Tag Archives: France

What is bourgeois democracy?

Posted on by
5

Most of Europe is involved in a proxy war against Russia, costing billions of Euros and untold lives; untold because the personnel involved were not supposed to be in Ukraine in the first place.  Who voted for the war?

This question sums up bourgeois democracy.

This has not prevented many on the left enthusiastically supporting it.  This left, which normally would not dream of calling a strike without a ballot, has given a blank cheque to its ruling class and its state.  Rather than demand a vote in order to debate the purpose and objectives of the war, they have simply endorsed it and called for it to be supported more vigorously.  I doubt the idea of a debate and vote even crossed their minds, not least because they don’t have an alternative anyway.

The justification, ironically, is that Ukraine is a ‘democracy’ and Russia is not; even though the current president of Ukraine is no longer an elected leader, since his period of office has expired, while the President of Russia actually won an election, for what it’s worth.  In the last few days Zelensky has tried to concentrate even more power in his hands by sacking around half his cabinet.  That opposition parties and media are banned in Ukraine matters not a jot to these people while Russia’s elections are regarded as a sham.  Let’s think about that for a minute and consider recent elections in the ‘democratic’ West as a comparison.

First, we have the new Labour government in Britain, elected with an enormous parliamentary majority by only 20% of the electorate on the basis of not much more than not being the Tories.  Starmer and his colleagues did their best not to commit to any specific policies and have quickly broken promises that they did make – on energy prices and austerity.  No doubt, further measures will confirm this course.  The widespread opposition to genocide in Gaza, reflected in support for some independent candidates, could find no reflection in the choice of government as both Labour and Tories support it.

Second, we have the most powerful bourgeois democracy in the world in which counting the money is a better guide to who will win than the polling of support for the various policies that the candidates claim to support.  The US is possibly even worse than Britain in terms of the vacuum of debate on what exactly parties will do when elected, whether anything they say can be believed and is not just a catalogue of lies.  For every Donald Trump and Kamala Harris we have a Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer.  The main appeal of each candidate is aversion for the other.

When the usual mechanisms for making sure the ‘right’ candidates are selected fail these are ditched and the men and women with money and political power step in to make the ‘right’ selection.  After months of primaries and the votes of millions – 14.5 million in fact – the Democratic grandees and apparatchiks stepped in to ensure that Genocide Joe would not be the Presidential candidate.  In this he was simply the subject of the same machinations that ensured he was the candidate in 2020 instead of Bernie Sanders, who was judged too left wing regardless of the popularity of his policies or of himself.

Even the proponents of bourgeois democracy worry that all this is not sustainable, while certain sections of the left cling to it all the more firmly the more rotten it becomes.  In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, a contributing editor noted that Kamala Harris has given only one media interview and even that not by herself – ‘she seems to think that if voters understand what she will do as president, they will be less likely to support her.’  It notes the irony that, while claiming to defend democracy against the “existential threat” to it posed by Trump, the failure to do what you say you are going to do means that ‘rather embarrassingly, you will be the one undermining the system of representative government.”

The argument of socialists is that bourgeois democracy – “representative government” – is a sham.  How could it be otherwise in a system in which the means of production are controlled by the capitalist class, including the means of communication – of producing ‘the news’ and disseminating it, and the state machinery through which government policies are implemented – thorough its top personnel and the economic structures through which policies can be allowed to work or alternatively are throttled.

A final example of bourgeois democracy in action is in France, where the defeated Emmanuel Macron, having prevaricated for two months, has announced that Michel Barnier has been chosen by him to be Prime Minister.  Despite the New Popular Front having won a plurality of the votes he has selected a leader from the right wing Les Républicans, which won only 6.57% of the first round vote.

The leader of France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has declared that “We’ve been robbed in this election”. It is normally the largest formation that is permitted to form an administration but such normalities are always disregarded when the political establishment thinks that it faces some sort of threat, especially from the left.

The real anti-democratic nature of this move by Macron is not so much the abuse of this Presidential mechanism but what the employment of this power signifies.  The elections were a decisive rejection of Macron and his policies, reflected in the vote for the New Popular Front and in the rise of the far right Rassemblement National.  Yet Barnier was selected preciously in order to confirm and continue these policies.

The front page of the Financial Times explained that the purpose of Macron’s choice was to ‘find a candidate . . . who would not seek to undo his pro-business reforms.’  The fraudulent nature of the far right alternative to mainstream capitalist policies was revealed by the response of Marien Le Pen who is quoted as ‘cautiously’ welcoming the appointment and saying that “Barnier seems at least to meet one of the criteria we’d demanded . . . and be able to speak with the Rassemblement National.  That will be useful as compromises will need to solve the budget situation.”

An analyst from one of the think tanks that litter the capitalist political environment stated that his appointment would ‘help in France’s bid to reassure markets over the economy and public spending’.  “He’s a safe pair of hands known to market participants, known to Europe and the domestic political elite within France”, adding that he would be expected to ensure that ‘Macron’s labour and pension reforms would remain intact.’

So, there we have it.  An overwhelming vote against Macron’s policies is turned, or is attempting to be turned, into an administration that will ensure their maintenance.  It is not the clear wishes of the electorate that must be counted but that of the ‘markets’ – national and international capitalism – and the ‘political elite’ that counts.

For all the hypocritical cant about ‘democracy’ we have yet another example of how bourgeois democracy is democracy for the bourgeoisie.  For the majority, including the working class, democracy does not extend beyond occasional visits to the polling booth in which meaningful choice has often been removed, or when it has not, constitutional devices are employed until these too are insufficient whereupon more forceful measures are employed.

Mélenchon is reported to have called for protests against this subversion of the popular will, demonstrating that, for the working class, democracy can only be enforced and guaranteed by its own actions.  What this action cannot do, however, is democratise the state itself, which is the instrument of the political elite and the markets – the bourgeoisie and capitalism.

The resort to protest is testament to where power for the working class arises and where it must be advanced – in the organisation and mobilisation of the workers themselves.  Elections can measure its strength and level of politicisation but only the workers own organisations can form a democratic alternative to the political elite, the bourgeois class and its state.  This in turn demands that the organisation of the working class movement itself must be democratic, but until some current socialists stop supporting capitalist war in defence of bourgeois democracy they will have nothing but a reactionary role to play in building up the workers own democracy.

A New Popular Front for Ireland? (3 of 3)

Posted on by
1

AFP

A final argument in support of the New Popular Front approach is to argue that the key task of the day in the class struggle is to stop the far right, and this the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) has done.  How else was it to be done in the circumstances?

