The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?

I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.

65 points
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A few comments from the original Hexbear thread come to mind

  1. “guy named Hakim from Iraq is Muslim, white people are shocked and appalled”

  2. In speaking about religion in HAMAS and other resistance groups. “I for one am shocked that members of the Islamic Resistance Movement find value in an Islamic text.”

Like seriously? We have people in this thread bringing into question The Deprogram crew for… having a member be religious? Also because they interviewed people that aren’t explicitly MLs? These guys that have done more to bring communist theory to more people than this entire instance. Lol stop acting like fucking ultras or whatever. I mean really? You all need to get a grip. Furthermore, expecting them to BE infallible while also complaining they act like the ARE infallible and the attacking them for that too? Please. Coming off like a bunch of wreckers. These guys have never claimed or acted like they are the gods of communism. They get on, discuss what they know, and give their opinions. Those opinions can be not always on point,and not always what you want to hear. It’s your own deal if you expect them to be perfect then get pissed when they aren’t.

A man can be both religious and a communist. He can also have a disagreeable point while having good intentions. And most importantly he can have flaws and still be an extremely important and beneficial person to the cause. The man is religious. He shares this religion with most of the people currently undergoing a fucking genocide. He probably feels more empathy towards them then most westerners do to their fucking next door neighbors. My heart burns for the Palestinians, I can only imagine how he must be feeling. Man probably understands the Palestinian culture and religions better than any of you. But please, tell me how you all, as non Muslims, probably white ass westerners, know so much better. I for one, am a white as westerner. Yet I am capable of at least understanding where he is coming from, even maybe disagreeing with him, without also attacking him as rabidly, and disgustingly, as some of you all have.

Honestly, after reading some of the gross over reactions and ridiculous attacks from this thread, I am legitimately ashamed of some of you. Like legitimately. Ashamed. Downvote me and attack me for saying so if it makes you feel better. That’s fine. After some of the absurdity I have seen here I’ll be happy to add some blocks to my list.

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People: want to learn more about Islam, ask for more reading materials on this topic.

Hakim: shares them, indicating that’s what he personally read, with some source criticism.

People: refuse to read them and treat a youtube comment to be a Marxist analysis ripe for critique.

And to those who took issue with him being an “educator” and thus shouldn’t do this: He’s a minor e-celeb who makes videos, he’s still a real person with his own worldview, just like the rest of us. He’s not saying this is how Marxists should think, he’s just sharing some books to better understand the context from his own point of view.

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Also religious belief can 100% motivate socialist beliefs. Take as two examples John Brown and Tony Benn

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6 points

Existing forms of community, such as religious groups, also lend themselves well to socialism. Religious dogma is idealistic, but it feels reductive to ignore the motivation of belonging to and supporting a community when analyzing whether Marxism and religious beliefs are compatible.

There’s evidence to support their compatibility as well as the damage religious groups can have on socialist causes. At the end of the day, I say more comrades is better.

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My thinking is this look at Catholicism, they adapted to Roman patronism, they adapted to feudalism, they adapted to capitalism, they’ll adapt again with a new economic system

liberation theology could be to communism what calvinism was to capitalism

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24 points

Yeah it’s definitely disappointing.

The irony in some of these comments castigating him for supposedly not being marxist, and doing so by applying the most dogmatic, context-free invective.

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39 points

this was already posted before but i don’t think you can discount the role religion plays in giving people a source of hope and strength where there otherwise isn’t any. Maybe you could do the same thing another way, but I’m at a loss as to how. We all know that religion plays a large part in the lives of a large portion of the world population.

It’s obviously not the a ONLY reason they fight back but it doesn’t hurt the cause at all imo.

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20 points
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But isn’t religion a source of false consolation? The real consolation would of course be the improvement of material conditions.

It certainly helps people cope with day to day life under capitalism, but eventually it needs to go.

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10 points
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I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn’t make much sense to call it false consolation.

Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it’s not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.

I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that’s just one factor among many in promoting religious belief, and as a general tendency, it doesn’t necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.

