A post last Sunday got over one and a half thousand likes by saying: “Shitting on Islam as a communist is just embarrassing. Islam is beating you at your own game [right now]. There [is] simply no one doing more to fight against colonialism and genocide [right now] than militant Islamic groups”1. In a year of history capped by the military victories of Hamas and Yemen’s Ansarallah, this attitude is an understandable reaction, but all the more dangerous due to its popularity. The post’s author is right to defend Islam from the puerile insults of Western chauvinists, whether they’re professed Marxists or not. But seeing the success of Hamas and Ansarallah as evidence of Islam’s superiority to communism is the height of superficial thinking and an insult not just to communism, but to the real merits of Hamas and Ansarallah.
The basic mistake of this view comes down to an assumption that the surface level identity of a political organization fully defines its content. The states of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua do not fully conform to the orthodox Marxist-Leninist handbook in terms of political identity, but they represent their working masses’ class rule nonetheless. Is their success due to unique components of their identity like Catholic liberation theology, or is it due to their internalization of the lessons taught by Marxism-Leninism to the entire world? Phrasing the question differently to address Hamas and Ansarallah: Is their success due to Islam surpassing communism, or due to Islamic groups correctly implementing the lessons of Marxism-Leninism?
As rich of a text as it is, the Qur’an is not a manual on guerilla warfare, nor on the political philosophy of a vanguard party. Hamas and Ansarallah, like the Sandinistas and PSUV, benefit from interpreting their popular religions through a lens of liberation, but they are simultaneously forced to look outside of these bounds for the full scientific knowledge needed to achieve economic and national sovereignty. As Thomas Sankara emphasized while discussing his favor towards the Bible, the Qur’an, and Lenin’s State and Revolution: “In modern times, Lenin is unquestionably the most revolutionary. But it’s also undeniable that Muhammad was a revolutionary who provoked much social upheaval. Jesus too, but his revolution was never completed”2. Like Sankara, we can appreciate the residual progressive content of religions without engaging in the fallacy that they have carried an unmitigated capacity for revolution into the modern day.
For a religious organization to achieve revolutionary potential, even within a particularly favorable environment, it must incorporate the scientific lessons uncovered by a modern theoretician such as Lenin. This should perhaps be especially clear now, precisely due to the success of Hamas and Ansarallah. The former’s success in its military offensives against Israel is built upon a tradition of guerilla warfare stemming from Mao Zedong, Vo Nyugen Giap, and Che Guevara, who elaborated both direct military tactics and the dependence of guerilla warfare on popular cooperation. Even imperialist mouthpieces have noticed this, as evidenced by Foreign Policy’s “Hamas’s Tunnel Warfare Harks Back to the Viet Cong”3.
The wealth of technique afforded to national liberation by Marxist-Leninists extends not just to the military sphere, but also to the political organization of Hamas, which became the administration of Gaza thanks to democratic centralism:
“In 1996, the push to take part in elections had been backed by very few individuals, among them Ismail Haniyeh. Then years later, however, all the groups that made up the Hamas leadership gave the involvement in PNA institutions the green light … In the end, as has always been the case throughout Hamas’s history, the Islamist movement accepted the will of the majority, according to a process very similar to the ‘democratic centralism’ that was the hallmark of mass structures such as those of Communist parties, ultimately defending the final decision and overcoming earlier splits”.4
The real criticism of communist groups in a political environment like Palestine is not that they ignore the anti-colonial power of Islam, but that Islamic groups like Hamas have implemented Marxism-Leninism’s lessons on political power to a larger effect. An Islamic group may enjoy certain advantages due to its pre-existing organs of mass contact and shared framework for liberatory dialogue, which can partially explain examples of success such as Revolutionary Shia Islam over the Tudeh party in the case of Iran, but the subjective factor of mistaken strategies plays a role as well. The outward identity of these competing groups weighs little in comparison with their ability to deliver the national and economic liberation needed by their country’s working masses.
This point becomes especially clear with Yemen’s Ansarallah, as this Islamic movement follows in the footsteps of a former socialist state, even delivering land reforms initiated by their Marxist-Leninist predecessors: “In Yemen’s western Tihama region, 104 thousand hectares of land was expropriated for farming. And while this is just one example of Ansarallah’s economic plan, the same story is unfolding in regions such as Dhamar, Saadah, and elsewhere”5. This expropriation should not be surprising, as Ansarallah originally rose to power in opposition to the foreign-backed austerity measures of the previous regime6. As a result, the power-loss of the Yemeni Socialist Party has not frozen the country’s revolution, even if it continues under a different guise.