One way this has been put is to say that:

‘If the left had not voted for Macron candidates in the second round, it would have meant an overall majority for Le Pen. Just listen to the relief expressed by ethnic minority people on TV in the Republic Square last night. They were terrified at a Le Pen government moving aggressively against so-called bi-nationals. Stopping a Le Pen government makes a real difference. Counter-posing mass struggles or street mobilisations as an immediate solution to defend black or Arab people is just demagogy.’

Let’s get some things out of the way first – ‘Just listen to the relief expressed by ethnic minority people on TV in the Republic Square last night’ is not enough, not nearly enough, to join that fear and then surrender political principle and independence.  If this is a guide to the rationale then it is woefully weak; the fight against the far right will be advanced by militant action based on socialist politics, not fear driving the working class into the arms of the main bourgeois parties and through them the French state. Were the far-right an immediate fascist danger it would be because this state, and its political class, had decided that fascism was required, in which case allying with this class in order to preserve the current state would be an obvious disaster. 

Let’s note the admission in this article of the price paid for this ‘success.’  First, that the NFP propped up the Macron bloc to the extent it could, and ‘we should not forget her (Marine le Pen) group topped the vote share, and the increase in her party’s seat tally is still historic.’  In other words the far right still gained and the main bourgeois parties that paved their way received protection by the intervention of a ‘united left’.  These are the circumstances that facilitated the rise of the far right previously, that precipitated the crisis, and which – despite the NFP ‘success’ – still. persist.  A ‘success’ which reproduces the threat at a potentially higher level is not a success.

So, what about the claim that the need for ‘mass struggles or street mobilisations as an immediate solution to defend black or Arab people is just demagogy’?  Well, since right now mobilisation and struggle will continue to be necessary, seeking these is clearly not demagogy and do not cease to be of primary importance because there is an election.  What about the NFP not being counterposed to these steps?

Well, since the NFP has failed to achieve a majority there will be no governmental programme that will offer an alternative to either the main bourgeois parties or far right and there will be no governmental endorsement of the physical or legal protection of black or Arab people.  The NFP is not going to mobilise workers to protect them as it isn’t going to organise workers defence groups to defend itself.

The failure to win governmental office may cause some demoralisation – or at least demobilisation – of NFP supporters, especially if the whole cobbled together alliance breaks up and erstwhile allies denounce each other for the failure. Even if this proves not to be the case the need for a robust alternative to be built will be no clearer or nearer to creation by it being asserted that forces like the SP, Communist Party and Greens will lead it.  They will not. An alternative to them will remain to be created but cannot if the priority becomes an alliance with them against the far right. Acceptance of the NFP argument would mean that the far right would have achieved the removal of an independent socialist left, one not wedded to defence of the French state and bourgeois democracy.

What about the claim: ‘Key point: Without the formation of the NFP, no defeat of Le Pen.’  The argument is that had the left decided not to unite it may have been unable to weaken the far right as much as it did, but the argument also entails the strengthening of the Macron bloc as just as necessary to this outcome.  It could therefore equally be argued that supporting this bloc from the start through an alliance in the first round of voting might have achieved the same result.

That this would obviously be rejected then as now can only be because this mainstream right was not and is not an alternative to the far right that could be supported – except that it then was supported.  Why not in the first round if was acceptable in the second?

Some appreciation that there would be a day after the election should have prevented support for the Macron bloc in the second round, a bloc that they now claim they do not support in power today; except this is precisely the argument against the whole NFP project.  The fancy that it is about stopping the far right, and that this is what matters, dissolves when the election is over and you’re back to square one. Short cuts do not take you to your destination.

In so far as the creation of left unity did evoke enthusiasm and activity it is an exercise in misleading and miseducating those who became active: that their activity on behalf of a cobbled together programme and alliance of forces without any real socialist alternative is a step forward.  Support for this alliance will not withstand its fracturing, and at worst lead to yet another round of claims that what is needed is left unity of those who are ultimately united only in acceptance of the French capitalist state and not to any working class alternative.  It is not enough to be ‘active’ – the political programme that you struggle for is decisive in whether it advances the working class cause.

The article referenced states that ‘this week the big issue is what next’; surely a question that should have occurred to the supporters of the NFP beforehand, but which then elicits the observations that the NFP is set for splits, and its left under Melenchon is not a democratic alternative.  One starts to wonder why it is necessary to argue against a ‘united left’/NFP when even those who support it admit it isn’t actually united and isn’t very left?  Why would socialists want to continually repeat this failure?

As for the far right itself, the article notes that: ‘although the RN has been pushed back, their position has still been strengthened compared to the previous parliament. An unstable period with no majority and various stitch-ups means they can frame it as the caste ganging up on the true defenders of French identity. So, it could still provide them with plenty of space to build their forces.’  In other words, the far right may continue to advance while the left fails to hold together because it substitutes opportunist electoral alliances for working class struggle – for the building of a stronger working class movement.

Building a stronger working class movement out of what exists and arming it with socialist politics – that recognises the independent interests of the working class – is the alternative.  This does not rule out agreements or temporary limited alliances with others opposed to the far right, but it rules out subordination of socialist politics to a cobbled together alliance that supports the main bourgeois parties and the state.  Agreement must be based on a refusal to do so, and if such agreement is not achievable then any other more limited agreement must be based on concrete actions.  Where no agreement can be reached this does not exclude participation in specific joint activity and mobilisations while retaining an independent policy.

*                  *                   *

If we return back to Ireland, we also return to the working class movement as it is, one that has been wedded to social partnership with the main bourgeois parties and Irish state for over a generation, for so long it is no longer discussed.  The trade unions are politically dead, and its bureaucracy is in bed with the state because it provides them with a comfortable home.  The massive growth of the working class has been driven by multinationals, but the leadership of the unions has a policy of not building the movement within them.  The Irish left has given up challenging this situation and while it will support individual strikes etc. it has no campaign against the bureaucracy.

Without a revitalisation of the working class movement the (genuine socialist) left in Ireland will remain weak, and while much of what exists of it is unusual in that it claims to be Marxist, the actual politics it argues is not very different from left social democracy.  What is broadly called the left hasn’t grown in twenty years as the table below, taken from this site, illustrates:

It could reasonably be argued that the Irish Labour party isn’t left because it has always allied with Fine Gael to get into office, but one could say something similar about the Greens and we know that Sinn Fein’s whole strategy is the same today.  Excluding them would not change the picture of a failure to grow, although what it would show is that the label ‘left’ is pretty meaningless.

Creating a working class alternative will not start by cobbling together any arrangement of these in an Irish New Popular Front that will be neither left nor very popular either.  As an electoralist initiative it fails on even electoralist grounds.  For the pragmatists these last three posts could have been ignored and only the table above provided to make the argument, but that’s the problem with the Irish left: it’s primary weakness today is political not electoral.

