The Clash of Civilisations
Sophie Katz argues that Samual Huntingdon’s infamous phrase is at its zenith following the Woolwich attacks
It has never been more important to look at the world from the point of view of the clash of civilisations. Three groups of people in the UK see the hacking to death of Lee Rigby as a symbol of such a clash. One group is the radical young Muslims, a truly multi-racial group in Britain, who believe that everything about daily life, the hypocrisy, the moral turpitude of modern G8 capitalism has to be destroyed. More. They believe a barbaric international war is being waged against Muslim countries, peoples and ideas.
The second group are the fascists and would be fascists who see G8 liberalism and multi-racialism as a deep failure of the modern world and who long, in Britain, to represent a third group. This last group are, today, mainly older (but with increasing numbers of young people) mainly white, with a mainly working class background, who increasingly think that all of their securities are being undermined, attacked and dissolved and who want to attach their free-floating anxiety to something other – an offensive from the ‘outside’. The current destruction of living standards, of welfare, of public health, of the gains made possible by their struggle and the struggle of their mothers and fathers, has become part of this picture; part of the whole; a sign of the coming end of times.
The Observer, the Times, all the commentators on serious TV news programmes search diligently for pictures of women in headdresses who weep for Lee Rigby. All our mainstream politicians form sonorous and pompous phrases to describe the need to ‘stand back, to be proportionate and defend ‘our’ democracy and ‘our’ way of life, which is apparently embraced ‘by the overwhelming majority of us’.
What is really happening?
Why did these young butchers talk gravely and coherently about violence and their lives to the brave young women who stood and talked to them and who cradled the dying soldier? The answer is that there is a clash of civilisations. And it will get worse. The liberals are holding ‘a centre that will not hold.’ The mistake that some older white working class people make in their fear (a cynically manipulated fear that is pumped up by various media and political outlets) is that they no longer belong to a civilisation that they at least had a hand in partially creating through their struggles and efforts and sacrifices from WW2 onwards. That civilisation – or at least that aspect of modern civilisation – is being killed off. Capitalism grinds on its way and the social pressures that amended and even curtailed its brutal hegemony have weakened to the extent that its despotic and relentless progress backwards seems unchallengeable.
The defence of truly human civilisation cannot be left to our current system of society or to its masters. That system is spreading poison across the globe. It is destroying the substance of millions of lives across the continents. In the G8 countries it is liquidating the gains that two generations of common people fought for and creating a madness among a sector of youth that imagines that anything, anything with some sort of moral centre, anything that appears to emerge from the oppressed nations of the earth, is legitimate, an alternative, a way of living that is fierce enough to withstand the blows and which means something.
This tells us where socialists and communists are – or where they should be. They need to be simultaneously at the height of the enlightenment, radically committed to humanity’s progress, able to deal with the historical political and social formations that are the residue of the post WW2 period and which still have a deep influence on the people, but which belong to the past and not to the future. And they need at the same time to help create the greatest revolutionary overturn of our current ‘civilisation’ – to complete the process that humanity began in 1789 in France in 1917 in Russia and in 1948 in China. And all this is urgent. Socialists and Communists need to be the clearest people on the planet about the need for a new civilisation. However, the politics and economics of how to get from here to there seems to totally absorb the socialists and communists in all aspects of their presentation and this is a weakness when it comes to both radical young islamists and even among wider youth circles as they smell the decay and sense the truth of things.
22 comments
22 responses to “The Clash of Civilisations”
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I don’t believe we’re seeing a clash of civilisations. We’re experiencing a clash of zealotries, with decent, rational people caught in the middle.
I know Sophie is making a rhetorical point, but I think it is unwise to use any ‘clash of civilisation’ references. It emphasises that there is some actual gulf between white working class people (and not only working people are racist by the way) and mainly Asian or black Muslim working class people. It also divides activists in the G8 (as you put it) from the struggles of oppressed people in North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc.
Sophie is correct to say that mere liberalism in the absence of equality and justice is not sufficient. The real clash of civilisation should be between US the ordinary people of the world and THEM the rich, powerful elite who totally rule and dominate our lives and life chances.
Just one point though, in what parallel universe has Mao Zedung got anything to do with civilisation?
