rampage across the region’ (Observer, 1 February). There is no sense of triumph for these troops as Kobani is completely destroyed. Thousands massacred, all that remains is a bombed-out shell. In the yawning craters left by US air strikes buildings have vanished during months of heavy shelling. One side street is blocked by the bodies of Isis fighters, rotting where they fell – a pile of bones marked only by a foul smell. This is the inevitable product of capitalism’s rivalries.


A strange communism

According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2015 the world now has a record 2,089 billionaires – and for the first time, India has more of them than Britain or Russia. ‘The list charts every dollar billionaire currently living in the world. It shows an additional 222 billionaires were created last year, almost a third of whom were in China. The US still holds the crown for most mega-wealthy residents, at 537. But China conditions are not far behind with 430, having acquired 72 new billionaires in 2014’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 February). Somewhat comically the Chinese government still claims to be communist.


A fortune in stamps

Capitalism is a crazy system that can condemn working men and women and their families to starvation for the want of a few pounds while this madness occurs. ‘a few stamps which lay together in a cigar box in a dusty attic for a century are set to fetch £250,000 when next auctioned’ (Sunday Express, 8 February). Scraps of paper worth more than human existence. Crazy.


An obvious statement

It hardly needed a high-powered business survey to tell us the following. ‘Big UK firms face a ‘crisis of trust’ and the next government must prioritise better ethics, a lobby group has said. In a survey, the Forum of Private Business (FPB) found that over three-quarters of respondents think big firms put profits before ethical standards’ (BBC News, 9 February). Tax avoidance, treatment of suppliers, and late payment were all areas of concern we can easily understand that the poll of 2,000 people found, but business putting profits before ethics? Wow, what a surprise!


Crime and capitalism

TV programmes and the national press are fond of depicting the police as dealing successfully with the problem of crime, alas that is a complete fallacy. The advent of cheap heroin in Chicago has led to an increase in crime undreamt of by Al Capone and his contemporaries. ‘In the 1920s, 227 gangsters were said to have been killed in the city in the space of four years. Last year there were 424 murders in Chicago, most of them said to be gang-related’ (Times, 9 February), an increase of almost double in a quarter of the time. Some progress.


Profit and pollution

Details released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science show that about eight million tonnes of plastic waste find their way into the world’s oceans each year. ‘The new study is said to be the best effort yet to quantify just how much of this debris is being dumped, blown or simply washed out to sea. Eight million tonnes is like covering an area 34 times the size of New York’s Manhattan Island to ankle depth’ (BBC News, 12 February). In the battle between profit and pollution there is a clear winner.


Desperate workers

According to the UN at least 300 migrants are feared to have drowned after attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa this week in rough seas. ‘UNHCT official Vincent Cochetel said it was a ‘tragedy on an enormous scale’. Survivors brought to the Italian island of Lampedusa said they were forced to risk the bad weather on ill-equipped vessels by human traffickers in Libya’ (BBC News, 11 February). Desperate workers are prepared to take enormous risks just to get a job.

Terrorism: What is the Truth? (2017)

From the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be unfeeling not to be saddened and outraged by the Manchester and London terror attacks, or to have no sympathy for those who knew the victims. But what are we to make of the reaction to it? The traditional laying of flowers and paying of respect to the dead is one thing, and you would expect an expression of solidarity, but holding hands and singing does nothing of itself to dig down toward the causes of terrorism and the solutions to it. How can people find out the motivations and machinations behind war and terrorism? How can the public find out the truth about who is supporting, arming and supplying Islamic State, when there is little or no transparency between government and the public, and when the mainstream media hardly bothers to address these issues?

Trade Wars

‘We stand together’ said the Prime Minister; but if the public knew what she knows then they would likely refuse to stand with her. Not that we see the political parties standing together. After the expression of condolences, and the platitudes, they immediately break into open argument, live, and in public. What we see is division and factionalism. The establishment, either wilfully or through ignorance, would never go so far as to admit that the protection of trade and profit is what really drives war and military intervention in the Middle East. We socialists believe that capitalism is the root cause of war, terrorism, poverty, and all of the major social ills that plague mankind. That is why we want to get rid of it.

Radicalisation

It is clear that governments are attempting to deal with the terror situation by only addressing the symptoms. Radicalisation is not a cause of terrorism, but both a  symptom of it, and a method to inflict it. The insistence of focusing on de-radicalisation programmes won’t do much to help. Behind those that the government mistakenly describes as having ‘become radicalised’, are whole nations of people that have become ‘radicalised’ as they’ve watched their families being blown to smithereens and their countries destroyed by air strikes. People became ‘radicalised’ as soon as the first bombs fell on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on Syria. Of course, it isn’t just as simple as that. The conflicts in the Middle East have a long and complex history, but there is a kind of group denial by Western governments that the terror attacks here are in any way a result of Western foreign policy in the Middle East.

