From Postmodernism to Postsecularism-- A Review

In January of 2012, I reviewed Eric Walberg's book, Post-Modern Imperialism (Clarity Press, 2011). I enthusiastically concluded that:

Walberg has offered a welcome taxonomy of imperialism from its nineteenth-century genesis until today; he has given a plausible explanation of imperialism’s contours since the exit of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism from the world stage; and he has convincingly described Israel’s unique role in the continuing reshaping of imperialism’s grasp for world domination.

Further, Walberg gave a needed response to misguided leftists who were quick to label Islamic resistance to US and Israeli predation as “Islamo-fascist.” Much of the US and European left took a smug, chauvinistic posture--a posture that coincided with the interests of imperialism-- toward fighters in the Muslim world daring to defy Western intervention and interference. They ignorantly announced that religious “fundamentalism” fatally tainted their resistance. Walberg struck a powerful blow against these immature conclusions.

Now Walberg has undertaken a more ambitious project in his new book, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization (Clarity Press, 2013). His argument can be summarized-- without too much violence to its nuances-- as:

1. The last great secular social justice project-- socialism-- has failed with the demise of the Soviet Union.

2. Islam and its attendant political-social-economic doctrines are viable alternative routes to social justice.

3. Islam is the only alternative that can deliver social justice. Therefore, Islam is the universal way to social justice.

Of course Walberg goes to great lengths to shore this argument with a detailed, fascinating history of Islam and its currents that, alone, is worth the price of admission. He explores the relative shortcomings of other religions, a brief that is factually accurate, but, like the account of Islam, tellingly selective.

Hints of this thesis were embedded in the earlier book, Post-Modern Imperialism. I noted in my review: 

In the same vein, it is an exaggeration to portray Islam (or any other religion) as inherently anti-imperialist: in his words, “The unyielding anti-imperialist nature of Islam, its rejection of the fundamental principles of capitalism concerning money, its refusal to be sidelined from economic and hence political life…”

Unfortunately, Islam has the same tortured relationship with imperialism as have all the major religions. Precisely because they possess no robust doctrinal opposition to imperialism in general, all major religions have stood on both sides of the barricades.

The Islamist movement, Hamas, for example, stands as an important component of today's anti-imperialist front.

But it was not always this way. US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, speaking in Jerusalem on December 20, 2001, affirmed that the rise of Hamas coincided with “the promotion of the Islamic movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement... with the tacit support of Israel” as reported by Dean Andromidas in Global Outlook (Summer 2002). Andromidas quoted Kurtzer: “Israel perceived it as better to have people turn towards religion than toward a nationalistic cause [like the PLO].” PLO leader Yasser Arafat is quoted from the Italian press:

But Hamas is a creature of Israel which gave Hamas money, and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarek.

And

Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations.

In the same issue of Global Outlook, author Hassane Zerrouky (Hamas is a Creature of Mossad) outlines how “Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat's Fatah movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal repression and intimidation.” (reprinted in Global Outlook from L'Humanité).

Thus, while honest revolutionaries must recognize Hamas’s role in defending Palestinians from imperialism today, honesty equally demands acknowledgment of its sordid role in collaborating with Israel in the destruction of secular nationalism and the Palestinian left. It's difficult to find an “unyielding anti-imperialist nature” in this treachery.

Egyptian Communists acknowledge this vulnerability to imperialist manipulation in the August 3 statement of their Central Committee:

One of the objectives of the projects of imperialism in the Middle East is the establishment of states on religious grounds, which serves mainly Zionist plan to declare Israel a Jewish state for all Jews in the world, as well as the important results of  pushing these religious countries to inevitably get caught up in sectarian conflict. And it necessarily creates strategic divisions and fragmentations of the Arab countries and brings the conflict between Sunni - Shiite, Muslim - Christian, Muslim - Jewish to replace the Arab-Israeli national liberation conflict, to replace the social class struggle among the peoples of the Arab countries, and to replace the struggle against authoritarian regimes  allied with the imperialist global and international monopolies.

Most Arab socialists and Communists have sought unity with organized Islamic anti-imperialist organizations, sometimes successfully, as with Hizbullah and Lebanese Communists. But on other occasions that trust has been brutally betrayed, as with the slaughter of the Tudeh (Communists) in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For Marxists, the major religions are a sometime ally in the struggle against imperialism.

