Pussy Riot's Challenge.

"Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, chase Putin out," they sang only to receive 2 years for less than 2 minutes of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Out of the convicted Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich have participated in performances staged by Voina. In one such instance Samutsevich released Madagascan giant cockroaches into a courtroom and went on to kiss on duty female police officers. Tolokonnikova took part in an orgy staged in the Biology Museum in Moscow. Pussy Riot could be seen as an off-shoot of this movement in its devotion to shock and challenge the assumptions of conservative Russians. Predictably Pussy Riot has come up against the cursed spirit of Russian chauvinism in its personification of a pallid dwarfish man-beast. This hardline strain of intolerance ought to be a source of shame for a country that produced so many great artists - from Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky - and particularly great in literature with which the West can hardly compete to this day. Now art has become a battleground for the faithful and the political in present day Russia.

In defence of the trial and sentencing Alexander Nekrassov pointed to the cathedral as an anti-Stalinist monument. Except Nekrassov conveniently forgets that the parodic punk prayer was meant to strike at age old pillars of Russian authoritarianism. The first target was Putin's Kremlin, the secondary target was Russian Orthodoxy as a superstructural spectre of the conditions in Russian society. It has to be said that the Orthodox Church has long served to legitimise the status quo in Russia. This was true in the days when the Tsar stood as the semi-divine head of the Church and it's unfortunately true in the present Mafia state. It was the Russian Orthodox Church which fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming the evils of the world on the Jewish people, and in doing so contributed greatly to the Judeophobia rife in Europe at the time. Indeed, it became Hitler's "warrant" for genocide. Today it is the bedtime reading of neo-Nazis everywhere, it has been distributed by Henry Ford and Hamas while David Icke has cited it as a 'factual document'.

 

Even Nekrassov's claim that the Church can be taken as an anti-Stalinist symbol shouldn't be taken too seriously. Although the Church had flirtations with oppositional activity, the suicidal regime of Stalin's creation fell back on religiosity as well as nationalism to support the war effort. The campaigns against religion in the 1920s and 30s were put on hold until Khrushchev began to close churches once again in the 60s. Indeed, it made sense given that the war with Germany was a bloodbath for Russia – leaving in excess of 20 million dead. The breach left open after the fall of the Tsar was filled by Stalin as he took on the guise of a god-king complete with an era of heresy hunts, miracles and even an inquisition. It was the Orthodoxy that had worked to instil a cultural credulity among Russians to the benefit of the Tsars and later Stalinism. This isn't to say that the Soviet Union was a religious state, but the Church can hardly be taken as anti-Stalinist so totally. We should turn to the question of Russia's politics and the rudderlessness of organised religion.

The real test is whether or not the Orthodox Church will rise to its stated commitment to the principles by which Christ lived by. As Giles Fraser points out "The legal case against Jesus was that he violated the holy. He was criticised for allowing his disciples to eat without washing properly and for picking corn on the day set aside as holy. He said he was God yet he was born in a filthy stable and willingly laid hands on lepers. He had no problem with being touched by menstruating women or eating with those regarded as unwholesome." This constituted a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the holy, as Fraser notes, that had become an alibi for political injustice. The same challenge was made by the Hebrew prophets, being profane is precisely the point. This should be taken as an opportunity for Russia's progressive Christians to reassert themselves as an alternative to the Kremlin's mascot church. Right now, the Russian Orthodoxy is just another rod with which Putin can kosh dissidents. But the Church will survive as a weapon for future administrations. So it's vital that there be an alternative Christianity to the established Church.

Syria's Islamic 'civil war'.

The Wrong brand of Islam.