When the Leader of the Opposition suggests that British foreign policy may be playing a role in causing terrorism here in Britain, he (and anyone else who states a similar view), is slated by the government and the mainstream media. The Home Secretary’s reaction to this suggestion was to state categorically that there was no connection between British foreign policy and the Manchester bombing. And over at the BBC, the typical reaction from news correspondents to this kind of suggestion was, ‘cannot compute’. Perhaps the government’s view is that that the existence of  Islamic State is simply down to the Devil himself; and that they just happen to be particularly successful at persuading vulnerable people. Their line on this is, “Nothing to do with us, nothing to see here”.

Fake views, fake news

To kill the debate says everything about the government’s position, and given that the sale of arms has long been an important part of British foreign policy, they certainly wouldn’t compromise the relationship with, say, the Saudi Royal Family, by asking awkward questions about the alleged support and encouragement of terrorism by the Saudi government. These allegations are skirted around by the mainstream media; and if there is evidence out there which would prove the allegations, then the  Establishment will put up fierce opposition to those attempting to uncover it. But it is acceptable for western governments and mainstream media to turn allegation into fact, as with ‘Russian hacking’, but, of course, this cannot apply when it comes to their friends in the Middle East. The double standard sticks out like a sore thumb.

‘The Dove’

All wars are commercial wars. There is no humanitarian war, but governments do their best to persuade the public that we are fighting them, and for our own good. The record-breaking, corruption ridden Al-Yamamah (Arabic: the Dove) arms deal of 1985 between the UK and Saudi Arabia still has elements in it that are yet to be completed. The latest tragi-comedy is that the ‘deal-maker-in-chief’, President Trump, wants to bring peace to the Middle East by signing a new record-breaking, $350bn-over-10 years arms deal with the Saudis. Is it true that UK-made cluster bombs are currently being used by the Saudi-led coalition in the conflict in Yemen? Or are they just relics of old conflicts, as the Saudi government claims? We will probably never find out. The less that people know, the less chance of them questioning the present situation; and so it is that the reaction to the terrorist attacks here will probably remain the same, and the cycle will continue.

The truth is in there

The lack of transparency in government inevitably results in the degradation of democracy, and it is more than a little sickening to see the ‘leaders of the free world’ stand up after terrorist atrocities and state that we stand together to protect  democracy, or freedom of speech, or western values, or anything else that they can co-opt and misappropriate in order to  serve the purposes of capitalism and the capitalist class. This isn’t just social observation or commentary. War, poverty, misery, terrorism – as socialists we find it impossible to imagine that these would exist in a socialist society. We cannot state that there would never be conflicts, but these are most likely to be local, and easily and peaceably resolved.

If, by some fantastic occurrence, a truth serum was to become mixed into the water at the next G7 summit, then the revelations thereof from these renowned leaders of the free world might bring their democracy crashing down around them.

NM

Proper Gander: The Jihadis’ Tale (2017)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the dramas he has written and directed for Channel 4, Peter Kosminsky has explored the impact which war has had on the people caught up in it. The Government Inspector (2005) dramatized UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly’s role in undermining the government’s attempted justification for the Iraq War, while The Promise (2011) was set in Palestine, drawing links between the situation under the British mandate in the 1940s with that in the 2000s. His latest drama, The State, tells the stories of young, enthusiastic jihadis who travel from Britain to Syria to fight for ISIS. Over four episodes, we follow the characters from their arrival in an ISIS stronghold to when life under the regime brings disillusionment with what they have committed themselves to.

The characters were based on real people who were interviewed by the programme’s researchers. As most British ISIS fighters who have returned are in prison, researchers largely drew on the experiences of people who were not from the UK. Unfortunately, any research into how they came to believe in ISIS’ interpretation of Islam enough to join didn’t end up in the script. More depth is needed in characters taking up four hours of screen time (including commercial breaks, featuring adverts for enlisting with the army, appropriately enough). Kosminsky explored the journey to becoming a religious fanatic in his 2007 drama Britz, so maybe he didn’t want to repeat himself. But if we can’t understand his characters’ motives, it’s harder to understand the appeal of a barbaric organisation like ISIS, or the mindset it encourages. ‘Radicalisation’ is often talked about in the media in the same way as a disease, as if people become infected with extreme ideas which then take hold much like the flu virus. This approach can simplistically ignore how our views are shaped by our experiences in a divided, competitive society. So, a life of feeling alienated and powerless could push someone vulnerable to swallowing ISIS’ warped worldview to find an identity and purpose there.

Instead of focusing on radicalisation, the drama concentrates more on its reverse, the process of becoming disillusioned with ISIS. One character gets frustrated at how her role as a doctor is impeded by having to wear a niqāb while working and being ordered to harvest organs from injured enemy troops, and when her son becomes drawn in to jihad. Another gets disenchanted with the regime because he doesn’t want to treat ISIS’ prisoners or his slaves brutally. In both cases, disillusionment comes when the characters’ more established values conflict with those of ISIS.