Insofar as they welcome cooperation and reject collaboration with the class enemy, Islam and the other major religions will find consistent friends in Marxist-Leninists. Thus, we welcome and support the current shift in the leadership of the Catholic Church toward the cause of the poor and against the ravages of capitalism, just as we regretted the alienation of past Popes from the fate of the Catholic masses.

Contrary to Walberg's premise number two-- the centerpiece of the above argument-- Islam and the other major religions fall far short of offering an adequate ethics of social justice for today's world. The Quran, like the doctrines of the Catholic Church, forbids usury, the collecting of interest on debt. Absent usury, Walberg believes that a comprehensive practice of charity will provide Islam with a complete program of social justice for today and tomorrow.

Aside from the fact that religious practitioners and their leaders conveniently find ways to sidestep or obscure the prohibition of the collecting of interest, “usury” fails to even remotely capture the prevalence and depth of modern-day labor exploitation. The Catholic Church's condemnation of “excess” profits fails for the same reasons. To suggest that charity alone can solve the incredible poverty, unemployment, and economic inequality of, say, a country like Mali seems patently improbable. And the solution of charity seems dangerously close to the answer advocated by the apologists for unfettered capitalism.

Likewise, the Hebrew concept of “Jubilee,” as an admirable moral prescription of debt removal and property restoration and an answer to the inequities of antiquity, will not put a moral dent in contemporary capitalism. That said, the vital principles of economic justice found in the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran suggest a posture toward the ravages of capitalism. A casual reader of the texts held sacred by the respective religions will find much encouragement for a condemnation of the process of capitalist accumulation. Should believers read those texts with earnestness, they would undoubtedly become Communists as well as believers!

My own-- perhaps eccentric-- view is that the major religions cannot escape the charge of hypocrisy unless they embrace socialism, the contemporary embodiment of the moral codes of their founders. Unfortunately, most religious leaders in our time choose to accommodate capitalism.

Walberg is not insensitive to the alternative vision of Marx and Communism. He devotes a full chapter to “Postsecularism: Marx and Muhammad,” going to great lengths to show that Islam answers the questions posed by Marxism while avoiding its “shortcomings.” 

Destructive to his argument, he misunderstands the Marxist theory of value as follows:

Kapital's weakness-- the labor theory of value-- is a materialist reductio ad absurdum, denying the 'value' of 'unproductive' labor (the elements brought to bear by the capitalist related to securing markets, research, innovations, factor management)...

This is fatally confused. Marx recognizes a value contribution in ALL necessary labor culminating in the production of a commodity, including the research, innovation, essential organizational management, etc. Further, he sees a necessary value deduction in the labor essential for a commodity's circulation. What he does not recognize is any value created or socially necessary from the mere fact of ownership. And this contradiction between ownership and labor is precisely the element missing in all of the social doctrines of traditional religions including Islam.

Walberg's confusion about Marx's value theory leads him away from the resolution of the contradiction between value created by labor and the ownership of that value by the capitalist, a contradiction only resolved by class struggle.

This error dooms his well-meant, but naive  synthesis of Islam and Marxism:

The ijtihad-jihad process is in a sense just a more comprehensive version of Marxist praxis [by] emphasizing:

●social unity rather than class struggle

●the family and spiritual life rather than material production

●evolution rather than revolution

While the sentiment is noble, it is irreconcilable with Marxism. Capitalism's rapaciousness-- acknowledged by Walberg-- cannot be eliminated by a retreat to mere spirituality, an unconditional appeal to unity or a common destiny, or the virtue of patience. These are simple facts that religions cannot escape.

I would propose a counter synthesis:

●class struggle as the path to social unity

●the family and spiritual life AND material production

●revolution leading to the realization of these values

which could readily open the road to a Marxist-Islamic understanding and cooperation.

Walberg's book is timely, coming in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring.” One feels a veritable joy in his writings bursting from the optimism generated by the risings in Northern Africa and the Middle East. Unfortunately, that optimism proved short-lived. 

The Islamic governments established in Tunisia and Egypt generated great social rifts culminating in overthrow in one and growing tensions in the other. Open opposition in Libya and Syria drew the intervention of outside forces that swiftly transformed the struggle into imperialist regime change, destabilization of the regions, and enormous human and infrastructure destruction. Grievances were quickly appropriated by US and NATO meddlers who seized an opportunity to shape the outcomes.