As Robert Fisk observes, the coverage of this conflict is mired in hypocrisy and mendacity. No Western power is serious about a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in this instance. The political class was relieved (though it won’t admit it) at the Sino-Russian veto which provoked such criticism in the West. Not that there is ever any such concern about the four decades that the US has spent blocking a peaceful settlement over Israel-Palestine. This is highly relevant as the Israelis want to see Syria fall into the hands of people who will betray the Lebanese resistance and sell-out on the Palestinian question. Interestingly, Hezbollah in Lebanon have gone completely quiet as its Shi'ite comrade Bashar al-Assad struggles to hold down a democratic opposition in his own country. Fisk notes "For 30 years, Hezbollah has defended the oppressed Shias of southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. They have presented themselves as the defenders of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza. But faced with the slow collapse of their ruthless ally in Syria, they have lost their tongue."

In The Evening Standard Philipp Bobbitt comments “Various Iranian officials have depicted the Syrian civil war as a clash of outside powers, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey serving as proxies for the US and the UK [which they most certainly are!], trying to weaken the alliance of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah [to further empower Israel].” Note that Bobbitt emphasises that this is the line of the Iranian regime, probably with the intention of muddying it in the minds of his readers. Yet it’s soon clear that Bobbitt is sympathetic to an “extensive bombing campaign, and air strikes” to undermine Syria’s air defences and lay the way for a power-sharing arrangement. He stresses that he isn’t for ‘Western ground troops’ (and no one is) but then stresses that we can rely on Turkey (and NATO) for that. Bobbitt goes on to frame all of this as a ‘civil war’ within Islam, between the Sunni and the Shia manifested in the competing orders of the Saudi Kingdom and the Iranian Republic.

Of course, it seems more like a conflict between Western influence in the region and the only current independent of American-Israeli edict. The problem is not Iran's human rights record, the real problem is that the Iranians will not take orders from Washington between hanging homosexuals. If there really is a ‘civil war’ within Islam then it’s a portion of the Sunni lot that’s on our side, in this view the Shi’ites are the enemy because they inhabit the oiliest land in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Iran poses a threat to the unnatural order that has oil profits being wired to New York and London. So naturally Iranian influence is highlighted as part of the problem in Syria. It seems more plausible that there’s a conflict over the natural resources of that region and it has multifarious belligerents. This is how to take the Sino-Russian opposition to any UN sanctions against Syria. It is also plausible that the objectives of the Western support for rebels go as far as the subversion of any democratic currents in Syria. But it isn't clear if this aim will be achieved.

The Saudi-Qatari ruling-class would love to create another bulwark to Iranian influence in it's tacit alliance with Israel. The Syrian regime has to be destroyed because it's a decrepit Ba'athist model rooted in the Alawite sect of Shi'ite Islam, which makes it a conveniently placed ally of Iran and Hezbollah. It is in the interests of the US and Israel to dethrone Assad and destroy the Ba'ath Party for this reason. This is where the interests of Wahhabi Islamists converge with the interests of Western power and the rebel groups fighting to bring down the Syrian regime. At the same time it has to be said that the popular movement to free Syria from this regime does not subscribe to any religious edicts coming out of Saudi Arabia. The sectarian Wahhabi Islamists are a minority within the struggle, as Richard Seymour has noted. It may be more plausible that the Turkish-backed Muslim Brotherhood will come to power at the ballot box, as seen in Egypt, but it's not a predestined conclusion.

The ideal outcome would take the most progressive aspects of the legacy of Arab nationalism further within a democratic framework to set the ground for a new politics. We should note, as Seymour does, that the Assad regime has sought to harden its position by paying agents to shout sectarian slogans. This is reminiscent of attempts by the Egyptian regime to stir inter-religious violence between Coptic Christians and Muslims. Instead the Coptics and the Muslims stood together in Tahrir Square, "We are one!" they shouted defiantly. Similar methods of whipping up anti-Semitic fervour among the crowds failed. This is a struggle for democracy in the region and it has yet to flower. It is vital that the Left stands behind the democratic opposition and resistance to Bashar al-Assad and the Ba'ath Party for the sake of a shift in paradigm. The opportunity to wrench Syria from all spheres of influence can't be missed. This isn't the same as saying that we should support the liberal interventionists and NATO apologists for bombing a sovereign country.