Some interesting observations. However I think , as an anti-stalinist socialist that there are some glaring problems with some aspects of your “take” on these issues.
Firstly, Fundamentalist Islam. Throughout most of the 20th century this backward looking ideology (“backward-looking” in a very real sense – with its completely mythical view of early Islamic societies, as idealised theocratic cultures where everyone lived in harmony, rich and poor, men and women, following the “true way” guided in every detail by the Holy Koran and its religious scholars), was very much sidelined as a dynamic belief system – by “modernist”oriented philosophies and political ideals – from the reforming western-capitalism apeing bourgeois nationalist secularism of the likes of Kemal Attaturk – to the “statist” , again secularist, nationalist command economy apeing of Stalinist Russia’s economic/political model in post WWII Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq , etc. It is only with the failure of the statist neo Stalinist model to bring sustained economic and social progress across the “Third World”, and the subsequent self-serving corrupt embracing of the former “statist” minority power elites of neoliberalism , to replace “statist” economic development strategies over the last 30 years that ,out of the failure of the promise of economic development for all, masses of desperate people have listened anew to the attractive, but of course fantastical nostrums of the religious fundamentalists. In Islam’s case, this fantastical ” alternative system” involves the need for a “worldwide Islamic Caliphate” to bring peace, fairness and justice to the world – led of course by the very “religious” ideologues claiming to be speaking in the name of God.
It is similarly the failure of western capitalism to deliver on its promise of “equality of opportunity and treatment before the law” to the young embittered , often culturally schizoid, children of the waves of postwar immigration to Europe and the USA) to feed the postwar boom, which has created the bitterness and “ideological vacuum” for so many young Black and Asian youth , which has left them prey for the seductive siren teachings of Fundamentalist Islam. In contrast to the amoral, individualist, hypocritical, chaotic , consumerist, , and of course still fundamentally RACIST, ideology of free enterprise capitalism, the confused, alienated young person is offered a vision of clear moral rules, rituals, order, justice, and of course a world-changing role for themselves as the “jihadist blessed”. For men of course we also have to frankly acknowledge the undoubted ideological appeal of fundamentalist Islam in justifying/promoting the oppression of women.
In its creation of a mythical ,idealised, pre-capitalist, past, – a past in which class conflict is almost totally ameliorated though the religious obligations of “charity” and fair treatment of ones co-religionists, and its drive to recover this past through political, often violent, action, it is quite easy to see direct parallels with key features of the ideological underpinning of European fascism. Of course fundamentalist Islam is not “racist” in the same way that certainly “nazi fascism” is, but , the petty bourgeois and Lumpen proletarian desire in traditional fascist ideology to return to a pre Big Capitalism, even pre industrial, agrarian, La La land of fantasy, following strict moral rules, following a benign leadership – away from the crushing power of uncaring market-driven big capitalism, has many interwoven similarities to the “ideological offers” of fundamentalist Islam. Both are reactions based in the despair evoked by crisis periods in the capitalist systems – the failure to deliver on the development for all “promise” implicit in the capitalist ideological “offer”.
Of course in exactly the same way, the dramatic failure of US capitalism to deliver on its traditional promise of “constant economic advance for all” and “an equal opportunity society” over the last 40 years, as neoliberalism has transformed US society into one of the least socially mobile in the Western World – and one of the most unequal in terms of wealth distribution, has driven millions of Americans , particularly the “petty bourgeois” Middle Class” of small businesspeople, into the irrational ideological myth-based politici-religious certainties of fundamentalist Christianity .
The missing “ideological/social alternative” element in this toxic brew of essentially irrational, myth-based ideological responses ( whether Fundamentalist Islam, Evangelical , Rapturist, Christianity, or fascism) to the failure of free enterprise capitalism to “deliver” on its promises of economic prosperity for all, certainly compared to the last global capitalist crisis on this scale, in the 1930’s, is of course “Socialism”. It is significant of course that the “model” of “socialism” most effective in winning hearts and minds on a mass scale in the 1930’s as a counterpoise to the obvious failure of capitalism was the Stalinist perversion of Socialism in the Soviet Union. The reality and human cost of the murderous tyranny of Stalinism was hidden to most people seeking a viable alternative to both 1930’s crisis-ridden capitalism and its fascist variant . Instead the propaganda barrage of the Soviet State projected a vision of constant economic progress based on a democratic workers state. Today, with the obvious economic failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, and much wider knowledge of the realities of Stalinist tyranny) the growing conventional bourgeois capitalist restoration in China, and the image of economic failure presented by states like North Korea, the very concept of “Socialism” has been very effectively damaged in the minds of its natural potential adherents in the working classes as a viable, desirable, alternative social system to replace the blatantly failing capitalist status quo.