In a little over a year, the rise of Islamic civilization that Walberg foresaw was dashed on the rocks of divisiveness and foreign intervention, just as it has in other times and places.

For the Marxist left, the Arab Spring provoked reservations and guarded sympathy, even apart from nefarious outside interference. On one hand, the rising against entrenched, reactionary authority was a welcome expression of popular will. On the other hand, the risings appeared to be more rebellions than revolutions. That is, the goals of the insurgents were neither united nor well-formed.

As events unfolded, these fears were borne out. Rather than challenge the structures of privilege and exploitation, sides were drawn around different attitudes toward tradition and “modernity,” secularism and spiritualism. While real and not fanciful, these differences do not touch the deeper relations of oppression. As with modern-day Western liberals who are occupied with lifestyle decisions and personal choices, the battles contested in the Arab Spring guaranteed that the poverty and exploitation of the masses would remain untouched.

One hopes are for the revival of a vibrant Marxist-Leninist movement in these countries to nurture these developments from rebellion to revolution.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

“Middle Class Revolution”: A New End of History?

The US is notoriously unkind to “intellectuals.” Popular culture portrays intellectuals as absent-minded, divorced from the everyday world, and obsessed with spinning useless, but harmless abstractions. They are good to keep contained in universities where they can give future cogs in the capitalist machine a taste, but not a passion for, impractical thought. Regrettably, those posing as intellectuals have gone far to earn contempt, favoring arcane, specialized languages and scholastic debates.

That's not to say that there is no room for thinkers in the US, but they are dubbed “pundits,” “experts,” “researchers” or “consultants,” words that ring with practicality and single-mindedness; they are purveyors of small, easily digested ideas and not the “big” ideas associated with intellectuals.

In the US, we are taught to distrust big ideas unless they are linked to religions. But then religion has been compartmentalized, shunted off to Sunday mornings or weddings and funerals. All the big ideas we need were decided with the ratification of the US Constitution.

We can thank corporate marketers and their masters for our continuing alienation from big ideas and taste for small ones. They prefer ideas that are easily and flashily packaged, readily digested, and quickly obsolesced. They select for us ideas that can go “viral,” grabbing the attention of not thousands, but millions. They select ideas that easily fit in a two-minute TV commentary or on 6 or 8 column inches of news print. Intellectuals didn't invent the term “sound bite.” Nor did they invent “twitter.” Corporate taste makers did. So what we get in the market place of ideas are small ideas, commodified ideas with shiny packages.

Thus, it may be hard to understand how Francis Fukuyama fits into the world of ideas. We know him for his celebrated 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, an ambitious intellectual tome designed to place triumphant capitalism and its attendant bourgeois democracy at the pinnacle of a long historical, dialectical process. A big idea indeed!

Of course it wasn't that difficult to conjure a motive for this rising star of the Right. On the heels of the fall of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries, Fukuyama saw the opportunity to mark "paid” to the theoretical foundations of Marxism by co-opting the Hegelian “dialectics” that Marx was schooled in and replacing the socialist ideal with something that looked remarkably like the socio-economic system of late twentieth-century US capitalism. Moreover, since Fukuyama had discovered the “end of history,” we needn't worry about any serious future military conflagrations or rebellions because we were entering the blissful era of market justice, parliamentary democracy, and human rights.

Fukuyama's big ideas can take small credit for the pious military crusades led by the US ruling class in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently in Libya and Syria, as well as the meddling in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. Those who failed to accept the end of history soon felt the wrath of history's enforcer. At the same time, the resistance to Fukuyama's vision of history's end challenged his big idea. The intense confrontation between the US and peoples in the Middle East and Latin America shattered the idea that with the demise of the Soviet Union the world would rush to embrace the values of the US and Europe.

With the “end of history” forestalled by unforeseen events, Fukuyama knocked around the research institute/think tank/academic circuit, writing books and resisting the temptation to join the courtiers of the mass media trading in small, nasty ideas. He passed on the enormous earnings available to the likes of the O'Reilly's, Limbaugh's, or the other aristocrats of wind-baggery. Instead, he scoured the landscape to find new opportunities to float big ideas.