Back to part 2

A New Popular Front for Ireland? (2 of 3)

Posted on by
5
– Demonstration against the extreme right in the presence of the new Popular Front – 15/06/2024 – France / Paris – Place de la Nation a Paris, manifestation contre l extreme droite. PUBLICATIONxNOTxINxFRAxRUS OlivierxDonnarsx/xLexPictorium LePictorium_0293005

Supporters of the New Popular Front in France start from the view that the task of the day is to defeat the far right while in Ireland it is to defeat the mainstream right.  In the first, alliance is made with the mainstream right and in the latter with the non-mainstream right that still parades a certain amount of fake radicalism.  Since neither the mainstream right or its fake radical opposition will break from capitalism the left makes compromises that it really can’t deny because it has accepted that the task is to defeat the far right, in the case of France, or the main right wing parties in the case of Ireland.  Since it is the mainstream right that has facilitated the rise of the far right in both countries the left has allied itself with the cause of this rise in France and discredited itself as an alternative.  In Ireland, the logic of the proposed policy is the same but simply lags behind France in its development. This is all pretty straightforward.

The following problems arise.  In order to create a left majority, the idea of ‘the left’ is expanded to include anyone opposed to the far right/mainstream right who proclaims itself as in any way left or socialist.  This includes those who have been in government and who have attacked the working class when they were there; for example the Socialist Party (SP) in France and Sinn Fein in Ireland. 

Since the world is full of parties with socialist or communist in their name that are anything but, it is necessary to know how to determine who exactly is a socialist.  In the case of the SP and Communist Party in France this is relatively easy – they have been in government and made it clear that they will defend French capitalism.  In the case of Sinn Fein, they have also been in office and present themselves as the most enthusiastic defenders of the institutions that are the product of a ‘peace process’ set up by British and US imperialism.  Sinn Fein’s claims to socialism are threadbare to non-existent.

Acceptance of any of these parties’ bona fides means that you join rejection of any coherent definition of socialism, ally with parties that defend capitalism and thus all of its consequences, and means that you then cease to offer genuine socialist politics. This is not because you have proposed some joint action for a specific purpose but because you propose to enter into a government with them with the pretence of a radical or socialist programme. This is not a policy you can turn off and on, becoming true to your claims in-between. This is not a slippery slope you can climb back up, but a result of the slippery slope you have already descended.

The use of words such as ‘radical’ or ‘left’ to justify alliances that cannot be described as socialist, as if there was something other than socialism that offers adequate answers and promises a different society, is one illustration. One consequence is that being on the ‘left’ becomes decisive over being socialist, with the latter robbed of any distinct meaning; all necessary because you have admitted that there is a task more important than fighting the capitalist system and socialism. This task, or ‘stage’, amounts to defending the so-called democratic version of capitalism from the far right, or ending years of the mainstream parties in office without ending the system they represent, as if they were the problem and not an expression.

The far right in France, and main bourgeois parties in Ireland, are here to stay in the foreseeable future, so the argument that there should be an alliance between the ‘left’ and the mainstream bourgeois parties in France, or a ‘left’ in Ireland that includes Sinn Fein, will hold as long as they do. This means that uncompromising opposition to both is fatally undermined and the rationale for an independent socialist alternative is permanently suspended.

The fundamental problem is therefore that the task of organising and politicising the working class to defend its own separate interests as understood by socialists is subordinated, if not entirely dispensed with, in order to defend a particular form of capitalist rule in France, while in Ireland it is to pretend that the latest generation of ‘radical’ nationalists are a genuine alternative to the rule of their historical equivalents.

We see this again and again in the politics of the ‘lesser evil’ – in relation to the war in Ukraine as well as opposition to the far right.  It is not an accident that the New Popular Front in France and united ‘left’ in Ireland support the imperialist war. The view that the separate organisation of the working class under socialism is the only safeguard against the far right is forgotten.  The view that the prime task is not to defeat the far right or replace one bunch of nationalists with another but to advance this organisation and politicisation is opposed.

Attempts are made, in relation to both France and Ireland, to claim that the policy of a popular front is part of, or at least not incompatible with, this sort of organisation but the alliance with fake-socialists and mainstream bourgeois parties makes such claims impossible to sustain.  This is fundamentally because of the second problem with the whole idea, which is that these left fronts are not about the mobilisation of the working  class but an electoral alliance.  The mainstream bourgeois parties might tolerate temporary expressions of mass support for an alliance with themselves but will never support an independent mobilisation of the working class, because this would have to involve opposition to them to be genuinely independent.

In France the previous Socialist Party government of François Hollande used the state to attack French workers mobilising against its anti-working class policies.  Sinn Fein has no tradition of independent working class organisation and even during the height of mass participation in the struggle against British rule in the North, when it wasn’t trying to manipulate it and subordinate it to its armed struggle, it repeatedly went behind the back of the mass struggle to negotiate in secret with the British state.

Today, People before Profit repeatedly declares that it supports ‘street politics’, and that while ‘a shift left will strike fear into the hearts of the establishment and the very privileged elite . . . . Our best defence against them is mass mobilisation from below on the real issues and injustices faced by ordinary working people.’  Supporters of the NFP in France point to the mass demonstrations in support of the NFP as showing the compatibility of mass struggle with electoral alliances.

Paul Murphy argues that ‘to overcome their opposition and actually implement the ecosocialist change necessary to resolve the crises faced by people would require a left government basing itself on people-power mobilisation from below.’  In reality, street politics, pressure from below, and ‘mobilisation from below’ in support of a left government are all precisely acceptance of the subordinate position of the working class to a left alliance and a left government.

A current within People before Profit put it well when it said that ‘Electing former traitors to disappoint workers is not a good strategy. Thinking that any amount of protest “from below” can make these snakes anything other than what they are is magical thinking.’   This applies to Ireland as much as France.

Paul Murphy stated that ‘I lost count of the number of times people said to me during the recent election that no matter who they vote for, nothing seems to change. I can’t blame them.’  However, instead of arguing that voting for an alliance that will include Sinn Fein is the answer he needs to explain to workers that the only way to change society is for the working class to do it itself, certainly not to promise that he and his organisation will to do it for them.

The whole article by Murphy makes it clear that radical change, sometimes even called socialist change, is to issue from a left government, to come down from on high with all the benefits of its manifesto to be acclaimed by a grateful working class; forgetting all the lessons of history and all the teachings derived from it by Marxists.  Governments don’t rule, classes and their states rule.  This is why Marxists call for workers ownership and control and a workers’ state, not a bunch of left politicians surrounded by the levers of office to be used through a capitalist state and bound by and to the economic power of the capitalist class.