A frank word about Immigration.

It is often the case that the cuts to public services are justified by the claim that the service is abused by immigrants. The claim most often made is that it is just the benefits are the reason that the ‘foreigners’ come here, they just want to leach off of the tax-payer and so on. It then follows that there should be cuts to benefits to deter immigrants, either to drive them into work or to stop the flow of immigrants totally. Benefit cuts will supposedly deter immigrants from settling here and pull the rug from under the feet of people already settled in the country, removing the safety net for the working-class as a whole. In the minds of many the ‘foreigner’ has two hands too many in the pot and this widespread perception (itself a product of a media campaign) the immigrant is left a vulnerable target. It doesn’t matter that out of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who settled in Britain since 2004, only a few thousand have become benefit claimants. Similarly it has to be noted that only 2% of housing has gone to immigrants over the same time period.

The neoliberal model can push open borders on the grounds of free movement of labour and anti-racist individualism. The system requires an endless flow of desperate workers which can be exploited readily. Immigrants serve as a reserve army of labour which undermines the wages of ‘native’ workers. This holds down wages to ensure high profits for capitalists. In turn creates a division between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ workers which can be used to pit the working-class against itself. The ethnic tensions are a result of economic relations, out of this comes a nativist populism which can be used to attack the standard of living for both ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ workers. This is just another version of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, except it is ethnically charged to provoke nationalist sentiments among the self-identified ‘deserving’. This is to put aside the racism which emanates from the old colonial role of European nations, with Britain this takes the form of anti-black and anti-Asian sentiments typically. But let's focus on the economic foundation for a moment.

The system produces reserve armies of labour in the form of dole wastelands of unemployment and through the import of cheap ‘foreign’ labour. The contraction and expansion of the reserve armies of labour can undermine the wages of workers, even workers in trade unions. The need for a continuous flow of labour collides with the interests of the labour movement which in turn resorts to pitting relatively privileged workers against the unprotected worker. In short it’s a false hope that the limiting of immigration could reinstate the privileges of ‘native’ workers many of which have been decimated over the last 30 years. We should be careful not to sneer at working-class ‘bigotry’. The widespread support for an end to immigration entirely from the working-class will be pandered to when the economic system has gorged itself on cheap labour and can do without another injection for a while. The move by trade unions to protect the interests of the ‘native’ working-class is not entirely “irrational” and “racist”. But it is short-sighted.

It’s when the discourse descends into cleverly glossed language about the problems created by ‘cultural differences’ – e.g. that the Jews bring crime and disease as The Daily Mail once claimed – then it has sunk to xenophobic chauvinism. The same can be said of the calls for British withdrawal from the European Union and the whole debate over the EU in the UK. Withdrawal would only open up Britain to even more rapacious and destructive market forces. If it’s not Brussels it will be Washington! Economic integration actually may offer a solution. The answer could be multinational unions formed to transcend borders to protect the rights, freedoms and standard of living for ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worker alike. This may be the only way to forge bonds of solidarity in the face of such division. We have to fight against the proto-fascist tendencies and nativist movements which seek to pit the working-class against itself. It can’t simply be that the best way to defend the working-class is to defend the free movement of labour under neoliberalism.

It’s not to say that the free movement of people is wrong in itself, rather the particular mode of immigration under conditions of exploitation has a significant downside. It is worth noting that the individual migrant would still be restrained by conditions of subjection, so it could hardly be described as ‘free’ in that sense. We would only describe the working-class as free with reference to negative liberty, the freedom from various forms of constraint. It’s clear that the main reason so many Africans try to get across to Spain or Italy on rafts is that the state of affairs in Africa has been horrendous for a very long time. Only to be captured by the Spanish police or navy and sometimes even killed by Italian fishermen. Similarly we find that the people fleeing genocide in Sudan to Israel have been met with appalling racism, there were race riots in Tel Aviv a couple of months ago and the Likudnik Miri Regev said that the blacks are a “cancer” on the Jewish state.