"Fascism and the Left": Nick Cohen responds

The Observer columnist Nick Cohen has written to me about my post on Fascism and the Left, which stemmed from his article in the New Statesman last week on the supersession of the principled Left. He says:

Many thanks for your kind words and mild criticism.... I accept everything you say, but still think you're wrong. What is novel is that no one from the Marxist tradition has ever embraced theocracy before. I'm sorry to quote myself - but then if I don't, who will? - but as I say in my latest book: 'Marx abominated religion. For the crime of preferring feudal bureaucracy to bourgeois democracy he would have tied copies of Das Kapital around the necks of the SWP leaders and thrown them into the Thames.' Marx saw himself as a part of the Enlightenment tradition. What's left of the far left is embracing the Counter Enlightenment. This is new.

You are right about the 1930s and the similarities between Lenin and Mussolini. But you're missing the wilful determination of many on the left to abandon what was for better or for worse their basic world view and go through a shameful and laughable inversion of their principles. As I also discuss in my book, there are good reasons for this, not least the absolute failure of Marxist Leninism. You might reply that what went on in the 1930s was worse, and it was. Or that if there had been religious totalitarian regimes around at the time they would have been supported. Maybe that's true too. But there weren't, and not just Marxists but many others on the left prided themselves on their rejection of superstition and rule by priests. That's the principle which has gone and in the process of losing it lots of people are making a nonsense of everything they profess to believe.

In other words, by maintaining there's nothing new under the sun, you're actually letting your opponents off the hook. (Bet no one's accused you of that before.)

I have written back:

Many thanks for your message, which I'm very pleased to have.... You're right about the novelty of Marxist support for theocracy. I said it was unusual, but I ought to have said instead that it was unprecedented. The nearest equivalent I can think of is the sympathy extended to Iran's revolution by Richard Falk - but we can charitably assume he had no idea what he was talking about.

But I don't agree that embrace of the Counter-Enlightenment is the essence of the SWP's rejection of the principles of the traditional Left. You believe I'm letting them off the hook by downplaying that element of their apostasy. But imagine if the party's position were one of 'critical support' for Saddam Hussein as a secular moderniser against Wahhabism and Shi'ah fundamentalism. They would attack Saddam for his compromises with political Islam, while acknowledging that these were expedients forced upon him by the obduracy of US foreign policy and the rapacious character of US oil interests. Their argument would be that theocracy at home and abroad could be defeated only by an appeal to international workers' solidarity, of which Saddam, as a Third World populist and economic nationalist, was an imperfect instrument but the most progressive force available (like Chavez). This would be a secular case reminiscent of many other Trotskyite campaigns (c.f. the Spartacists' support for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan). The civilised Left would not in these circumstances say that the SWP's position had been sanitised of its worst elements and allies; the party would be supporting as a matter of ideology (and not merely realpolitik, as the US did in the 1980s - grotesque and myopic as that stance was) a tyrant whose regime was, as you point out, modelled on Nazi Germany and which received strong support from Joerg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen. The SWP's support for fascism (notably including its wish for Saddam's regime to be militarily victorious), and not its deference to superstition, is its defining characteristic.

You overlook the fact that, whereas the SWP's position is indeed unprecedented for a Marxist party, contemporary fascism is also staking out previously-uncharted territory. So far from believing that there's nothing new under the sun, I consider that both sides have changed radically in the last 20 years. You're concentrating on the 'left' side of that symbiotic relationship to the exclusion of other ideological currents that serve as political Islam's apologists or supporters. The far-Right is much more of a global and insurrectionist movement than it was 20 years ago. The racism and malevolence are constants, but the strident nativism has become less significant relative to violent antisemitism and hostility to democracy. The far-Right is becoming much closer to the "pure" academic model of fascism as (in Roger Eatwell's words) "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way" than it was when led by buffoons such as George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party or John Tyndall of the National Front. The spark for the creation of an "International Third Position" is, of all things, support for political Islam. Partly this is opportunistic - Libya has dried up as a source for funds for extremist groups, but Iran hasn't - and partly it's because Islamism is seen as a potent force to counter Jewish financial power. On those grounds, Horst Mahler of the German NPD supported the destruction of the Twin Towers, just as he'd supported the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics when he was a leader of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Unlike Mahler, the SWP is not a supporter of Islamist terrorism; it is an apologist for Islamist terrorism. I cited its position on 9/11, which has its counterpart in the language used by far-Right ideologues. The late William Pierce, leader of the US National Alliance (and author of the survivalist novel that served as the inspiration for the Soho pub-bomber David Copeland), blamed the attacks on the alienation and hatred generated by the United States. The French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson described the US as the real terrorist. David Irving compared the deaths in NY ("by 19 intelligent and virile young Muslims") with the bombing of Dresden and drew predictable conclusions about who were the real war criminals.

Unlike the NPD or the Front National, the SWP is not a party of the far-Right - but it has taken the route common to other Leninist organisations I've cited, of support for fascism. I can see why you want to stress the party's distinctiveness apart from that position. Its stance on political Islam is indeed unlike anything else on the Left. But that's because it's the only organisation on the Left to replicate the ideology of the contemporary far-Right. Yes, that's new, because not even the most reactionary among other totalitarian-Left organisations is stupid enough to be that consistent.