While the lack of background to the characters is disappointing, the programme is more revealing in the details of life in ISIS-run Raqqa. Until they marry off and rent a home with their partners, male and female mujahideen live in segregated, rule-driven shared houses. The men are trained up to be soldiers, while the women are trained up to be wives. The scenes set in and around the women’s house are unsettlingly reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (see July’s Socialist Standard). In both, women are taught to be subservient to men, women aren’t allowed outside without being accompanied, their clothes have to cover them up almost completely, they’re expected to keep to domestic duties, they adopt new names, and are used as sex slaves. And in both, culture is shaped by fundamentalist religion, Christianity in The Handmaid’s Tale rather than Islam. Religion has long been a way in which power relationships are expressed. In ISIS’ version of Islam, the differences in power between men and women, slaves and owners, believers and non-believers are supposed to be justified by chapters of the Quran. Those in charge choose the quotes which back up their authority. At the same time that it creates divisions between people, the religion can also create a common identity, essential to hold together an organisation as extreme and fanatical as ISIS. It is this blinkered fanaticism towards such a brutal dogma that marks out ISIS adherents as sociopaths.

The State is useful to show how oppression can become normalised for the few who accept ISIS’ twisted ideology, even if it is lacking in the reasons behind this. The latter point was picked up in several other reviews, including that on The Arts Desk website, which summed up the drama’s characters by saying ‘no one is nuts enough’ (21st August). The programme didn’t impress the Daily Mail’s Christopher Stevens, who called it ‘poison’ in his review of 20th August. He accused Kosminsky of interpreting ISIS’ propaganda as an accurate reflection of life under the regime, thereby glamorising jihadis. He adds that ‘this is a recruitment video to rival Nazi propaganda of the 1930s calling young men to join the Brownshirts’, just like the Daily Mail did at the time.

Mike Foster

Mosul: the Horrors of War (2017)

From the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In mid-July Mosul finally fell. After over a thousand days into the campaign against Islamic State, and after an urban battle that has lasted three months longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, the last stronghold of IS in Iraq was taken.

This was at enormous cost, Towards the end of the battle, reliable reports came in of over 100 children dying of starvation. Untold numbers of dead remain buried in the rubble of Mosul, one estimate is up to four thousand. As Airwars, an organisation tracking the effects of the wars in Iraq and Syria report:

'Thousands of Moslawis have credibly been reported killed since October 2016, with West Mosul in particular devastated. The Coalition alone says it fired 29,000 munitions into the city during the assault. Five times more civilians were reported killed in west Mosul versus the east of the city, Airwars tracking suggests – an indication of the ferocity of recent fighting' (airways.org).

Western Mosul has been destroyed. The numbers are prodigious: 3,000 IS fighters took on an army of over 150,000, including the elite of Iraq’s special forces. Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, wrote on The Conversation website:

'…the elite Iraqi Counter Terror Service (or Golden Division) had sustained serious casualties and there were already fears that Mosul would turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, reducing the one force that the Iraqi government could depend on in any future civil war to a shadow of its former self'' (theconversation.com.uk).

The final death toll among civilians will be hard to establish, but there are credible reports of around eight thousand deaths: caught in a combination of Coalition bombing, artillery and IS murdering those who tried to escape. The IS troops deliberately kept the civilian population hostage to hamper the Iraqi government forces and their allies. Even still, over 700,000 people have been displaced by the battle of Mosul, and most will have no home to return to.

The devastation caused by a tiny handful of fighters is a testament to the dangers and horrors of modern warfare. It raises the question of the longer term in Iraq. Even when east Mosul was cleared, reports came in of stay-behind cells carrying out attacks on the rear of the Iraqi forces: and it’s still not clear if the fall of the West of Mosul means the end of most of the IS fighters there, or if they have scattered, to carry on an irregular campaign. The denuding of the Iraqi special forces, and their reliance on Iran-backed Shia militias (much to the resentment of the mainly Sunni citizens of Mosul and its surrounds) means that anything approximating peace may well be a long way off.

A significant feature of this campaign has been the distortions of propaganda. The campaign in Mosul was almost identical to that waged by Bashar Al-Assad and his Russian ally in Aleppo: but the coverage was vastly different. Aleppo was subject to daily reports of every bombing and allegations of continual brutality. Mosul only really entered the UK news as a footnote, or to mark a significant victory.

Given the undoubted brutality of IS, it would not have been difficult to try and justify the civilian deaths along the way: but silence was the main media response. Part of the difference is that BBC journalists were embedded with Iraqi forces, and so were showing their side of the story whenever they reported. Though the same sources of information on deaths in Mosul were available as were to be found in Aleppo, even massacres by IS did not make the mainstream news. The conclusion could be that it is thought that the public might not stomach the cost of pacifying Mosul (it’s worth noting in passing, that Fallujah has been similarly pacified three times, so even this phase of the story may not be the complete end). Another possibility is that the toll of civilian casualties is unpopular in the Arab world. Juan Cole on his blog notes that Sunni news sources have been focussing on civilian casualties (www.juancole.com/2017/07/declares-triumph-casualties.html).