The siren appeals of all the irrational, bogus-alternatives to free enterprise globalised capitalism, and the sucking in of idealistic, vulnerable,young people to be adherents of these pseudo-alternatives, whether it be fascism or fundamentalist Islam (or Right wing evangelical Christianity) will continue unopposed to win adherents until we on the Radical Left” can raise our game to show through word and deed , that we do have a viable alternative social and political model, both for the future, and as a “resistance ideology and practice” in the here and now. It’s a big task, and undoubtedly at present the promoters of ideological models of irrationality and intolerance are setting the pace, not us.
Spot on John.
The Soviet Union didn’t fail economically. In 1992, detailed research by group of academics for the IVth World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies were forced, despite their anti-communist instincts, to admit that “for all it’s deep-seated flaws, the Soviet economy was a viable system. Its performance was actually improving in 1983-5, and could have improved without endangering the system. The current [in 1992] sorry state of the economy is the result of the paralysis of political authority, and of the mis-guided reforms and policies of the Gorbachev period.” (see Ellman and Kontorovich’s “the Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System” for their analysis)
The collapse was political – the tragic end result of decades of revisionist crawling to shallow Western consumerist glitz and shame at their past bureaucratic mistakes.
What relevance does this have for today? Well, the last barrier to achieving socialism is the the bourgeois lie pumped into the working class for decades that “it’s nice in theory but it doesn’t work in practice” – compounded by Stalinism’s cover up for past mistakes (including the lie that it was all went bad from Khrushchev on) and Trotskyism’s sour non-stop “all is rotten” denunciations from the 1920s.
If Stalin (or Khrushchev) were “counter-revolutionary”, what happened in 1989 (-the real counter-revolution; cheered on by whole of world imperialism)???
The Soviet Union didn’t fail economically?? Why were there so many food shortages? why were there so many queues for basic goods? Let me guess it was all caused by an American conspiracy.
China abandoning a command economy? That’s a conspiracy as well.
I’m afraid it is deluded to think that the Soviet Union was somehow more efficient than Capitalism in the 1980’s. Present day North Korea is a good example of how a purely Stalinist economy fails to even feed its own people.
Patrick,
1,200 Bangladeshi female workers crushed to death in their sweatshops to benefit Western consumers tells me all I need to know about “capitalist efficiency” – Not to mention the whole-scale environmental and human devastation inflicted on the Third World by capitalist production methods and imperialist warmongering. Still, such super-exploitation paid for the NHS and the Welfare State so capitalism can’t be that bad(??!!).
It is ludicrous to compare the Soviet Union with capitalism anyway. They didn’t base their economy on Third World sweatshop labour, for a start. Also, they didn’t start from the same levels of material development. I wasn’t making the comparison. The quote I gave says that there were difficulties.
Building a totally new society and co-operative way of living is not going to be easy, especially in a society that suffers non-stop threats of nuclear annihilation and invasion.
It’s more meaningful to compare what was achieved with conditions before the revolution. 97% of Pyongyang was destroyed by US imperialism and it’s entire economy shattered. In that context, North Korea’s achievements are huge. Compare Cuba’s economic development with that of Haiti, or China with India, and then talk about the achievements of “capitalist efficiency”!!
See this from Russell Brand, who talks great sense eleoquently. Another person who should join us!
http://www.russellbrand.tv/2013/05/woolwich/
What would Ken Loach think of such a personality joining the moment/party? We could get Simon Cowell too. He would really be an asset. Clever bloke him.
