Class Struggle and This Thing Named
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1 Class Struggle and This Thing Named ‘The Middle East’ by Melancholic Troglodytes شون ۀت ییایلوخیلام نانیشنراغ Zanj class struggle Bahrain lebanon syria Godfather nationalism anarchism Dune native americans Carmathians situationism Anton Pannekoek ةروث sadomasochism WAR racism riots workers’ councils islam Pakistan Louis Farakhan water kitsch media lies Saudi Arabia OIL FETISHISM wage slavery الله رغصا بلاقنا atheism We Amy Pond Al Pacino revolution kitsch iraq James Tiberius Kirk feminism alienation god Gaddafi 2 “In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To boldy go where no revolutionary has gone before! 3 Class Struggle and This Thing Named ‘The Middle East’ First edition By Melancholic Troglodytes Leeds, United Kingdom 4 First published, October 2011 anti-copyright Class Struggle and This Thing Named The ‘Middle East’/Melancholic Troglodytes Includes pictures, bibliographical references and index (298 pages). Authors can be contacted at: meltrogs-books@hotmail.com 5 6 Contents By way of a Preface ……………….……………………. 7 1. Afghanistan: A Potted Social History ……………………………………… 9 2. Reservation Politics: The Palestinian Experience through the Historical Monocle of Native Americans ……………………………………… 21 3. Hydro-Jihad: Water Conflict and the Class Struggle ……………………………………… 49 4. Uncle Louis, his Fruits and Vegetables: A Proletarian Critique of the Nation of Islam ……………………………………… 65 5. God Emperors of Dune ……………………………………… 127 6. Godfathers of Levant: Syrian-Lebanese Dispute and its Implications for the Class Struggle ……………………………………… 137 7. Pakistan: The Mummification of the Class Struggle? ……………………………………… 195 8. Zapping the Zanj: Towards a History of the Zanj Slaves’ Rebellion ……………………………………… 209 9. Carmathians cometh? Old and New Struggles in Bahrain ……………………………………… 225 10. The Great 2011 ‘Middle Eastern & North African’ Revolt …..........…....................……… 255 By way of a Postscript ……………….…………………….. 289 By way of an Index ……………………………………… 291 7 ةقرولا مامأ فقأ اتغابم لاوهذم لیمجلا ضایبلا اذه رسک یلع رسجی نم - دادح مساق Before the paper I stand amazed and surprised Who dares to violate this beautiful whiteness? - Q ā ssim Hadd ā d (Bahraini poet) By way of a preface Comrade Not-so-brights & People of the Ugliness: have recent events in the ‘Middle East & North Africa’ confused your pretty little brains? Do you want to understand the class struggle better? Comrade Not-so-brights & People of the Ugliness: as niffy-daffy Gaddafi takes a bow, Saudi troops torture Bahraini rebels, Syrian capitalists mow down proletarians, Egyptian generals deposit their medals in secret offshore accounts, protestors take over Tel Aviv Habima Square, as Osama meets his mama and the mullah-bourgeoisie turban-defecates, as the US-British-Israeli elites shriek “Lordie, lord! What’s happening?”, as a Norwegian Neo-Nazi butchers Norwegian social democrats and blames it on foreigners and as London rioters ruin the prime minister’s fiesta, we offer to share our proletarian wizardry with you. Consider yourselves privileged. Comrade Not-so-brights & People of the Ugliness: one swallow does not a summer make, nor does obligatory attendance at an ‘adopt-a-nationalism’ spectacle a revolutionary create. A Hilton tour of the fucking ‘Holy sites’ doesn’t forge a Middle Eastern expert and a tired Leninist account of ‘the rentier state’ doesn’t shake the tyrants in their sandals. Conferences on ‘Psychotherapy and the Middle East’ prove less effective than a Prozac overdose and a knee-jerk western bourgeois atheism merely serves to enhance the careers of washed-up professors of biological determinism. Drenching yourself in Ambre Solaire at Sharm el-Sheik doesn’t turn you into an authority on the Tahrir Square carnival, and a subscription to Jane’s Defence Weekly does not make you a counter-terrorist warrior. Over-pronouncing the already guttural languages 8 of the Middle East does not endear you to your audience, even if it helps fool the old buzzards into giving you the TV Journalist of the Year award! Yet another lame call for a one-and-a-half- state or even a two-state solution will not solve the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ and the robotic chant to abolish wage-slavery, money and the state only ends up competing with other chants in the mantra-bazaar of fool-fucks! Comrade Not-so-brights & People of the Ugliness: your stupidity offends our sensibilities. Your