There can be no doubt that IS were a particularly brutal and barbaric gang. As we have noted in these pages, the core of their structure was made up of experienced military officers, a fact which accounts for the difficulty in dislodging them from Mosul. These were not rag-tag amateurs, but schooled military professionals. Their slaughter of civilians was the cold ruthless logic of war. Their rule was equally as brutal as it was weak.

There are equally savage regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, for example, is engaged in a prolonged war with rebels in Yemen that is seeing misery piled upon misery, and not content with that, it has been laying siege to Qatar, for no other reason than regional rivalry. Its domestic record is also infamous. We are unlikely to see MPs in Parliament lining up to demand air-strikes on Saudi.

The reality is that the horrors of modern war are not to be laid on the shoulders of a religion nor an ideology, nor even on specific individuals. Fault and justification for destroying an entire city can always be found when military, political and economic needs demand it. IS tried to join the worldwide gang of killers that get their power from the barrel of a gun (and the guidance system of a missile).

The fact that the invasion of Iraq has led to city after city being crushed in prolonged urban warfare, shows the limits of the usefulness of warfare in achieving any political ends. The means of violence are abundant, cheap and easy to obtain, tiny groups can wield vast devastation, when they achieve the right levels of motivation. IS will continue to strike: its fighters have gained skills and attitudes that will see them spread across conflict zones the world over. Whether IS had any material link to recent attacks in Britain, they have shown a willingness to use terror for their propaganda purposes.

Pik Smeet

Pathfinders: Selling History By The Pound (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

You have to hand it to Isis, in a way, for their orgiastic ability to outpace the world’s sense of shock-fatigue. Now they are bulldozing cities and sites which are among the most ancient in the world, sites like Nimrud, an Assyrian city dating from 1250BC, and Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire and the largest city in the world until it fell to a coalition of Babylonians, Persians, Medes and Scythians. This at a time when Rome was still a village and western Europeans lived in hill-forts and hide tents.

It turns out though that Isis have not simply gone insane with cultural bloodlust against anything un-Islamic. They are canny operators in the capitalist marketplace. In public and on camera, they are weighing into ancient statues and monuments with pick-axes and sledgehammers. Privately and away from view, they are looting archaeological sites and making a fortune selling artefacts to western collectors through a black market administered by organised crime (New Scientist, 14 March). With sculptures, mosaics and coins fetching anything up to $60,000 a piece, it’s not hard to understand the incentive, and a bit of public vandalism is a very useful way to drive up black-market prices. Any socialist comment would be redundant.

Let’s Get Medi-evil

That Isis are total unmitigated bastards intent on clocking up crimes against humanity is hardly news, but nevertheless some liberals, ever cautious when faced with absolute statements of any sort, are tempted to look for mitigating factors. In an interview with the cast of BBC’s Tudor drama Wolf Hall, one actor observed that Islam was approximately 500 years behind Christianity in terms of age, and that if one were to look 500 years or so backwards in English history, what were we doing to each other then? The answer: beheading, burning, hanging, drawing and quartering. The intention of this observation was not to excuse Isis as such, but merely to provide some sort of historical context. The unfortunate effect, though, was to patronise the great majority of western Moslems who are quite at home with modern values, thanks very much, and don’t appreciate being described by well-meaning white actors as medieval barbarians.

It’s a silly argument anyway. The post-Columbian United States is around 1,500 years younger than Christianity, so on this logic American policy-makers should still be crucifying people, sacrificing goats and reading the future in chicken guts.

The reality is that societies don’t necessarily develop at the same rate nor independently of each other. Ideas don’t stop at frontiers and societies at different stages of development are forever cross-fertilising each other – that’s why socialism will spread geometrically and not serially. As for what ‘we’ did to each other in Tudor England, it was no different from behaviour across the whole of ‘civilised’ Europe at the time. When these forms of behaviour later came to be regarded as brutal, they fell out of favour in all related societies. (For an interesting historical account of the birth of Islam, see page 12 in this issue).

Isis are out of step with modern times and modern ethical values not because they are somehow psycho-historically underdeveloped but because they have a calculated and steely resolve to scare the living shit out of everyone they meet. As a strategy of terror you just can’t beat biblical brutality, and that’s something Isis probably did learn correctly from history, theirs and ours, unlike some people who act in plays.

Death Row Dispatches

They might not be crucifying people or burning them at the stake, but some American states are having trouble choosing ways to execute them, now that European pharmaceutical companies have almost unanimously grown a spine and refused to supply the US with lethal chemicals for use on Death Row inmates. Now Utah is proposing bringing back the firing squad, despite liberal objections that it is an inhumane method of murder (BBC Online, 11 March). Hmm, really? In Oklahoma they’re considering using gas, a method with unpleasant historical resonances. Well, we’ve got news for the liberals. All methods of murder are inhumane, by definition. It says a lot about the mentality of ‘reasonable’ people in capitalism that this is even considered a negotiable question.

