Corresponding author: Saladdin Bahozde (AKA Saladdin Ahmed), is a Senior Mellon Fellow at Asian University for Women (Chittagong, Bangladesh), an associated researcher at the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, and a member of the New University in Exile Consortium. E-mail: saladdin.ahmed@gmail.com ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4636-8217
He is the author of over ten books including Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (SUNY Press 2019), Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism: Marginalized Voices and Dissent (Bloomsbury Academic 2022), Critical Theory from the Margins (SUNY Press 2023), The Death of Home (De Gruyter 2024), Elsewhereness (Daraja Press 2024), Fascism in the Middle East Nationalism, Islamism, and Imagining Other Futures (Routledge 2025), and Fascism or Whatever You Want to Call It (De Gruyter 2025).
‘Immediately with the formation of the first nation-state in the Middle East following WWI, what can be called fascism came into the picture’
Historical Expertise: Your book Fascism in the Middle East Nationalism, Islamism, and Imagining Other Futures has just been published. What is it about? Why do you believe that fascism in its nationalist and religious forms has been dominating Turkish, Iranian, and Arab politics for over half a century?
Saladdin Ahmed: The book focuses on the present moment, how we got here, and where we should look for a way forward to negate fascism. The main problem that necessitates the book is that fascism has not been problematized enough, especially, in West Asia and North Africa. We are at a point now that fascism must be confronted by not only small progressive movements here and there, liberation movements of the minoritized groups but a new egalitarian social revolution formed from the onset as anti-nationalist, anti-Islamist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal. Immediately with the formation of the first nation-state in the region following WWI, what can be called fascism came into the picture even though the term, “fascism,” was still in its infancy stage and had not left its Italian birthplace yet; the Young Turks, the founders of the Republic of Türkiye[SB1] [1], were fascists by all accounts. As Stefan Ihring points out, Hitler and Mussolini looked up to Ataturk as their role model, source of inspiration, and hero.
Ataturk’s state from the outset was meant to be a state for Turks exclusively, so non-Turks were subjected to mass deportation, mass killing, and/or forced assimilation. Ataturk ordered Turkish scientists to establish the racial superiority of Turks as a scientific fact. If this language sounds like something coming from a widely condemned past elsewhere, in Türkiye, it continues to be the norm. The independence was a catastrophe for the already minoritized non-Muslim and non-Turkish peoples everywhere from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, from Istanbul to every corner of Anatolia and much of Mesopotamia. Just like the Young Turks, the first Arab nationalist elite came out from the ruling class in the Ottoman Empire.
A major Arab nationalist figure from that generation was Sati Al-Husri, an Ottoman teacher and official from a well-off family from the city of Hallab. Al-Husri was part of the Young Turk’s movement but turned his attention to Arab nationalism. Applying the nationalist-modernist formula of Turkish nationalism, he had the most influential role in founding the pan-Arab model of the fascistic education system in Syria and Iraq, which would gradually be copied in most other Arab countries in the postcolonial era as an essential part of the Arabization project that has never stopped under any of the so-called Arab republics.
Following Al-Husri’s pan-Arab orientation, Michel Aflaq and Salah Al-Bitar, two Syrian teachers and graduates of the Sorbonne, established what later became Baathism and the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq. Baathism is in every sense a textbook example of fascism in its most militaristic and bluntly totalitarian form as an ideology. The Baathists were obsessed with the army and militarization of society from the beginning. While he studied in Paris, Aflaq might have picked up some of the romanticism characteristic of the writings of early inspirers of German nationalism such as Fichte and Herder. He never cited them, or anyone else for that matter, which is typical of other fascist ideologues including Mussolini and Hitler. Aflaq developed a fascist discourse using idealist expressions and capitalizing on religious symbolism. For instance, his speeches and essays are full of expressions such as the soul of the Arab nation, national Arab personality, national mission, fate of the nation, resurrection of the nation’s great civilization, etc.
While from a Christian family, Aflaq especially focused on making use of the Islamic frame of reference to create a modern mythology. This new idealism, Arab nationalism, was secular despite its intentional re-idealization of Mohammad as a model for the Arab personality. As a secular ideology, Baathism became a promising cause for intellectuals who came from religious minorities but were on the right, unlike those on the left, who saw communism as the only inclusive movement defending universal equality and protecting the rights of the minoritized groups.
From the beginning the Baathists developed a political worldview almost identical to their Fascist and Nazi counterparts in Europe, and very much like Mussolini and Hitler the Baathist ideologues were inspired by Ataturk’s militaristic cult. Ultimately, we can find a lot of influence in both directions between European and Turkish nationalist industries of the fascist cult, the father figure who comes and miraculously turns supposed social decay and political defeat into an opportunity for a new era of imperial glory, a civilizational resurrection of the pure and superior race. The Arab nationalists came out from such a climate of nationalistic idealism and racist romanticism shaped by the Turkish, French, Italian, and German far-right.
Until they came to power, the Arab nationalists, including the Baathists, were not popular anywhere in Syria and Iraq by any standards. In Iraq, the communist movement was by far the most popular movement. In Egypt, the communist movement had an even earlier point of strong intellectual, political, and social appeal. According to some sources, when the October Revolution took place, in proportion to the respective populations, there were more Egyptian communists than Russian communists. The British colonial administration reached out to the Islamic authority in Egypt to denounce Bolshevism on a religious basis in order to demonize the movement in the eyes of the mostly uneducated and impoverished Egyptian population, a strategy repeatedly deployed from Egypt to Iran, and from Indonesia to Afghanistan.
The intellectual and organizational leadership of the communist movements included Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, and other non-Arabic-speaking intellectuals alongside Arabic-speaking intellectuals. That was also the golden political era for women and women’s rights. In the 1950s, the Iraqi Communist Party became the most popular, the most diverse, the most feminist, and the most democratic political party that had and has ever existed in Iraq. The communist movement became the object of increasingly violent campaigns by conservative social forces, religious forces, ultra-nationalist fascists such as the Baathists and Nasserists, and the US-UK-led anti-communist international camp. By the 1970s, the communist movement had been brutally crushed at the hands of the pan-Arab nationalists, the Baathists and Nasserists who controlled state politics and introduced military coup as the main path to power, thereby ending political plurality and parliamentary politics for good. In Iraq and Syria, the age of fascist states under the rule of fascist parties began in the 1950s. By the 1970s the communist movement was on the defense. Because they insisted on relying on civil and democratic politics, despite the broad popular support for the communists, they were brutally suppressed by the nationalists who, on the other hand, always relied on terror, torture, assassinations, executions, and mass murder.
In Iran, the communists were a major force in the 1979 anti-Shah revolution, and, unlike now, at the time there was a strong sense of solidarity and discursive continuity among the international left. For instance, if you check some newspaper archives, you see pictures of German protesters holding signs calling the Shah a fascist as he was on a diplomatic visit to West Germany (imagine European leftists today protesting against the Iranian regime as a fascist regime!). Unfortunately, the Islamists were able to hijack the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as Khomeini had just returned from his Parisian exile on a plane that landed in Tehran. The Islamist takeover was not smooth by any means. Many communists joined their Kurdish male and female comrades in the Northeast in their resistance against the new regime, but the resistance did not last long as Khomeini announced his first bloody jihad campaign against the Kurds and communists sending herds of his heavily armed followers to storm the blockaded area. In 1980 the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran from multiple fronts, which ultimately helped Khomeini’s regime further mobilize Shiaa Islamists in Iran and militarize the Iranian society to defend their country against an invading army. During the next eight years of war, both regimes used their full terroristic force internally and externally to wipe out the leftists, often assassinating leftist figures even in European capitals.
The Islamist regime in Iran from the beginning tried to exploit the Palestinian plight for its own advantage thereby exporting Shiia Islamism through one of the most effective geopolitical, cross-national, and ideological ports in the region. In the meantime, in the 1980s, Sunni Islamism was undergoing its first transformation from isolated groups to a global movement with extremely dangerous militaristic capacities, training, logistics, and financial resources. This happened through the multi-national mobilization of Arab and Afghan jihadis to wage a religious war against the newly established socialist government in Afghanistan. The United States, Pakistan, and Wahabi-ruled Arab kingdoms in the Gulf joined forces to intensify mobilization, training, transferring, arming, and funding jihadis.
The Mujahedeen, which is the Arabic word for religious fighters, started their crusade from the rural areas. As it is clear in the main American newspapers from the 1980s or the American government’s resolutions and statements from those years, the Mujahedeen were typically called “freedom fighters,” and they were systematically and proudly supported by money and arms, including heavy weaponry, in their jihad. That is when and where Al-Qaida came into being. That is the same Al-Qaida that designed and carried out the 9/11 attacks, which Bin Laden’s former buddies in Texas and Washington D.C. used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Twenty years later, both countries are in a state much worse than ever, both countries are ruled by Islamists as a result of the anti-communist crusades and then the invasions.
Today, looking at Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia it is difficult to imagine that in these same countries, once there was a popular movement that was anti-fascist, secular, egalitarian, inclusive, pro-women rights, and the most representative of various demographics compared to any other movement before or since. The overwhelming rise of fascism, first in the form of ultra-nationalism and later as Islamism, was the direct result of the brutal suppression of the communist movement. In many countries, the communists were in the opposition, but even in their capacity as opposition, they would have been able to prevent the rise of Islamism. There is absolutely nothing in all the bloody campaigns against the communists that could in any way be justified on the basis of supporting liberalism let alone democracy. To the contrary, the anti-communist campaign was the most fatal attack on the prospects of not only democracy but also liberalism even in its bourgeois formula.
None of this is to say that fascism in the Middle East is a Western liability. Rather, what I am pointing out is that the multi-national and multi-alliance crusade against the communists is what led to today’s misery in the Middle East and beyond. That said, Islamism is primarily a Middle Eastern problem and sooner or later must be confronted by more popular egalitarian and anti-fascist movements in the Middle East. With the decline of the communist movement, Islamist and ultra-nationalist groups became the only main players, thereby guaranteeing the imposition of fascist rule one way or another.
Unfortunately, the gap that was left behind after the collapse of the communist ethos has not been filled yet, so democratic movements lack the political velocity and philosophical perspective to stay effective beyond a few moments of wide resonance of collective anger or euphoria. Repeatedly, we have seen how an uprising could take place presenting an incredibly popular force, sometimes capable of bringing down a dictatorial regime. However, because of the gap, that is the absence of the left, the Islamists easily highjack such turning points. In the absence of a strong leftist movement with a robust philosophy and program for social revolution, such moments of change that are brought about by uprisings will inevitably be short-lived and will be followed by a horrifying chapter of Islamist rule making people wish for the good old times under the rule of a general. What happened in Egypt following the fall of Mubarak’s rule is a clear example of this trajectory. Islamists are extremely organized and militarized fanatic groups, so even a relatively small Islamist group could seize the moment of the fall of a government or any similar state of relative chaos to impose its rule on vast civilian populations. Whether through elections or sheer terror, they take over, and unless they are removed quickly, they establish themselves to rule for a long time. This was exactly the scenario of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and, about three decades later, the Arab Spring. Every single time, when a government collapsed, an Islamist group was waiting to take over. A civilian movement inspired by a vague idea of democracy as free and fair elections is never going to be able to prevent a fascist takeover.
About the last part of your question, I would say perhaps repression is too strong of a word for what I experienced in Türkiye, at least this last time, 2014-2015. A group of 12 professors from Mardin Artuklu University were expelled. No official reason was given, but the authorities unofficially accused us of being foreign intruders (and spies!). Foreignness, Kurdishness, and secularism/atheism seemed to be among the reasons. When they sent out the announcement, I noticed my name was the fourth on the list, which was particularly upsetting because I fully met all the conditions while everyone else on the list met only two or three conditions. I tried to explain, but there was not much I could do to have them commit the wrong correctly. The lawyer ended up appealing the actual decision of the expulsion as opposed to the fact that I was not listed at the top of the list of those who had been expelled.