Promising to achieve the change set out by PbP from a left government is actually worse than the misadventure of the NFP in France.  In France the excuse is that the enemy is at the gate, even if it fails to realise that its other enemy is inside the gate with it.  In Ireland, PbP are promising not only that it will thwart the far right but will transform Irish capitalism as well – and with Sinn Fein!

Sinn Fein has demonstrated with its new policy of opposition to the accommodation of refugees that it will continue moving to the right, which PbP can follow by pursuing its ‘left unity’ or reject by tearing up its electoralist strategy and looking for an alternative. The new SF policy is really a two-fingers to its proposal and flushes any pretence it could be part of any genuine left project down the toilet.

‘Street’ politics, ‘pressure’ and ‘mobilisation from below’ of a top-down project to deliver radical change for the working class is not new. It is not the working class achieving its own emancipation.  It is the working class being employed to support someone else doing it for them; feeding it the illusion that the capitalist state is the vehicle for its delivery.  It makes its activity subordinate to the politics of the left alliance, just as in France today the working class is subject to the machinations within the NFP and the vetoes of discredited politicians such as Holland, once so decisively rejected he didn’t bother standing for President a second time.

The alternative of independent working class organisation and action is not difficult to understand.  It is very difficult to achieve, but then liberation and emancipation by the state is impossible.  Sinn Fein is not going to become a genuinely socialist party and the Irish civil service is not going to deliver an Ireland of equality and working class power.  No amount of PbP TDs will make it happen.  The history of class struggle across the world is littered with self-declared socialists who promised to deliver for the working class but didn’t understand that what they promised could only be delivered by the working class itself.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

A New Popular Front for Ireland? (1 of 3)

Posted on by
1

It’s not often that in politics you get to carry out an experiment that will tell you what will happen if you propose to take a certain course of action, but that is what we have with the proposal for the Irish Left to copy the creation of the New Popular Front in France.

People before Profit have proposed that a left pact that includes Sinn Fein should stand as an alternative alliance to the current Fianna Fail and Fine Gael government that will seek a new government mandate later in the year.  Its TD Paul Murphy has explained that a new mandate ‘would be a ‘disaster’, further ‘ratchet up’ the ‘scapegoating of asylum seekers’ and ‘embolden the far right even more.’   In this, the left should ‘take inspiration from the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) in France.’

There are so many issues with this it is difficult to know where to start; but let’s start with the most obvious.  In France the NFP was put forward as a way to stop the election of a far-right government of the Rassemblement National (RN).  This has involved an electoral alliance of the NFP with the main French bourgeois parties in which left voters were asked to vote for these parties where they were placed second in the second round of voting. Just like in Ireland, this alliance claims that it has been the policies of these parties that has helped incite and support the far right in the first place.

So, in Ireland, an alliance with the main bourgeois parties in France is held up as the example to follow in order to defeat the same main bourgeois parties in Ireland.  It might be claimed that this is not what is meant by copying the NFP example but that is only true if you ignore the politics involved, and politics is what it’s all about.

At a very basic level the proposal is all about what you are against and not what you are for, a common charge against the left by the right that the left continually confirms.  The far-right offer an alternative, even if it is reactionary and built on lies, while the main bourgeois parties offer the status quo, which includes all the powerful and hegemonic political, economic and ideological forces in Ireland and the world.

When faced with the slender possibility of presenting its own alternative government following the elections the hastily constructed joint platform of the NFP in France has been no help; the main point was purely negative – to allow the creation of a pact that would stymie the far right.  The NFP includes the very parties who led to the collapse and discrediting of previous left governments composed of the Communist Party and Socialist Party.  The former is now a shadow of its former self while the latter has been allowed to climb back up from its utterly discredited rule between 2012 to 2017 under President François Hollande, also back from the dead and part of the NFP.

With stopping the far-right as its prime and overriding purpose, there can be no objection to further capitulation to the main ‘centrist’ parties, which suffered the biggest defeat in the elections and to which the majority of the French public is bitterly opposed.  Now, along comes the united left to form an alliance to prop it up.  While the left in Ireland portrays the French elections as a victory for the left it ignores that this was a victory (of sorts) of an alliance with these discredited bourgeois parties, which have an effective veto over the formation of any new government.

What now remains to be determined is the exact configuration of the caretaker government cobbled together from the fragments of the NFP and bourgeois centrists before the next presidential election in which the far-right will then again claim to be the only real alternative to the rotten establishment.  Such are the fruits of short term surrender of principles, or opportunism as it has long been known as.

The relevance to Ireland is clear enough.   The left alliance proposed by People before Profit only has the remotest credibility because it must contain Sinn Fein, so this party must be called ‘left’ because it can’t be called socialist, which shows how this is a purely relative term, loaded with ambiguity and therefore dangerous in application.

The political experiment I alluded to at the start of the article also relates to the fact that Sinn Fein is already involved in a coalition government in Ireland, and with one of the most backward and reactionary parties in Europe.  What’s more, the DUP and Sinn Fein seem to get along famously, with differences not over fundamental policy but just how the sectarian pie is carved up between them.

The Stormont regime is a now a byword for disfunction and incompetency, but these are just expressions of its sectarianism.  This sectarianism has made it easy for Sinn Fein to join with the DUP in imposing austerity while trumpeting the fact that it is now the leading party in the whole rotten edifice.  Widespread acceptance of this arrangement has been possible mainly by portraying the North as a place apart with different rules that don’t apply in the rest of the country.

People before Profit thinks it can form an alliance with Sinn Fein in the South, telling it that its project of a coalition with Fianna Fail (FF) or Fine Gael (FG) would face a veto on any radical change.  It has sought to persuade SF that its attempts to make this work have failed, including its overtures to convince FF & FG that ‘you were not advocating a radical left programme’, and its ‘reluctance to clearly oppose the government’s scapegoating of asylum seekers.’  Yet this is the party that PbP portrays as ‘left’ and a vehicle for radical change!

It’s not even that PbP is promoting this with its eyes closed – blinkers maybe – but even the most blinkered can’t ignore the hypocrisy of Sinn Fein and its talking out of both sides of its mouth; one of the reasons its vote fell so far from expectations in the recent local and European elections.

Everyone knows that Sinn Fein was expecting to be in government after the next general election, with the prime candidate for partner being Fianna Fail, one of the evil twins that are the target of PbP and which it regards as the over-riding priority to defeat. If this strategy, its record in Stormont, its promise of good behaviour, and its failure to challenge the scapegoating of asylum seekers; if all this is not enough to expose the real character of Sinn Fein then we must ask the question – what compromises are PbP prepared to make for an alliance with it?

If there are none, is this because the joint platform will be so anaemic, the politics of SF and PbP are so similar, or because the priority is to get FF and FG out so it doesn’t matter?  If there are compromises to be made, what are they?

