If you are to say that to the public, then, someone will pipe up: "So, I take . . . that your answer is that instead of imposing bourgeois wealth and liberties on the unwilling masses in typical imperialist fashion, we can let the clerics impose Sharia law, stuff the women into chadors, authorize honor killings of raped women who disgrace their male relatives, beat clean-shaven men, hang the queers and stone the adulterers, and build a bomb" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20071022/020182.html>).
What is your answer to your own rhetorical question?
On 10/23/07, farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> Yoshie may not be offering in these recent discussions the correct
> answers but I think she has been asking some of the right
> questions (without which, of of course, one cannot find the right
> answers). Some of the questions are: How do we as mostly
> secular leftists relate to religiously minded people, such as militant
> Islamists who might be engaged in anti-imperialist struggle? In fact
> ought we relate to the religious who share many of the same
> enemies as we do, but who might dream of a religiously based
> utopia, unlike ourselves?
>
> These issues are not confined to the Middle East. In Europe,
> secular leftists have found themselves confronting the same
> issues too, as more and more of the proletariats there become
> comprised of immigrants from Muslin countries. In the UK there
> has been, for some years an ongoing debate on the radical left
> over these issues. The British SWP, for instance, has decided
> to cooperate with Muslim activists. The new political party,
> Respect (who most well known figure is politician George
> Galloway) is based, in part on alliance between the SWP and
> other secular leftists and Muslim activists. Other groups on the
> radical left in Britain think this approach to be wrongheaded.
> I don't think there is any clearcut answers to these questions.
> But these are the sorts of questions that we ought to be asking.
First of all, it is crucial to determine what the empire is attempting to do and what we want to do about it. For those leftists who do not think that US imperialism is the most dangerous problem at present on the international level and that therefore they must do everything they can to check it, the question of Islam won't be all that important, so they should stop reading this right here.
To those who do, though, I'd suggest that we begin by asking questions like these.
Is there an organized Left to which you belong in your country? If so, what is the size of this Left? What is its structure? Is it a parliamentary Left, an extra-parliamentary Left, or both? What are this Left's short-, medium-, and long-term objectives?
Similar questions (about organization, relative and absolute sizes, objectives, etc.) must be asked about each Islamic state, party, or movement that this Left needs to take into account.
Those who currently do not have any such organized Left in their countries, like those of us in the USA, and cannot therefore examine these questions in concrete fashion might begin by considering the various approaches of leftists elsewhere who are organized.
I've mentioned the approaches taken by the JCP (toward Iran), Latin American socialists (in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua toward Iran), the Lebanese Communists (toward Hizballah), a New Left in Egypt (toward the Muslim Brotherhood), etc. What do you think of those? Are they right approaches for them, given the objective balances of forces they respectively face at the domestic (i.e., outside Latin America, leftists are marginal, and even in Latin America, Marxists are a minority of the populist Left) and international levels? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/>