The future of working class politics?

[rhys gethin]

Thomsy - do you know Claude Cockburn's story about his Father? He was so polite that he ALWAYS wrote a letter of thanks for any favour - and for thank-you letters too. As a result, says Cockburn, whenever his Father came into contact with someone similarly given, a lifelong correspondence ensued. I am beginning to believe we are getting into such a situation here, and fear that if this goes on, we shall really be getting to be, as brassicattack would have it, 'pushing on a bit age wise' before it is concluded. It is not that I want the last word, honest, but that I don't like my position's being misrepresented! I am not an economist and HOPE you are not an idealist. There are three elements to this discussion - (a) Islam-in-the-Middle-East, about which you know far more than I do, (b) Islam-as-a-minority-in-Britain, about which I know, if not more, at least a different aspect, namely its similarity to other minorities and (c) a sort of Platonic and unchanging 'Islam', which is certainly what the Prophet had in mind (the Koran stays Arabic and so on) and which many Muslims of my acquaintance also believe. That latter is, in my view, unhistorical and impossible: just think of the linguistic problems alone (I remember Koestler's description of sitting on a bus in Tel Aviv and offering a friend a Woodbine in Hebrew: 'Would it please my Lord to make smoke?'). I think you believe in it as somehow 'there', influencing history independently whereas I, having spent most of my life studying texts and the way they are misunderstood, find it very easy to suggest that economics are primary to our readings - which makes me, I think, a sort-of Marxist rather than an economist. You say:

As Muslim communities (or any other cultural grouping) gain critical mass, they are able to insulate themselves from contact with other British communities. You end up with towns where, for example, the people watch Pakistani or international cable media, send back to Pakisatan when they want a wife, and feel no association or need for contact with the other British communities.

There have been very large settlements of immigrants in the past, but they have never gained that critical mass, not even the Roman Catholic Irish and the Orthodox Jews. Yes - there are better opportunities for preserving your own culture nowadays - but there are also huge countervailing forces. I can get Sianel Pedwar Cymru quite easily where I am, for instance - but only a very few of its programmes interest me, because I live here in England. And I, mark you, am someone very strongly concerned with the survival of our culture. From the direction I'm coming from, I could wish there was such a survival-magic as you believe in, but there isn't. I think the Pakistani girls - and boys - wished on these British people come to seem increasingly foreign, and the whole idea more and more daft to the British Muslims as time goes on. But I shouldn't, in the context, have spoken of a 'worldview' - it is daily experience that does the job. You write:

Btw, it is not accurate to equate ‘fundamentalism’ with ‘quaint’ rural traditionalism. The ‘fundamentalist’ movement is a product of the contact of Islam with modernity. The leaders and most militant adherents of the movement come from educated, urban and largely middle class ranks: doctors, engineers, IT technicians, accountants, etc..

And I wholly agree: 'fundamentalists' like Bush are cynical atheists, the sort of people who want OTHER people to live in quaint old villages and be patronized, or delightfully to believe in 'that ole time religion', at which they can fondly and oh-so-intellectually smile. The Oxford Movement of Newman and co. was a similar reaction to modernity, in my opinion: it is a stage groups go through, that's all - including Muslim groups. Bear in mind that the British Government subsidised Maynooth as an RC theological college as a good way to control the Irish, just as the blairies now want to do the standard colonial exercise of creating 'chiefs': some of the chiefs started sympathising with the Indians back then, and some of the new ones will probably turn worker-imam of something surprising. I wait in hope.

I have not read Assef Bayat (though in a minor way Naipaul's 'Beyond Belief' and a few personal contacts give me the idea) and shall do so - and Sayyed Qutb’s ‘Milestones’ too. You know more than I do, but I agree with what's already been written by Yield about Western interference there - what they did to Mossadeqh (sp?), the weakening of the Tudeh Party, the current colonialist invasions and, above all, the American support for a neo-nazi 'Israel' - all made that 'fundamentalist' take-over much easier. ' The core cultural practices are divinely enjoined and become manifest wherever the Muslims find themselves possessed of the authority to establish them', doubtless - as RC social thinking came to dominate in the Irish Republic till the Protestant population was reduced from 13% to 6%. Fortunately, they are not possessed of that authority here, nor, I think, would the children of the community agree to be locked up in picturesque holy reservations.

I think the chances of a Muslim takeover here are therefore minimal, and refuse to get worked up about it. The Middle East, I freely agree, is another, and far more complex. matter.

 

[Thomsy]

Hi Rhys Gethin,

I haven’t been answering to be polite. I have answered because you express ideas which are common within the British Left and which, I believe, are fundamentally wrong.