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25 points

Isn’t hakim’s argument that religion helps people keep fighting for better material conditions because they can bare the struggle better?

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8 points

That is still poor analysis. People can have religion, but to chalk up a people’s survival to it is absurd and horrifically bad material analysis.

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16 points

Through a collection of a peoples wills and faith in their country, people, and survival? Literally what the Soviet Union did during WW2? Very few Soviets thought that God would save them. They knew that their own collective strength would save them.

This belief gave them hope.

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11 points

but for every group that did it without religion, how many relied on religion, or worse didn’t come together to believe in themselves?

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8 points
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Can you give examples? That’s just an open ended hypothetical that no one can answer. I really don’t get what your argument is here.

Don’t forget that faith has been used as a tool of oppression and placed at the height of state, the entire “Opiod of the masses” spiel. Of course people will turn to it if that’s all they know… many wouldn’t if they knew the alternatives.

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54 points
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[Long post ahead]

Frankly, I was a bit confused at first at the responses to Hakim’s supposed misdeed. I saw practically nothing wrong with his post.

This is speaking as someone who considers themself “ex-muslim” and rarely practices any of the daily rituals of being muslim.

I have read through both the Hexbear thread and this one here on Lemmygrad. Firstly, I would like to say I agree with Aru’s comment on the other parallel thread running right now.

I’d like to address some of the contentions people have about the post. Hakim starts his post with this statement:

How do the Palestinian people persist? As muslims…

Not because they ARE muslims, as in, Islam was the only way in which they were able to carry out anti-colonial struggle, but rather they carry out the anti-colonial struggle through BEING muslim. Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education. It is the masjid that organizes the local community. It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

To say that if Palestine was fully christian or any other “religion”, they would still reject colonization, misses the point. It doesn’t matter about some hypotheticals that you concoct in your head. That’s as useful as saying that if China was 100% Christian they would still be communist - what is the point in engaging in idealist hypotheticals? To simply compare it to Christianity, is idealism. Because you are not comparing the reality in which these cultural traditions, epistemologies, and beliefs operate. You are comparing one idea to another, utterly deaf to the material context behind it. The material reality of the ummah, the material reality of Palestine, means that Islam is the force in which anti-imperialist and anti-colonialism is carried out.

So yes, perhaps for many muslims, the Quran, the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) becomes the starting point of their political conciousness, and to somehow call it immature, backward, or a type of “false consciousness”, is to fall into the orientalist idealist tropes of the days of direct colonization.

Throughout the entire Islamic world we have seen numerous secular and communist organizations that directly collaborated with the colonizer, that never gained support from the muslim masses and that also had to face a visceral reactionary force funded by the West. To say that secular movements only failed in the Islamic world because they were being pitted against reactionary Western-funded movements ignores the fact that if these secular movements truly had the mandate of the people - truly did listen to the working masses, they would have succeeded in maintaining power in the first place.

To act like this analysis is somehow “idealism”, when it is actually idealism to ignore history and material conditions in favour of a dogmatic secular understanding of class warfare.

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR? Why doesn’t anyone ever mention about the beacon of liberal modernity and secularism - France - in which if you ask anyone in the ummah what they think about it, they would vehemently reject associating with that Islamophobic “secular” state. Why is it immediately assumed that when someones says they want an Islamic country, it is immediately assumed they want a monoreligious populace with forced conversions on heretics and heathens? Why is it assumed when we say something is Islamic, it means that it cannot involve people of other faiths (or lack thereof)?

In my eyes, the answer is simple. It is because the Western left still carries the mental burden of colonization, of cultural genocide, and they project it onto the global south - onto the ummah.

Are we suppose to ignore the Islamic influence of for example Southeast Asian foreign policy, Arab nationalism, or North African decolonization? How about the Islamic Axis of Resistance pushing back against the Zionist Entity and other US imperial projects in West Asia? Islamic socialism and Islam has been, and continues to be, materially closer to anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and communism than Western Marxism could ever even dream about (that is - if they even recognize imperialism). Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

Is it the “muh slems” that are idealistic, or is it the Western’s left misunderstanding of the “unity of opposites”? If you can only percieve reality in absolutes, in black-and-white, then “religion” is always “immaterial”; that means you will be unable to identify your friends from your enemies and it also means you will never understand Islam and the ummah.

