{UAH} FASCISM AND ISIS & LRA

A socialist perspective on the ISIS and the LRA, why they are both
fascist and must be fought.

Fascism and ISIS
International Socialism
Issue: 148
Posted on 5th October 2015 by Camilla

Anne Alexander and Haytham Cero

Ghayath Naisse's article "The 'Islamic State' and the
Counter-revolution" is an extremely valuable contribution to the
discussion about the nature of ISIS. In particular, Naisse's emphasis
on the devastating impact of war on Iraqi and Syrian societies—in the
Iraqi case over the course of decades, in the Syrian case over a much
shorter timescale—is crucial to our understanding of the political and
military struggles playing out across both countries. The article is
uncompromising in its rejection of an external "solution" to the
problem of ISIS in the form of further imperialist intervention. As
Ghayath rightly notes, "The US occupation of Iraq destroyed what
remained of the country's infrastructure and social fabric, and
created conditions for the development of such movements. What is
more, the 'War on ISIS', with the US at the helm of an imperialist
coalition, will not defeat ISIS but will give it anti-imperialist
credentials that it will use to attract popular sympathies".1

In the context of the drive by the Tory government and sections of the
media to whip up fear of ISIS in order to justify yet more military
intervention, the clarity of this analysis, and the fact that it is
proposed by a Syrian revolutionary socialist is enormously important.

We are in agreement with the majority of Ghayath's thoughtful and
succinctly argued article. However, there is one specific point where
we feel that his analysis requires a rejoinder and further debate,
namely the proposal to consider ISIS "through the experience of
fascism".2 Again we want to stress that Ghayath's contribution to the
debate over this question is very welcome in helping to clarify and
refine the overall analysis of ISIS. Yet, as we will outline below, we
believe that there are a number of problems in analysing ISIS with
reference to fascism, and that the differences between ISIS and
fascist movements are more important than the similarities. We note
that Ghayath explicitly argues that his approach does not "refer to
the details of fascism within Europe", but suggests that ISIS should
be considered "in relation to the new fascist movements, within a
specific and limited context".3 Despite this, the framework he
proposes for analysing both fascist movements and ISIS references only
Leon Trotsky's classic theory of fascism, developed in response to the
crisis of the left in Germany in the context of the rise of Nazism.

We will outline here a number of reasons why we believe that a
comparison with fascist movements is of limited use in analysing ISIS,
and may open the door to confusion about the nature of both. Finally
we argue that other lines of inquiry, and comparison with other kinds
of armed political and religious groups, are likely to be more
fruitful in understanding the rise and probable future development of
this brutal organisation.

First, the context in which ISIS has arisen in Iraq and Syria differs
significantly from both the historic context in which European fascist
movements arose and the context in which their successor movements
operate today. Secondly, the role played by fascist movements in
confronting and ultimately defeating the organised working class is
absent in ISIS's case (although this is because the working class is
practically absent as an organised actor in Syria and Iraq and not
because ISIS is ideologically or practically less hostile to working
class self-organisation). Thirdly, ISIS is not organised in a similar
social movement form to fascist movements. In its heartlands it
operates principally as an army that claims state authority, rather
than as a political movement with an armed wing. It is certainly not a
mass movement, but rather an elitist vanguard of fighters whose
political impact is predicated on their military capabilities, not the
other way around.

Ghayath proposes a number of characteristics of ISIS which invite
comparison with fascist movements. Firstly, ISIS is explicitly
counter-revolutionary: "It has crushed all manifestations of the
revolution within its territories".4 Secondly, he points to its
authoritarianism and elitism, expressed in its imposition of "an
ideological and social way of life" on the ­inhabitants of territories
under its control.5 This links to a third point: that ISIS espouses a
particular form of reactionary ideology, characterised by its
militarism and glorification of violence, which harks back to a
mythical past while proposing to create an "aristocracy of new men"
who will purge the existing corrupt state and build their own in its
place.6 Ghayath does not specifically make this point, but we could
add here that the misogynistic and patriarchal aspects of this
ideology might be a relevant point of comparison between classic
fascist movements and ISIS. The genocidal impulse of classical fascism
and the vicious sectarianism of ISIS would be another.

The critical point in Ghayath's analysis, however, is his argument
that ISIS shares with classic fascist movements its social base in
what Trotsky called "human dust": "town artisans and traders, civil
servants, clerks, technical personnel and the intelligentsia, bankrupt
peasants, to which we may add the unemployed".7 Moreover, the
mobilisation of this "human dust", in the form of a "party-militia to
fight the current state and establish a fascist state," Ghayath
contends, is the key to understanding both the formation of ISIS and
fascist movements.8

Ghayath is absolutely right to insist, as Trotsky also did, on what
Jim Wolfreys calls "the strength of fascism as an autonomous
movement", rather than portraying it crudely as "an instrument of big
capital".9 However, fascism did not come to power in Germany by
"fighting the current state", but rather (as Ghayath rightly notes
elsewhere) through a complex process involving physical confrontations
with working class organisations, deploying anti-Semitism and
anti-Communism to mobilise its core social base, and convincing
sections of the existing ruling class to bring the movement into
power. Crucially, it was at the invitation of President Hindenburg,
representing conservative circles that believed they could use Adolf
Hitler for their own purposes, that Hitler became chancellor, and not
simply as the outcome of the party-militia's street battles. While
part of the Nazi movement's appeal rested on mobilising the fury of
the petty-bourgeoisie "against all the old parties that had bamboozled
it",10 the target of that movement was not the state or its agents but
others who might present organised ­resistance to it, or convenient
scapegoats such as the Jews.11