Forward to part 2

French elections: when Left unity is not such a good idea

Posted on by
1

The second round of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday will determine whether the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen will be able to win enough seats to form a majority government or perhaps do so in coalition with others.  Stopping this has become the priority for the French left, which has united in a New Popular Front, recalling that of the original in the 1930s.  It consists of La France Insoumise (LFI) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Socialist Party (PS), the French Communist Party (PCF), Greens and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA).

To secure the defeat of RN, third placed candidates of the NPF have pulled out in favour of Emmanuel Macron’s bloc of supporters.  Left unity against the far-right has thus also meant arms-length unity with the discredited Macron Presidency.  While this alliance has placed opposition to RN as the key issue, his defeat has been the stand-out message of the results.

The growth of the Rassemblement National and vote for the New Popular Front demonstrates that the people have given their verdict on Macron’s increasingly arrogant, unpopular and discredited Presidency.  By withdrawing in his favour the NPF has accepted fundamental agreement with him, or rather, agreement on fundamentals.  The unity achieved means that this encompasses almost all the left, from the utterly discredited Socialist Party to the New Anti-capitalist Party, which proves that its anti-capitalism is purely rhetorical, never mind socialist.

The Left has once again chosen what it considers the lesser evil on the basis that parliamentary elections are the litmus test of politics: that which will ultimately determine your political stance.  When the choice has to be made, this Left has decided that there is no such thing as an independent working class politics separate and opposed to all varieties of capitalist political movements.  The lesser evil is indeed evil, one that the Left has embraced just as the majority of the French people have rejected it.  Marine Le Pen can now argue that only she is implacably opposed to what the majority has also decisively rejected.

Support for the discredited ‘Republicans’ of Macron’s Ensemble is justified by the threat of the far right and the idea that liberal bourgeois politicians are principled and reliable defenders of bourgeois democracy.  This means that the Left has embraced the primacy of defence of this democracy, with its dependence on the power of the capitalist state; the influence of money and capital over political decision making; the exclusion of any sort of economic or social democracy; and the acceptance of the capitalist system, with all its inequality, oppression and violence.

Were the Left seeking to protect the limited democratic rights allowed by this democracy, that permit the working class to more freely organise, it would have understood that the weapons required to defeat the far-right lie not simply or mainly in parliamentary elections, but in the organisation and political mobilisation of the workers’ movement.  Such a political mobilisation of the working class is opposed by its ‘republican’ allies.  If, or when, the choice comes down to a militant working class or the far right these republican defenders of ‘democracy’ will ally with the far right against it.

The Left’s political opportunism, the surrender of political principle for short term advantage, in this case the possible defeat of far-right Rassemblement National, will not make up for its subordination to the republican friends of capitalist democracy and the exposure of the feebleness of its opposition to the discredited and unpopular Macron Presidency.  The policy of short term gain fails to recall the observation that the long term for the opportunist is just a long series of short terms.  Lesser evil follows lesser evil . . .

The New Popular Front naturally forms its alliance on the basis of supporting the French imperialist contribution to the war in Ukraine, the provision of weapons to Ukraine and of French troops within the war zone – calling them “peacekeepers” changes nothing.  Its programme fails to denounce the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and of course fails to call on French workers to stop the delivery of arms to the Israeli state.  As we have said, the political mobilisation of the working class movement is not part of its policy.  If it were Macron and Ensemble would be repudiating its assistance. The NPA project of an alliance with bourgeois democracy requires a bourgeois programme.

There is nothing very much new in this New Popular Front, the Left in France has been supporting the lesser evil for a long time, each time delivering another iteration; a lesser evil groundhog day, or déjà vu all over again, as it may be put.  Starting with the 2002 Presidential election run-off between right-wing candidate Jacques Chirac and the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Left responded by endorsing Chirac as a defender of democracy against Le Pen. It was such a success we are here again with the Left defending the establishment while the far right adopts the mantle of opposition.

That this policy is a clear failure should by now be obvious, but that would be to mistake the purpose of the policy, which is not to promote independent working class politics but to maintain bourgeois democracy and to be the Republic’s loyal opposition.  Such a policy puts this left in opposition to the working class and makes it prey to the contradictions of capitalism, which currently involve imperialist war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, the militarisation of France and the bill for it to be paid by its workers.

The New Popular Front is unwilling to challenge capitalism, supports imperialist war, restricts itself to vacuous moralising when faced with genocide and will shatter itself when the bill is forced upon French workers.  The logic of its position is to join the discredited bourgeois forces inside a government, which would bolster the credentials of Rassemblement National and demoralise its own supporters, as some of its constituent parts have already done.  It will no doubt go down singing its lack of regret as it repeats the failed policy of the 1930s original.

Fighting terrorism after Paris

Posted on by
2

_86692951_86692950One expression of the dogmatic campaign that has followed the terrorist attacks in Paris is the near hysterical reaction of politicians and media in Britain to Jeremy Corbyn’s reply to a question on support for a police shoot-to-kill policy, that he ‘would not be happy with it’.

This has evoked an opportunist and cynical moral outrage that seeks to marginalise opposition to repressive measures by making everyone feel that, of course, the very idea of opposition to such an idea is crazy.  Yet when you look at the question asked, Jeremy Corbyn would have had to be crazy to answer it in any other way – ‘would you be happy to order the police to shot to kill.’

So a politician orders the police to adopt a shoot-to-kill policy, a licence-to-kill, that, if it were to mean anything other than incoherent frothing at the mouth, would mean rewriting the law by simply ignoring it.

All obviously in the course of defending our liberties and the rule of law.  Giving the police the prior authority to kill in advance ‘of split-second decisions’ (what a contradiction that is for a start) is held up as defence of western civilisation.

Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station on CCTV........pic by Gavin Rodgers/Pixel 07917221968

Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station on CCTV……..pic by Gavin Rodgers/Pixel 07917221968

Has the name of John Charles de Menezes slipped from everyone’s memory already?  Isn’t it revealing that the same BBC that only five months ago was reporting the tenth anniversary of his murder are demanding  that just such an approach to policing is made the benchmark of a rational response to terrorism. Have the police ever shown any reluctance before to do anything other than shoot-first-ask-questions-later?  How many are languishing in jail for having murdered innocent people?

The great British liberal establishment once again demonstrates every criticism made of its hypocritical self-righteous arrogance to be completely true.  These liberals will wrestle with their conscience and their conscience will lose.  They will defend democratic and civil rights, except when they are under attack.  And they will defend our freedom by ridding us of as much of it as they can get away with.

What has been staggering has been the sheer stupidity of some of the contributions to this ‘debate’, a debate in which no one is allowed to present a different opinion.  One can almost still hear the BBC Radio 4 presenter raise his voice to exasperated levels asking why Corbyn didn’t answer a different question from the one he was asked.