Nuts to Bosses

Here’s an idea what we can do in socialism with all those ex-aristocrats and ex-CEOs who remain narcissistically devoted to their own self-importance. Such people will undoubtedly exist, and while the majority of us will just ignore them or, perhaps cruelly, laugh at them, some will find it in their hearts to pity the petty Napoleons, flapping like fish out of water in a society that has no use for them. Assuming that they are addicted to power like junkies are to smack, we must also assume that going cold turkey will be an unbearable torture for them.  So how could we make it easier on them? Simple. Give them robot flunkeys to order about. AI will make a terrific Jeeves to their Bertie Woosters, grovelling tastefully on cue and getting them out of all sorts of scrapes, thus saving the rest of us the trouble of minding them.

Think this is a joke? Just look at the behaviour of some of these people today, like the lunatic executive of Korean Air who forced a plane to taxi back to the departure gate and worse, forced an air steward to kneel in front of her and receive a humiliating barrage of vilification over a stupid bag of nuts (BBC Online, 11 March). If businesses in South Korea are really run by preening princesses like her, and workers put up with it, it makes you understand how the North Korean junta gets away with it. Happily though the steward didn’t put up with it, and sued for damages. Even more happily, the executive ended up in jail, though for obstructing aviation safety rather than for behaving like an arrogant tit.

So, no reason for the likes of Stephen Hawking to fear that AI is going to kill us all in a Terminator-like Armageddon. Just get the robots to wear morning suits and eat lots of fish, and the world’s ex-bosses can be kept in delusional bliss while the rest of us get on with the important matters of life.

We Dream of Gini

Socialists are always looking for ways to make the case simpler, and here’s one approach we haven’t tried before: Object: to set the Gini coefficient to zero. It’s fifty years since Italian statistician Corrado Gini devised his index for measuring inequality, which charts the distribution of income in any given society, deriving a number between zero, where everybody earns the same, and one, where all the income is earned by just one person (BBC Online, 12 March). The zero figure is entirely putative, since no capitalist society would or could ever fix all incomes as equal, and in fact the only real way to achieve this ultimate equality would be to abolish incomes and the wages system altogether – which is one definition of socialism. Capitalism’s logical end point is similarly obvious, whether any capitalists care to admit it or not: to set the Gini coefficient to 1.  That such an outcome is not only undesirable and unsustainable but in fact globally suicidal ought to be glaringly obvious to any schoolchild, and never mind the political sophistries.

PJS

Pathfinders: Blam! Kerpow! Trump! (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If life sometimes imitates art, then politics sometimes imitates a Marvel comic.

Those sinister cowled crusaders of the hacker group Anonymous, who have in the past tilted at the windmills of the Vatican and the Turkish state, recently decided to declare cyber-war on Isis. Whether Isis felt any frisson of alarm at this development has not been reported, but you've got to love the showboating chutzpah of pimply computer geeks in Guy Fawkes masks who think they can take on real murdering thugs in ski masks. Did we say Marvel comics? More like the IT Crowd meets the Sopranos. Fingers crossed the geeks don't come a cropper. If the thugs ever find out who they are, there'll be more than connections getting cut off.

Not content with waging holy jihad, now Anonymous have also declared war on Donald Trump. Now, as much as anyone else we loathe that ruddy, right-wing billionaire bigot, who like some cartoon antichrist rampages across the headlines with the reckless arrogance of the untouchably rich. He really is Marvel material - Spiderman's newspaper boss J Jonah Jameson brought hideously to life. Nothing would be too bad for that man. We hope that acute poverty descends and crushes him like a comet from heaven. We hope he puts all his cash into an Armenian Ponzi scheme. We hope his balls drop off.

But still, and for the sake of balance, there is something we need to ask the keyboard bandits of Anonymous - something quite important which they apparently are not asking themselves.

Just who do they think they are?

The thing is, nobody asked them to be vigilante heroes. Nobody elected them. They don't have a mandate. They don't have the right to make unilateral decisions about who the world's renegades, rats and scumbags are and then declare war on them on our collective behalf. And if they are not doing it on our collective behalf, well then they are renegades themselves, which makes them part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Because the solution has to be democratic action, open, accountable, informed, discussed, participated in, agreed upon. Whatever Anonymous are up to, it isn't this. However good these 'good guys' think they are - however good we think they are - when they act as if democracy doesn't matter that's the same as perverting it. When you hack a computer system – just because you can – you are not asking, you are dictating. The problem with a world that runs on computers is that there are suddenly a lot of people who, with a bit of tech knowledge, could decide to dictate from their bedrooms. And seeing that the democratic process seems able to trump forth a bad smell like Donald may make these bedroom activists even less likely to believe in democratic processes and more likely to play politics via the virus and the DOS attack. And that way, as they say, madness lies.