I assume from your comment that you did not read his article. You will not find him lacking in intellect I can assure you. The piece is an honest opinion, clearly from the left. I agree with many of your posts, Robboh, but this one is a bit narrow-minded. If Ken Loach has any sense he would welcome Brand too – unconventional and shocking as he is.
And what has Simon Cowell got to do with anything!
Hi Ray
Apologies for my infantile post, I guess I am getting a little frustrated in working out exactly what L.U. is. I am fed up already with all the non-senses that is on here. So no offence intended Ray. I lost my career because of this government, so did my wife who works in social services, and we are looking for something to be done from someone, thats going to have a tangible effect in stopping and reversing the cuts. We have also seen the effects of the cuts on the vulnerable people we use to work with, real people with real lives ruined. That is why I cannot abide any talk of Lenin or revolution or any idiocy like that, because it means you have no interest in really helping out.
As for Russel Brand I happen to have known him briefly in a personal capacity through a friend who works in the media, and let me tell you he is a disgusting human being. The values Mr Brand represent are more similar to capitalism, as he does not give a f.cuk about anything but his own ego, no matter what he says on stage. But my personal views aside, I guess the sort of people that would endorse LU depends on what the movement aims to be. LU could become a talent show! Mr Cowell could spot the activist with the best speech and give them a show biz contract! Wooooo! Socialism socialism! revolution revolution!
I agree that what is happening is capitalism in it’s grinding onwards. But that may not be apparent at pavement level, or in St.Georges’ Hall/Wetherspoons Bristol, or on the EDL’s Fb page. Neither might it be apparent during the relatively peaceful EDL parade in Newcastle on Saturday, where it has been suggested that crowds cheered them.
I think we have a perfect storm brewing: a Tory party at odds with its leader over Europe and his pro-gay marriage policy; Nigel Farage and UKip; Tony Robinson and the EDL.
It’s as though long unheard voices, the ones many decent people, many liberals, with a small ‘l,’ and many on the Left had thought were put to bed decades ago have re-emerged from the undergrowth. I’m not sure that the hegemony of multi-culturalism, or multi-faith ideas, was ever really accepted by large numbers of people. Too often I have heard well-meaning people indicating that freedom of speech should be extended to far-right groups, now we are where we are.
Tony Robinson has a working class voice, something that has not been heard a great deal from the Parliamentary Labour Party leaderships for a long time.
The other night I watched the EDL Fb page grow at something like 600 ‘likes’ per hour. The comments being made were alarming. I felt on my own Fb page that I was a lonesome voice because I linked some items about Uncle Saleem who was murdered in Birmingham recently. On Friday I visited a Gurdwara where one of the officials was very anxious and tried to assure my companion that we were in a Sikh temple not a Mosque. Afterwards I said to my friend, also female and white, that I feel that people who reach out are a minority. But I am also challenged as to why I can’t reach out to my fellow white working class people. I find myself being shot down.
I hate to say this but now might be the time for Left to choose a charismatic working class man as its leader. There, I think I’ve uttered the unmentionable, that we need someone like Nye Bevan, [I am sure other examples can be named,] someone who can capture the imagination and bring hope along with clearly directed policies on the economy and jobs.
I just don’t think that there is time, at the moment, to waste. This person, this leader has to be out there. The time for exchanging nuanced theoretical insights is over, at least for the time-being. Now is the time to come out the corner fighting. The Right’s unholy trinity, as I have described above, is going to win hands down at this rate.
I think you mean Tommy Robinson (or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon if you prefer). Tony Robinson played the character “Baldrick” in Blackadder. I don’t think Tony (a Labour Party member) would be pleased that you linked him to the EDL.
It is the labour of the working billions which creates the wealth and makes societies work.
While the right and right wing media continues to con and divide we need to wake all working people up whatever their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disabity and to unite.
Left unity needs to start leafleting and start talking to working people on council estates to begin with but we also need to ensure we canvass multi-ethnic areas.
We should have a pay what you can afford membership fee so could be 10p for unwaged up to £30 for someone like me in a good job.
Our community leaflets should promote equality, socialist ideas and anti-discrimination.
As a party we should be grassroots-led, bottom up and I do like one member one vote.
We should use everyday language but if use a big word we should explain it for example ‘We do not belive that markets should rule our lives, what academics call ‘Neo-liberalism’ ‘ – so we are promoting political education as well.