ugliness pains our eyes. Get off your high horse. Stop preaching to working class camel-jockies. We’re preacher maxed-out. Yes we’re talking to you, you shit-for-brains liberal tossers; you war- mongering media asshats; you psychologically damaged Nazi in-breeds; you fascist Ayatollah sheep-shaggers; you Archbishop kiddie-lovers; you potty-untrained US pastors; you fistfucking Talmud-thumpers; you smelly anarchist asswipes; you Mensheviki mother-suckers; you cuntish Bolsheviki father-fuckers; you Che-Guavarist fucktarches; you left-communist fundamentalist fuckwits; you council communist arse munchers; you pretentious Pro-Situ posers; you Autonomist Marxist two bob cunts; you libertarian communist douchbags; you pantywaist arm- chair generalissimos; you identity-craving YELLOW BELLIES; you … Comrade Not-so-brights & People of the Ugliness: with a wallop of malice and a cherry of schadenfreude we inform you that while no one was watching, we got smart- smarter than you’ll ever be! We are now ready to inflict upon an unsuspecting world the first edition of a planned trilogy of texts aimed at escalating the class struggle. So, zip up that Jabba the Hutt cake hole of yours and marvel at the proletarian genius that is ... Melancholic Troglodytes! Melancholic Troglodytes (in a dark, witless mood), Chicago, 18 th October 2011. You know Meg … I’ve cum to the conclusion that one should never write a preface when in a foul mood! Remind me to sugar-coat it before it goes to the publishers. Sure thing Stewie. 9 “AFGHANISTAN: A Potted Social History” began life as a leaflet handed out at various anti-war demonstrations in 2001. It meanders between past and present events in order to construct a different narrative. The original allusion to Kipling’s poem is concretised here through a parodied version of “If…”. Errors have been corrected (e.g. our underestimation of Taliban’s longevity) and material added to take account of changes during the last decade. As insecure cross-burning Afghani Muslims are once more provoked into performing victimhood by insecure Koran-burning American pastors, the proletariat must posit a world beyond all sacred artifacts. We argued in 2001 that Afghanistan will be increasingly treated based on a geographic division between mineral rich north-eastern provinces and cheap labour and opium rich southern regions. Energy companies seem to have finally got their act together in order to exploit Afghanistan’s resources (see online text “Could Osama’s Death Really Mean the end of Afghanistan’s Occupation?”). We also showed how the US was simultaneously backing both Pakistani and Saudi trained warlords (after all why should the US back only one gang of cutthroats when it possesses the resourcefulness and moral ambiguity to back two)?! Finally, we indulged in a little bit of armchair military forecasting and postulated a new mode of warfare (called postmodern warfare). The contours of this new model of mayhem have become clearer. References have not been included in keeping with the leaflet’s original style. If If you can keep your legs when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on IEDs, If you can bear to hear the lies you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things others gave their life to, broken, And stoop and bash ‘em up with semi-smart Cruise: If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If no men count with you, but some too little, If you cannot fill the unforgiving hour With sixty minutes’ worth of truth, Yours is the Pentagon and everything that’s in it, And–which is more–you’ll be a Butcher, my son! – (with no apologise to) Rudyard Kipling 10 AFGHANISTAN: A Potted Social History I the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about playing hard to get when capital turns on the charm: a mainly small-holding peasantry and artisanal population that spurns the joys of wage-slavery; imposed treaties by foreign powers; saturated carpet bombings by external foes (sometimes in conjunction with the Afghani government) that fail to crush the smuggling operations of the mountain people; the transformation of peasants into refugees and refugee camps into right-wing guerrilla fighters; civil wars and the restricted nature of export crops making (non-drug related) industrial agriculture untenable; bandits collecting taxes from all sides in return for protection, making the state’s tax collectors green with envy; meticulous social engineering plans to divide the country into northern-eastern (oil, gas, and minerals reserves estimated at a staggering one trillion US dollars) and southern (cheap labour and soaring opium harvest) spheres of influence, overwhelmed by ethnic/tribal/religious complications. If Mineral wealth in Afghanistan SOURCE: U.S. Geological Survey | The Washington Post – 15 June 2010 11 Congress of the Peoples of the East (September 1920, Baku) Like the Columbian communeros (common land) and the Russian obshchina, the self- subsistence Afghani local jirga (now completely devoid of its communitarian structures) proves a formidable obstacle to ‘progress’. The small amount of surplus secured by the state makes the seizure of power a dubious victory. On the few occasions when the native bourgeoisie has tried to develop the country independently, its plans for universal education, limited secularism, and women’s rights have run into an entrenched conservative clerical opposition. Such was the fate of King Amanullah Khan (1892-1960) whose attempts to copy Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Khan in Iran were only partially successful. Capital has almost given up creating modern structures of domination in Afghanistan; instead of ‘nation-building’, it tries to negotiate a settlement with traditional northern jirgas in pursuit of mineral wealth, oil and oil pipelines deals (the latter a speciality of the little runt, President Karzai), and a different settlement with southern local warlords for the regulation of labour power and a drug trade that account for half of the country’s GDP (allegedly a speciality of Karzai’s recently assassinated half-brother)! In 2001 General Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, massacred 2-3,000 Taliban and Arab prisoners to seal his deal with the US. The 2010 US accord with the Shinwari tribe to fight against the Taliban bypassed the central government altogether. The Shinwari are the same tribe that in 1928 were bribed by the British state into forcing the modernising King Amanullah to abdicate! II the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about the nauseating counter- revolutionary stitch up that is known as the ‘Congress of the Peoples of the East’ (Sept 1920, Baku). Through the Congress, the subordination of proletarian interest to the capitalist Bolshevik state became entrenched. Basically the circus intended to muster nutritional and military support, amongst the region’s workers, for the fledging Russian state. The Bolsheviks plummeted abysmal depths of opportunism during the Congress by calling for a holy jihad to save the USSR, whilst adopting the Koran as a political platform! The Shariat If 12 (Islamic law) was credited with promoting the common ownership of land and waqf (charitable endowments and at best an intra-classist mechanism of wealth distribution between the mosque and the state), hailed as a real gain for the poor! The self-serving Bolsheviki call was unambiguous: “Now we summon you to the first real holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International. We summon you to a holy war for your own well-being, for your own freedom, for your own life!” (Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East, Zinoviev chairing, December 1920). The few dissenting voices from this policy of class collaboration were fighting a losing battle. Narbutabekov whilst observing etiquette, criticised Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev for denying ‘Moslem working people’ a voice whilst John Reed criticised Bolshevik demagogy somewhat more forthrightly. M. N. Roy’s attitude was the most clear-sighted. He saw the stitch up for what it was and simply refused to attend. III the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about Ibn Khaldun’s distinction between asabiyya (here, tribal solidarity) and umma (the fictive Muslim community). From time to time an integrationist wave of rural Muslims storm the citadels of urban power, which has become ‘weak’ through corruption, laxity, and the loss of warrior spirit. Once the state’s booty is divided amongst the victors, the city’s rulers undergo a fresh cycle of decay until they in turn are overthrown by the next wave of puritanical ‘incorruptibles’. Thus urbanisation is followed by de-urbanisation and development by de- development. As soon as victory over a common enemy (be it the USSR bourgeoisie or the Kabul elite) is in sight, all the tribal, ethnic and religious divisions resurface. Fragmentation ensues and the equilibrium re-establishes