It's not just the hackers. Last month we saw Tim Cook's Apple Corporation stick two fingers up at the FBI who, as you will recall, wanted Apple to break its own phone security protocols so that the Feds could read the private messages of two Islamic assassins. Apple made huge play of civil liberties issues, of their 'right' not to be coerced by federal government, and of their 'responsibility' to their customers. Rather surprisingly, or perhaps not, the press sided with Apple. In fact Apple felt entitled to take the high moral ground as defenders of 'liberty' by calling the FBI request a 'stretch' of the law that would have appalled America's founding fathers .

That's pretty damn rich coming from a capitalist corporation run by unelected tycoons whose own workers certainly don't have a company vote and whose future intentions are about as far from democratic liberalism as it's possible to get. Just ask the Chinese Apple workers throwing themselves off rooftops.

Anyone would think the corporations really run capitalism and politicians are nothing but dumb finger-puppets. But take heart, Hilary Finger-Puppet and not Donald Duck Finger-Puppet will probably get the top job in the White House, so that's alright then. Oh, wait…

10-4 Good Buddy

Excitement is revving in UK transport quarters as George Osborne has announced trials of driverless lorries on a quiet stretch of the M6 in Cumbria (BBC Online, 16 March). The potential fortune saved in the cost of goods distribution – through not having to pay driver wages or stick to tachograph hours – is pushing autonomous road technology ahead despite reservations by many stakeholders, including even Google, whose own unblemished driverless record perished recently when their car hit a bus. For one thing, it's by no means certain that sensors in driverless vehicles are good enough yet to cope with all weather and light conditions, nor is it clear that they can correctly interpret the gestures of human traffic cops. Worse, they are still rather too easy to hack, or fool with lasers into swerving to avoid non-existent objects. And if they run you over, who exactly is liable? As we've seen before with downloading and also with 3D printing, the technology has already raced round the world while the legal framework is having breakfast in bed.

The Cumbria trial, however, hopes to avoid most of these problems by going in convoys of ten trucks, with a human driver in the lead truck. Cue for a particularly cheesy 1970s song about convoys at this point. But the AA points out that, with more entrances and exits than any other motorway system in the world, the UK is not going to be able to accommodate 10-truck convoys, because of all the other vehicles trying to get on and off the motorway.

There's an obvious hi-tech solution to this. Create a special single lane for these truck convoys, then link all the trucks together and mount them on steel rails to save fuel and reduce drag. Instead of driving the lead truck, the driver would be driving the entire chain, or you might call it a 'train'. You could probably run passenger versions of these 'trains' too, with perhaps quiet coaches and restaurant cars.

Funny that nobody's ever thought of this before.

Paddy Shannon

'Marxism and the Muslim World' (2016)

Book Review from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Marxism and the Muslim World', by Maxime Rodinson, (foreword by Gilbert Achcar). Zed Books. 2015. ISBN 9781783603367

This book is a collection of essays by the French Marxist scholar of Islam and the Middle East, Maxim Rodinson. The essays originate from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and so are showing their age, but have a certain value in demonstrating concerns and debates within the left at the time. They are also a demonstration of an independent Marxist thinker’s work who is worth reading, even to disagree with.

The central thrust of the essays is the course of de-colonisation in the Middle East from the 1940s onwards. One essay looks back at the twists and turns of the Communist Parties as they followed the instructions of Moscow in the 1930s, shifting and turning on their approach to nationalism and national independence in the Middle East – with an historically interesting note on how this lead to a generally anti-Israeli orientation that prevails among much of the left to this day.

As part of this, much of the work is about an analysis of ideology, which (refreshingly) Rodinson views in practical terms. Ideologies for him are about mobilising and motivating movements, and they include a mythological/utopian element as well as immediate programmatic implications. Significantly, he objects to the term ‘historical materialism’ seeing Marx and Engels’ works as, rather, a rejection of ‘historical idealism’, and this, perhaps, allows him to escape dogmatism and the schematism seen in the French academic Marxism of the period.

He sees in Marxism not so much an idea that will liberate humanity (indeed, he maintains that despite its ‘ideological’ proclamations, Marxist sociology shows us that there will never be a final liberation and a conflict-free harmonious society) but an opening to scientific sociology that will allow us to examine society and better weigh ideologies and their potential effects. ‘Every society and every group, every “class”, even any individual, needs to find an answer to the truly important questions: what is Man in the Universe?' It is the series of chosen answers to that question and the range of choices it throws up that, for Rodinson, defines an ideology.

Chiefly, he sees nationalism as the chief organising feature of society during the period he was writing, although he notes the inherent dangers of limited nationalism in an interconnected world. When he comes to prescriptions, however, as a leftist, he does suggest that Marxism needs to appropriate the mobilising idea of nationalism and development in the de-colonising world.