We have a Labour MP saying, and I paraphrase: ‘we have bombed Iraq why can’t we bomb Syria – it would be like bombing Hamburg and not Berlin in the Second World War.’

They’re different bloody countries you idiot!

When you bomb a country you are declaring war on it.  (This blog by Boffy explains.)  Not hard to understand but easily proclaimed by the politically hysterical in the safe and secure knowledge that as long as you bare your bloated chest in moral outrage and demand more repressive measures you will be saved the cross examination meted out to Corbyn or, last night, to Ken Livingstone.

So the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme had some Tory MP and ex-Brit (as we put it in this part of the world) saying that, just like the Prime Minister, we ‘shouldn’t look back’, which was in response to another interviewee pointing out the disastrous consequences of western intervention in the Middle East in the past.  The latter of course is called learning from history, or ‘evidence based policy’ as it might also be called nowadays.

For the educated and discerning liberal, with the memory of a goldfish, there is this article in ‘The Guardian’ which says – yes the west has screwed up the Middle East but (and this is the bit where you need a goldfish memory) Corbyn’s argument is “mangled history without a conclusion, half an argument, the sound of one hand wringing.”

So we begin with this “mangled history”:-

“The charge sheet against western policy dating back a generation is easily drafted. It takes moments to weave a tale of counterproductive geopolitical vandalism, starting from US support for the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, via the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq, pausing to condemn blind eyes turned and arms sold to Saudi Arabia, whence the theology of infidel-murder pullulates.”

Only for all this to be simply “selective history that adorns jihadi propaganda” at the end of the short article.

This is not unlike some commentary on the Left which, recognising the thoroughly reactionary nature of Islamic fundamentalism and the attacks in Paris, seeks to deny that these acts are at least partly the result of imperialist intervention; as if this rather obvious fact necessarily lends some little bit of legitimacy to the terrorists’ actions.

So they echo in left phraseology the claim that the Paris attacks were solely motivated by a barbaric and obscurantist religious fanaticism, which at the very most uses western actions as cynical justification.

That it was indeed inspired by the former does not exhaust its motivation or that of those who join it.

With a liberal understanding of politics, of moral absolutes that get applied relatively- depending on the circumstances, but rolled out as absolutes again when it suits, it is easy to see the logic.  (A good article pointing out the hypocrisy is here.)

With a Marxist approach it is not.  Those who seek the development of a working class movement don’t have to think twice about denying anything legitimate in, or any progressive impulse within, movements that would happily destroy any manifestation of socialism in societies they control.

The reason all this is important is not really that we must demand fair and balanced coverage from the BBC.  If you’re waiting, hoping or something like expecting that, you must also be expecting a new ten-part series on massive welfare sponging by a long-established German immigrant family in a palace called Buckingham.

The class bias of the BBC is part of its DNA.  While we can expose it and condemn it and even demand it stop, the answer does not lie in expecting this to happen.  Its blatantly biased treatment of Corbyn will become a vaccine to more and more people, and will prove to be the case when the British labour movement builds its own mass media to counter the BBC and the gutter press who manufacture many of the stories it regurgitates.

The real importance of this analysis is the fact that the state that is the author of  the ‘mangled history’ is now presented as our only protector against unmerciful violence.  And the working class movement is in no position to present an immediate and live means of defence as an alternative.

An armed mass labour movement does not exist and will not forseeably for some time so our alternative means of defence starts with political argument.  And prime among these is a fact already apparent to many, that western imperialist intervention in the Arab region has fertilised the soil of Islamic fundamentalism and must share responsibility for the monster it has both directly and indirectly created.

To expect this imperialist state to place the needs of working people above its own needs is a political innocence that needs to be shaken off and renounced.

To win an argument that working people cannot rely on the armed forces of the state never mind agree it be allowed vastly increased powers is a difficult one where we are under direct threat and direct attack.  We should therefore not accept its exculpation of its own sins on the basis that we must simply damn the reactionary terrorists.  The depths of this terrorist reaction is testified not only by the barbarity of the attacks on ordinary working people but by their objective of seeking to make all of us part of the undifferentiated ranks of western decadence and aggression.

This is not the West that really exists just as Islamic fundamentalism is not the Arab world that exists.  There is a unity between the peoples of both that stands separate and above the alliance of western imperialists and reactionary rulers of the Arab peoples.

However far away this might now seem there will be no justice for those murdered through surrendering our own freedoms and cheering the imperialist acts of violence that brought us to where we now seek to escape from.

 

Visiting Avignon

Posted on by
1

DSC_0373This year I went to Southern France for my holidays, including Avignon, famous for its song ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon.’ I was there just at the end of its annual arts festival so it was buzzing with life, hosting some fantastic busking musicians who could keep you entertained for hours while licking ice cream.  At least that’s what I did quite a lot of the time.

It’s also famous as the site of exile from Rome of the Popes, from 1309 to 1376, and has a very impressive Palais des Papes, which was their residence and is now a major tourist attraction.  As the audio guide to a visit explains, the palace demonstrated the secular as well as the spiritual (ideological) power of the papacy but the history untold is not one of the rise in the secular power of the papacy but of its decline from its zenith a century earlier.

DSC_0378

Boniface VIII, pope from 1294 to 1303, who liked to wear a crown, declared papal authority over the clergy and threatened France and England with excommunication. In 1300 he also pompously staged a Holy year, selling indulgences to finance his worldly domain. Overreaching himself however he planned the excommunication of the French king, who promptly arrested and imprisoned him in his castle in Anagni.  Even though subsequently freed by the people of the town he was a broken man and died a few months later in Rome.  The second next pope was enthroned in France and eventually establishing his seat of power in Avignon, the start of a series of French popes all largely dependent on the French monarch.

The Catholic theologian Hans Küng remarks that though such events might lead one to assume a tempering of papal claims, this was not the case.  Indeed the guide to the Palais deals a good deal with its vast system of financial management, required to finance building of the Palais and development of the papal bureaucracy:

“In the late Middle Ages, the Roman papacy increasingly lost its religious and moral leadership and instead became the first great financial power of Europe.  The popes claimed a spiritual basis for their worldly demands, of course, but they collected revenues with every means at their disposal, including excommunication and bans” (The Catholic Church)

It was in this period also that saw creation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, originally propagated by an eccentric Franciscan previously accused of heresy.  Apparently this early claim was not taken particularly seriously and was eventually condemned as the work of the devil and the ‘father of all lies’, only to be resurrected later in the nineteenth century.

For political reason the papacy moved back to Rome in 1377 but the next pope showed “such an excess of incompetence, megalomania and outright mental disturbance that there was reason for an automatic dismissal.” (Küng) So another pope, Clement VII was chosen except that the incompetent, megalomaniacal and mentally disturbed pope – Urban VI – didn’t accept this result and so they had a fight over it.  Upon defeat of his troops Clement VII took up residence in Avignon again.

