In protest against the Salute to Israel Parade in New York City, a small grouping came together of Islamist antisemites with the Islamic Thinkers Society (http://www.islamicthinkers.com/), self-described Leftists of ANSWER, and the Orthodox Jewish anti-zionists of Neturei Karta.
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In a debate in the Platypus Review Jerzy Sobotta outline’s “nationalism’s transformation from an emancipatory bourgeois ideology into a civilizational cataclysm.” Here: “On nationalism: An anti-fascist intervention.” It is a reply to a reply to Sobotta’s original text (Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse: The stench of decay on the German Left, 1932–2009) in the Review, which although extremely short and overly simplistic, covers some of the antisemitic incidents that the German Left, namely the Red Army Faction, participated in in previous decades. Check out Sobotta’s text “On Nationalism.” It’s worth a read!
Nationalism was originally a liberal project advanced by revolutionaries. A democratic nation-state promised the third estate political empowerment and the legal protection of the individual. The creation of the nation was the project of an oppressed majority and constituted its attempt for political emancipation. The 18th and early 19th century liberal nation-states created the foundation for the advancement of capitalism, the mode of production that started to emerge in the previous centuries and which revolutionized the social forms of all of society. As a result, the abstraction and individuation of people changed the way that individuals encountered each other from then on: as legal subjects.
Created as an expression of freedom, bourgeois subjectivity, however, soon encountered its limitations as capitalism itself progressed. The mechanisms of social domination embedded in the economic system bypassed the individual liberties the revolutionaries had fought for. In the first crises of the early 19th century it became obvious that the rules the economy followed were not controlled by a group of people, although they were put in place and constantly reproduced by human beings themselves. Industrialization and the emergence of the working class rendered bourgeois freedom formal at best. Their grim lives and brutal working conditions revealed the coercive character of this social system and the freedom of which it boasted. From the standpoint of the proletariat, as Georg Lukács pointed out in the twenties, it was possible to grasp the inherent antinomies of bourgeois thought and to formulate a practical answer to the problem of capitalism: revolutionary social transformation. With the proletariat established as a class, bourgeois freedom was to be clarified: In Marx’s formula, “the free development of each (must become) the condition for the free development of all.” This could only mean the proletariat seizing power in order to abolish its own existence as a class and with it the capitalist social order.
The contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the working class surfaced in the revolutionary attempts of 1848 which took place, as Leon Trotsky wrote, in one way “too early and in another too late. That gigantic exertion of strength which is necessary for bourgeois society to settle radically with the lords of the past can only be attained either by the power of a unanimous nation rising against feudal despotism, or by the mighty development of the class struggle within this nation striving to emancipate itself.”[3] The bourgeoisie, at that point, experienced an internal friction: while it needed the workers’ support, it was afraid to lose the privileges it already gained. It gave up on the revolution and turned its back on the struggling workers. The proletariat, however, was not yet fully developed as a class. It lacked the organization and experience necessary to carry out the revolution on its own. The outcome of the failure of the Revolution of 1848 was the disintegration of bourgeois liberalism as an emancipatory ideology—and with it, the nation-state as an emancipatory project. As Marx recognized clearly in Louis Bonaparte’s France, nationalism had become a project of the Right. The year 1871 reveals this disintegration of liberal nationalism in two world historical events. The first is Bismarck’s reactionary unification of Germany under Prussian aristocratic supremacy. The second is the Paris Commune, in which the newly emerged working class was able to organize itself as a political force and attempted to seize political power. Both mark, once and for all, the decay of bourgeois ideology as a vehicle for emancipation. It had degenerated into a counterrevolutionary force that stood in the way of any further advancement of human freedom.
The following decades of classical imperialism are the geopolitical and national counterparts of this ideological regression. The nation-state could no longer serve as the site for the advancement of liberal freedom, but could only be critically assessed as a catalyst for the capitalization of backward countries, a necessary evil for the development of the proletariat that inherits the emancipatory potential.
On the blog “People of Color Organize!” there is a new post, “The Little Known History of Germany’s Genocidal Second Reich in Africa!” The short post expresses anger over the silence about these crimes in comparison to the public knowledge of the genocide of the Jews. The author writes, “I mean how many times have we heard about the horrors and brutality of Germany’s Third Reich, how they methodically set out to exterminate the Jewish race,” but how little is known about the German genocide against Africans. The author continues, “In short, The Nazis took their avarice way too far when they started to exterminate ‘white people.’”
The author does note the fact that the atrocities against Jews were actually regarded with indifference amongst some of the Allied Forces, saying, “not that the Allied Forces could have really cared less about the Jews that were being exterminated.” And furthermore that what got the Allies in the war was the intention to prevent the Germans’ desire for global domination, writing “remember Germany was vying for total supremacy of the world, and was threatening The Allied Forces power.”
But the author then strongly contradicts these statements arguing:
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[Update Below]
I recently linked to the short article “Tea Party Protests and the White Working-Class” by Andrew Epstein, which attempts to “begin a discussion” about “populism, race and class.” Epstein relies on a story about a retired social worker who joins the tea party protests, as an example of working-class individuals that are involved in the movement, to inquire into “the dynamics of class and race that contribute to populist movements and ultimately cedes large swaths of the American working class to the racial chauvinism that has historically served to limit its transformative power.”
Epstein thoughtfully critiques the way the New York Times portrays the link between having one´s house foreclosed on and joining the conservative movement. He writes: “The New York Times, itself so muddled in ruling class ideology, presents the transition as if it were a natural occurrence: of course someone foreclosed on by a big bank would embrace a conservative ideology which ultimately favors the power of the banks.”
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From Radical Archives:
Judith Butler:
I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.
Excerpt from Democracy and Nature:
One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.
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From the conference “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left” organized by the The Platypus Affiliated Society in November of last year.
Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.
In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.
As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.
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Not an inch for the Fascists! No pasaran!
It’s rare to go to an action and leave with the certainty that we’ve achieved a victory. No footnotes, no relativising it: when we went to Dresden to take part in mass blockades intended to stop Europe’s biggest Nazi-march from going ahead, we won. Some ten thousand people shut down the area where the Nazis were planning to march, making it impossible for the police to ‘guarantee the safety’ of the Neo-Nazi demonstration, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.
The mass-blockades were organized on the initiative of the antifascist alliance No Pasaran? a german-wide
network of antifascist groups and were supported by civil society groups, [left/liberal] parties and unions. In the run-up more than 600 organizations and more than 2000 individuals signed a list of support, declaring that they would come to Dresden to block the nazis. Some weeks before Dresden Authorities confiscated posters of the Alliance, which mobilized for the mass-blockades and forbid rallies, nazis attacked supporters of the Alliance and the police proudly announced the acquisition of american pepperball-guns.
Two texts on the problems of anti-imperialism:
Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925
By Loren Goldner
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html
‘The Anti-Imperialism of Fools’: A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement.!
By Camila Bassi
In ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies
http://www.acme-journal.org/vol9/Bassi10.pdf
January, 24, 2010, Germany — Neo-Nazis across Europe are planning to march on Dresden on February 13th. A broad coalition of over 200 groups — left, ecology, labor, student, youth, human rights and anti-fascist — has called for counter-protest, for broad-scale civil disobedience to prevent the Nazi march. “We are colorful and we are placing our selves in the way of the brown mob. From our side, there will be no escalation.”