In assessing the similarities between Marxism as a mobilising idea, and Islam, he sees them both as movements to realise their own image of a just society. His premise is that ‘we can move away from the idealist conception of religion as a set of ideas floating above earthly realities and constantly animating the spirit and actions of all its followers. We can assume, on the contrary, that all religious ideologies, like all ideologies, have a concrete and real basis in the constantly competing human groups who share out the planet between themselves or form the different strata of society.’ It would be a useful idea for many contemporary politicians to absorb, as they continue to talk about ‘poisonous ideologies’ and seem to suggest they just fall from the sky on susceptible heads.

He notes that there is no constant Islamic culture, and the character of the Middle Eastern region comes from the persistence of human civilisation there, rather than from any Islamic doctrine, indeed, noting that things such as face veils were an accommodation of Islam to existing practices. He notes, ‘there is no such thing as Homo Islamicus. The history of the Muslim world is specific, it has its own style and colour, it is an incomparable part of human diversity.’ He demonstrates how, for examples, Islamic states have permitted lending and borrowing at interest, with barely a murmur from their populations. Indeed, he writes:

‘Hostility towards much-hated innovators, especially foreign ones, often appear in the guise of religious misoneism. I remember a case of a Muslim cemetery in Beirut during the French Mandate; the Beirut Muslims invoked religion in their fierce opposition to and redevelopment of the land. Once independence was achieved, however, the cemetery was soon disposed of and the plot used to build a cinema or some such other building.’

He notes, that although there is a consistent core to Islam, it has changed and adapted throughout the ages, and there is no reason to suppose that it could not cope with the state ownership of the means of production he supported. This core of Islamic values, includes precepts over charitable giving and inheritance that suggests that ultimately, as an idea, Islam must support the idea of private property, and be opposed to socialism as we understand it; but then, the resilience of ideas suggests that it and other religions could, in the end, mutate to accommodate some version of themselves surviving in a world with a socialist majority. Rodinson takes this anti-idealist viewpoint to the extent that he states ‘I have often said that, under present circumstances, purely religious ideology cannot stand in as a mobilizatory ideology.’

Given the rise of the religious Islamic parties in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and its offsprings, and of course, Islamic State, has his analysis been invalidated?

Of course, just as with the Muslim cemetery Rodinson described, these movements contain distinct elements of nationalism, and anti-colonialism. Al-Qaeda is directed against American hegemony, just as much as it is against the ruling elites of the region.

Rodinson has a refreshing approach to imperialism, rejecting any idea of it as an abstract self-motivating force, preferring to look instead to the direct interests and needs of states, classes and strata who benefit from military expansion, just as he rejects a similar role for any self-motivating abstract Islam. Behind all civilisations, ideologies and movements are people, living daily lives and creating their circumstances. The members of ISIS have brains that are practically identical to that of every other human being. It is their circumstances and the way their lives and minds are created and recreated that leads them to think that the expressed creed of ISIS and its brutality, torture, rape and atrocity is a good idea. Whilst, as Rodinson suggests, Islam (and religion) are not the purely mobilising factor in the Middle East, it’s clear that it has managed to take the role of being at the forefront of the nationalism that he envisaged some form of state capitalism taking.

The important thing that socialists can take from this book is that opening up movements and ideas to close analysis helps sweep away the distortions that led to both talk of ‘war of civilisations’ and its inverse of denying that ISIS have any connexion to a ‘true’ Islam. There is no ‘true’ Islam, there is just the endless variety of ways humans try to interpret their world in order to act in it.

The materialist understanding that changing the way we live will change the ideas is liberating, and it brings to the fore the very idea that the resolution to the conflicts of the Middle East lies in the humans behind the ideas finding a new way to live. Rodinson was incorrect to see some sort nationalism as the answer, instead we need to look to a genuine worldwide movement that offers the prospect of establishing a genuine global community through common ownership of the wealth of the world. He is right in that this will not end all disagreement and conflict. What it will do is enable us to turn any conflicts into democratic arguments among equals, instead of pawns in the service of the owners and shifters of mobile wealth.

Pik Smeet

What is the 'Islamic State'? (2015)

From the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

ISIS stems from the breakdown of Iraq. Its core is former officers of the Iraqi army that served under Saddam and were displaced by the Americans when they disbanded the Iraqi army after the conquest of that country. Those officers found themselves marginalised further by the capture of the state by an expressly Shia political party (under the sway of Iran). The army had been dominated by a confessional and cultural Sunni section of society. They were able to turn to their co-religionists to recruit support to mobilise against the new government. Although Islamic State (as a group) was already formed, and had emerged from Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Islamist insurgent groups, it was this lash up with experienced military commanders that allowed them to make their break through, around 2010.

It was their combat expertise, the poor moral of the new Iraqi army, and the general lack of government authority in several Sunni provinces, that allowed ISIS to capture the heavy weapons and advanced military equipment that enabled it to advance quickly and overrun Iraqi army positions to take control of vast swathes of the country in the north. The other contributory factor in its growth was the breakdown of civil order in Syria, which enabled ISIS to become a participant in that civil war.