The context for the emergence of fascist movements in inter-war Europe
was the pulverisation of the social layers which were to form
Trotsky's "human dust"—"small proprietors never out of bankruptcy, of
their university sons without posts and clients, of their daughters
without dowries and suitors"—by multiple crises: "war, defeat,
reparations, inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and
despair".12 Unlike workers, who had organised powerful mass
organisations which not only expressed their interests as a class, but
also proposed a socialist alternative to the existing state and
society, these people were unable to achieve or even articulate their
own route out of the crisis.

The betrayal and defeat of workers' revolution paved the way for the
rise of fascism, and in the paramilitary gangs that hunted down and
murdered revolutionary activists like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht, the first fascist organisations began to germinate.

As Trotsky noted in 1933, "as Social Democracy saved the bourgeoisie
from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate
the bourgeoisie from Social Democracy".13 Fascism's historical role is
­materially to destroy any and all existing forms of working class
organisation, be they trade unions, mass reformist or revolutionary
parties. It does so on behalf of the bourgeois capitalist class,
albeit without necessarily being explicitly mandated by it. For Chris
Harman, this is the key factor distinguishing fascist movements from
others with a similar social base which appear at different moments in
history. He argues:

Petty bourgeois movements only become fascist when they arise at a
specific point in the class struggle and play a particular role. This
role is not just to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie, but to exploit the
bitterness they feel at what an acute crisis of the system has done to
them and so turn them into organised thugs prepared to work for
capital to tear workers' organisations apart.14

Other aspects of fascist movements (such as their social composition),
their reactionary ideology (including their leader-fascination,
violent, militaristic elitism and genocidal racism), the forms of
movement organisation that they assumed out of power and their
practices while in power, are not unique to fascism.

Moreover, there are difficulties if we attempt to apply a version of
this analysis to the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. As Ghayath
rightly points out in his article, it was the Bashar al-Assad regime's
brutal repression and ­systematic policy of mass killings and
destruction that broke the back of the popular movement and created
the conditions of socioeconomic devastation that ISIS has been
exploiting since its seemingly unstoppable expansion of summer 2014.
Of course, ISIS suppresses any attempt at popular or democratic
activism in the regions it controls, but the retreat or annihilation
of the popular movement was a precondition for ISIS's expansion, not a
result of it.

As Ghayath describes in his article, in the regions it controls, ISIS
attempts to restore public order by means of fierce repression, but
also by offering a minimum level of public services, utilities, food
and fuel subsidies. By this combination of terror and welfare, it
appears in some cases to have won at least the passive consent of
large sections of the local population, who have been through years of
harsh deprivation and insecurity. Are these supporting layers of the
population an inherent and active part of ISIS as a political, let
alone military force?

In an attempt to answer this question we can look at the dynamics of
ISIS's expansion, the way it has conquered territory in Syria and
imposed its hegemony over what it calls the "Caliphate". ISIS has
expanded spectacularly by a mixture of military victories and securing
the allegiance of other, smaller jihadist groups.

The most astounding military victories took place in Iraq, against the
Iraqi army. The rapid conquest of Mosul in June 2014 is a testament
not only to the disastrous state of the Iraqi army, but also of ISIS's
­military capabilities. No other Jihadist faction had been able to
inflict such a catastrophic defeat on the US-trained army. As Ghayath
points out, the presence of many former Ba'athist officers in ISIS's
ruling body could be one of the factors lying behind its superiority
in terms of organisation and military tactics when compared to other
groups.

The conquest of Mosul meant that ISIS found itself in control of a
substantial amount of military equipment which it then used to conquer
and police vast depleted territories in Iraq and Syria. The
quantitative and qualitative military superiority of ISIS over other
Jihadist groups is undeniable. Moreover, as recent testimony to the US
Congress by Linda Robinson of the Rand Corporation notes, ISIS's
success in seizing Mosul has left the group better equipped with
Humvees and heavy arms than the Iraqi army.15 This, in combination
with its terror-inducing propaganda, means that many groups have
pledged allegiance to the so-called Caliphate without fighting. Others
have been defeated in battle and annihilated. Of course, ISIS is not
immune to setbacks, most notably during the battle of Kobanê: the
zealous resistance of the Kurdish fighters led ISIS to impose a siege
on the town which made its static troops very vulnerable to US-led
aerial bombardment.

What is notably absent from the quick sketch above is anything
resembling attempts by ISIS and its supporters to build a political
movement which attempts to win mass support in areas before their
military conquest. ISIS's media channels portray life under its rule
as prosperous, safe and pious, suggesting that the organisation
understands the importance of balancing coercion with consent.
However, we have found no evidence that, in territories not under its
military control, ISIS attempts to organise in social movement form.
Rather its members appear largely to play the role of undercover
fighters—demanding protection money from frightened shopkeepers and
restaurant owners or threatening pharmacies with closure if they are
found to be selling counterfeit medicines.