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Honestly this post reminds me that there a lot of people using the revolutionary language and history of Marxism to justify their own nationalism or other views which are not those of internationalist Marxism or Communism.

Yes religion is idealistic. Idealism in the history of Marxist use can mean both ontological idealism, in which one thinks that the only or most fundamental components of what exists has the basic properties of the mental; and epistemic idealism, where the explanation of certain events or properties is based first and foremost on ideas, in which ideas are given priviledge of explanation, rather than what those ideas are ideas of. Someone can be ontologically idealist on paper while acting like an (epistemic) idealist in their reasoning, of which many liberals are perfect examples. Of course, for a genuine materialists, ideas do also in a sense reduce to matter, while also emerging out of matter, and so are types or expressions of new properties which emerge out of very complex forms of matter. You do give a good example of epistemic idealism, which is people ignoring the historical and more specifically the religious context of these countries in which national liberation movements are active. However it is equally idealist to ignore the profoundly reactionary implications of a group being Islamist (as opposed to, say, simply being a group most or all of whose members are Muslims). I don’t think anyone is implying that the political role, influence or importance of religion is to be ignored here. If anything it is the opposite. Though it seems you are implying they are in order to imply their view of what that significance is is incorrect, contrary to your own I’m guessing.

You are also introducing an unjustified exclusivity between (1) Islam being idealist (which you haven’t made clear what you mean), but is most definitely when we are talking about the ontological content of Islamic beliefs and the kind of religious reasoning that is based on it; and (2) westerners not understanding the ‘unit of opposites’, which seems to be to just be a force of relativist mysticism; if you mean that is no such thing as truth or a correct view. This is not Marxism (a modernist ideology). This is simply another expression of postmodern relativism. If here you mean that have to recognize that there are potentially progressive aspects with non-preferable components such as strong religious ideology, then sure, that is something to be recognized. Islam is a material phenomenon, like every other religion, because it exists in the social world. But the actual beliefs, the content of it, are not materialist. Materialism is not the same thing as something being material. This is just a confusion of what different words mean.

An irony is that you yourself are essentializing Islam (or maybe it only seems so due to the lack of clarity in what you saying) by claiming that it ‘is the form which the anti-imperialist struggle takes form’. Reactionary groups can oppose Imperialists. This is not a mystery. And assuming that because they do that they must be progressive is precisely the kind of ‘absolute, black and white’ mystifications you are accusing others of committing. There are plenty of non-Islamic, non-religious liberation struggles, and again there is a great difference between a movement containing religious people, and the movement being religious in character. Every Islamic or Islamist revolution has been a reactionary nightmare, for the people in general and the left in particular. The vast majority of genuinely progressive and successful revolutionary movements in recent history have been secular communist ones, notably of national liberation in the global south.

Marxists in many non-Western societies are often far more explicitly anti-religious in private than the sheepish left of the West, who are terrified of losing their virtue-signalling points. One example is Haiti: when I’ve spoken with Haitian comrades, they are fully conscious of the reactionary potential of religion, because they are in a society in which religion (whether in the form of Christianity of Voudou) is an immense obstacle and impediment for communist education, radicalization and organization. We are not going to bring people into the communist fold by ignoring reactionary views they hold or not attacking them. If anything, the fetishism of Islam extending into one of Islam, on a supposedly Marxist forum no-less, is an expression of the fact that these individuals actually almost certainly have no experience of organizing politically as Communists, let alone in the countries they are talking about.