This fact must be remembered when it comes to the general retreat of socialism in 1991. Marxist-Leninist parties across the world fell or retreated into social democracy, but the national liberation, human rights agreements, and social programs which accompanied capitalism’s post-WW2 retreat across the planet cannot be fully erased. The retreats of socialism and capitalism differ due to the historic mandate of the former, contrasted by the desperate adaptations of the reactionary latter. The fact that socialist revolutions have not been led by textbook Marxist-Leninists in Venezuela and elsewhere actually indicates the inevitable victory of scientific socialism. Even in the low-tide of formal communism in the decade after the USSR’s fall, the science discovered by Marxist-Leninists could not be suppressed, finding its expression in Bolivarianism and even in religious worship via liberation theology.
To quote Hugo Chávez’s attitude towards his own development: “All these things were impacting me in one way or another: Torrijos, I became a torrijista; Velasco, I became a velasquista, And with Pinochet, I became an anti-pinochetista”7. We can accuse Chávez of eclecticism, but this misses the unifying thrust behind his influences, testified to by the success of himself and the PSUV. The real danger of eclecticism to socialists does not come from the lessons of scientific socialism being propagated through a religious lens. Eclecticism becomes harmful when we decide that scientific socialists must tail religious forces, rather than the other way around. We can and must learn from the examples of Hugo Chávez, the Sandinistas, and others, but not because their religious influences give them superiority. Instead, their value comes from applying scientific socialism despite the greater residual strength of religion in their nations, adapting religion to suit socialism.
I titled this article “‘Secularized’ Communism” because communism’s theory has been carried into ostensibly un-communist areas, just as religious forces diffused their universal conceptions into secular areas of civil society, where they remain potent despite lacking an explicit link to religious authority. Communism as a crystallized identity has followed this pattern, but that does not mean its scientific method will remain “secularized”. Alongside the success of Hamas and Ansarallah rises the political weight of the “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian”8 Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa, now its third most powerful party. The fall of the USSR and its contemporary Marxist-Leninist states cannot be reversed, only built on by applying scientific socialism to meet the weaknesses which led to communism’s retreat. The victories of Hamas and Ansarallah are part of this process, not its antithesis, because their increasing success through Marxist-Leninist methods will further test the limits of Islam, just as the Sandinistas’ victories in Nicaragua provoked Vatican sabotage and a subsequent weakening of Catholic faith there9. Avoiding tailism requires us to see this historic process in full, not just follow an individual ebb or flow.
Bibliography
biah 碧雅بيا (@j1h4di). “shitting on Islam as a communist is just embarassing.” X, December 24, 2023. https://twitter.com/j1h4di/status/1739025116023976132.
Sankara, Thomas. Thomas Sankara Speaks. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988. (p. 158)
Buccino, Joe. “Hamas’s Tunnel Warfare Harks Back to the Viet Cong.” Foreign Policy, November 1, 2023. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/01/gaza-hamas-israel-idf-tunnel-warfare-vietnam-viet-cong/.
Caridi, Paola. Hamas: From Resistance to Government. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. (p. 173-4)
Agerhus, Rune. “Ansarallah: The Vanguard of Yemen’s Agrarian Revolution.” Al Mayadeen, September 1, 2022. https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/blog/ansarallah:-the-vanguard-of-yemens-agrarian-revolution.
“In this context, AnsarAllah not only threw out a corrupt foreign imposed government filled with crooks and Islamist bigots, but they also reversed the selling of Yemen’s economic future.”
Blumi, Isa. Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. (p. 4)
Chávez, Hugo. Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution. Translated by Chesa Boudin. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005. (p. 28)
Shivambu, Floyd. “Where Do We Come From?” In The Coming Revolution, 1-113. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014. (p. 79)
“Only 37% of Nicaraguans today identify as Catholics [in 2021], as opposed to 50% in 2014.”
Renk, Becca Mohally. “Catholic Church Backed Violent Coup Attempt in Nicaragua, Meddles in Politics.” Geopolitical Economy, August 29, 2022. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/08/29/catholic-church-coup-nicaragua/.