The left has always been good at demos, city centre stalls etc but its time to get out on the doorstep.
We should also support campaigns and do things with groups and not for them.
Hopefully we will attract a lot of diverse working people and leaders will emerge.
There is hope!
‘TOMMY ROBINSON – NO MUG AFTER ALL
Robinson made a potentially fatal mistake at Woolwich where the EDL appeared as if celebrating the soldier murder for the political opportunity it them. The pissed up balaclavas and regulation bottle throwing at blacks did not appeal to the people of Woolwich. Neither will last night’s battle of Wetherspoons in Bristol. However Saturday in Newcastle was a different story. By and large discipline was maintained and the real plus for the EDL was that people watching were applauding and encouraging – would the same be true in Woolwich if they marched in orderly fashion with St.Georges flags flying and the balaclavas and goons abandoned? You tell me.
So it might appear that Robinson has the old Nick Griffin problem – how to turn the bonehesds into suits – but he doesn’t cos UKIP are the suits.
Robinson has been waiting for the islamacist atrocity to come along and would no doubt be happy for three to come along at once. In truth the Left/anarchists have no one coming close to Robinson as a canny political operator as anyone seeing him give Paxman the runaround in his Newsnight interview way back would have to acknowledge. He is working class, he talks like he’s working class. One of the few times you hear a working class voice talking politics on the telly. The snobby left trying to say he’s stupid need to wise up quick.
After the Newsnight interview many snobby leftists were laughing at his grammar. He is also daring and bold – the rabbi stunt was fucking funny as well as daring. He leads for the front – ever seen any left leader do that? He has a strategy of how to get from A-B. There I’ve said it – how many years will our armchair anarchists be salivating over that. Time to stop kidding ourselves – we’re sleepwalking to a right wing Tory/UKIP coalition with the bright lad acting as enforcer. We need to acknowledge some realties rather than tilt at windmills comrades. Then we might…just fucking might…begin to organise and fight.’
From Ian Bones blog, don’t agree with all of it, but he is right on the substantive points, working class issues have to be LU’s priority, benefits, inequality, housing, and yes issues around migration, etc.
R is an insular w class Little Englander who dehmanises himself and is essentially frightened of other ethnic groups and cultures.
It may surprise Jonno but some of us are w class socialist housing association tenants who have read and who see the richness of diverse humanity.
It’s simple, as others attempt to divide socialist should work to unite especially in the current right wing tide.
With immigration we should offer sanctuary to asylum seekers and refugees, trade unionise migrant workers so they are not used by unscupulous employers to unddercut wages and encourage working people to mix and actually talk to these groups more to realise we have much in common.
If he sees my previous post I suggest ways that we can build support for equality, socialist ideas and anti-discrimination.
As the right and right wing press sets white against black to distract working people from the rich and powerful perhaps armchair activists and Jonno should get their asses out on the estates like me to talk with our class.
Jonno, leave it alone, matey. You are very tentative in spelling out what your “core point” actually is , in amongst all your usual laughable “I’m such a horny handed worker…. and everyone else is just a Lefty middle class snobby wanker” pose, but from previous posts it is quite clear that you are simply picking up the now dropped “political baton” from the totally failed IWCA workerist initiative of the 1990’s. Strip away all your criticisms of the Austerity Offensive and what you are saying is ” the Left needs to surrender to the anti Muslim, anti migrant worker, sentiment present in significant sections of the White Working Class, and adopt suitably slipperily worded policy objectives to attract people to our ranks who are the natural voting support of the BNP”. It can all be dressed up with pseudo leftish pronouncements against “identity politics” and being in favour of “pro working class policies” – rather than ” multiculturalist” politics which are claimed to “split the working class”, but its actually pure reactionery political poison.
