From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Re: Re: Reply to Harald
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 10:07:45 -0500


A few quick notes.

1.  Indeed, Caffentzis call for capture and trial in the world court struck
me as odd at best.  Who really thinks that that would have anything to do
with "justice" (a word I have no use for)?  Caffentzis certainly can't.

2.  Do you really think that Hussein's regime came closest to post-WWII
Hitlerism?  Really?  You must be joking.  At least try Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge.  Or any other Middle Eastern country, since all of them were as
bad (including Israeil in many ways.)

3.  Secularism has its limits.  Look at Turkey.  Extremely reactionary
government, cyanide gas for thousands of Kurdish people, and totally
secular.  In fact, the secularism of the gov't has been a big boost for
Islamic Fundamentalists because practitioners of Islam are quite openly
attacked in Turkey.  That is why posing the problem as one of Islam vs.
secularism is a dead end.

4.  I have read a few things, including the idea that autonomist Marxism
leaves open a non-critique of nationalism.  Maybe, I am not sure.  Since
autonomist Marxism has many strains, I don't know.  Aufheben is certainly
autonomist in many ways and NOT soft on nationalism.  Read their stuff on
Chiapas.  What I do know is that a focus on class composition makes the
question ideology only part of the process and secondary to the practical
actions that working class people take.

5.  While we can make a critique of Islam, I suggest we think about in the
context of the 20th-21st centuries, not in the context of what is said in
the Qur'an.  The return of Jihad as 'Holy War' has taken place in the last
200 years.  From the 10th Century to about the 18th, Jihad as Holy War was
virtually non-existant in political practice.  Jihad also means a great
struggle against evil in a broad sense, and was often interpreted as an
internal struggle within a person, a battle for one's soul, as it were.
>From the 10th to the 15th centuries, Islam was widely recognized as the most
tolerant religion and Jews and Christians were recognized as people of the
Book, even if they had not accepted all of Allah's word.  To say that Islam
is doctrinally worse than Christianity or Judaism is wrong.  To say that the
most reactionary ideological stew in the Middle East takes the form of an
Islamic Revivalism is certainly true.  That is why I raised the US, not
because being a non-Christian will get you killed, but because religious
fundamentalism is a feature of the current period (I left out religious
fundamentalism in Russia and other parts of the former USSR, but it is bad
there too).  As such, what are the preconditions for something other?  The
Iranian oil workers who overthrew the Shah in 1978 (a regime as bad as
Iraq's) were not Islamicists but they were unable to offer an alternative to
Khomeni in the long run.

6.  I suppose the real question is, "What burden do we place on
consciousness?"  Is it possible to educate people out of their religiosity?
I don't think so.  Can we think about this in terms of class composition?
Will US intervention not set back, as this attack did, the positive
recomposition of the working class, of anti-capitalist forces?  What are the
goal of our interventions?  What role does an alternative vision of society
play in all this?  Maybe we can start a more useful track on this by
starting from these questions, eh?  Let's ponder what attitude towards Islam
in that light.

Cheers,
Chris



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