‘Thousands of professors across the Kurdish region and the other parts of Türkiye were expelled, including over 1200 just for daring to put their names on a petition asking for peace’
HE: If you can tell us about the repression you suffered in Türkiye, please.
S.A.: At any rate, all this happened before two major events: the resumption of the war on the Kurds and the military attempt to remove Erdogan. As the aggressions started against the Kurdish cities, thousands of professors across the Kurdish region and the other parts of Türkiye were expelled, including over 1200 just for daring to put their names on a petition asking for peace. While I had already been expelled so putting my signature on the petition, not to mention my commentaries on Turkish politics in European and Middle Eastern outlets, did not make a difference. However, all our Turkish colleagues who had supported us, the 12 international expellees, and signed the peace petition were expelled too. Thousands of Kurdish activists and politicians were imprisoned. All this took place as the left-wing Kurdish movement was engaged in a decisive conflict with Islamist groups, which had already committed the Yezidi genocide in Sinjar and was threatening all the Kurdish majority areas in Syria. Obama’s last-minute decision to order air attacks on ISIL in Kobane, where the Kurdish YPJ and YPG had been desperately hanging on a few pockets, helped make a Kurdish victory over the Islamists in Kobane and later elsewhere possible. Erdogan was counting on ISIL to finish Rojava and the Kurdish movement for him. When that plan failed, in 2015, he declared full war on the Kurds not only in Syria but also in Türkiye. Then, there was the failed coup attempt in the summer of 2016, which Erdogan used to justify an even larger surge of persecuting everyone he did not like and imprisoning tens of thousands of people.
The short answer is that in 2015, I was expelled as a professor, but that was neither the first nor the last time. In Canada, governmental intervention in academic institutions is unnecessary to ensure the exclusion of the untouchables and the expulsion of the undesirables. While I do not rule out racism (who could?), racism is not exactly what I am alluding to here. You could be from the Middle East and have a better position than a white person with a similar profile as long as you fit into the culturalist image of the other. Furthermore, some of the idealogues of Islamism are actually based in the most prestigious universities in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada. Anyway, I taught at three American colleges for a total of six years, but in Canada, I have never been given a chance to teach a single course. Incidentally, I am writing these lines on a plane as I am on my way to Southeast Asia to take a research and teaching position, which, of course, I appreciate whatever happens.
‘Today, capitalism is by far the most powerful religion borrowing from monotheism a totalitarian standpoint while compelling Christianity and Islam to become two of its sub-institutions’
HE: Axel Honneth points out the paradoxical phenomenon that the crisis of the left movement is taking place against the background of disillusionment with capitalism. Do you agree that the Left is in crisis? What are the causes of this crisis?
S.A.: There is definitely a crisis or rather crises. There are fragments of social fetuses, as opposed to social forces, that are counted on the left, some of which, especially in the West, have nothing to do with leftism. We can no longer speak of an international left with a sense of solidarity or a somewhat shared internationalist perspective. What we have today is the aftermath of a smashed left that was already always deeply fractured even during its best days. From my perspective, post-Marxists and half-Marxists have too many philosophical problems to be taken seriously as leftists. The most unforgivable of those problems are culturalism and Islamist apologia. The rise of Islamism is part of the rise of fascism in the world. Those who have sympathy for Islamism are not different from those who have sympathy for white supremacist forces. Let us not be deceived by the two camps' antagonism toward each other. What they have in common is much more decisive than what they differ about. Each side idealizes the fictive collective self and demonizes its presumed other. What opposing fascist movements differ about is not the mode of perception, frame of signification, or formula of representation. What they differ about is simply the identity of the representatives of good and evil. They share the same ideology form, which is fascism, as I have argued in multiple articles and books.
How should we start to touch on this question even on a very general level? I want to talk about the prospects of what I would like to call the left while critiquing movements that are formed around moralist and culturalist discourses that proclaim leftism, discourses that are barely distinguishable from those advanced by priests. Indeed, liberation theology is part of the idealist left that took shape as a safe alternative to Marxism. This alternative reduced leftism to moralism and by doing so basically killed it. Most of the so-called left in the West need to be liberated from theology and, more broadly, idealism. Their love affair with an ultraright-wing movement such as Islamism is not a coincidence. To the culturalist mode of perception, the other is an object of either hatred or pity but never a political subject. The difference between Islamist apologists and Islamophobes in the West is sentimental rather than ideological or philosophical.
Part of every leftist crisis is the conception of leftism. There are some extremely gloomy sides of the current historical moment and some promising, albeit implicit, aspects of the present moment and what it might be grasped as a historical trajectory moving forward.
We are living in a phase of capitalism that can best be characterized as the age of fascism and advanced totalitarianism. Nazism and Fascism (with a capital F) were defeated, but fascism, if anything, developed far beyond its two early variations. Nazism and Italian Fascism were doomed mainly because of the domination of the Fuhrer and the Duce, respectively, who imposed their militaristic and fatalistic personalities on their parties essentially tying the movements with their own fate and thereby encrypting the inevitable destruction on the birthplace of their movements. An effective totalitarian system is one that is mechanized and structured around the utilitarian principle of the technology of power. In advanced totalitarianism, leadership is an occupation, so leaders come and go, but the system endures and continues to devise exercising power on ever more micro-levels. Under primitive totalitarian systems, everyone is aware of the fact that the system is totalitarian. Advanced totalitarianism, on the other hand, is premised on a universalized mode of perception that not only produces false consciousness but also entirely reverses the conception of the self and the world. Those who live under advanced totalitarianism not only are unaware of their unfreedom but they also take their presumed status as the freest people in the world for granted.
Regimes that are similar to the first-generation model of fascism in their deployment of spatial technologies of biopower are doomed. They are doomed by the fatality of the Fuhrer principle and their overtly militaristic-terroristic nature. Precisely because people are afraid, they often become creative in inventing new spaces of freedom and sophisticated methods of perception, performance, autonomy, solidarity, and so on. Today, all Iranians, including those who support the ruling Islamist regime, know that they are unfree. Those who aspire to be free become innovative in their production of spaces of resistance, art, solidarity, and so on. Simply because most of them are politically conscious of the world, if they had the option of free elections, Iranians would never elect a moron such as Trump. Khamenei is certainly and incomparably a bigger moron and a more corrupt human being than Trump. Also, Khamenei is a mass murderer, and he is aware of that. In Islamist morality, mass killing non-Muslims is allowed and often even encouraged. Like any other Islamist, Khamanei intends to kill, which is the primary factor that determines his regime’s foreign policy. That does not apply to Trump however corrupt he may be. The issue is that Khamenei did not come to power through elections. Trump did. Khamanei’s followers do not claim to be the world’s freest. Trump’s followers do. Which case, the Islamic Republic of Iran or the United States of America, is a more successful totalitarian system?
That said, compared to the American government under Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, or Biden, Trump represents a fallback into an undeveloped model. Precisely because he has a tendency to act as a totalitarian leader, Trump represents a threat to the advanced totalitarian system that has been in place. He has already inflicted irreversible damage to the reputation of American liberalism, which also affects the relevant ideological and psychological hegemony that is at the heart of advanced totalitarianism. Americans may be just as unfree as they were in the pre-Trump era, but with Trump in the White House, it is less easy for many of them to assume that they are free, which amounts to a setback for advanced totalitarianism.
Let us go back to the main line of the argument, namely, the hypothesis regarding the ideal model of totalitarianism in terms of suitability for hegemony. Now, the same correlation applies in a parallel way and in the same direction to the ideal modality of fascism toward the production of which capitalism strives. The fascist model that suits capitalist hegemony and utilizes the hegemonic aspects of capitalism is a model that is also compatible with advanced totalitarianism. The strategic principle of advanced totalitarianism comes down to a formula that focuses on playing with the economy of perception by utilizing the capitalist political economy in order to create a fictive sphere of liberated/liberal politics, a political system that is perceived as free and democratic. The tactics are drastically and continually adjusted to better meet the condition of the utility of power and better operate the technologies of power within the production of the totalitarian space, but the strategy remains the same. The ultimate strategy has two sides: the politicization of the non-political and apoliticization of the political. Breaking down the functionality of this intertwined strategy will take us back to the problem of culture and culturalism.
The paradigm of culture and the ideology of culturalism have had an effective function in the process of pushing back leftism to near complete destruction. That process simultaneously brought about the age of fascism by A. supplying the rhetorical ingredients needed for updating the discursive strategies of the fascist ideology form and B. destroying leftism as the main force of anti-fascism. During the first half of the 20th century, fascism emerged in Europe primarily as a counter-revolutionary movement against the rising communist movement. Going by their own accounts, the most fundamental mission all fascist movements of that era had in common was to stop and destroy the communist movement. Fascist movements from different parts of the world can be in conflict with each other sometimes in bloody ways. In fact, most of the ongoing wars are wars among fascist camps even though every side may have the ability to exploit legitimate grievances of ordinary people in order to mobilize the masses in support of its wars. However, the warring camps are fanatically anti-Marxist; they have enmity toward communism in common.
The pseudo-concept of culture has been deployed to help accomplish what fascism has always aimed to accomplish. At the same time, the deceptive ideology of culturalism helped fascism develop more advanced forms, especially those that can persist and grow in a liberalist political climate. Notice how today the more advanced models of fascist movements deploy politically correct discourses! I am not suggesting that they might pass for genuine liberals; rather, I think they are genuine liberals. If we look at the right end of the liberalist spectrum, we can detect some of these misleading symptoms of fascism for what they are, that is, as symptoms of fascism. For instance, it is those who are placed at the right edge of the liberalist spectrum who are the loudest (alleged) defenders of freedom of speech. Whereas those who are located at the center all the way to the left end of the liberalist spectrum seem to be betraying the principle of freedom of speech as they tend to prioritize political correctness. The problem is of course not political correctness but the fact that political correctness has merely covered the racist mentality relieving it in some ways from potential counterarguments, which is key to the endurance of fascism. That proper cover, or the mask that has helped fascism persist, can largely be described as culturalism.
The post-Marxist left, which is in my view only falsely called left, is even more culturalist than average liberals. Unwittingly, they have internalized cultural racism more dogmatically than average liberals. The post-Marxist left and the right are equally racist. One side largely adopts cultural racism while the other seems to be less embarrassed by its adoption of biological racism. I do not think cultural and biological racisms are exclusive categories. Rather, the difference merely pertains to discursive devices. The primary function of discursive devices of ideology is to deceive the utterer rather than the recipient of the speech. Only as an effective self-deceiving device can the discourse become strategically effective in its communicative function. Most racists are genuine and moral persons. They are not trying to deceive us; rather, their speech and other political behaviors originate from their true consciousness. The problem is that their true consciousness is false.
Right-wing politics always needs false consciousness. That is exactly why the right wing in every society is idealist, that is, either religious or adopts a worldview that functions in the same way as a religious way of perceiving the world. Leftism on the other hand cannot be based on false consciousness. In the pre-Marxian world, many leftists were idealists. In the Marxian universe, that is, in the world that follows the moment of the discovery of (the Marxist) materialism, idealist leftism should be considered as a clear case of contradiction in terms, just like liberation theology, national socialism, Islamic human rights, and Islamic-feminism. In fact, leftism must be understood in terms of its purpose as the negation of the irrational world and false consciousness, both objectively and subjectively.