And now he's back with a new big idea.

Fukuyama won a think-piece in the June 28/29 weekend Wall Street Journal entitled “The Middle Class Revolution.” He argues that “All over the world, today's political turmoil has a common theme: the failure of governments to meet the rising expectations of the newly prosperous and educated.” Cognizant of the worldwide mass risings of recent years, Fukuyama chooses this moment to offer an explanation, a theoretical explanation for those risings, an explanation palatable and comforting to US elites.

He rightly understands that linking the most recent mass upsurges requires sizable ideas. While there are many similarities, there are many differences as well. Successful exposition of their common features would tell us much about the underlying processes and likely offer a glimpse into the future. In short, it would give us a theory of contemporary social change, a decidedly big idea.

Unfortunately, he gets it all wrong.

He builds his case around reflections on events in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey, a mixed collection neither reflective of all of the mass activity of our time nor sharing many common features. Seduced by recent headlines and sensationalist accounts, Fukuyama finds the “middle class” as the revolutionary agent in all cases. Besides the elusiveness of the term, he offers no evidence beyond youth, cell phones, and the presence of a vaguely sensed entrepreneurial spirit to justify the assignment of this role. And he is equally slippery in explaining what constitutes a “middle class.” Instead, he considers a series of candidates: income ($6,000-30,000 year), relative income (the middle of a country’s income distribution), and relative level of consumption (greater than the subsistence level of the poor). Rejecting these, he settles on “education, occupation, and the ownership of assets,” none of which is produced as evidence regarding any of the particular countries under review. In fact, the demographics of the four “revolutions” fail to show common attributes; nor do they demonstrate a rising of the “middle class.”

When Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vender in Tunisia, set himself afire in December of 2010, he became the symbol for the uprisings that pundits have dubbed “the Arab Spring.” Tunisia, under Ben Ali, was one of the success stories of neo-liberalism, a poster child for corporate-friendly “competitiveness” and foreign investment. Its industrial and service economies were relatively well developed. 

While the neo-liberal regimen delivered growth, modest GDP/capita, some social benefits (education and welfare), it was rocked by the economic crisis and the scourge of high unemployment. The youth (constituting nearly half of the population) endured one of the world's highest unemployment rates: 30.7%. As in the US, Tunisian youth are relatively well educated, but denied access to meaningful employment. The relative affluence of Tunisian elites enjoying the fruits of a growing economy and the lack of opportunity for a youthful population spurred the overthrow of Ben Ali.

Egypt presents a different picture. While Sadat and Mubarak also embraced the tenets of neo-liberalism, they did so in the shadow of Nasser's legacy of anti-imperialism, public ownership and social welfare. Moreover, free market capitalism fared far worse in this country. Despite a large industrial base and due, in part, to a relatively large agricultural sector (56.5% of Egyptians live outside of urban areas), Egypt achieved a GDP/capita roughly only 2/3 of that of Tunisia. 

But Egypt shares with Tunisia an extremely youthful population with massive un- and underemployment. With little government educational expenditure, it is no surprise that Egyptians have a relatively low participation in higher education.

Egyptian professionals-- the social base for the Muslim Brotherhood-- could count as a “middle strata,” though they are a small part of the population. Most Egyptians, however, enjoy an income only marginally above poverty, marking membership in what would properly be considered the working class.

The global economic downturn only brought the plight of young Egyptians to the fore and prompted mass action and the deposing of Mubarak. The subsequent Morsi presidency brought a further disintegration of the economy and a spike in unemployment and poverty. The Muslim Brotherhood failed to attempt an exit from neo-liberalism and restored the foreign policy of Mubarak, even betraying the Syrian government to imperialism.

The people have again taken to the streets. In the words of Salah Adly, General Secretary of the Egyptian Communist Party, Egyptian Communists believe “that what happened on 30^th June is a second wave of the Egyptian revolution that is stronger and deeper than the first wave in 2011. It has taken place to correct the path of the revolution and seize it back from the forces of the extreme religious right...”