Sorry , Jonno, you’re wasting your time, Left Unity is never going to embrace policies which make concessions to bigotry, in the guise of a bogus but actually Lumpen, reactionery, “workerism”. A genuine radical Left party should not, and of course cannot “outflank” the Far Right by adopting their key obsessions and policies.A racist mythology conceded to is a racist hysteria which simply grows ever greater. First it is “just” the EU migrant workers that are demonised as “a problem” – oh yes, and “a few Muslim extremists”. Eventually it is the entire non-White community in the UK which becomes “the enemy within” – the target for the mob’s scapegoating rage and attacks. Exactly as has occurred in Greece as the old ruling parties have conceded ground again and again to racism and anti immigrant hysteria – only to actually grow the racist hysteria, and the forces of organised Nazism ever stronger.
The Left has to stand firm against the racist storm, offer solidarity with all our ethnic minority communities, and try to work and build resistance to the capitalist Austerity Offensive which unites as many people from as many components of the broad working class, manual worker and white collar (middle class), black and white, as is humanly possible, on a progressive , socialist programme.
All your repeated recommendations that Left Unity embrace hostility to immigration offers us is division and concession to the unending efforts of the capitalist class to distract us from the real cause of the 2008 World Crash , and the resulting homelessness, the privatisation of the NHS, mass unemployment, lack of youth opportunities, ie, the capitalist system itself .
Your obvious admiration of Tommy Robinson and the EDL is misplaced – he is a dangerous fascist rabble-rousing bigot, whose ramshackle EDL project is actually in the throes of utter collapse. Forget it, Jonno, Left Unity isn’t going to jump on any Islamophobic or anti immigrant “bandwagons’. If you want to, then there are organisations ready and willing to recruit you.
I can’t see any consideration here of what is meant by “civilisation” – it seems to have been jumped over. For example, where does this concept come from and what assumptions does it contain?
Robboh
Sorry to hear about your personal circumstances. I hope you don’t give up on LU.It IS possible to be in a campaigning organisation fighting back against this government and at the same time think through the ideas that should form the basics of our approach on a blog, in discussion with others.
Are you a member of a local group? That is the way to get stuck in. My blog writing is either done illicitly at work or late at night after meetings on the bedroom tax etc. We recently had a great meeting on a local estate with 50 plus people there, more than half of whom were previously politically inactive residents on the local social housing estate. Things are moving and Left Unity must be part of that.
Thanks Ray, I am currently looking for an organisation to join, to add my small contribution in the electoral downfall of this government. I hope LU turns out to be all it set out to be, because someone has to do something here. In the mean time I’ll be waiting for the LU “what we stand for” statement. Encouraging news from that estate, its good people are fighting back somehow.
A very interesting take on this by Frank Furedi, cited below, who argues that the clash WITHIN civilisations is what drives international conflict. Furedi sees the clash of rival values within western polities as the source of the determination of western ruling elites to deal with these by transforming its cultural / ideological enemies within into perceived foreign threats. So – the threat from counter-cultural values such as anti-capitalism, Occupy, domestic Islamic culture, postmodern anti-rationalism, etc – is rendered alien through its perceived, treasonable, alliance with the foreign threat which becomes the focus of mass propaganda. I would argue further that this was also the primary character of the Cold War, which emerged out of a real fear of socialist revolution in southern Europe led by the left-wing domestic anti-Fascist resistance groups and the American determination to nurture European markets to keep its war economy going indefinitely:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/frank_on_the_clash_of_civilisations/14059#.UkGLc2SidjG
There is a very compelling analysis by John Penney above but its main problem AFAICS is not to see that the roots of Islamic fundamentalism lay in the search for an alternative to imperialist subjugation. This started with Wahaabism arising in rsponse to Ottoman imperialism and continued in the 20th century, in rsponse to western imperialism, with the mainly Egyptian thinkers who put together the ideology behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which had both conservative and radical interpretations within it.
The fact that the Brotherhood, which built its support in the slums around Cairo by providing social welfare, much like Hamas, is now being proscribed by the Military regime which has emerged out of the 17 million strong movement against Morsi, is testament to the power of Furedi’s argument and to the power of the Military’s position over the people; it is now in a place it could not have dreamed about at the height of the Arab Spring in Cairo, all because it has been able to tweak the call made by the 17 million in June to fit into the War On Terror narrative of contemporary international affairs and use this to clamp down. As far as the Egyptian left is concerned, they may well ponder a re-worked piece of old wisdom – “First they came for the Muslim Bortherhood …”!