Now, let us go back to the crossroads where we left the point of the fascist intertwined strategy of politicization and depoliticization. There is an automized, self-operating, system in place that politicizes everything that is not (or should not be) political and de-politicizes everything that is inherently (and should be) political. Now, let me give several basic and clear examples. The environment, food, housing, health, and education are fundamentally public matters and, as such, they should be at the heart of democratic political deliberations and awareness. Alas, under what is called liberal democracy the above-mentioned subjects are systematically and fanatically privatized, commodified, and rendered irrelevant or less relevant in political debates, elections, and so on. At the same time, the right to the body, e.g., a woman’s intrinsic right to abortion, should never be turned into an issue of political authority, or an electoral mandate. The socially liberal voters will be compelled to prioritize defending what should be inherently their personal rights against the socially conservative camp who are mobilized to impose a certain set of religious and moral values on all. The first casualty of this deliberately ignited form of politics is what a person is universally entitled to as a human being, e.g., the right to the body. The second casualty of the politicization of the non-political is the political or the common good. In other words, the most pressing issues that make up public affairs and are critical for the public well-being such as the environment, air quality, the right to clean water, the right to the city, the right to housing, public safety, and peace, at best, become secondary concerns in political platforms.
What can be more essential subjects of referendums and elections than war and peace affairs? Yet, the person who is elected mainly to impose morality, which should never be allowed politically anyway, or a person who is elected to protect an individual right, which should not have been threatened in the first place, ends up making endless decisions of war and peace. Let us be careful though. None of this is a coincidence. On the contrary, these are all part of the intertwined strategy of the system of advanced totalitarianism, which is operated by a fascist modality in accordance with the requirements of perfecting capitalist hegemony. The issue here is not whether the state should provide, for instance, housing. We are trained to put the political question in that formula, which is false and extremely misleading. The real problem is that the state, as an institution that is completely dominated and hegemonized by the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie, plays a crucial role in protecting and disguising the systematic production of homelessness. The so-called real estate sector would not be such a lucrative business if a ratio of the population were not continually prevented from housing. This is exactly what the commodification of housing means. It means a mechanism that ensures the endurance and perpetuation of the occasion of supply versus demand. If, in one way or another, a ratio of the population is not made homeless, it means the immediate and drastic danger of the decline of demand across the market. Therefore, materially, even when enough housing structures have been built to house everyone in the population, a substantial ratio of the housing units must be made unattainable or even simply forcefully vacated and/or red-taped so that the market dynamics for profit-making persist and thrive. Those who manage to stay sheltered are compelled to become participants in this cannibalistic bioeconomy. The couple or family who live in their house and hear that the price of housing has risen feel more privileged and richer even though they know that a miracle did not take place to make the place any better. Overall, those who own a housing unit or more are psychologically and financially rewarded for their secret or not-so-secret, apolitical or political, amoral or moral, conversion and complicity. As a matter of course, most house owners would not take it upon themselves to bring in a political party that might “solve” the crisis of housing because that would supposedly make them less wealthy. Capitalism ensures that the state will always protect the biopolitical economy of housing and the production of homelessness while disguising its role by adopting a completely misleading discourse. Precisely to protect and disguise the production of homelessness, the discourse makes us assume that the state aims to solve the problem of homelessness. In order to sustain the state’s biopower and the capitalist bioeconomy, politics itself must be killed. In order to kill politics within liberalism’s framework, the citizen must be made apolitical. An apolitical citizen amounts to a citizen who undermines the very concept of citizenry.
To make the citizen act as an anti-citizen, that is, as an anti-democracy actor even on the most essential level, what is more effective than reversing the state of affairs in such a way that the political is replaced with the non-political and vice versa? Parallel to that process, a retrogressive cognitive process takes place whereby the most effective false consciousness takes shape. That means, the formation of a type of false consciousness that is not randomly false but rather precisely reversed. This mode of false consciousness will subjectify objects and objectify the subjects, including the subject’s own subjecthood. The commodities assume a social role while the subjects assume a non-social existence. A person who is made to perceive the house as a commodity is a person for whom the body is secondary in value and significance to the house. Moreover, her (supposed) political behaviors will be determined by the house as a commodity, that is, endowed with value, endowed with a form of sacred power. The commodity form will decide what the owner will or will not do, how s/he might or might not vote, dream, wish, etc. The owner will wish for a world in which the house will only gain more magical power to make her/him richer without making any effort. S/he will act in ways that might make the wished-for world be realized or in ways that the house will always be a commodity with an increasing magic power.
The act of voting thus has already been transformed into a practice that is determined by something that not only has nothing to do with the public well-being but is entirely supportive of the implied laws of indefinite privatization of the common good, the commodification of life necessities, and the exploitation of invisible, nameless, and worthless bodies who are doomed to produce capital. What the house owners do not realize is that they have unknowingly empowered a system that is indefinitely totalitarian. Also, now they have become isolated entities under unlimited control of a force that is essentially objectifying, isolating, alienating, and indeed dehumanizing. These citizens may speak of moral values all the time, love world peace, and hug everyone who is ready for a hug, including a Mussolini. They might genuinely believe in all that morally sounds right. Nonetheless, the dominant political economy that is capitalism has already turned them into the perfect little fascist within an advanced fascist model and an advanced totalitarian universe where not only the citizen as the essential agency for democracy but even the human as the essentially free being, a subject in charge of his/her faculty of understanding, a person endowed with autonomous personhood and revolutionary potentialities is dead. Whether s/he is a scientist, philosopher, lawyer, priest, prostitute, poet, or anything else, his/her emancipation is impossible as long as the falsifying, objectifying, dehumanizing, and commodifying system is in place.
Now let us look at a specific political framework to break down and examine this hypothesis more concretely. In the United States, bourgeois liberalism has mastered the strategy of de-politicization of the political and politicization of the non-political. The Republicans who are mandated to deny defenseless immigrants their rights and the Democrats who are elected to protect rights that are, according to liberalism’s own foundational claim, intrinsically universal and indisputable, are empowered by all the wrong reasons to exercise all the wrong kinds of power. As an unspoken or unimportant dimension of the authority package that is handed to them “democratically,” they are able to make decisions about the environment, war industry, arms trade, nuclear technology, and geopolitical affairs, all of which could be and often are catastrophic for Americans and even more so for the rest of the world.
The ideological defenders of liberalism have the audacity to call such a system democratic. The liberalist gendarmes of knowledge in advanced totalitarianism have such a sense of epistemic and moral entitlement to even lecture the Chinese about how they should respect human rights. They have the audacity to justify the imposition of starvation on Cubans and Venezuelans in the name of defending Cubans’ and Venezuelans’ democratic rights. At the same time, to them, Qatar, where elections are non-existent, is never a subject of any debates regarding possible sanctions. Also, note that Qatar is a major source of financing and propagating Islamism, which has been a curse for the vast majority of people from Afghanistan to Syria. Erdogan’s Türkiye has been producing hundreds of thousands of jihadist imams and fighters among Turkic and Arab nations, yet it is a major NATO member, which is supposed to be an alliance for defending “the free world.” Most Americans presume that the United States is the world representative and defender of democracy. The average non-American is also made to hold similar assumptions about capitalist liberalism and the American supposed embodiment of all that is democratic in the world. That is how through universalizing a deceptive mode of perception advanced totalitarianism reverses the consciousness of populations and individual subjects across borders and boundaries.
Where does the question of leftism stand from all this? What is perceived as the left for the most part either is under the same spell of the liberalist mythology or believes it is critical of capitalist liberalism while unknowingly reproducing the neoliberal version of racism, which is culturalism. The problem is not necessarily the mono-culturalism of the right or the multi-culturalism of the (alleged) left. The problem is culturalism. We could hold the best of intentions toward a particular population or all populations in the world, but if we perceive the world through culturalist lenses, our mode of perception is distortive, and our discursive economy is deceptive. If our mode of perception is false, it is not of great philosophical importance whether morally we are a little more or less wrong.
My critical theory of fascism conceptualizes fascism as an ideology form, and I theorize form as a category that designates ideological characteristics. There is no such thing as the ideology of fascism, but there are fascist ideologies. When used accurately, the concept of fascism designates a class of movements whose ideologies have a similar form. This is why fascism is not specific to a particular time and place. One way to think about this is to analogize the use of fascism as what I call an ideology form with the way we use the concept of sexism. There is no such thing as the ideology of sexism, but there are certainly ideologies that are sexist. One of the symptoms of fascist worldviews is that they conceal an ideological perspective that unknowingly homogenizes people.
The problem with culturalism, in all its forms, including the ones that are celebrated on a moral-altruistic basis, is that they are homogenizing. A culturalist, whether from the right or the alleged left, tends to perceive the other as someone essentially defined by an anthropological term called culture. As such, the other in her very otherness is impossible to be a person. Personhood is reserved for the one who gazes. The gazed-at, on the other hand, is assumed to be an entity merely embodying a non-historical, non-political, non-philosophical, and non-psychosocial, formula called culture. To put it more bluntly, this notion of culture is used in the sense of nature. The ethnically identified other is not considered to be an individual in society but only a member of a homogeneous collective. To the culturalist way of thinking, the individual member and the collective can be recognized through each other; knowing one member suffices to anticipate all, and having an idea about the so-called culture suffices to anticipate the world in which every member operates.
Just as a non-human animal can be defined, identified, and anticipated through knowing what its nature is like, which is inferred from the animal kind, it is assumed that the other can be known through his or her collective identity. This racist form of humanism is at the heart of coloniality. Coloniality (per Aníbal Quijano) normalized and universalized the myth of racist superiority and inferiority. I think any method or academic tradition that, intentionally or unintentionally, tries to study the history of capitalism without looking into what Quijano calls “the coloniality of power” is, knowingly or unknowingly, part of the hegemonic regime. This is also to say that theories and schools that are not equipped with the analytic formula for the critique of the capitalist regime of production, including its racist production of knowledge, are strategically situated to perpetuate social domination. Their emphasis on morality and applied (and unapplied) ethics is merely an indication of the nature of the educational institution’s mission as the leading force of defending the oppressively irrational reality and (re)producing false consciousness.
Culturalism is a form of racism that is committed within the framework of ethics and morality. The problem is that ethics is unethical, and morality is immoral. The talk about multiculturalism and respect for others’ cultures is framed ethically as a rejection of racism, but it is just a new form of racism. Culturalism is the ethically polished form of racism. The talk about and critique of “cultural genocide” or “cultural appropriation” are equally deceitful insofar as they assume a moral position within a morality that is epistemologically predetermined to serve the perpetuation of the interests and worldviews of the ruling groups. Put simply, it is absurd to fuss about “cultural genocide” but ignore the genocide. The absurdity of (the dominant) ethics is that it allows the mass murderers to come back to the stage that is built on mass graves and present themselves as the world voice of ethics and the historical conscience of humanity simply by commodifying what is supposed to represent the so-called culture (of the people who have been mass murdered).
In place of race, which became too strongly associated with Nazism, culture was adopted as a logical and proper-sounding concept referring to the (assumed) collective identity of the de-individualized and anthropologized (or, more implicitly, biologized and animalized) other. In other words, for the ideology form that is racism to be retained and made even more effective, “race” for the most part has been replaced with “culture.”