Tellingly, in the unrest, Fallujah (already twice bloodily pacified during the US occupation) rose again. Whilst ISIS nominally maintains it controls the city, it is reported that the revolt was by local tribes, using ISIS assistance and military support. ISIS is thought to have about 30,000 fighters, and about 8 million Iraqis under their control. That is not sufficient military force to subjugate an entire population (before the uprising, about 1 in 20 of the Syrian population were employed in the Ba’athist security forces, which partly explains the regime's resilience, and gives an indication of the scale of resources needed to completely suppress a population). In order to hold this population, it projects an image, with global reach, claiming to want to create a universal Caliphate and convert the world to genuine (i.e. its brand of) Islam.

The organisation is concerned with having a fearsome reputation, just as every bandit, feudal baron and Mafioso has needed in the past, in order to protect itself and continue its business. It is all about respect and appearance. Hence the, frankly, incompetent terror attacks on Paris, which were more about show and spectacle than about any sensible military strategic goal. Indeed, it has been noted that when they first encountered significant resistance (the Kurds of Kobane) poor morale and training of ISIS forces saw them handsomely beaten.

Their reputation, though, allows them to carry out their commercial operations. According to Channel Four News ISIS has been able to seize over $400 million in bank robberies. A further $40 million comes from kidnap and ransom operations. Its main source of regular income, though, is the $100 million it makes through selling oil, most of it, surprisingly, to the Assad regime in Syria (http://tinyurl.com/oxp3nfv). The American historian and blogger Juan Cole:

“I would argue that Daesh (ISIS) is analogous to the pirate enclaves of the early modern period. Al-Raqqa, Palmyra, Mosul, Falluja and Ramadi function for it as desert ports, as Tortuga and Port Royal did for pirates in the Caribbean and St. Mary’s on Madagascar did for pirates in the Indian Ocean. It is easy to be misled by the organization’s language of “state.” It is a militia of some 25,000 fighters who conduct raids. They don’t actually do much governing of the places they dominate, and mainly extract resources from them. Tribal raiding states in it for the loot have been common in Middle Eastern history, as with Nadir Shah in the eighteenth century. Looting one city pays for the raid that lets you loot the next. They even make the people who want to emigrate and escape their rule pay a sort of exit ransom” (http://www.juancole. com/2015/11/modern-raiding-pirate.html).

Essentially, then, in his view ISIS is the most spectacularly successful mafia operation in history.

ISIS, far from being an existential threat to the western way of life, is in fact a species of a phenomenon seen time and again in history. Its economic basis is the availability of a natural resource which can be extracted with little labour but which commands a high price (other examples are metals and diamonds in Africa, or narcotics in South America). It complements this resource by the proximity of a disposable, largely uneducated population, whom it can recruit to do its dirty work and fighting. It extends this principle with the mass kidnap of woman, and institutionalised forced marriage and rape as a reward for its soldiers. It is, in essence, no different from the Mexican drugs cartels that terrorise the border regions of that country, and infiltrate and direct the governments there.

Essentially, unlike capitalists who live off surplus value, ISIS and its leadership live off the direct expropriation of material surplus wealth, much as a feudal aristocracy did. Hence why its medieval economics rely on medieval methods of rule. The local populations do not have to be disciplined or mobilised into its system, the way workers have to be, merely passively present to extract wealth of fighting manpower from whenever it is necessary.

The role of religion in this context is to keep the local population compliant, and to help attract recruits. A common confession of faith creates the idea of a common identity, and legitimises the excesses of the ruling gang. It also helps to attract ideologues and recruits from abroad. Its most useful role is in attracting money and support. ISIS follows the Wahabbist trend of puritanical Islam that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia. This (and links between Iraqi and Saudi tribes) allows it to obtain funding from Saudis. That Saudi Arabia is itself locked in a regional power struggle with Iran, which in its turn uses the Shia strand of Islam to spread its influence, means here are geostrategic elements to the precise doctrine followed by ISIS.

The other use for Islam by ISIS is to set its stall out against the Great Powers of America and Europe, and their legacy in the Middle East. ISIS expressly rejects the boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers, and seeks to mobilise people in the region behind it against the Western Powers. Islam is embedded into the culture and history of the region, and in the state building manner of ‘selective invented traditions’ it is trying to forge a polity against the great gangsters of the Western militaries, who are sufficiently successful to make their grabs (which tend to be in terms of the territories and the resources in the ground, rather than their movables directly) almost invisible to the eye.

Whilst Islam as a religion is not the only mobilising factor in the Middle East, it’s clear that it has managed to take the role of being at the forefront of nationalism from the state capitalism of an earlier period as expressed in Nasserism, the Ba'athist regimes in Iraq and Syria and the PLO.

Pik Smeet