Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 00:10:44 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Katsiaficas: "Coexistence With Islamic Fundamentalism?"


I just wanted to revisit the question of Katsiaficas'
essay and make a few general points in response to
some posts on here:

1) Katsiaficas is not a "third worldist" - rather he
is a part of the autonomist wing of the post-New Left
milieu, and a former student of Critical Theorist
Herbert Marcuse, which is reflected on his attention
to the margins of society (people of color, women,
youth) which for him are not only 'the oppressed' but
also some of its more privileged sectors (students,
intellectual laborers, etc.) as the 'conflict zone' of
our time - this is very different from the typical
third worldist perspective which certainly would never
see first world, middle class students or others as
central to social conflict! 

2) Katsiaficas made a bold and noble defense of the
black block after Seattle '99 in the face of an
overwhelming condemnation from the NGO-dominated
mainstream Left, who were threatening to "turn people
in" and "send them to jail". His argument was very
reasonable and very simple - "don't throw the radicals
overboard". Personally I respect him for having the
guts to say that when so many others started going to
the police and showing their true colors, really
disgusting tactics, which, I imagine, would make Phil
Ochs roll over in his grave after all the teaching he
supposedly gave these folks about liberalism back in
their heyday.

3) Katsiaficas has probably thought far more deeply
about the complex ethics of tolerance and intolerance
than most of his critics have, as he has been one of
the few who is willing to voice support for a
plurality of truly different forms of social
organization despite his own radically democratic /
anticapitalist politics, which at first glance, might
seem entirely universalist in their implications - his
book "The Promise of Multiculturalism" is testament to
this, in which he argues that the universal resides in
the particular, in other words that for instance,
black liberation benefits everybody, including white
people, feminism benefits everybody, including men,
and we can infer from this, the liberation of the
Islamic world benefits everybody, including the West
and the 'secular priests' of Christendom (as he
argues, "many Marxists lament the appearance of
identity politics. They see it as shattering the
promise of proletarian universalism, but they miss the
latent universality present in new social movements.
Identity construction can be a form of enacting the
freedom to determine one's conditions of existence, to
create new categories within which to live...at their
best, autonomous movements like Italian Autonomia or
the German Autonomen bring the latent universal
content of single-issue identity politics to
consciousness...multiple centers of revolutionary
thought and action are historical necessities posing
the features of a decentered future society in the
making"). Privately, he has expressed his admiration
for the 19th century conception of 'panarchy'
http://www.panarchy.org/nettlau/1909.eng.html
celebrated by the anarchist historian Max Nettlau, and
this seems quite compatible with his argument here.

4) While western imperialism and Islamic
fundamentalism are said by some to "both suck" I would
question the extent to which we in the West really
understand Islam, even moreso what we *call*
"fundamentalist Islam" since most of what we know is
heavily filtered through the mass media, educational
systems and other untrustworthy sources - how many
people know for instance about the concept of the
'veil of resistance' in which Islamic women have
sometimes used veils as a challenge to Western dress
codes (as for instance currently in France with its
imposition of mandatory secular dress)? How many are
aware of the internal divergences and diversities of
Islam? Frankly, this discussion is beginning to remind
me of Slavoj Zizek's book "Did Somebody Say
Totalitarianism?" in which he argues that the
opposition in the West to what we *call*
totalitarianism is not really an opposition to
totalitarianism but rather an embrace of the ideology
of Western liberal democracy, a sort of reversal that
is not well understood especially insofar as it masks
the totalitarianism of our mass societies, which rely
on precisely this consensus of the absolute evil of
the Other. 

5) Katsiaficas nowhere claims that Bin Laden is a new
Che Guevara in *his own* eyes, he says rather that
many South Koreans see him this way, which is a *very*
different statement, one that is done in the spirit of
*reporting observations* (obviously this is
description and not prescription) and it is quite
dishonest to imply otherwise (it starts to sound like
the right-wing condemnation of cultural studies and
postmodernism right after Sep. 11) especially if you
are going to claim that this is somehow 'confirmed' by
his well-known criticism of Western liberals'
intolerance of Islam and embrace of the rhetoric of
'just war' led by, who else? the American war machine
(Norman Mailer, Jeane Beathke Elshtain, etc.) If
anything it is the inability of some to condemn this
disgusting Left-wing cultural imperialism that has
emerged in recent years, not to mention the actual
wars fought since Sept. 11 that is most disturbing to
my sensibilities (to see anarchists lining up next to
these spineless 'intellectuals' is even more absurd,
and I have not heard one of you who jumped on
Katsiaficas say that you oppose the war or that you
disagree with these turnabouts, what does *your*
silence say? If Katsiaficas' silence speaks than so
does yours).

6) I agree with the person who rejected the rhetoric
of what it is or is not our "duty" to oppose or not
oppose, because I do not think that we really
understand the internal diversity of Islam nearly as
well as we like to think we do, as Hakim Bey and
others have demonstrated, there have been many strands
of Islam that have been quite liberatory and
open-ended, and sometimes these are branded as
'fundamentalist' by ignorant Westerners who are
themselves quite 'fundamentalist' in their uncritical
worship of the ideology of secularism as supposedly
universally more valid than religious or other forms
of social organization, go read Virilio or somebody
about the power of a unashamedly spiritual critique of
the absolutist materialism of our culture.

7) The 'antiglobalization' discourse of Amory Starr
and George Katsiaficas is consistently anticapitalist,
it not 'procapitalist' by any stretch, both of these
thinkers are far more Marxist than I will ever be, for
instance, but I respect their work and anyone who has
read a little of it will recognize that it is not the
typical 'antimperialist' rhetoric, it is coming from a
much different perspective than that, one of respect
for local autonomy and self-determination of all
peoples, ON THEIR OWN TERMS, as a sort of panarchist
type discourse of the Max Nettlau kind, or a radical
multiculturalism, which of course means that
non-secular cultural norms might be part of that
resistance, since to demand that all resistance
conform to Western standards is to claim that there is
in fact only one way to live, and frankly if you think
this is the case, then like Emma Goldman, I do not
want to live in your world or be a part of your
'revolution' (this is what I meant when I said the
Insurrectionists seem to have little respect for
difference, in other words if your universality is one
that embraces 'true' universality, then my difference
is one that embraces 'true' difference - is there a
meeting place between?? Can not a supposed respect for
difference, a supposed universality that vehemently
effaces any nonsecular discussion as oppressive become
its opposite??)

8) It matters not at all whether the differences that
are being respected by a radical multiculturalism are
"real" or "essential", what matters is that every
individual and voluntarily associated group of
individuals are able to determine their own lives and
futures as they see fit and in whatever style they
choose, regardless of what we may think about it, so
long as they are not forcing anyone into anything we
should be open to it, in my opinion. Internal
resistance can and should be supported but in
conjunction with this there should be a serious and
concerted effort not only to not tow the line of the
mainstream Left, in its embrace of 'just war'
rhetoric,  but also take a long hard look at what we
have been socialized to believe about the great Other
of the West, which is Islam. Finally while Shawn
argues that "capitalist markets 'respect difference' -
at least as long as 'difference' never attempts to
assert itself beyond the sphere of
interchangeability", it seems obvious that the whole
point of a radical multiculturalism of the kind argued
for by Max Nettlau, Starr, Katsiaficas and myself
would be to reject this extremely limited notion of
difference and to put forth the obvious point that a
radical respect for difference would necessrily
require for people to *not* be dependent on state or
capital for their survival.



 
 


===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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