We know that a dog would not act like a cat because we know what dog nature implies. This is precisely the mindset with which culturalists perceive those they unknowingly culturalize. In the culturalist worldview, the world is divided into white societies and non-white communities. There is the white society that is made up of individual persons to whom individuality and personhood are essential. Then, according to the culturalist normalized belief, there are those whose world is mainly determined by their (supposed) collective culture as opposed to individuality and personhood, or what is vaguely called individualism. Thus, the world of the non-individualists, i.e. non-whites, are classified in terms of (supposed) collective identities, which are perceived elusively on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, and of course the most idealist and the vaguest of all terms: culture, which could allude to any number of the above, rendering an already oversimplified and weird image of the other even more stereotypical and mystified at the same time. The culturalist ideology perceives the non-white section of the world as Muslims, Arabs, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, etc. just as non-human mammals are perceived in terms of their nature, e.g., elephants, dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbets, dear, bears, mice etc. When put this way, the culturalist classification sounds morally offensive, and it is indeed morally offensive. However, we must focus on why it is intellectually offensive, philosophically false, or epistemologically idiotic. Otherwise, i.e., as long as the normalized racist assumption is not problematized, the problem of racism will persist in other forms. I say this, but, as a materialist, I know that racism, like religiosity, primarily is a problem produced through the same exploitive social regimes of production and historically imposed relations of power that actualize material inequality. Just like the critique of religion, effective falsifications of culturalism and other forms of racism remain important for any academic, intellectual, or philosophical activity that could be called emancipatory or critical.
I am not in any way suggesting that culturalism is only common in the West or among perceived white societies. Nationalism and its primary institution, the nation-state, have endorsed culturalism wholeheartedly. In fact, long before the cultural turn, which started to take place in the second half of the 20th century and took off during the century’s last decade, nationalism had been spreading as a culturalist form of ideology for a long time. By the time culturalism became the norm at the end of the 20th century, nationalism had over 150 years of cultural idealism and romanticism behind it. If we take Herder and Fichte as the founding fathers of nationalism, then the culturalist tradition is about two centuries old.
Coloniality developed another notion of culture that is very different from the romantic one established by German idealists like Herder and Fichte. This notion was developed by redeploying the mythologies of othering that had been accumulating since the crusaders, but it was the Napoleonic expeditions that gave birth to it as a supposedly scientific notion. The history of the notions of race and culture are intermingled throughout the 1800s and 1900s. Often one of the terms was used to define the other. Today, it is common for culture to be used to imply race. In many ways, the supposedly more politically correct option, i.e. culture, has actually helped make racism more, not less, common. Transferring the center of this form of ideology from biology to the social sciences and humanities made it more resistant to scientific falsifications simply because the social sciences are themselves a thriving hub of pseudoscience or rationalization of ideological prejudices and normalization of the false epistemology of the dominant. In other words, culturalism is much more enduring than old biological racism. One could use a biology lab to disprove race, but clear-cut evidence to disprove culture for its believers would be impossible to produce. How do you produce scientific evidence to prove to a spiritualist that “spirit” is a figment of imagination?
Culture is much more useful for the idealist deception and distortion that is the ultimate purpose of racism. The post-colonial nation-state took it upon itself to complete the project of coloniality. Being nationalist by definition, the elites empowered by nation-states popularized and normalized culturalism voluntarily. Today, Indian and Pakistani ruling elites are enthusiastically committing self-culturalization as if by doing so they repair historical damage inflicted on the supposed collective self, the nation. What national leaders and nationalist intellectuals in Asia and Africa have done to their “nations” concludes the colonial project European elites started. When nationalism reaches maturity, it becomes fascism. Culturalism is the trajectory of nationalism. Culturalism is a leap toward the fascist outcome of coloniality, a leap performed through the final stages of nationalism.
Terminology such as ethnicity and culture, as Alana Lentin and others have argued, were made more popular in the humanities and social sciences after WWII when it became morally problematic to use “race” as a scientific term. The concern was too moralistic, that is, intellectually not genuine. “Race” has been so deeply considered factual by the elites who control knowledge production that they could not dispose of it as a socially constructed myth. Instead of actually questioning their racist mode of perception and mode of knowledge production, they merely gentrified the terminology and the broader discourse. Today, culture and ethnicity are used for the exact same conscious and unconscious purposes for which “race” was used in the pre-WWII European and Europeanized world.
In the culturalist worldview, there is the sociological world of the European man and the anthropological world of his others. In the anthropologized world, which covers most of the global south, there assumed to be “communities,” as opposed to societies. A community is a homogeneous group of people whose world is determined by an alleged natural factor such as “race” or a collective value system such as what is vaguely labelled in terms of tradition, religion, or culture. Unlike a community, a society is by definition sociologically complex, politically vibrant, historically dynamic. In a society traditions and religions may bring together groups of individuals to form any number of organizations, but ultimately the fundamental entity that makes up the society is the individual person, the human who is an end in him/herself and who is endowed with personhood and a mental ability to think and decide autonomously and freely. Thus, the post-eugenic world is still typologized and divided according to the same old racist duality of the world of the individual subject and the world of the non-subject collectives. Just like the eugenic world of the early 20th century when race in its modern sense was invented and sceintificalized, especially in North America and Germany, culturalism divides the world into the world of the (super)humans vs. herds, the human and the sub-human but using more pluralist and democratic sounding terminology and discursive strategies. Most importantly, the dividing line is now called culture rather than race, and the imagined diagram is meant not to look bluntly hierarchical. The old racists were not able to invent a term like “multiracism” even though they believed that the human world is made of multiple races. Presenting themselves as anti-Nazis and non-racists, culturalists not only marketed their version of discrimination using moral arguments but also presented their worldview is fundamentally tolerant, democratic, and pluralist. The successful ideological offsprings of Nazism are genuine multiculturalists, and as such they assume the position of unprecedented advocates of diversity and the world leaders of democracy.
Unlike those who believe(d) in eugenics, culturalists are unaware of their believe in and deep commitment to racism. Like those who falsely believe they are free under advanced totalitarianism, culturalists falsely believe that their worldview is not only non-racist but also fundamentally anti-racist. More often than not, the expression of culturalism is meant to be an expression of humility, recognition, altruism, or even solidarity. The monologue, which is sometimes also a dialogue, is something along the following lines.
Such and such community/culture might look funny, weird or absurd to me, but hey who am I to judge them or decide for them.
The one who gazes simply fails to realize that what is perceived does not originate from the object of the gaze, but rather it is the gazing that produces what is perceived. While the culturalist mode of perception and knowledge production typically moralize the problems of the oppressive reality, i.e. assume that the problems are fundamentally of an ethical nature, the first lesson for any student of critical theory is to realize that it is futile to search for right moral positions in a cultural landscape, which is a fictional landscape assumed on the basis of a culturalist mindset. It is problematic to assume a culturalist formula of ethics even if that formula is “multiculturalism” because such a canon of ethics is inevitably and fundamentally based on false assumptions. The culturalist assumptions of ethics and multiculturalism originate in the reductive mindset that arbitrarily groups large numbers of people together under “culture,” which is never anything more than an extremely simple and entirely fictional mental image in the first place. Whenever the term culture is deployed, the homogenization of millions if not billions of people has already been committed. In today’s world of academia, the term culture is very widely used almost by everyone to falsely group billions of people and therefore unknowingly homogenize them as persons without personhood, individuals without individuality, humans without brains of their own, repetitive and identical members of a community.
A mentality that is formed around false consciousness cannot be leftist. The culturalist landscape is produced through a false mode of perception and will only produce false consciousness. The most dangerous worldviews are those that assume morality according to the terms of a false reality. Leftism is neither morality nor immorality. It cannot be determined by a moral compass or assessed through the employment of an ethical rubric. Leftism is negativity.
Leftism is intellectual criticality and critical praxis. It is cognitive, intellectual, philosophical, political, material, and materialist commitment to negate false consciousness and the false reality. A left that reproduces falsehood is a problem for the social force of historical progress toward emancipation, which is leftism. A left that reproduces falsehood on moralist bases is just as bad as (if not worse than) the right. We live in a fascist ethos that defines the ideological landscape, so often what is called “the left” is at the heart of the very process of social domination and an active force for furthering and totalizing hegemony.
This picture might look too gloomy, but there is another side of the historical moment. We have barely started moving toward a Marxist turn. The initial moment was extraordinary, but it should not confuse our historical perspective. Perhaps the impressive and swift rise of the Marxist movement from shortly after Marx’s death until the 1950s and 1960s made us too optimistic, too unrealistic, in terms of our expectations about the international/ist revolutionary momentum of the communist movement’s ability to overcome the international division of labor that had been brutally put in place through five hundred years of the growing hegemony of capitalism. Who could have imagined that within a few decades an egalitarian revolutionary movement would gain an international momentum of such a scale and force that it would put an end to European colonialism across Asia and Africa?
An emigrant philosopher called Karl Marx, disowned by even the leftist intelligentsia, spends most of his life in miserable conditions in exile, and when he dies less than twenty people would show up for his funeral. To make the odds even worse, his work is focused on a discovery that goes in complete opposition to the dominant regimes of truth, radically rejecting the philosophical and theological traditions and institutions. And yet somehow within a few decades of his death, his theory inspires the largest egalitarian movement in history, a movement of such a scope and momentum that puts an end to European colonialism across Asia and Africa. No philosophy in human history has had anything comparable to the egalitarian and emancipatory potential of Marxism.
Despite all the suppression the philosopher and the philosophy were subjected to on the hands of the most powerful classes and states, they gave rise to the largest democratic movement in history, giving the marginalized the confidence to believe that they could emancipate themselves and humanity as such and bring about universal enlightenment in the form of what they used to call scientific socialism. We have not yet comprehended the immensity of that historical moment. There has never been such a moment of hope for human emancipation on such a universal, societal, and historical scale.
The unexpected rise of Marxism as an anti-feudal, anti-bourgeois, anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal in the East, West, North, and South might have made us take it for granted, and, tragically, made us take the moment of its brutal suppression as its ultimate death. Precisely because we have not been able to comprehend the immensity of that moment of concrete hope, that overwhelming glimpse of human emancipation followed by a violent and painful fallback discombobulated us on a collective and historical scale. This state of discombobulation might take a long time, but it is irrational to assume that the Marxist negation of idealism has become irrelevant. The fictive and deceptive regime of knowledge production is part of the hegemonic idealism, so the foundational premises in the humanities and social sciences are, naturally, anti-Marxist. Wherever Marxism is not ignored, it is either demonized or gentrified. The gentrified accounts are no less detrimental than the anti-Marxist approach.
As we all know, following the demise of the Greek and Roman civilizations, the monotheistic ethos became dominant in the Mediterranean for about 1500 years. In the seventh century, shortly after the emergence of Islam, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and other parts of Asia and Africa, multiple civilizational canons were debilitated by the Islamic ethos. While the influence and nature of the Islamic hegemony fluctuated from era to era and region to region, today wherever the Islamic influence is present, the society is stuck in one of its murkiest historical pits. More generally, in the regions where the monotheistic ethos has been dominant at one point or another, societies may get stuck in irrational and violent ages. That said, one of the clear lessons of modernity is that centuries of falsehood could collapse in a matter of decades.
Today, capitalism is by far the most powerful religion borrowing from monotheism a totalitarian standpoint while compelling Christianity and Islam to become two of its sub-institutions. Most of the ongoing 100-plus wars and conflicts are mere inner boiling points within the same imperialist pan. Today, it is impossible to find a place outside capitalism. Nonetheless, the legacy of the modern communist movement is still alive even if only in very small groups. It is only a matter of time before the communist movement remerges in a new historical form. There is a simple and essential premise we tend to dismiss because of the sense of utter despair imposed by the bourgeoisie’s gendarmes of knowledge and totalized regime of truth. Namely, as long as there is hunger, homelessness, exploitation, oppression, and alienation, a socialist movement can rise taking its point of crystallization from that very reality.
‘The fall of the USSR represents a historical turning point signifying the beginning of the global hegemony of advanced totalitarianism’
HE: The ‘real socialism’ of the twentieth century led to the discrediting of the left. After the Gulag Archipelago many are convinced that the realisation of any project seeking to create a society based on the principles of social justice would inevitably lead to a new Gulag. How should the Left deal with the tragic experience of the USSR, of the ‘camp of socialism’ in general, and of your country in particular?