Now we had two popes who excommunicated each other.  You can’t have too much of a good thing; so you had two colleges of cardinals, two Curias and two financial systems.  Clement was supported by France, Aragon, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and Scotland plus some Germans while Urban was supported by the German Empire, parts of Italy, Flanders, England and some others.

In order to sort this mess out the cardinals met at a general council in Pisa in 1409, deposed the two popes and elected a new one.  Except neither of the existing popes accepted this result either, so the Catholic Church now had three popes! You really can’t have too much of a good thing and we now had a new holy Trinity.

Of course this couldn’t last and eventually the Church managed to get itself just the one pope.

I’d forgotten all this history while doing the tour of the Palais and it would really make for a ripping yarn if it was included in the audio guide to the tour.  But unfortunately some people don’t like the story history tells us.

Another thing I didn’t know was that the area of Avignon continued to be owned and governed by the papacy until the French revolution, only joining the rest of France in 1791.  In the meantime (the Michelin ‘Green’ Guide explains) Jews were confined to a ghetto, locked in at night, compelled to wear a yellow cap, pay dues to their Christian rulers and listen to sermons designed to convert them.

The incorporation of Avignon into a unified French state reminded me of another book I had read some years ago, ‘The Discovery of France’ by Graham Robb.  He noted that at the time of the revolution there were hundreds of small towns, suburbs and villages all more or less independent of any national state.  France was a name often reserved for the small ‘mushroom-shaped’ province centred on Paris.

DSC_0352

There was little common French national identity and no common language among ‘the French.’   As late as 1863 a quarter of recruits to the army spoke ‘patois,’ a ‘corrupt language’.  French seemed to be declining in some areas so that children forgot it when they left school.  Even half a century later some recruits to the French army in the First World War couldn’t speak French and there were reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.

Most people in the 18th century didn’t travel far and their identity was a local one.  Robb quotes records of 679 couples from 1700 to 1759 showing that almost two thirds of the brides came from within shouting distance of their bridegroom: – “In Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, all but four of the fifty-seven women had married less than five miles from home. Only two of the six hundred and seventy-nine were described as ‘foreign’. This was not a reference to another land.  It meant simply, ‘not from the region.’”

Some of these towns and villages were “flourishing democracies” when France was an absolutist monarchy.  In one village, Salency, the children were never sent away to become servants, all were considered equal, and everyone worked the land. The village was conspicuously clean and tidy, harvests were abundant and crime was unknown.  Of course horizons were limited and no one was allowed to marry outside the village, which had only three surnames.

In another set of villages covering many square miles a clan called Pignou occupied an area in the northern Auvergne. All men over twenty elected a leader, there was no private property and all children in one village were brought up by a woman who ran the communal dairy.  Again people were forbidden to marry outside the clan and those who did were banished forever, “although they all eventually begged to be readmitted.”

So while the destruction of papal control over the mini-state of Avignon was obviously a progressive outcome of the French revolution the destruction of the much loved independence of many small communities by a remote, centralised state with its demands for standardisation, inevitable destruction of local customs (including language) and imposition of oppressive requirements, such as conscription into massive bloody wars, was not.

But such is capitalist progress.  Marxists understand its positive and negative aspects.  In fact understand that capitalist progress is a function of the contradictions and antagonisms within society that does not allow for real separation of good and bad.

Should it be rejected by seeking to go back to the past?  Obviously we can’t now go back to isolated village communities with no private property in the means of production in France or anywhere else but that is not how the question is posed today.

Today it is posed in terms of rejecting capitalist progress at the international level, also characterised by standardisation, centralisation and lack of democracy in favour of a return to more local, nation-state democratic forms.

Unfortunately much of the Left today is no longer confident about the future so seeks solace in the past.  But as we see, this past in the form of nation states was built upon its own brutality and disregard for peoples’ choices.

But just as the development of the nation state also heralded undoubted progress for humanity so also does the internationalisation of capitalism promise the grounds for a new and better society, a socialist one.  This is the ground upon which we must fight and seek to build an alternative.

The Paris attacks

Posted on by
3

paris imagesWhen the events in Paris unfolded last week I initially thought that I was witnessing marginalised and alienated young people involved in acts of reactionary medieval brutality.  However the terrorists, and that is exactly what they were, employing the weapon of violence in order to terrorise into silence critics of their religion, were not young.  Nor was their inspiration.

Perhaps this does not matter.  Seeing them as marginalised and alienated adults is not so very different from seeing them as disaffected youth who are rebelling against an authority they despise.  It does however make it easier to appreciate that not every act of the marginalised and alienated is a distorted expression of progressive impulses.  For the second half of my initial view can hardly be challenged – that the Islamic fundamentalism expressed by the attackers is reactionary and characterised by medieval barbarism.

The forces mobilised by fundamentalism in such attacks should no more be seen as potential candidates for enlistment in the socialist cause, but who have unfortunately been led astray,  than are those who normally make up the ranks of the lumpenproletarian supporters of fascism.  Not all victims of capitalism are candidates for its socialist opposition.  That has never been the case, nor will it ever be the case.  The basis for socialism is not the most angry, desperate or oppressed but the working class and particularly its most enlightened sections.

These are not people who seek a failed or counterproductive means to an end with some progressive content.  The victory of Islamic fundamentalism over imperialism in countries with a Muslim majority is no sort of victory for the working class.  The enemy of my enemy is not by this fact my friend and the view that the greatest enemy is imperialism does not relegate to minor status the reactionary forces that seek to take society backwards.  This is especially true for socialists in those countries in which fundamentalism is strong and who do not have the luxury of seeing these forces as second order opponents or worse, genuine expressions of some sort of anti-imperialism.

The Anti-Capitalist Party in France states:

“This murderous violence comes from somewhere. It’s created in the heart of the social and moral violence which is very familiar to large numbers of the young people who live on the working class estates. It’s the violence of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and the violence of unemployment and exploitation. This barbarous violence is the monstrous child of the social war that the right and the left are waging in the service of finance. On top of this there are the wars they have started against Iraq, in Afghanistan, Libya, Africa and Syria. . . .”

But we can identify the ‘somewhere’ more accurately, for there is a direct connection between the murderous violence and reactionary social forces in what is called the Middle East, reactionary forces that are the enemy not only of French workers but of young people and workers in the countries of the Middle East.

The Anti-Capitalist Party also says that “there is no answer to the social decomposition of which the crime against Charlie Hebdo is a dramatic expression unless we fight the politics which make it possible.” But this social decomposition has taken the form in this case of Islamic fundamentalism, which must be fought.

