Orsan on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:12:09 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev |
Alex Foti's last post reminded me of Sultan-Galiev, for some he is the father of Muslim national Communism, and for others of the third wordlist revolutionaries, like Fanon, Che, Maritegui and others. In last decade Galiev become increasingly popular, referred by Neo-Maoists, nationalist socialism, as well as groups that are developing an anti-capitalist Muslims posture. The below is an interesting new article below about the guy. I have been reading his stuff coming out of Soviet archives, since 1995-96, and trying to trace the ideas influencing him. Finally very recently found out that the methodology Galiev claims to be using for developing his strategy 'energetic materialism' -which he claimed to be a more radical version of historical materialism- was actually originated in work of another forgotten name Bogdanov. This makes both names more relevant to Nettimers, since Bogdanov's major work Tektology is seen as the original source of the cybernetics and General Systems Theory which probably influenced all of us in one way or another. Have been looking forward MacKenzie's Molecular Red and the English translation of Bogdanov's Empiriomonizm, believing and hoping there lies here an historical link, that was waiting to be made and that could help us to develop a vision that can bring together all forces defines themselves as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, anti-exploitationist, anti-authoritarian and those working on building pro post-capitalist, eco-friendly, peaceful, solider, free, equal worlds. ... In The Wretched of the Earth, from 1961, Frantz Fanon argued that Marxist analyses should always be slightly stretched every time we have to confront the colonial problem.[1]1 This notion is an excellent starting point for reexamining the postcolonial problematic of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the "provincializing" of Europe. Within subaltern, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, there are two heterogeneous and competing conceptions of this provincialization of Europe, whose entanglement remains a source of ambiguities. There is, on the one hand, a conception that holds provincialization to be synonymous with the particularization, and thus relativization, of "Eurocentric-European thought," and Marxist thought in particular. There is, on the other hand, an understanding of provincialization as a stretching that underlines the need for an extension and displacement of the borders of theory beyond Europe, as a condition of possibility of an authentic universalization. The opponents of postcolonial critique have until now almost exclusively seemed to resist the first of these two forms of provincialization, relativization, in that they really perceived it to be a break with anti-colonial thought and struggles for emancipation. But they seemed to be a bit less attentive to the second form-stretching or extension-where they would have seen that this indeed draws on deep roots in anti-colonial thought, and anti-colonial Marxism in particular. There are many ways to retrace this genealogy, that is, to elucidate the continuities as well as the ruptures that are foundational to the historical-epistemological transition and division from anti-colonialism to postcolonial critique. I look to consider here the problem of the nationalization of Marxism. Usually, this is understood as a simple question of the "adaptation of Marxism to singular conditions"; this does not account for the complexity of the way in which, as Gramsci and C.L.R. James have shown, such a nationalization engages in a process of theoretical and practical translations. The most famous example remains the "sinification" of Marxism led by Mao Zedong. As Arif Dirlik writes, in what is otherwise an unrelenting critique of postcolonial studies: "One of Mao's greatest strengths as a leader was his ability to translate Marxist concepts into a Chinese idiom"; in other words, he articulated a "vernacularization of Marxism."[2]2 Here, one can already see that the process of the nationalization of Marxism is not reducible to Stalin's formula of "national in form, socialist in content."[3]3 I am interested in an experience that is less well-known, that of "Muslim national communism" as it was developed in Soviet Russia, then in the USSR, from 1917 to the end of the 1920s. It seems important to shed light on this experience for at least three reasons: 1. First, as the name indicates, Muslim communism raises the question - more relevant than ever - of the relations between, on the one hand, emancipatory movements with "white origins" (as in the Soviet example) and, on the other hand, Islam and the groups that integrate it in multiple ways into their own political claims. 2. Second, one is confronted with an anti-imperialist emancipatory movement that developed in concert with a revolutionary process in the very heart of the (Russian) empire, a historical situation whose most famous precedent is the connection between the French and Haitian Revolutions at the transition of the 18th to the 19th century. 3. The third reason concerns a "colonial revolution" that unfolds from within the territorial borders of the "metropole," its confines. But it is not a matter of an exception so much as a limit-situation that discloses the fact that, in a global imperialist context, extra-European nationalism never forms an "outside" to empire; rather, it is its permanent limit. To think the nationalization of Marxism, and more specifically, of Bolshevism, as the provincialization of Europe, means to therefore not to imagine an radical alterity opposed to Marxist-Leninism, and could not alter or relativize the latter; it is to conceptualize the theoretical and practical margins of Bolshevism-itself the the product of a prior translation of Marxism into Russia-or in other words, to stretch it. This entails as well the elucidation of the modes through which Bolshevism was rethought from the margins of the empire. Not having any pretensions of giving an overview of all of Muslim national communism, I am interested here in someone who remains its major figure, the Tartar Bolshevik intellectual and militant Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, whose first arrest was remarked upon by Trotsky in 1923, when he cited Kamenev's words: Do you remember the arrest of Sultan-Galiev? [...] This was the first arrest of a prominent Party member made upon the initiative of Stalin [...] That was Stalin's first taste of blood.[4]4 But let's take things up from the beginning.[5]5 [6]https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-comm unism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/ 1. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/#fn1-4183 2. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/#fn2-4183 3. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/#fn3-4183 4. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/#fn4-4183 5. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/#fn5-4183 6. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org