ISIS's seizure and loss of the city of Derna in Libya is instructive
in this respect. ISIS declared a province "wilaya" in Derna in
November 2014, after the local dominant jihadi faction, the Majlis
Shura Shabab al-Islam, declared allegiance to ISIS leader al-Baghdadi.
Over the course of the next six months ISIS carried out government
activities ranging from street repairs and running law courts to
public executions. It was forced out of the city in June 2015 after a
violent feud erupted with another armed faction, the Abu Salim Martyrs
Brigade, who were apparently supported by local residents.16

Given the ultra-violent and sectarian character of ISIS's propaganda,
we might expect to see the organisation agitating for its civilian
supporters to carry out pogroms against religious and ethnic
minorities. By contrast ISIS's own propaganda glorifies the role of
its fighters in carrying out sectarian massacres: potential supporters
are encouraged to enlist as soldiers under ISIS's command, not to
carry out sectarian attacks themselves.

All of this points to the fact that ISIS is in essence an armed
faction, which has emerged in the context of insurgency and civil war,
rather than a social movement. This does not mean it is irrelevant to
ask questions about the organisation's social base—its soldiers and
commanders may well be drawn largely from specific social backgrounds.
But it is another crucial point of difference with fascist movements,
which historically proved able to deploy paramilitaries along with
civilian organisers in a single coherent movement. What makes the
spectacular political success of an organisation like ISIS possible is
precisely the conditions which Ghayath describes so well in his
article: the decades of war, sanctions and occupation in Iraq and the
utter destruction of large parts of Syrian society.

Finally, there are other contexts and other kinds of movement which
may provide more useful comparisons than with fascism. If we take as
our starting point not the character and ideology of ISIS as a
movement, but the conditions in the area where it arose, it is not
difficult to find other potential comparators. Central Africa, for
example, has been ravaged by years of war between and within the
states of the region. It has suffered mass population displacements,
genocides and ethnic cleansing. In this context, groups such as the
Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, which emerged in the
Acholiland area of Uganda in the late 1980s, emerged and grew.

The LRA claims to be creating a new social order based on the Bible's
Ten Commandments. It is responsible for massacres, systematic
campaigns of rape and mutilation. The group is infamous for its
abduction of children who are enlisted as soldiers, and is reported
also to have abused and raped thousands of women and girls.17 Although
the LRA is much weaker today than at the height of its campaigns in
the 1990s and early 2000s, it is estimated to have killed 100,000
people in Uganda alone and caused the displacement of 1.6 million.18
The organisation's initial impetus came, however, from an insurrection
in the Acholiland area in response to massacres carried out by the
National Resistance Army of Yoweri Museveni who seized power in Uganda
in 1986 from Tito Okello, a general of Acholi origin.19

ISIS's transnational connections, including its developing role as an
alternate centre of gravity to Al Qaeda in international jihadi
networks are an obvious contrast to this narrative. It is also vitally
important to set the rise of ISIS in the context of the defeat of the
Arab revolutions, and to see the crisis of mass Islamist reformist
movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, in the face of
counter-revolution, as a critical factor in explaining how ISIS has
come to have such a resonance beyond the core areas of its
territory.20 Nevertheless, it seems to us that ISIS has more in common
with armed factions such as the LRA, which have emerged in contexts of
war and sustained ethnic and religious conflict fuelled by the
rivalries of local states and imperialist intervention, than it does
with fascist movements.

Fascism, at its core, is a mobilisation of large layers of the petty
bourgeoisie in a violent mass movement that aims to destroy the
working class's capacity to wage struggle. This analysis is key to
understanding the historical role of fascism. From this viewpoint, we
have argued that ISIS cannot be considered fascist, because, although
ultra-violent and ultra-reactionary, there is no evidence of it
building or attempting to build any mass movement, and it has arisen
at a different moment in the class struggle in Iraq and Syria. It was
the Assad regime's brutal repression that destroyed the Syrian popular
movement and the people's revolution, thus creating conditions in
which ISIS, an elitist military group, subsequently thrived. In the
case of Iraq, there was no revolution in the first place so that ISIS
could emerge as a counter-revolutionary force.

Ghayath is absolutely right, however, to insist on the primacy of the
fight against the Assad regime, noting that "bringing down the regime
is the prerequisite to crushing the fascist and reactionary forces".21
And as he stresses earlier, imperialist intervention will only feed
into ISIS's anti-Western rhetoric and help the rehabilitation of the
Ba'athist dictatorship. The vitality of the Syrian Revolution lay in
the mass mobilisation from below which sparked the revolutionary
crisis in 2011. As Ghayath notes, even in areas controlled by
reactionary Islamist groups or the Assad regime, activists continue to
organise protests and campaigns inspired by the demands and hopes of
that popular movement. The best hope for the future of the Syrian
revolutionary movement surely lies in keeping those courageous
traditions alive for a new generation.

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