Fascism and the Left, part III

Jonathan Derbyshire, a philosopher whose excellent new blog I have added to my links, takes issue with the notion that there is no precedent for an alliance between Marxism and theocracy:

There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called 'New Left' in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled 'New Styles in "Leftism"'.

Another philosopher, Jeffrey Ketland of Edinburgh University, also maintains that there are precedents for this peculiar alliance. He has written to me to point out:

One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of "political spirituality", and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects. According to Foucault, the suppression in Iran represented a new kind of "regime of truth", one he approved of. There's a brief discussion of Foucault's view of the Iranian Revolution in Francis Wheen's new book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (pp 84-5).

On the broader topic, it's hard to say to what extent the anti-Enlightenment features of postmodernism and social constructivism animate the views of current far left groups, including SWP and Respect, and the occasional letter to Guardian. To some extent, there is an undercurrent of relativism and sneering towards allegedly Western notions of truth and objectivity. Alan Sokal described this undercurrent as a "weird zeitgeist" in modern academia and beyond. But I would argue that they are predominantly motivated by simple-minded hatred of the US, rather than direct sympathy for Islamic theocracy. For example, I've never seen political leftists directly defending Sharia law, stonings, beheadings, etc., but there's sometimes a disturbing whiff of apologetics.

There is one last (except it probably won't be) point that I would make on this subject. There can be little argument that the totalitarian-Left has mutated in a bizarre direction given its attitudes to clerical fascism. My argument is that this reflects an underlying affinity with fascism that has characterised the far-Left at various times. I believe that coincidence of interest and ideology is becoming more sharply-defined, because at the same time the far-Right has changed too. There is an illuminating discussion of this shift in fascist ideology in a new book by Richard Wolin entitled The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to Postmodernism. Wolin argues, specifically in the context of the French extreme Right, that there is a clver strategy to move from the terrain of biological racism and orthodox fascism to the more 'respectable' guise of cultural racism:

For the sake of making its claims palatable to a wider audience, [the French New Right] cynically appropriated the universalistic values of tolerance and the 'right to difference' for its own xenophobic agenda. Thus, argued [Alain] de Benoist and company, it was the cosmopolitans who were the true racists, insofar as it was they who forced immigrants to submit to the brutal rites of assimilation.... Sounding like a liberal's liberal, de Benoist embraced what might best be described as a nonhierarchical 'diferentialist racism'. No culture was intrinsically better than any other. Instead they were all 'different', and these differences should be respected and preserved.

This, it seems to me, is the key to the convergence of the far-Right and the totalitarian-Left. In place of obviously crude biological racism, modern fascism (in the form Wolin calls 'designer fascism') has adopted a cultural racism that decries the achievements and principles of the Enlightenment. The astonishing spectacle of the far-Left around the Respect coalition defending the progressive character of - among other aspects of Muslim particularism - the hijab is the 'left' variant of the same phenomenon. I stress that we are not talking here of Muslims' right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith, for religious liberty is an essential principle of the Enlightenment tradition. I mean instead the insistence that the character of those observances is itself a principle to be defended. As Salma Yaqoob maintained in the article she contributed to the Socialist Workers' Party's theoretical journal last autumn (emphasis added):

It is notable that the majority of the Muslims playing a leading role in the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition were women, confident in their Islamic identity and increasingly confident in their ability to present themselves as leaders of this broad movement. Contingents of young Muslim women, well organised and often more forthcoming than Muslim men, were a striking feature of all our demonstrations and protests. I would attribute this effect to the fact that, by wearing the hijab (headscarf), many of these women are constantly conscious of their Muslim identity when interacting in public.

COMMENTS: A couple of correspondents comment on Foucault. My brother, Richard, says:

Foucault's relationship to the Enlightenment is a bit more complex than your correspondent suggests. Foucault went through a number of fairly tortured and tortuous chains of reasoning in respect of different intellectual traditions that fed into it and developed from it. By the end of his career he tended to concentrate on criticising the French republican tradition, chiefly the collectivism that looks back to Rousseau, and contrasted it unfavourably with Anglo-American liberalism, advising his students to read Hayek. But there is a fundamental ambivalence about the Enlightenment in him which led other writers on the left, like Habermas, to attack him vociferously. Unlike Foucault, Habermas does have a strong attachment to western secular values and argues for their general validity, even if he needs large tracts of print and theory in which to do it.

Mark Bowles writes:

Regarding your recent posts on Fascism and the Left, would you care to define, briefly, what definitions of 'Fascism'/ 'Fascist' and 'Totalitarian' you are working with? Could I also just add (to a point made not by you but someone you cite) that Michel Foucault was an idiosyncratic thinker and hardly representative of the 'Left' in France or anywhere else. What attracted him to the Iranian revolution was a putative 'spriit of revolt', a throwing off of authority, rather than the Islamic content.

The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way." The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism. It is a broad definition that even so is able to distinguish between clerical reaction (e.g. Franco) and fascism - a point that I consider was missed by Johann Hari in his recent Independent column (which I have been meaning to comment on and will do so) expressing foreboding about a resurgence of Catholic fascism.

A totalitarian order is one characterised by a totalist ideology, a one-party state, a fully-developed secret police, and that possesses a monopoly of weaponry, communications and economic control. A totalitarian party advances that order, and already possesses a totalist ideology and a fundamentally anti-democratic system of internal organisation. This definition accords with the early work - they later revised it - of Brzezinski and Friedrich in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1957).