S.A.: You have described the general conviction among the intelligentsia about socialism in the post-Soviet era accurately. Often anti-Marxists and others, including former self-proclaimed Marxists repeat something along those lines to have us believe that socialism has already been experimented and failed. Amazingly, anti-Marxists who did not read Marxism assessed and failed Marxism through their assessment of other anti-Marxists who did not read Marxism. A widely popularized charge against socialism is that it, supposedly, does not work. At the same time, we have been made to believe that capitalism works.
Stepping back and creating a distance necessary to accurately perceive any situation is extremely essential and yet extremely rare. It is a simple theoretical requirement but at the same time a very difficult step. To fulfill the imperative of re-assessing the objectivity of what we take for granted as objectivity, I will try to keep the structure of my arguments as clear as I can.
If the Gulag is a reason to damn not just the USSR but socialism as such, going by the same principle, the deliberate use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to name only one charge, is a reason to damn liberalism as such. As a matter of fact, if the Gulag and the use of atomic bombs are damning evidence against a historical system or mode of production, that historical system or mode of production is capitalism. We can add to the list of evidence for the dysfunctionality of capitalism crises such as poverty, famine, over 100 ongoing wars, and ecological catastrophes, among many others that might not be so obvious. For instance, within the span of six months, the bullets that are manufactured are enough to kill the entire human population on earth, a bullet per person. There are enough nuclear weapons that could eliminate life on the planet several times over. The US and the Russian Federation have deployed multiple nuclear weapons that could be used any minute reaching any part of the world within one hour. So, now that communism has been dumped because of its alleged failure and dysfunctionality, we should ask: how successful and functional is capitalism, especially given the fact that it has barely been challenged by any international movement for at least half a century? How functional is a system that has been fatally destroying life conditions on the planet and has already pushed thousands of species into extinction?
Capitalism may be working for some, but it is certainly not working for more than half of human society who live below the poverty line. Nor is it really working for the other half given the fact that they are not safe from the intensifying consequences of climate change and the deterioration of life-sustaining conditions of air, water, and soil across the planet. The planetary scope of these concepts and their somewhat gentrified presentation not only create a wrong impression about what the capitalist world system amounts to but also give us a false sense of security. We tend to assume that these planetary problems do not concern us in a direct and pressing way as individuals immersed in everyday life and embedded in a world of over eight billion people. Also, because the subject of the environment has been winning more coverage in political arenas and the media, we tend to assume that somehow and on some political level it is taken care of. We tend to underestimate the imminency and immensity of biological damage and the infinite proliferation of microscopic threats to millions of species.
The fall of the USSR speaks to the failure of yet another variation of the political economy that is capitalism, yet it has been presented as empirical proof against the feasibility of communism. My other point is that even if that were the case, it is absurd to assume that the existing order is the best possible one. The ecological catastrophe alone is more than sufficient empirical evidence that capitalism does not work. Aside from the assumption that things are somehow taken care of, I think, there are two other widely assumed positions: denialism and apocalypticism. The denialists believe that there is no reason for concern at all, that the environmental crisis is a made-up story by leftist scientists and others on the left whose aim is to impose more taxation and limitations on vast industrial sectors and ban certain industries altogether. Apocalypticists, [SB2] on the other hand, are those who have already accepted the idea that there is nothing we can do to prevent the ultimate end of the world, which is compatible with the perception Abrahamic religions have been establishing for millennia. Both sides, denialism and apocalypticism can be called nihilism. The demise of the communist movement in many places of the world coupled with the hegemony of anti-communist ideologies, including the ideologies that have been disseminated and internalized most effectively as non-ideology, have brought about an era of nihilism in many parts of the world outside China, which for the most part has stayed less effected by anti-science reactionary forces and monotheism. The worst part of nihilism is its capacity to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In light of all this, I think today more than ever we need an international movement of social revolution against the dominant nihilist forces, which have been actively and increasingly reproducing violence and destruction on countless geographic, societal, international, and ecological levels.
The fall of the USSR represents a historical turning point signifying the beginning of the global hegemony of advanced totalitarianism. In the 1990s, the right seized the opportunity to push their anti-Marxist crusade with full force and in all directions, whereas those who were supposedly on the left were in a deep state of self-reproach with many among them even seeking, as it were, redemption in the right-wing, including nationalist and religious, movements. This was the catastrophe, but, at the same time, it shook the communist movement almost forcing the opportunistic, pseudo-leftist, and elitist riders to fall off. Those who persisted as Marxists or turned to Marxism at the end of the 1980s and later did so for critical, meaningful, philosophical, and good political reasons.
The USSR was after all a state, and like all other modern states, it was capitalist. If we are speaking about the Marxist variation of socialism, as opposed to other variations that are either not relevant to Marxism or are falsely attributed to Marxism, then the USSR cannot be considered a socialist entity. I want to pose for a moment and respond to a counter argument that is common, yet every time it is presented as some sort of badass revelation. There are many intellectuals who dismiss every distinction between the Stalinist regimes and Marxist socialism on the basis that it is supposedly similar to arguments of authenticity vs. inauthenticity in Christian and Islamic discourses. I suspect that the charge itself, namely the attempt to analogize Marxism to religion, is a symptom of the internalization of a religious episteme. The theory that is called Marxism is not based on belief in metaphysical entities. Rather, it is based on scholarship that can be examined. That scholarship entails extensive amounts of documented research in tens of languages. Taking a position about Marxism without bothering to learn its basics is indeed a sign of chronic dogmatism identical to religious anti-intellectual rigidity. Anti-Marxists suffer from fundamentalism, which, is certainly not without signs of neurosis.
Both Marx and Engels made it very clear that a communist state would be a contradiction in terms. Now, the quickest way to figure out whether, according to the Marxian school, the USSR could be called anything other than a capitalist state, is textual citation (because here we are not talking about your, my, or a general understanding of socialism, but rather a specific one, which is the Marxian one). Consider the following lines from Engels’s Socialism: Scientific or Utopian:
… State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.[2]
Once more, in response to the supposedly clever criticism mentioned earlier, citing textual evidence here is in no way comparable to debates on authenticity. The point is that what Engels expresses here is what any student of Marxism can learn by studying the philosophy. In philosophical scholarship, nothing is more common than citing textual evidence, yet somehow Marxists are expected to accept what they are told about Marxism without raising any questions. They are expected not to try to cite Marx and Engels even when the subject matter is Marx’s and Engels’ philosophy. This is an example of the absurdity that produces and is reproduced by anti-Marxism. I do not know of other such absurdities in academia or intelligentsia. This absurdity is a broad and systematic tradition of dogmatism established specifically to prevent any rational discussion of Marxism.
The Bolshevik tragedy culminated in the Stalinist mystification of the proletariat, rendering it just as meaningless as the notion of “the nation” in a nationalist discourse. The Bolsheviks fetishized the figure of the worker and romanticized the proletariat so much that they ended up creating a monstrous regime run by former workers to brutalize the actual proletariat. In his famous State and Revolution, Lenin strongly denounced the state as a class institution and ridiculed state bureaucracy, which is one of the most original elements of his thought as a Marxist theoretician.[3] However, his own party of professional revolutionaries ended up creating an extra-state bureaucracy, which turned the state to an even more brutal tool at the disposal of officials. Instead of the democratization of legislation and politics, which is what the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat implies, they ended up creating an even more hierarchical regime of legal and administrative privileges. In place of state bureaucracy, which they had mocked so sarcastically, they created a bureaucratic machine that exercised all the state powers while at the same time parodied the liberal distribution of the centers of power let alone the communist principle of social democracy.
In the name of empowering the working class, former workers were selected on the basis of loyalty to the rulers in order to execute the Stalinist terror. The Bolsheviks betrayed the workers’ soviets almost immediately after the October Revolution, and, therefore, we will never know how democratic the soviets would have been. Anything along the lines of what Stalin would later call “socialism in one country” meant the failure of the proletarian revolution as all the Bolsheviks insisted up until several years after 1917. Western states’ antagonism against what became the Soviet Union, the civil war, and the immediate rise of Stalinism after the civil war imposed too many limitations, boundaries, and borders on the project of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s worst nightmare came true as the movement of the communist revolution died because it did not continue westward rapidly enough, and on its grave another state rose, which, to make things even worse, was especially brutal against workers, including agricultural workers.
Communism has been reduced to Stalinism by both Stalinists and other anti-Marxists. Only ironically or for deceiving propaganda purposes can someone like Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Ceausescu, or Hoxha be considered a communist figure or an authority about Marxism. When it comes to liberalism, nobody would consider someone like Churchill, Blair, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, or Trump an authoritative figure on the subject. Nietzsche was widely admired by the Nazis, but despite his many problems, Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for the rise of Nazism. Adolf Eichmann cited Kant during his trial in Israel, but it would still be absurd to conflate Kantian philosophy and Nazism. It is equally absurd to conflate Stalinism and Marxism. It is very easy and quite fashionable to hold Marxism accountable for Stalinism despite the obvious fact that Stalin killed millions of Marxists, many of whom were Russian. Statistically speaking, Stalin is only second to Hitler as the biggest killer of Marxists in history.
Now, to bring up a different but relevant point, unlike, Kant or Nietzsche, Heidegger was alive when the Nazis came to power, and he joined Hitler’s party. Yet, today, it is far more acceptable in the philosophy schools of North America to be a scholar of Heidegger than a scholar of Marx. My point here is to draw attention to the normalized anti-Marxist fanaticism. I am yet to come across an anti-Marxist who has bothered to read a single book of the vast body of works that are considered essential classics in the area.
Communism was confronted by dogmatic antagonism long before the USSR existed and even long before Marxism came into the picture to redefine communism. When it comes to egalitarianism or any claim regarding the entitlement of the marginalized to personhood, those who represent the hegemonic order and make up the voices that are assumed to be the general sense insist that such calls for egalitarianism are catastrophic, unrealistic, utopic, and so on. Nothing about this is new. Marx was expelled from academia before he professed communism. He was a genuine liberal, and one could say he remained more liberal than any liberal philosopher. When he was expelled from German journalism and Germany, his work could still easily be classified under liberalism. He started pointing to the way the poor were deliberately brutalized by the state or the so-called law enforcement, and as a result, he was expelled. That was the limit of liberalist tolerance from the perspective of the bourgeoisie. What he finds appealing in joining a communist movement is precisely the urge to open new historical and spatial possibilities.
One of the great discoveries that make Marxism stand out in the history of philosophy is that it does not rely on any supernatural assumptions. It rejects the myth of superhistorical notions such as “human nature.” The Marxist philosophy of history and sociology is nothing short of a Copernican revolution. Nietzsche in his fragments makes the case that truth has a history, which is also a major inspiration for Foucault’s genealogy and archeology of knowledge, but Marxism is the first comprehensive philosophical system to make that discovery within a full-fledged non-reductive theory of history without relying on any metaphysical presumptions such as “human nature,” soul, God, or Spirit. Furthermore, the theory is capable of explaining all such ideas in terms of production, which is another revolutionary concept created and deployed analytically by Marx and Engels. Knowledge is a product and production. Therefore, philosophies and theories of history that are premised on any metaphysical entity such as “human nature” etc. are unfounded.
By the standards of his own theory, Marx would have committed an elementary mistake if he had provided a positive description of a future historical stage. The conditions that would make such positive knowledge about a potential future society called communism are not available, so such positive knowledge is impossible at the present historical stage. Contrary to the common understanding among Marxists and non-Marxists, Marx’s communist thesis is a negative one. Only negatively can we define communism. We articulate what communism is not.