The argument that the enemy is imperialism and the task is to oppose it as the root cause of the Paris events cannot excuse the need to respond to these attacks in the appropriate way, to identify the actions as wholly reactionary – the acts themselves, their motivation and their consequences.

In any case imperialism and fundamentalism are not opposites.  State sponsors of Islamic fundamentalism, such as Saudi Arabia, are often supported by imperialism and no general distinction can be drawn between the two such that opposition to one can be fundamentally separated from opposition to the other.  The forces of Islamic fundamentalism are at least partly the direct and indirect result of the actions of imperialism.  That they are only partly the result means that while opposition to one cannot be separated from opposition to the other neither can opposition to one be reduced to opposition to the other.

While some of this fundamentalism now pretends to an anti-imperialism this is the purest opportunism behind which lie reactionary class and ideological interests.  That first great fundamentalist state, Iran, now collaborates with imperialism in fighting a separate fundamentalist movement in the shape of the Islamic State.  The Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan were for long dismissed by the Pakistani people as the B-team for the army that was the solid ally of the United States.  And we all are aware of the alliance between fundamentalism and the US in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Above all Islamic fundamentalism is an enemy of democracy and socialism.

It is therefore appropriate that the terrorist attacks have been used by the security agencies of western imperialist States to seek greater powers.  Even while the terrorists were known to these agencies and they failed to prevent the attacks.

Ordinary citizens cannot rely or place their trust in these agencies.  Their original sponsorship of Islamic fundamentalism in the war against the Soviet Union cannot be dismissed as a ‘mistake’ nor, as noted, can their continued collaboration with the most barbaric regimes that support various branches of fundamentalism be ignored.  “Saudi Arabia Launches Huge Arms Buying Spree; France to Net Most Orders” is one headline that shows both ugly faces of this alliance.

The restriction of democratic rights in France, Britain or Ireland will not come from these fundamentalists who do not have the power to implement their political programmes in these countries but from security apparatuses demanding greater powers.  It is not that the terrorists seek the implementation of repression in some misguided belief that this will stir resistance.  They do not seek resistance to the restriction of democratic rights because they do not support such rights themselves.  The whole idea of such a motivation would not cross anybody’s mind.

The reactionary character of these attacks is widely understood, which is why in France there has been widespread expression of the view that the division that the attacks seek to create must be opposed.  The latter is a progressive impulse that can only be consistent if it expresses complete opposition to fundamentalist terror and any racist or anti-Muslim response.

The indiscriminate murder of writers and journalists and any person that was in the Charlie Hedbo offices can also therefore only be seen as an attack on the right to freedom of speech, in this case the right to criticise Islam.  The attack was not an attack on Islamophobia or on racism.  The political programme of Islamic fundamentalism does not care for the equality of religious affiliation but regards non-believers in its faith as infidels.

In this sense statements that express the view that the “cartoons such as those published by Charlie Hedbo do nothing to advance the cause of freedom of speech. Rather, they amount to hate speech” do not change the nature of the attack.  In this situation it is necessary to identify clearly what has happened without fear that it compromises some political standpoint, which by virtue of being compromised demonstrates its misconception.

Such rights are purely bourgeois democratic rights?  Of course they are.  Is France not a capitalist country?  Bourgeois freedom of speech leads to the expression of views we dislike, even abhor?  How could it be otherwise?

But is it not better, much better, for French workers of all religions and none to have such democratic rights?  Are we only to defend freedom of speech when it is to our taste?  And for how long would that position be taken seriously?

The anti-Islam cartoons did not advance freedom of speech?  But were they not an expression of it?  And if there were no more cartoons ridiculing Islam, what would that be an expression of?  Is the Marxist critique of Islam also to be subordinated to the view that the oppression of Muslims means that the religious sensitivities of that people must not be offended lest their oppression be enhanced?  Where then are these peoples’ route out of oppression?  How are socialists in ‘the West’ to point out the hypocrisy of Christian support for war if religion is above criticism?

Perhaps it is only the religion itself that should be spared criticism but not its institutions?  But what of states where there is no separation?  Like many where Islam is the majority religion.

So the immediate response must be that of defending democratic rights and opposing the terrorism that seeks to destroy such rights.  It requires opposition to the security agencies of the State and the attempts to turn the actions of fundamentalists against every adherent of the Islamic faith through attacks on mosques and individual Muslims.

Such a defence must raise the banner of democracy against the fundamentalists that would destroy it, the repressive agencies of the State that would subordinate it to their control and to its false friends in the capitalist parties for whom it is accepted only in so far as it does not develop to threaten their system.

Does all this get to the root of the problem?

Is this root the alienation of capitalism or more specifically the imperialist domination and war against countries that are mainly Muslim?  Is it Islamic fundamentalism or religion in general?

I have mentioned a number of times that socialists are defined by what they are for but knowing what you are against is not a small thing either.  In Ireland we have socialists who are sanctimonious in their opposition to religious sectarianism but studiously avoid determining its exact concrete nature.

So yes capitalist alienation is expressed in the acts of desperate people who engage in barbarous acts of violence but we know that this alienation arises from the rather more concrete circumstances of imperialist domination and war in certain Muslim countries.  It would be impossible to effectively fight the violence of the Paris attacks without also opposing imperialist violence in these countries.  But the fundamentalist response to this imperialist violence in Paris and in these countries themselves is itself barbaric and must be opposed, in the interests of the potential victims of terrorism in France and in the Muslim world.

But if we know the causes of this alienation we also know how it has come to express itself in the backward form of Islamic fundamentalism.  We are therefore required to fight this reactionary, obscurantist ideology and programme.

Fundamentalism has grown not just because of the actions of imperialism, and the failure of nationalist and leftist programmes and movements in many Muslim countries, but also because it can more readily gain acceptance due to the fact that the populations are already deeply religious.

Combatting this is no easy task and, while opposition to religion must be a principle, its prosecution can only be carried out with regard to ensuring that those who want to fight for a better world in the here and now are not rejected for their belief in a hereafter world.  Such a fight will involve opposition to the material privileges of religion through its support by the state and through an alternative to the social programmes of well-funded fundamentalist movements.

In ‘the West’ it also means fighting the privileges of religion and for complete separation of church and state, in circumstances where it is rather easier to fight the material and ideological basis of religion.

As in all struggles it is necessary to be with the workers, in this case in their genuine expressions of revulsion at the terrorist attacks and their sincere advocacy of democratic rights, even, if not especially, when these are cynically and hypocritically appropriated by the likes of the dignitaries of such imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism who took part in the million person march in Paris.  At the same time it is necessary to put forward the equally sincere and honest programme that such violence can only be ended by opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, the imperialism that is its partner in barbarism and the irrational belief systems that so easily sanctify both.