I generally give a person the benefit of the doubt and apologize if s/he claims I have misrepresented him/her, even when I do not necessarily believe I have misrepresented anything. I have no desire to silence anybody, particularly not if they are simply trying to re-establish their personal dignity. But I think you have the ability to defend yourself and clarify if I really had misrepresented you.

‘Economism’, within Marxist / materialist / Leftist thought, is the presumption that class consciousness spontaneously emerges due to the contradictions of capitalist production. Economism characterizes SWP theory. It goes hand in hand with the SWP belief that the party should effectively tail working-class thinking wherever that leads – that the party should be just ‘one step and one step only’ ahead of the people the party aspires to lead. This stooping to the lowest common political denominator culminates in incidents such as Lindsey German famously saying that standing up for gay or women’s rights would not be a shibboleth for Respect if it meant losing Muslim votes.

I pointed out that in many of your posts you have expressed an economistic confidence. You have repeatedly argued that the ethnic and sectarian loyalties of different cultural communities in Britain will inevitably erode on contact with modernity, with British culture, with the media, with different Worldviews, etc. – that class consciousness will inevitably out. I don’t believe this is inevitably true at all. (Mind you, I’m with Lenin on that one. So I’m probably wrong.)

In your last post, you acknowledge that there are now “better opportunities” for different cultures to preserve their own identities, but that there are also “countervailing forces”.

The point I have been trying to make all along is that official Multi-culturalist theory and practice – aided and abetted by the economistic or brazenly opportunistic thinking of much of the Left – has offered no countervailing force. Rather it has prioritised, justified and institutionalised ethnic and sectarian identities.

Btw, I'm not sure if you realize how many (Muslim) academics have been forced to flee the Islamic World after daring to question the divine nature and eternal, immutable verity of the Quran (and Sunna)? If you suggest there is one a grammatical error in the Quran… well, frankly, just don’t. It’s not worth the attendant risks. Academics used to have the option to flee to the West. It’s not so easy now. Did you read last week about that teacher in France – a French secularist – who’s now on the run from safe house to safe house after foolishly disputing the eternally-&-universally-valid ideal-status of the Prophet's model?

I have said the the core Islamic texts are inviolable to a degree that most people in the West cannot comprehend. Muslim societies, on the other hand, have shown local idiosyncrasies and have appropriated elements from pre-existing cultural forms. And there have been periods when Islam, even in the Arab World, has seen its dominant position eroded and temporarily eclipsed by other secular or nationalist ideologies. But the marked feature today – as Muslim commentators themselves acknowledge – is that wahabbi and salafi Islam, bankrolled by massive funding from the Gulf and inculcated by any number of educational and propaganda initiatives, is tending to define Islam everywhere from Preston to the Philippines. It offers a stark, barren vision of Islam, drawing on the most exclusive and intolerant features that are actually to be found in the core teachings of that faith. And as it supplants and de-legitimizes other strands of tradition, the global Islamic community is actually tending to become more monolithic. This is happening partly because the sponsors of that creed are highly motivated and make no economistic assumptions.

Can you cite where I even once discussed the possibility of "a Muslim takeover” of Britain? My argument, as repeatedly and clearly stated, was that increased communalist tensions in Britain would be used to justify a more authoritarian state. Who is trying to misrepresent whom?

You know, you have claimed I have had insufficient “exposure” to dialectics – without adducing any argument to support that claim. You told me I have never been in, and am thus incapable of understanding, “weak groups” – with no evidence upon which to base this claim other than, paradoxically, my references to the oppressed minority communities within which I have lived and worked. You have said that I was basing my arguments on a singularly Egyptian experience, when I have been employed across the Arab World. And you continue to claim – erroneously, and rather comically if you knew the truth – that I lack contact with or knowledge of Muslim communities in Britain. You can’t really dish out ad hominems like that and then cry foul when I criticise things that you’ve actually and repeatedly written.

Doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy talking to you, though. I’m supposed to be spending every moment this weekend writing on something far less amusing. So I've been grateful for the interesting intermissions. Take care.

 

[Thomsy]

G'day, Yield, I have had to revise my reply to your last post, though I have tried to leave it as accomodating and irenic as possible.

If you’re still there, though, I actually wanted to ask something. You said:

For me Britishness is one of voluntary peaceful assimilation, since the end of colonialism anyway... Anyway multi-culturalism requires that you come from a culture of multi-culturalism. I always thought it was the polite way of saying, you'll integrate eventually, give it time.

Do you mean that you think multi-culturalism as a theory and practice is meant to produce cultural assimilation? And if so, are you aware that most advocates of Multi-culturalism believe the doctrine is intended to achieve the reproduction of different cultures – cultural diversity – within in one polity?