Islamism

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Nov 10 16:14:01 PST 2002


``...The rise of Islamism parallels the rise of Western 'new social movements' (NSMs), such as environmentalism and feminism. While the influence of Western NSMs grew from the decline of the organised labour movement post-1970, Islamism expanded over the ruins of Third World nationalism. Organisationally NSMs and Islamist movements exhibit many similarities...'' James Heartfield (hopefully paraphrasing Philip Cunliffe?)

``...It is fair to argue that some aspects of Militant Islamic fundamentalism can be analyzed using NSM theory, but the rest of the attempted analogy is very weak, and ties back into the implicit red-baiting...'' Chip Berlet

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It is not only, not fair and weak, it is wildly irrational reactionary propaganda to argue that militant Islamic fundamentalism shares anything, especially its internal motivations and organization with so-called new social movements like environmentalism and feminism. What are you two thinking?

The more accurate parallel development in the West to militant Islamism are the rise of reactionary Christian and Jewish movements---all three of whom currently represent the tripartite war between the US, Israel and the Islamic world.

Women's movements and environmentalists are vehemently opposed to the intellectual, socio-cultural and historical foundations of these fundamentalists movements.

I am even a little surprised all three fundamentalist movements haven't joined forces and conspired to eradicate the environmentalists and feminists as the common enemy. Luckily the Christian and Jewish fanatics seem to hate the Islamic fanatics and vice versa, more than they mutually hate women, tree huggers, and homos. This isn't entirely accurate. I should say that exterminating Islamism or the Judeo-Christian West is considered foreign policy and exterminating feminists and environmentalists is domestic policy. While the religious fundies disagree on foreign policy, obviously to the point of total war, they absolutely and unanimously agree in their domestic agendas. Let's put it that way. The historical and cultural reasons for this agreement on domestic policy stems directly from their mutually shared roots in the Old Testament where the archetypes of brutal paternalistic hierarchies, war, nationalism, genocide, and insane bloody retribution seems to be all there is to human life.

The only abstract point of concordance between new social movements and religious fundamentalists, and it is a very abstract point indeed, is these are vastly different reactions and rejections of Modernity. But these rejections and reactions don't conceive of Modernity in the same terms, so the point is little more than a rhetorical coincidence.

Both the historical and conceptual core of Modernity is in fact anti-clericism, whose goal was the overthrow of the feudal political world dominated by hierarchical religious thought and practice. Hence, the fundamentalist's attack on Modernity is primarily focused on erasing this modernist history and its ethico-cultural humanism and secularism. On the other hand new social movements like feminism and various environmental groups pro-actively embrace precisely this ethico-cultural track of Modernity, and are attempting to extend its humanism and secularism through further dismantling various hierarchical ethico-cultural, social, and intellectual systems of thought and practice. The attack on Modernity, from the point of view of new social movements is focused principally on Modernity's hierarchical ordering of social structures and Modernity's or Postmodernity's implicit equivalence between all social value schemes with those of corporate capitalism.

And just as a point of order of the historical difference between the US and the UK, the new social movements (NSM) might have evolved out of a Labour party base in the UK, but in the US, all those movements grew the civil rights and anti-war movements. The difference is important only in the sense that Marxism was probably a much stronger influence in the UK developments than in the US. While there were some socialists and marxists elements who survived US labor movement purges of the 40s-60s, for the most part socialist and marxist elements were re-united with NSM completely outside organized labor. It has only been in the era subsequent to the civil rights and anti-war movements that the new social movements while re-evaluating and reconstructing both socialist and marxist ideas and histories have tried to re-inject themselves into US organized labor.

Whatever the origins of this very wrong headed and very sloppy conflation between militant Islamists and NSMs, it is alarming to see it performed here on LBO without much notice.

Chuck Grimes



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