That said, the historical formula regarding history as a scientific theory is knowable and indeed infinitely verifiable at the present time. Therefore, what Marxism offers us is not at all a description of a communist society. Marxism’s communism is negative in the sense that it is meant to:
1- negate capitalism by going forward, as opposed to the tendency to turn backward like conservative and romantic movements;
2- overcome the division between intellectual vs. physical bifurcations of labor through revolutionary praxis, whereby theory is not abstract but transformative, and practice does not paralyze but cultivates the ability to theorize;
3- progressively emancipate by dialectically negating the existing irrational reality, thereby creating a more rational reality.
is amounts to the continual expansion of the realm of reason, autonomy, consciousness, and freedom through continually emancipating human activities from oppressive forces. The continual progress implies preserving the scientific and technological discoveries and transforming their applications from the object/commodity/capital-centered principle to the individual/human-centered principle. It would be a typical idealist fallacy to assume that we could imagine what a communist society would look like while we are living under capitalist conditions. What we can and should know is how unfree we are and at the same time how capable we are to transform conditions of unfreedom using what we have at our disposal in our particular circumstances.
What I call the negative thesis of Marxist communism can be expressed along the following lines. We do not know what a communist society might look like, but with every negation we get closer to being able to materialize a step forward that is both a building block for a new society and another step to enable us to imagine more and negate more, and so on. Marx’s and Engels’s writings do not offer any positive accounts or descriptions of communism. To reiterate, if this were not the case, their work would contradict the materialist formula they discovered. It is impossible to mentally conceive the communist society positively before negating the oppressive mode of production that is capitalism, which implies transforming everything from social norms and relations of power to the production of knowledge, from spatial experiences to modes of perception, and from the material prospects of well-being to the capacity of imagination.
In most places, for all the wrong reasons, Marxism has been either almost banned or imposed, either demonized or sanctified. Therefore, contrary to appearances, it has not been studied as closely and widely as necessary. What makes Marxism far more important than any other progressive and emancipatory philosophy is that it does not profess a positive notion of truth. Instead, it offers formulas, tools, concepts, and methods for breaking down the reality, problematizing the norms, and voicing the unspoken. Note that Marx did not title his masterpiece Communism or Socialism. He called it Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
Marxism makes unlearning attainable. It is the unlearning that liberates. Marxism is, by far, the most powerful and sophisticated philosophical system for the decolonization of not just thought but also thinking. I use the term decolonization here in the broad epistemological and cognitive sense in terms of social ontology. Not only is it more liberal and democratic than its perceived rivals, including what has become known as liberalism, anarchism, republicanism, libertarianism, etc., but also it is a different phase of philosophical evolution at the level of individual self-emancipation or enlightenment. The most sophisticated philosophical systems would compare to Marxism as earthworms to homo sapiens. It would be too optimistic to anticipate that within two centuries of its birth Marxism would reach a point where it could inspire an international communist movement. The implication here is not that the masses are too dumb to get it. On the contrary, the bourgeois and religious regimes of knowledge production are too oppressive to allow for the democratization of such a critical philosophy of democratic social revolution and individual self-emancipation.
‘The communists defended liberal principles such as parliamentary politics, free elections, civil society, and freedom of speech adamantly. No movement has ever advocated democratic rights, gender equality, agricultural reforms, and public health and education so strongly’
HE: Are Left ideas popular in your country? What specific difficulties does the left movement face? What is the relationship to the Soviet experience in the Middle East, in Kurdistan?
S.A.: In Kurdistan and other regions in West Asia, the Marxist terminology was adopted more or less by all resistant movements and movements of national liberation as well as most of the secular intelligentsia. With the fall of the USSR, almost immediately that lexicon fell out of fashion. As if by a miracle the intelligentsia and the political parties had suddenly made a historical discovery amounting about the alleged unviability of Marxism. Denouncing something they never understood anyway, the former Marxists now were more fanatic believers in capitalism than the Milton Friedmans of the world.
When I was growing up, in the 1980s, most intellectuals professed Marxism. All intellectuals are expected to use Marxist terminology. Some of the most influential public intellectuals in the region and beyond were Marxists. These things actually made me suspicious of Marxism. Even in my twenties, I was never intrigued enough to seriously study Marxism let alone proclaim it. Only in my thirties, in the 2000s, in Canada, did I start studying Marxism seriously. I realized that the label Marxist or communist in most circles was (and still is) a bad word. I used to joke about this saying that I am a Marxist because Marxism is the best way to annoy people.
I remember back in West Asia, in the beginning of the 1990s, people suddenly started speaking of the alleged failure of socialism. Many former communist activists either joined the anti-Marxist crusade or became somewhat apologetic. The “need to revise past mistakes” was on the tongue of the few who remained identifying as communists. Yesterday’s Stalinists got into the habit of competing with each other about reproaching Marxism, apologia, guilty pleas, and, most of all, disowning the communist “ideology.” Suddenly, everyone became an advocate of so-called non-ideological thinking. As Žižek would say, the alleged free thinkers who claim to think non-ideologically are especially, hopelessly, and unknowingly immersed in (or rather being dominated by) the ruling ideology.
To be non-ideological, one was (and is) expected to be an anti-communist. The advocates of so-called non-ideological or post-ideological free thinking unwittingly have internalized fanatic ideological forms, all of which have anti-communism in common. This was indeed the beginning of the global hegemony of the anti-communist and (new)nihilist ideologies, most of which could be diagnosed as fascism. While today fascism includes a wide range of movements, what they still have in common is anti-communism. At one end of the spectrum there are old fashion fascists, like Islamists and neo-Nazis. These are criminals. They may be deceived, but they are aware of the fact that what they commit is murder. At the opposite end there are those who function as the central nervous system of the globally hegemonic regime of advanced totalitarianism, the supposed non-ideological centrists and those who are identified as left or right in comparison to that conservative center. These may not be aware of the fact that the system they maintain inflicts endless suffering and commits endless murder. Assured by their collective non-ideological mythology, they function as the vital agents of the hegemonic system of social inequality.
As I try to clarify in my book Fascism in the Middle East, the communists defended liberal principles such as parliamentary politics, free elections, civil society, and freedom of speech adamantly. No movement has ever advocated democratic rights, gender equality, agricultural reforms, and public health and education so strongly. Certainly, no movement has been so widely popular, inclusive, anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and secular across all of Asia and Africa. By all accounts, socially, politically, philosophically, and literally, the communists were more democratic and more liberal than any liberalist movement across the region. Unlike the bourgeois liberals and nationalists, the communists of West Asia and North Africa resisted reactionaries starting from home. The Arab communists in Iraq defended equal rights for Kurds more strongly than any Kurdish nationalist party. The communists in Iraq were the only inclusive movement that unapologetically defended the Iraqi Jews even when that was considered the most detrimental thing to do in a state that systematically used anti-Jewish conspiracy theory to target all Jews in Iraq in the name of security, anti-Zionism, and the rest of the typical discourse that became the norm in Iraq and several other countries in the region. In fact, the Communist Party is the only political party in the country that has had Arabic, Kurdish, Hebrew, and Assyrian speakers in all its ranks including its leadership circles.
Today, in Iraq, and the rest of the region, there is an atmosphere of universal distrust among ethnically labeled groups while religious and sectarian divisions are also exploited fully by the new buffoons of the bourgeois elite and political Islam in order to pit the miserable against each other. Sadly, like most of the world, there is barely any leftism to speak of. There are all kinds of weird movements, alliances, associates, and affinities. Communism, on the other hand, is disowned even by communist parties. Whether in Kurdistan and West Asia or North America, I feel I am the only communist in the world, which is, of course, not true, but the feeling is.
In addition to countless philosophical, political, and historical reasons to own communism, today, it is almost poetic to be a communist.
‘The Revolutionary project will continue reoccurring in more and more brilliant ways until what is unimaginable today will become a given’
HE: Zygmunt Bauman wrote that modern people are unable to imagine a better world than the one they live in today. Is it correct to believe that the decline of the Left is due to its lack of an appealing vision of the future? What should be the socialism of the XXI century? What do you think about the idea of an unconditional basic income?
S.A.: We need to question the normalized terms and the terms they impose. We need to unlearn the dominant ideology and radically alter our mode of conception. We are made to conflate the dictatorship of capital and democracy. We are made to think democracy and the market economy are the same, just as the people of Mesoamerica did not separate between the conquistadors and horses. What is democratic about the so-called liberal democracies’ global politics?
From the Marxist point of view, democracy and socialism immediately imply each other. In Marx’s social and political philosophy, democracy is a socialist necessity, and socialism is a democratic necessity. It is impossible to realize one without the other. In fact, rationally, it is impossible to even conceive one without the other. Only in an idealist philosophical system can democracy be conceptualized apart from and in contradiction to socialism.
In the late 19th century Europe, more than any other movement, the Marxist communist movement was identified as democratic, and the members of the movement often used the words “democratic” and “socialist” interchangeably. The bourgeois liberalism’s proclaiming of democracy is a relatively new thing, and it was meant to discredit the communist movement as an oppressive or non-democratic movement. Even Lenin’s party until 1918 was called the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. One may list various reasons to argue that the Bolshevik party was not democratic, but one could argue that, for those same reasons, it was not communist either.
Be it as it may, the opposite camp was even less democratic. It is laughable to think that defending democracy was the motive behind the central and western European states’ support for the White Army during the Russian Civil War following the 1917 Revolution. It is equally absurd to assume that creating an Islamist front in Afghanistan against Afghanistan and the Red Army in the 1980s was intended to support democracy.
It is absurd that the UK of the early twentieth century is considered a democracy while it continued to brutalize, loot, and exploit wherever its navy had reached from Canada to Nigeria to Kenya to India to Hong Kong to Australia to Jamaica. Why should a state’s foreign policy not be part of the criteria for democracy? Who decides that democracy only concerns politics within the state? Who decides that certain so-called democracies have impunity when it comes to their foreign policies? The brutality of British colonialism in Africa and Asia was no less barbaric than German colonialism in central and western Europe. The German, British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, and American colonizers saved their most barbaric and genocidal enterprises for populations they deemed to be racially inferior.
Even within the UK, there was nothing democratic about the British rule of Ireland. There was nothing democratic about the American government’s racism, including the Chinese Exclusion Act and eugenics to Jim Crow laws. In Canada, the government-sponsored a large network of Christian schools that exclusively targeted the Aboriginals, for more than 150 years systematically abducting and abusing children. An unknown ratio of the 150,000 children who were forced into this state and church regime were subjected to systematic physical and sexual abuse. Some of the so-called Indian residential schools were operating until the mid-1990s. Why do we call these states liberal democracies? Who names these entities? Who defines these terminologies?
As Roberto Esposito points out, liberal democracy is an oxymoron because democracy is concerned with equality whereas liberalism entails impositions on and on behalf of people. Also, there is a central question we should raise. Namely, what are exactly the subjects and objects of liberalism? In other words, what is liberated and from what? A related but more easily articulable question is who does the liberation? What we call liberalism today is bourgeois liberalism, and it is far more concerned with owners of property than human liberty. It is not concerned with historical emancipation. Nor does it recognize individual liberties as entitlements (or rights) of the human subject as such, without classificational criteria of discrimination or conditioning categories for allocating privilege and imposing underprivilege.
The liberalist formula is based on an idealist frame of reference for liberty that imposes an illiberal social reality. It is an ideology that utilizes idealism in order to portray freedom as an abstract value as opposed to experience. It does so in order to effectively undermine the material conditions of freedom. Imposing a fictive idea of freedom, the ruling ideology helps normalize and institutionalize exploitation. To ensure the persistence of the social institution of class, what Althusser calls “the ideological apparatuses of the state” continually metaphysicalize freedom as a mere idea independent of actual living conditions of living breathing human beings. From the bourgeois perspective, it is essential to prevent the proletariat to obtain class consciousness and instead make them falsely believe that they are somehow free and in charge of their individual fates.