Islamic socialism is certainly better than no socialism at all, and you are completely correct that white western atheists absolutely and completely condemning these movements purely on that basis is chauvinistic and ignorant, that is nevertheless completely irrelevant to any discussion of the political nature of religion, and there are certain fairly unavoidable conclusions on that front when we scientifically analysis the historical and contemporary evidence as Marxists. It’s not clear to me how anything you’d said impacts in any way any serious discussion of the political nature of religion in general and particular religions specifically. Not all religions are equal, but there are sufficient similarities (hence using the common term ‘religion’) for us to be able to start making more general theorizations and conclusions about it. This includes the how religions function politically and influence politics in different contexts.

Another issue here is that no-one is making a distinction between Islam and Islamism, which is particularly ironic in a thread with a couple self-flagellating white westerners virtue-signalling other their desire to understand the religion of the downtrodden and avoid Islamophobia.

Regarding this:

In my eyes, the answer is simple. It is because the Western left still carries the mental burden of colonization, of cultural genocide, and they project it onto the global south - onto the ummah.

It seems equally obvious to me that this is a giant jump in reasoning. I’m not really seeing the evidence here. This is also, again, ignoring the massive elephant in the room of Islamism. Fear of Islamism is the most rational emotional response to have towards it. Anyone who says otherwise has not lived in Islamist societies, does not understand Islamism and its both its differences with and intimate connections to Islam more broadly. This whole discussion is also again a reminder which angers me immensely that most Marxists from these parts of the world are not having their views discussed very clearly, and is ignoring that the vast majority of communists who have lived under Islamism understand that it is an extremely reactionary ideology that makes life misery. By far the most anti-theist people I have ever met are my Communist friends and comrades from and in the Islamic world, and most of all the Iranians. You seem to me to be giving a clearly idealist explanation here. The form of anti-imperialist politics is deeply influenced Islam and Islamism because these are deeply religious societies in which secularism and notably the secular left failed, and because they are responses to the correctly perceived, widespread racism and Islamophobia of the West, because many people in their suffering, misery and alienation turn to religion as a consolation that becomes essential and precious in their lives, and because modern Islamism explicitly formed itself on a conception of politics similar to the Leninist clandestine party organization, aiming for mass radicalization where they would take advantage of the radical energy of mass movements and direct them for reactionary ends, very similarly to Fascism.

On the France point, which I can speak to as having lived there, it is correct that the form of ‘secularism’ practiced as policy by the French government is not only inconsistent in its application to Muslims compared to Christians, and thus does not live up to the ideal of secularism which should be aimed for, but is deeply and structurally discriminatory in its application. Going from the fact that French secularism is racist, to the conclusion that secularism is racist, is like realizing that a square in front of you is red, then seeing a red circle, and saying that the circle is square. The French state is racist, but that does not imply in any way that we should not be secularists in our policies. Religious justifications have no place in a Communist party. Period. End of discussion.

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5 points

Reactionary groups can oppose Imperialists. This is not a mystery.

Ever heard of critical support? Who else is gonna fight “Israel?”

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I’m very familiar with the concept, being a member of Leninist orgs and having been in Maoist orgs.

I agree that there are not any other alternatives at the moment. No where have I claimed otherwise. But that doesn’t imply that they are not reactionary. It speaks to how fucked the situation is that, as I see it, it is tragic necessity that the only vehicle currently available for armed struggle against Israeli apartheid, settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing is in Palestine in Hamas. I agree with you. But political forces and movements can be multifaceted. Hamas, on the one hand, provide social services in Gaza. They are also a deeply misogynistic, anti-communist, homophobic and anti-semitic organization (them removing the the Elders of the Protocols of Zion from reference in their public constitution notwithstanding).

My basic point is simply that Communists need to not lose sight of the reactionary aspects of these organizations or they are going to be lead into embarassingly incorrect judgements in the long-run, and will de-legitimize themselves in their own national contexts, by tacitly assuming that these orgs are less reactionary than they actually are. Honestly if people are so moralistically offended by this point then they are lacking the basic political realism of actual Marxists. If that offends them, then I guess they will have to dirty the reputations of most Marxists in history who have also recognized that oppressed classes, notably who have been lumpen-proletarianized, are often vulnerable to reactionary ideology and radicalization. At best, Hamas acquiring dominance in a state in Palestine would lead to conditions for the creation of a national bourgeoisie. But as other Islamist cases demonstrate, even in the less extreme cases of somewhere like Iran, these situations are pretty much never good for the left.