itself. After the US led invasion, the Taliban went through an internal version of this trend with Pakistani Taliban and the pro-Mullah Omar clerical network renewing the movement, some now call ‘neo-Taliban’. Taking advantage of the widespread dissatisfaction with the Kabul government and US heavy-handedness, this rural neo-Taliban movement is now ‘encroaching’ on non-Pashtun areas as well as urban centres. The harshness of the government’s security forces, the frequency of US drones assault on civilians, and the viciousness of ground operations is highly correlated with the waves of new recruits for the Taliban. The further infusion of their ranks with Tajik and Uzbek fighters is a symptom of their growing popularity. All this despite the fact that their bombs and use of human shields have killed 31% more civilians in 2010 compared to the same period in 2009. According to a UN report, May 2011 was the deadliest month since 2007, with 961 civilians killed or injured. If 13 IV the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about a contending historical trajectory of class struggle that manifests itself sporadically but emphatically. Occasionally Afghan proletarians (rural as well as urban) express their class interests autonomously and in so doing generate a contending political discourse. Some 2,000 meetings and demonstrations have been catalogued between 1965 to 1973 alone. These were sometimes led by reactionary Stalinists and Maoists but at other times began spontaneously and led to small victories in terms of pay and improved working conditions. Worker and student rebellions had to struggle against both the state and right-wing Islamists throughout this period. The CIA intensified its ‘covert’ backing of Islamic reactionaries around 1973-74. The 1978 Saur (April) Revolution was, of course, nothing more than a military take-over of the state apparatus by ‘leftist’ officers and Stalinist/Maoist ‘intellectuals.’ Its legacy was increasing reliance on USSR capitalism and a few concessionary liberal and social democratic reforms such as limited trade union representation and peasant debt reduction. When female proletarians exert their autonomy the misogyny of traditional men reacts through random acid attacks, rape, drive by shootings and more recently poisonous gas attack on young school girls. More girls are attending school (around 57%), but more schools are burned to the ground (20 during a 6-month period in 2010). This is occurring not only in the south but also in Kabul. Significantly, Afghani women’s situation is even more desperate amongst some refugee camps in Pakistan. It is not clear how much longer women have to pay the price of men’s sense of economic, sexual and psychological insecurities. The sad truth is that current Afghani proletarians are struggling against insurmountable odds. They have to contend with a mixture of foreign occupiers, warlords, drug smugglers, corrupt state authorities and capitalists, conservative clerics as well as reactionaries amongst their own ranks. No proletariat is strong enough to exert its autonomy in such a hostile environment. V the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about the dream of Sultan Galiev (1892-1940), a Muslim Tatar who joined the Bolsheviks in November 1917 and worked under Stalin’s ‘People’s Commissariat for the Nationalities’. Galiev saw ‘Muslim societies’ as collectively oppressed (with the exception of a few big landlords and bourgeois elements). He, therefore, argued against fanning the flames of class war inside such societies. If If 14 He envisioned a petty-bourgeois cadre leading his new Muslim Communist Party. His attempt to synthesise Islam, nationalism and Bolshevism was genuine but very confused. He believed the Comintern’s emphasis on the West as the engine of the world revolution was misplaced. Later he advocated a Communist Colonial International for non-industrial countries to counteract both the ‘West’ and Russian Chauvinism. Once the Bolsheviks were finished using him against Koltchak, his unorthodox views became burdensome. Arrested three times in 1923, 1928 and 1937 he served varying sentences for pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies. He was probably killed around 1940 on Stalin’s orders. Many of today’s Mojahedin (Sunni Afghanis from northern provinces) are more reactionary versions of Sultan Galiev. Download 64.9 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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