On its own, individualist mythology does not guarantee maintaining the prevalent social order, so the ruling groups encourage the participation of additional models, mechanisms, and technologies of the idealist industry. Religion, image-based hyperreality, nationalist education, and a patriotic ethos are some of the other effective drives of false consciousness. At the end of the day, liberalism is immensely flexible to make room for any other abstract notion of freedom to be invested by any player as long as the totalitarian institution of class is maintained. Liberalism always favors hegemony over control, but if and when the institution of class comes under any threat, the means of control, discipline, and punishment are reintroduced in ways and quantities deemed necessary by the security apparatuses.
Internally, it relies less on militaristic means of terror and more on ideological means of control. Could a capitalist state exist without adopting liberalism? Yes, of course, it could, and there are many more examples of those states than those who adopt liberalism. Take for instance the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has survived so far for 45 years using the means of terror alongside religion. Clearly, the religious apparatuses are nowhere as effective in accomplishing security for the regime and the state. Religion and material reword are used to recruit enough armed thugs to control the rest of society through the means of punishment, torture, terror, and so on. The Islamic model is not as effective as the liberal model.
In Europe and North America, there have been two main models of capitalist states: market dictatorships, e.g., the US and the UK, and government dictatorships, e.g., Yugoslavia and the USSR. Certainly, the former model has won the game for many reasons including those that are related to colonialism and primitive accumulation of capital. For a moment, it looked as if subordinating the state to capital was more hegemonic. The Fukuyamas of the world mistook that moment for a supposed ultimate victory of the US model of the capitalist state. Be it as it may, the extrapolation regarding the collapse of the USSR-led bloc as the beginning of the ultimate globalization of “liberal democracy” proved to be nothing more than a false prophecy. Today, the world is much less liberal and democratic than any other time since the mid-twentieth century. In fact, as I argue in an upcoming, Fascism or Whatever You Want to Call It, today more people live under fascist regimes than at any other time in history.
The Marxist critique of liberalist philosophers is fundamentally a critique of liberalism’s democratic limitations. At its root, the Marxist dispute with liberalism has to do with liberalism’s betrayal of and contradiction with democracy. As an idealist ideology with particular objectives and material interests, liberalism is progressive only relative to reactionary and more conservative ideologies. Insofar as it defends the interests of a particular social class at the expense of another, larger, class, it is an ideology that perpetuates class society, and as such, beyond a certain point, it collides with the progressive objective that is democracy. In so far as it is the ideology that reinforces the institution of class, liberalism tries to objectively render the realization of democracy impossible.
There is a lot of deliberate and internalized distortion about the assumption that portrays the Marxist critique of liberalism as something stemming from a supposed illiberality within the Marxist critique of political economy or an alleged illiberal tendency of Marxism. People tend to forget that Stalin killed millions of Marxists. No historian could justifiably deny that most of those who fought fascism in the 20th century were Marxists/communists. What is less recognized is that most of those who opposed the Stalinist regimes were motivated as communists, saw themselves as Marxists, and used Marxist terminology to express their politics and struggles. Yet, somehow, their plight against totalitarianism is dismissed, and instead, their movement is labeled as undemocratic, totalitarian, and so on. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that it is not the anti-Stalinist communists but Stalin who represents the communist movement.
The existing violent order is irrational, unsustainable, and intolerable. The urge and will to negate the capitalist relations of power cannot disappear unless the capitalist regime as such collapses. And since the Marxist discovery has already been made, there must be another point in the future where enough people will deploy the Marxist framework to mobilize and revolutionize the will to negate the capitalist order. We cannot predict when we will be able to leave behind these dark ages, but what is certain is that the revolutionary project will continue reoccurring in more and more brilliant ways until what is unimaginable today will become a given, meanwhile, these very circumstances we take to be the final chapter of history will look as crazy as the past eras look from our perspective.
The Marxist ethos has the power to negate the existing regime of falsehood and turn the capitalist mode of production upside down. It took over three hundred years for the Copernicusian turn to fully take place. Why should we assume that the Marxist turn is a failed project if it is not realized within a relatively brief period of time? Whether we believe in Newton’s laws or not, they are true. The fact that a person first discovered and articulated them does not make it less true. The same applies in the case of Marx’s materialism. The materialist plausibility does not depend on the number of Marxists in the world.
After the Marxian discovery, leftism cannot be defined by going back to something prior to the Marxian universe. One of the good things about the post-USSR intellectual era is that all those who were clinging to Marxism for all the wrong reasons dropped their claim as Marxists and communists. The way has been cleared for a new phase of Marxism to emerge as a creative movement invented by a new generation of Marxists. That is how it happened in the past, and that is how it will come back to haunt the established system again. A new generation that revolutionizes the frame of reference before they are noticed by old teachers, judges, police officers, and so-called liberation theologians. They will happen to the world as all great events always happen to the world. By the time they are noticed as a threat, they will have already set off an unstoppable historical event to negate the irrational real in the interest of realizing the rational. That is when “the left” will be made present again. Now, the left is nowhere to be seen in the areas and realms we assume it to be. Those who carry the torch of leftism are the revolutionaries from the margins of the margins of the margins. It is in those margins where the hypothesis of no-alternative is smashed into pieces because the alternative has already been actualized, spatialized, lived, developed, and defended on an everyday basis.
The advocates of the idea of “unconditional basic income” are either discrete communists or have no clue about the most basic principles of capitalism. If everyone receives a basic income, nobody will be compelled to enter into an exploitive contract the disadvantaged party of which is herself, and, therefore, there the entire regime of the capitalist production will cease. In the absence of economically compelled labor, the only way for production to reassume would be through a non-exploitive model whereby workers work as free subjects, i.e., not forced to work by the constant threat of hunger, homelessness, and illness. As a free subject, a worker would not dedicate any portion of her labor to make the rich richer and more powerful and herself poorer, more disempowered, and less free. Only negatively can we describe socialism: it is a social system of production that is not based on the monopoly of the labor force. Capitalism, on the other hand, fundamentally relies on the exploitation of labor by classes whose only job is to control the livelihood of laborers and collect the capital that is produced through that exploitation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the “rescue plan,” the Biden administration deployed what they called “stimulus checks,” which, as the name suggests, were meant to rescue the economy. There was a universal check of about 2,000 and a couple of other semi-universal checks of a similar amount for those who could not go to work or did not have a job. The Pandemic was not over yet when many “business owners,” politicians, and opinion makers in the media industry started unwittingly arguing that there was a severe shortage of workers because of the government “handouts.” They were not incorrect in their claim, but what they unwittingly revealed is that if workers are not under the imminent threat of hunger and homelessness, they would not take up the jobs offered to them for the wages offered to them. Even though the social security money people received was very small by American standards, it was enough perhaps to remove the threat of immediate hunger and homelessness, say within weeks or perhaps a couple of months at best. Yet, that was enough to make many workers refuse to rejoin the established regime of wage labor. You can imagine what the so-called “unconditional basic income” would create. Needless to say, the source of any such program can only be the surplus value that is created by labor anyway. The idea of “unconditional basic income” originates from a moralist perspective that falsely assumes that wealth exists independent of work and that the source of capital could be something other than exploitation.
‘Today’s wars are also wars between imperialist forces. Whether the battlefields are in Ukraine or the Middle East, national and religious ideals are utilized in order to mobilize more people, recruit more fighters, and justify more death and destruction’
HE: The twentieth century was marked by the confrontation between capitalism and socialism, during which ‘convergence’ took place in the West and resulted in the birth of the ‘welfare state’. Today, the key conflict is between the countries of neoliberal democracy (the conventional West) and the supporters of so-called ‘traditional values’ (Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and others). What can be born out of this confrontation? What position should the Left take in this conflict?
S.A.: I don’t think any of those wars are wars of values. They are imperialist wars among imperialist states or state alliances. Granted a regime such as the ruling Islamic Republic in Iran upholds a discourse that is openly anti-Western, but this does not mean it stands outside the capitalist world order. Today, there are not any states outside that order. The ruling regime in Iran has become trapped in its own propaganda, which is meant to supply Islamic consumption but inevitably creates a relationship of distrust and confrontation with the West. Erdogan is not any less Islamist than Khamenei, but Türkiye is an influential member of NATO. Erdogan’s pragmatism is more effective than Khamanei’s. Erdogan oversees the production of multiple discourses, one for national consumption, one for Islamic consumption, and one for international relations. In the end, Türkiye and Iran are as capitalist and imperialist as a state can be under their respective leaderships. Similarly, the conflict between Western governments and the Kremlin is anything but a conflict of values. The Kremlin would make a closer ally to the Western states if the issue were about values. In the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth century the Tsar, Nicholas I, mistakenly expected Britain and France would take his side or at least would not support the Ottomans. He was wrong because he thought Britain and France would act based on the values involved. The rulers of imperial forces may be idealists, but they nonetheless act in terms of material interests. Not much has changed; today’s wars are also wars between imperialist forces. Whether the battlefields are in Ukraine or the Middle East, national and religious ideals are utilized in order to mobilize more people, recruit more fighters, and justify more death and destruction, but we should be careful not to take the idealist mythology seriously. The common idealist discourses have serious consequences, but they are still mere mythology propagated by the armies of intellectual gendarmes recruited by the ruling groups, who otherwise would not be able to continue to accumulate wealth and power.
‘What we have witnessed in Latin America is the failure of the neoliberal turn from Chile to Argentina to Brazil to Mexico’
HE: At the beginning of the 21st century many people were inspired by the ‘left turn’ in Latin America, which was associated with the name Hugo Chavez. However, Venezuela can hardly be called a successful country with its severe economic crisis, galloping inflation and serious violations of democratic norms. Does that mean the ‘left turn’ failed? Do the governments of Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Colombia have the chance to revive it?
S.A.: I think it is exactly the other way around. What we have witnessed in Latin America is the failure of the neoliberal turn from Chile to Argentina to Brazil to Mexico. Before this, what took place was the failure of the non-revolutionary wave of leftism, following the death of Che Guevara. What has been taking place in Venezuela is another case of imposed famine and poverty that have resulted in endless political oppression and forced migration. For over 70 years, the camp that claims liberalism has been actively imposing famine and extreme poverty on entire populations supposedly to punish the rulers and ruling regimes. Sanctions, including the longest ones, i.e., those imposed on North Korea since 1950 and Cuba since 1959, have caused extreme suffering for the respective populations of those two countries. Other than that, they have also been successful in prolonging the life expectancy of the respective ruling political systems in both countries, despite the fact that there are considerable differences between them. The sanctions have further empowered Maduro’s dictatorship while turning Venezuela into a failed state and millions of Venezuelans into desperate refugees. If Venezuela is a failed state, it is so because of the failed international regime rather than a socialist project.
We need to look at each case separately but within the same world system (per Immanuel Wallerstein). That said, if we speak of what has recently become known as the “pink tide,” Brazil under the leadership of Lula aims to be a game changer. Lula’s government has been trying to revive both Latin Americanism and build some sort of global internationalism, albeit a mild one that is state-based. There are comparable attempts in West Africa in terms of Pan-Africanism and antiimperialist, especially over the last few years, and in Asia, where a relatively strong alternativist tradition exists with roots going back mainly to the Chinese Revolution and partly to the non-Aligned movement. Lula’s international politics flows in the direction of post-colonial attempts of states in the global south to free themselves from the domination of the global north. On another level, I think the pink turn is more like a second wave of the second wave of Latin American leftism. I do not think that this wave will be more successful than the first wave of the second wave, but I hope my assessment is wrong. The turn is pink rather than red precisely because it lacks the philosophical frame of reference and political momentum that is needed to negate the capitalist hegemony. It lacks the intellectual zeal and democratic courage to be communist. Much of today’s left has internalized a moralist and conservative idea of leftism that is historically detrimental to leftism.