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21 points

I’m happy you said something. I think it’s also clear from the text that he’s not being chauvinistic (he makes purposeful allusion to important figures in Judaism and Christianity and clearly considers them all part of the struggle) and I think there’s tactical value to taking the wind out of the sails of Islamophobic depictions of the struggle by helping provide context. Maybe there’s room for criticism but I think he’s doing more here than he is being credited for.

Or maybe I just wanna defend my video friend.

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6 points

🙏👏

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9 points
*

The first time I read this comment, I started to write a reply but then realized that I’m not totally sure what you mean in some places, and I figured it would be better to ask than just assume.

Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

What do you have in mind with the notion of ‘entrenchment’ here?

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education.

How does this distinguish the masjid from superstructural institutions generally, like schools or mass media?

It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

What does this mean? That the masjid is an employer? That it’s a marketplace? Or just that it carries out the functions of the state in Islamic societies?

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR?

To be clear here, ‘the’ ummah extends to everywhere Islam is believed or practiced? Or does it mean instead something more like ‘Muslim countries’?

Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

To make sure I understand what you mean here, Is this a fair (equivalent) restatement or does it miss some things?

in the ummah, anti-imperialism takes the form of Islam

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1 point

I don’t know if Islam is a material force per se, because it is a super-structural phenomena. But looking at it from the Palestinians perspective, materially, the Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists are colonizing them materially. However there are Palestinians that are not Muslim. There are Palestinians that are Jewish or Christian that are subjected to the same horrors as the Muslims.

However it seems that if the Islamic countries united under one banner geopolitically, ban foreign capital from influencing them, that would materially undermine imperialism. Quadaffi tried to do something like this and we’ll see if someone there can manage to do this again. Just make sure that if one develops nukes, keep them to protect your people.

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Yeh their post is so confused and unclear its difficult to even beging to parse and deconstruct it.

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23 points

Thank you

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28 points

In pretty much every post here and on hexbear that’s defending Hakim’s post I see at least one of a few assumptions taken as true which aren’t.

Firstly, no one here is criticizing the Palestinian resistance and the forms it takes. We’re criticizing Hakim’s post. Hakim has positioned himself as a Marxist educator and taken on the role of spreading ML theory. With this come some responsibilities, namely to share actual Marxist analysis. When he departs from this, he’ll get rightly criticized for it.

He can be religious and do what he wants. No one is criticizing the fact that he’s religious. We’re criticizing the fact that he brands himself a Marxist educator with Lenin as his picture and then shares idealist analysis like in this post.

Secondly, that his analysis is not idealist, when it really is. This has nothing to do with Islam specifically, it would be true of any religion, but stating that a religion is what’s driving resistance is simply idealist. As Marxists we know that it’s the material conditions that are the primary drivers of both the zionist settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance. We, of course, don’t neglect the superstructural aspects, with ideology and religion among them, but we don’t make them the primary drivers of resistance. We begin with the material.

There have been similar resistance movements throughout history, some religious and some not which have persisted just like the Palestinian movement. As Marxists we understand why that is, and that, while in each particular case the particular ideology had an impact, ideology as such is not the driving force behind revolution.

As Amílcar Cabral said

always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better lives and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.

What we (Marxists-Leninists) should be spreading are works through which you can learn about settler-colonialism and resistance to it in general, and works about the specific conditions of Palestine. No one’s even saying we should totally ignore religion, but it cannot form the basis of our analysis, and we cannot center it above the material.

An example of a better (in my opinion) post about Palestinian resistance right now is this thread by Roderic Day.

Also, as Marxists, critique is what we do. No one is beyond critique, and especially not our fellow comrades. Such critique and discussion is how we arrive at correct theory (and practice) and consolidate around it.

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1 point
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