The street demonstrations in Turkey, a country that has one historic foot in the Arab world and a tentative one in Europe, is more a political struggle than an explosion of economic discontent. Turkey's demographics are similar to a European country, a poorer European country like Portugal or Poland, but with a much higher percentage of youth in the population. The Islamist president Erdogan represents cultural traditions that conflict with that of more secular youth. Of course others, including workers, who have economic demands, support the demonstrations, as do unemployed youth. But they do not challenge the structures of bourgeois democracy or monopoly capitalism. Turkish Communists recognize this fact. As Kemal Okuyan, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkey, states “... this is an outburst of a huge social energy. It is powerful in extent and effect. But there are some Marxist criteria for defining a situation as a revolutionary crisis. We are far from that. At least for now...”

Brazil, Fukuyama's final example of a “middle class” revolution, demonstrates its own unique demographics and weaknesses. Despite showing exceptional economic growth, Brazil counts as one of the most economically unequal countries in the world. Highly urbanized, Brazil's poverty is concentrated in city neighborhoods, with all of the attendant social problems of poverty intensified. The large and growing service sector affords enough jobs to contain unemployment below crisis levels. But grinding poverty and the contrasting extreme concentration of wealth produce a persisting tinderbox.

Brazil's social democratic government has shown occasional anti-imperialist spunk, standing up to US arrogance at different times. This, along with the government's competent management of the capitalist economy, and some social welfare initiatives, has spawned national pride. At the same time, support for the government is fragile because of its inability to dent the massive economic and social inequalities suffered by working people. This contradiction between national sentiment and contempt toward the working class was brought home by the mass objection to new soccer stadia, in a soccer-crazed country, expressed by the mass demonstrations.

Clearly what all of these countries do share is a popular response to the failure of leaders, institutions, and political parties to overcome the legacy and reality of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. Fukuyama hides this failing behind the mythology of middle class dissatisfaction with the level of consumerism and cultural expression: they rebel because they want to be like us in Europe and the US. One would never guess that an almost unprecedented and persistent economic calumny has shaken the social and political foundations of nearly every country over the last five years. One would never guess that all four of the countries under discussion suffer from severe economic and political problems unsolved by their past and current leaders.

In Tunisia, Ben Ali's embrace of neo-liberal fundamentalism was a bankrupt answer to youth unemployment. In Egypt, corrupted leaders brazenly counted on the accommodation with imperialism to prop up their aloof rule over an abused people. Turkey's leader, like politico-theological leaders of other persuasions, overstepped the limits of governance and opened the door to airing the many grievances of the opposition, formerly trumped by religious commitment. And Brazil's social-democratic government learned the folly of attempting to manage capitalism while promising to rectify its inequities.

From the Indignados to the Occupy movement, from the revival of the Latin American left to the Arab Spring, authentic popular up-risings have emerged from the failure of capitalism to deliver the future and security so seemingly assured before the great crisis of 2008. Millions have been failed by the institutions, parties, and leaders that they formerly trusted. It's not as though they have been dealt a bad hand, but it is as though there is no good hand to be found in the deck.

Spinning theories based on such a corrupted sociological idea as the “middle class” guarantees failure. Of course one can't blame Fukuyama entirely for buying in on one of the great intellectual frauds of our time. Everyone, from the Chamber of Commerce to the misleaders of labor, likes to remind us that we are all members of a vast collection of people located economically between the rich and the poor. Within this distorted picture there is something for everyone. We all share home ownership, a good job, vacations, family, and comforting values, so the fantasy goes. The unfortunate poor are with us because they have failed, though they deserve our compassion and, perhaps, our charity. The rich are with us because they are successful and merit our respect. This harmonious picture is only disrupted when the rich get too greedy or the poor get rebellious.

This myth serves the ruling class, their political flunkies, and labor's class collaborationists in maintaining class peace and stability. But most importantly, it obscures the real class divide between employers and employees.

The divisions that spark genuine revolution are not between some muddy notion of a middle class at odds with an equally obscure specter of government, but between the power and dominance of capitalist corporations and the diverse and largely unrepresented workers who enrich them. This sharply drawn class division accounts for the fundamentally economic, but also cultural and spiritual alienation of youth. Whether conscious or not, this division generates discontent and outrage. Expressed in many ways, the conflict between the employers and their employees stands behind the conflicts of the twenty-first century. And only its resolution in favor of the employee class – the working class-- will bring these conflicts to a close.

It's not a new idea; it's a big, but not too big of an idea; and it’s an idea that promises an escape from the failure of capitalism: Socialism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com