The institution of religion played a major role in moralizing the leftist discourse and oversimplifying leftism. The so-called liberation theology in particular played a major anti-revolutionary role. I touch on this point in detail in two of my books, Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism (2022), and Critical Theory from the Margins (2023). The theologization and moralization of leftism is not any less lethal to the left than violent anti-leftist campaigns led by fascist forces. As I argue in detail in the two books mentioned above, for liberation, we may need critical epistemology, postpositivist pedagogy, and postnihilist philosophy but certainly not theology. As I mentioned earlier, if anything, it is liberation from theology that much of the world needs.
‘The production of violence starts at every border of every nation-state’
HE: Politicians are increasingly implying that the era of peace is coming to an end. In Europe, the Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for the third year now. In the Middle East Israel is continuing the war in Gaza and teetering on the brink of war with Iran. The world fears China's invasion of Taiwan and the resumption of long-standing conflicts on the Korean peninsula and in the Balkans. Does humanity have a chance to avoid World War III and a nuclear Armageddon? Is it possible to end the above-mentioned conflicts or they are ‘hotbeds’ of world war? How do you see the end of the Russian-Ukrainian war and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What should the left-wing forces do to achieve this purpose?
S.A.: As I tried to argue in my responses to the previous questions and in several relevant articles, these conflicts have been instigated and prolonged by the extreme right. Some forces of the extreme right emphasize nationalism or patriotism while others focus on religious politics, but in the end the conflicting parties have more in common than we tend to think. Each party claims that it defends a people, a nation, against unjustified aggressions, conspiracies, and injustices. While some of these charges the clashing parties make against each other have some truth in them, all their claims about representing and defending their respective societies are false. The reverse would carry more truth. This is to say, each party has been instrumental in harming innocent people within not only the population they perceive as the enemy but also the people they supposedly defend. The right-wing government of Israel falsely claims to represent all Israelis and the Hamas leadership falsely claims to represent all Palestinians. Both Israelis and Palestinians are systematically demonized and attacked. With each aggression, the supposed defenders put more lives of the supposedly defended at risk. I am not saying both sides are similar, but I do say that the conflicting ruling groups have more in common with each other than with the victims, including the victims of the population they believe they defend.
As for the NATO leadership and the Kremlin, if we could rationally imagine a court of basic justice, it would be clear that there is not a single type of crime one side has committed and the other has not, from violating international borders, invasions, support of extreme nationalists, racialization of already marginalized populations, and certainly anti-leftism. Here too, I want to emphasize that conflicting parties are not similar, but they do have much more in common than what they want us to believe. The war is mostly fought by the miserable ones, but it is not a war for the miserable ones. It is a war between ruling groups from different geographic zones for interests, ideas, and values that have nothing to do with the lives and deaths of the victims. It is, in the less fashionable language of the left, an imperialist war at the end of which no population will be freer. At the end of the war, there will be more graves. Unless living near mass graves has some intrinsic value, we are unaware of, we can say with certainty that people will only be more miserable.
Of course, there is always the objection that says, “Oh, so people were not supposed to fight Hitler? etc.” As usual, this is a false analogy. It would be less inaccurate to portray the scenario as a conflict between two fascist camps, or two Hitlers. So, yes, I do think it is wrong to fight a fascist for another fascist. It makes more sense for antifascists to form international fronts while also opposing the fascist forces in their respective countries.
Another common objection some people like to through at any position they do not like is “blaming the victim” indictment. Ironically, the sympathizers of the extreme right-wing or simply fascist force habitually through around this kind of accusation not knowing that justifying the production of suffering, victimhood, and death is precisely what they are doing by equating a fascist ruling group with the population the group claims to defend. Again, I am not saying that Israelis and Palestinians or Russians and Ukrainians are not situated in different circumstances. Nor am I saying that everyone is equally wrong or right. Rather, the claim here is that our modes of perception, expression, and articulation are all suffering from what is already at the heart of the dominant order that systematically produces violence. The irrationality that is nationalism is reproduced normally, on a daily basis, and in terms of morality. The moment we speak of a conflict as it is presented to us, the “Russia-Ukraine conflict” or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are already taking part in the reproduction of the irrationality that is the very foundation of the production of violence. This habit of conflating or intentionally equating between the country and the state, the population and the so-called nation, the government and the governed people, etc. is always inevitably homogenizing and therefore always and inevitably false. It does not matter which side you are taking as long as your naming of the sides is itself borrowed from the hegemonic regime of truth, which has normalized falsehood and violence within and without language.
Since most of the political discussions surrounding wars and conflicts are framed within ethical frameworks and assume moral positions, let me put the problem in moral terms:
The moral distance that separates most Israelis from most Palestinians is much smaller than the moral distance that separates most Palestinians from the Islamists among the Palestinian leadership or the moral distance that separates most Israelis from the Israeli far-right.
Also, while the Islamists and the Israeli far-right have many differences, the moral distance between the two sides is much smaller than the moral distance that separates either side from any general population, including Palestinian, Israeli, Arabic speaking, Hebrew-speaking, or any other general population anywhere in the world from the far east to the far west and from the south pole to the north pole.
The same applies to Russian nationalists and Ukrainian nationalists in relation to each other and the general population in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and beyond. In any moral argument the premises of which, implicitly or explicitly, advertently or unwittingly, equate between Ukrainians and the Zelenskyy government or Russians and the Kremlin, I see a political discourse entrenched in morality and paralyzed by its own ethical frame of reference. The problem is that in an irrational world such as ours, morality is immoral, and ethics is unethical. It is a disaster if we continue to assume that the language we have inherited is even remotely suitable for any rational political debate or any critique of violence.
The production of violence starts at every border of every nation-state. By the time we speak a national language, we have already been recruited to exercise murder not despite but because of ethics. Ethics is nothing other than what we believe to be right, and what we believe to be right may or may not be premised on false truths, ideologically assumed divisions, racially perceived subjects, and mythically named entities. A soldier’s job is to kill. The rest of us also kill. We kill while enjoying a drink with family and friends. As if that is not disturbing enough, some of us also continue to idolize the figure of the fighter as the ultimate hero who dies for us, and somehow, we always seem to need someone to die for us. How different is this from the ancient practices of sacrifice? It is no wonder we even feel comfortable using the term sacrifice to describe what professional killers do; they sacrifice themselves for us. All this must sound sickening to someone reading about us in the future.
On a last note, concerning this question, by making my point about “moral distances,” I do not mean to imply that similarity or closeness between two populations is the moral reason for peace. I think peace does not need a moral reason. It is the other way around; all these religions and moral systems exist precisely in order to justify violence. I have always found something disturbing in the positions when someone says something along the following lines, “we [Arabs and Jews] are cousins, so we should not fight” or “we [Russians and Ukrainians] are so similar, closely related, etc., we should not be at war with each other.”
What it does not say but naively assumes shows why such peace morality is indeed committed to violence. Namely, the unintended implication is that it is alright to commit violence against those who are not related or similar to us. Also, I simply do not understand this fascination with similarity. Any talk of brotherhood or cousinhood is deeply patriarchal, tribalist, and chauvinistic even when it advocates altruism, peace, and other moral ideals. Finally, why should a world made of brothers, sisters, and cousins be perceived as wonderful and peaceful? For sure such a world, if nothing else, would be lethally boring. After all, to say someone is my cousin is to say s/he is the mistake of someone who is related to the one whose mistake I am. Maybe a couple plans to produce a child, but the child is almost entirely accidental insofar as he or she is born as the result of an actualized conception among trillions of other potential children. Now, cousinhood as a social relationship constitutes the most absurd of all mistakes because it is a relation between two mistakes who are mistakenly linked to each other.
‘The only path to any potential freedom is unlearning. For unlearning, a negative philosophy, or what I call postnihilism, is essential’
HE: There is a lot of talks today about decolonisation and neo-colonialism. What is the threat of modern Neocolonialism?
S.A.: Colonization continues in one of its most barbaric forms. Clearly, the independence movements failed catastrophically as they produced fascist states, which in turn resulted in the creation of endless fascist movements. The failure of the independent movement in what became the Arab republics in West Asia and North Africa is obvious on all accounts. In Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq the citizen is systematically insulted by the state. In my view, the state as the political institution of sovereignty and the sovereignty of public institutions has never been born in the region. Ironically, the republics have been the worst. Where the most vocal anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist regimes governed for long periods such as Iraq and Syria have been the worst in terms of the humiliation of citizenry. Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and, most recently, Syria have been falling into another pit of right-wing extremism, which is Islamism. The change is merely a transformation from nationalist to religious forms of fascism. Today, there are Islamist states, which makes them even more exclusionary and oppressive than Islamic states, which are already exclusionary and oppressive. In the so-called Islamic republics, such as Pakistan, the failure of the independent movement was, ironically, stated in the constitutions (a republic cannot be based on a religious identity, so “Islamic republic” is an absurd contradiction in terms).
HE: In your opinion, which works of left-wing thinkers published in the last decade present the most interesting models of the future, alternative to both the ‘real socialism’ of the last century and the current neoliberalism?
S.A.: I do not think there is a model for the future. There are brilliant leftist thinkers, but none of them would see himself or herself as that kind of prophet-thinker. There is a rich school of leftism with a wealth of knowledge on various aspects of social revolution. However, just like Marx’s time in the 19th century, and Benjamin’s time in the 20th century, the strict totalitarian regime of knowledge production does not give revolutionary thought any chance. Benjamin was expelled from academia by both liberal systems and fascist regimes, but some others, like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Löwenthal managed to survive in academia. I doubt today any of those figures would be hired by an anglophone university. As you know, there are many emigres from the Middle East and North Africa. Hundreds of Islamists are tenured across Australian, British, Irish, Scottish, American, and Canadian universities. There is also an ongoing demand for experts in Islamic studies. On the other, hand, hardly any Marxist scholars are employed in universities. It is nearly impossible for a scholar of the Marxian school to find employment unless s/he successfully conceals his/her interest and works in the area. Occasionally you might come across a tenured Marxian scholar only to realize that they got his/her chance in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s.
Anyhow, my point is that the regime of knowledge production is such that leftism barely has a chance to become a social movement. The next leftist movement will have found a way to break through the totalitarian regime of knowledge production.
You have to keep in mind that elites who are in charge determine what is taught, by whom, and how. They manufacture what is considered truth and objectivity. Most importantly, they name. Through naming, idealizing, demonizing, defining, demarcating, teaching, normalizing, naturalizing, and eternalizing, the dominant groups make us reproduce irrationality, absurdity, violence, and unfreedom. The only path to any potential freedom is unlearning. For unlearning, a negative philosophy, or what I call postnihilism, is essential.
Thanks a lot for the answers!
[1] S.A.: “I realize that is the new way to spell the name of the country, but like many other academics, including many Turkish academics, I rather use the old spelling. For me, and I think for many others too, the reason is simple: not to recognize another one of the Erdogan regime’s resolutions.”
The editorial board has decided to use Türkiye as opposed to Turkey.
[2] Frederick Engels, 1880, Socialism: Scientific or Utopian, Marxist Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
[3] See V. I. Lenin, 2014, State and Revolution, annotated and introduced by Todd Chretien (Chicago: Haymarket Books).
[SB1] I realize that is the new way to spell the name of the country, but like many other academics, including many Turkish academics, I rather use the old spelling. For me, and I think for many others too, the reason is simple: not to recognize another one of the Erdogan regime’s resolutions. Anyway, if it is the policy of the the journal to use Türkiye as opposed to Turkey, I understand, but if it is not, then I rather go with the old spelling. I do not mind adding a small note about my choice if that helps.
[SB2] I realize Word does not consider this a correct term, but it is supposed to be apocalypticists as opposed to the apocalypticism or apocalypticisms.