On the question of cultural racism, an anonymous correspondent writes:

[F]ascism defends particularism against universalism for "ourselves alone" and the New Left defends particularism against universalism for "the Other", making space for exactly the common ground you point to with de Benoist - mutual belief in "difference". Just like the fascists, the New Left also work on the basis of assertion and resolution - there is no truth, so we must allow people to define their own and follow through the results. It's Mill's experiments in living without either his noticing that you needed a civilised people and the rule of law to respect a person's right not to take part.

FURTHER COMMENTS: From John Green:

This idea of cultural racism has indeed been around for a while. I recall while studying for a master's in cultural studies at Salford in the early 1990s that Celia Lurie had coined the phrase "cultural essentialism" to identify this way of defending exclusionist practices. At the time, I think the preferred example was the Loyalist community in Northern Ireland who were trying to defend their way of life as intrinsically valuable, a sort of 'Ulsterism' in such a way as to counter the nationalist version. Arguably it's been around a lot longer, in various forms of 'national sovereignty' and claims of a particular people's 'right to self-determination', both of which advance the specificity of a culture ahead of universalist human rights.

From Bill Martin:

I'm not so sure that the change you note in the right is all that new. Racists have used cultural relativism and particularism before. In the Southern US states 'Separate but equal' was the watch word, respecting the two distinct cultures of 'black' and 'white'. I also recall Botha (I think) defending apartheid, saying how they had given the blacks their own homelands, the Bantustans. After all, the essence of racism is that 'they' don't belong 'here', and no-one would deny 'them' the right to their own homeland, which happens not to be this one. Lincoln advocated colonisation of the blacks, Hitler had the Madagascar plan (to be honest, I think the Nazis would have loved Israel, it would have made ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe so much easier, 90% of the anti-semitic anxiety was precisely the non-location of a Jewish homeland). The biological has moved in and out of vogue, but the separateness is the key to all racist ideology.

From Charles Magoffin:

Your exchange with Nick Cohen has been interesting. I was particularly struck by Cohen's comment: "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."

Far from it. By coincidence, only yesterday (on a train journey to London from Birmingham) I was reading Isaiah Berlin's "Political Ideas in the 20th Century" from Four Essays on Liberty (an essay I'm sure you're familiar with, given your frequent references to Berlin's thought). Like Cohen, Berlin characterises Marx as part of the Enlightenment tradition, but sees "a somewhat sinister element dimly discernible from the very beginning in Marxism - in the main a highly rationalistic system - which seemed hostile to this entire outlook, denying the primacy of the individual's reason in the choice of ends and in effective government alike". Berlin traces how, from this starting-point, Lenin and others would build their great argument justifying the suppression of intellectual enquiry, unlimited power for the Party and its total control of all human affairs. Berlin draws out the uncanny resemblance with the thought of (for example) Joseph de Maistre and with the Communists' close cousins, the Fascists....

Far from this alliance being unprecedented, the totalitarian Left is staying true to its origins. The key difference is that the extremist Muslims are an explicitly religious movement. But otherwise the radical Left is very familiar with - is a pillar of - the Counter-Enlightenment. To be fair, Cohen would be aware of this history and no apologist for Communism. His point was 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". But the more decisive abandonment of principle took place a long time ago; Berlin sees the turning point as taking place in 1903, when at the Russian Social Democratic Party congress the argument was put forward that 'the safety of the revolution is the highest law', taking precedence over fundamental individual liberties and democracy. The Bolsheviks embraced this position, and put it into effect as soon as they seized power.

Once this choice was made, it was a much shorter step to form tactical alliances with like-minded totalitarians (such as the Nazis), even ones whose ultimate aims are radically different. In the absence of a more influential secular basis for "resistance" the SWP are embracing the strongest anti-liberal and anti-democratic force in the world today. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Left has not been as starkly revealed since the Hitler-Stalin pact.

I've also received a couple of anonymous and dense protestations that fascism cannot be sensibly discussed independent of the material forces of production. They defy my attempt at precis, but I'll at least try to put their thesis in my own words.

Even the most antediluvian Trotskyite these days has caught on that it's not possible to explain fascism as the paid agent of capitalism in crisis. (Though there's always one who's slow off the mark: a pseudonymous SWP member did post a comment here not long ago proclaiming that scholarly studies confirm that German big business was responsible for the rise of the Nazis. He was clearly alluding to the thesis of an American Marxist, David Abraham, in a book called The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Abraham's research was so bad that it was cited in the David Irving libel case as a possible precedent - which it wasn't, because Abraham (not a German speaker) admitted his mistakes when confronted with them - to Irving's conduct as a pseudo-historian. As the historian Richard Evans comments in his account of the Irving case, Lying About Hitler, "Abraham was driven out of the historical profession, unable to find a job because of the flaws detected in his work.") The current fashion, attributable to the Marxist theorist Nicos Poulantzaz (whose book Fascism and Dictatorship the following quotation comes from), is to explain fascism with the following propositions. First, it is "a development of capitalist forces of production.... It represented industrial development, technological innovation, and an increase in the productivity of labour." Secondly, it represents the triumph of a politics of class struggle, and Poulantzaz and his imitators expend much effort in identifying the class interests, the "hegemonic capital" and so on, that fascism served.

Once you start asking for empirical evidence - especially economic data - for this, you pretty soon find there are more profitable ways of spending the time than continuing to press for it. One of my correspondents appended a remark from Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School on the significance of capitalism for fascism, which I assume was intended to serve in lieu of that empirical evidence, except that it doesn't. As Horkheimer said in his essay on Traditional and Critical Theory, "In the general historical upheaval truth may reside with numerically small groups of men" - and presumably that's reassurance enough for the totalitarian Left.