Daily Times

“Whoever has provoked men to rage against him” Nietzsche says “has always gained a party in his favour, too”. The publication of the caricatures of the prophet of Islam has proved Nietzsche succinct. A magazine of a remote repute, a sinking ship or to be precise a cadaver on oxygen tent chose a method of resuscitation by publishing few grotesque images of the prophet of Islam. The grisly act of a young lone wolf slaughtering a teacher displaying the images in the class complicated the matter further. It not only projected the believers and the religion in the poor light but also gave a lease of life to the right-wing magazine.

The position of the French president Macron is no different than the magazine, instead of words, the Sartre’s pistols the magazine uses images to fire. Macron guarding the interests of his class keeps a literal pistol to the workers temples but the workers’ of France are no pushover instead they have pushed him to the corner. His designs to impose neo-liberal agenda through coercion have back fired; the Yellow Vests have refused to give in to the dispossession by the capitalist state.

The Yellow Vest movement is one of those spontaneous struggles that proved Marx’s premise of emancipation of working class by the working class flawless. Workers can be emancipated from outside but indirect emancipation suggests the immaturity of their class consciousness.  The emancipation from the outside can motivate the workers to launch a revolution but not to lead the revolution; shepherded by a party from outside leading them in their name and class the notion of leadership becomes theoretical.

The movement launched by the Yellow Vest has no central leadership; they are their own masters, causing a unique challenge to the bourgeoisie of France. In the absence of a central leadership, Macron is unable to fancy to whom he can talk with, an existential question, a dilemma for the bourgeoisie habitual of negotiating with the unions. The bureaucratized central leadership of the workers can be subjected to coercion, greed and intimidation, but the self-organization of the proletariat commanding their destiny remains immune to these tactics. They can be subjugated through a naked and barbaric state-terror alone and that too with partial success.

Western democracy is privy to the coercive tactics, once the system is in threat despite the much-hyped civility, it feels little or no reluctance in using them. After a long protracted struggle extending over a year and a half workers have managed to restrict the neo-liberalism from snatching back many of their hard fought gains of the past won through decades of sacrifices. The steady struggle was interrupted by the COVID, but once the threat has decreased despite state coercion workers are back on the streets.

And then came the apocalyptical happening, not a bolt from blue but an organized, premeditated incitement from the right wing of France to guard the decadent system. Capitalism leaves nothing to chance, Macron looking for diversion found it in the name of free speech. This is where the contradiction of capitalism becomes obvious. Demanding the right to free heath, free education and a just order become synonymous with treasonous betrayal while freedom of speech a hollow slogan gains holiness and sublimity.

Defining the concrete substance of freedom is a basic question that needs to be posed to all the democratic societies that present a soulless democracy and freedom of speech both as fetish. ‘Some souls’, Nietzsche points out, ‘one will never discover, unless one invent them first’. The soulless souls of western democracy and freedom of speech are the inventions of capitalist necessity for domination through consent, if they become counterproductive to the realization of capital, they can be cast aside.

The capitalists’ ‘institutions of free speech Marcuse says do not hamper the mental coordination with the established reality. Barring few exceptions such as holocaust—a memory of a massacre arranged and hallowed for capitalistic expansion— they shamelessly integrate everything from unreason to vulgarity. If freedom means ‘holding a woman from her pussy’ [New York Times 2016] or ‘offering fellatio to vote for Hillary’ [Global News,2016] this freedom not only negates the concept of freedom but also promotes a culture of submission. The individual’s choice to choose between Trump or Biden is no choice. The precondition of political freedom is freedom from the politics people have no control upon. and the expression of free speech needs freedom to question the class nature of the system that gives pelf to few and penury to the rest.

In the past, the blasphemous caricatures in France met with a mixed response. Internally they proved divisive and externally received a backlash from the Muslim communities living elsewhere. In 2006, the then president Jacques Chirac condemned “overt provocation” inflaming the Muslims’ passions living in France, (BBC2006). Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister of France criticized the magazine’s decision calling it absurd, declaring it ‘pouring oil on the fire” (Washington Post, 2012).

France in those days had a stable economy, the ruling class was not eager to cleave the people in ethnic or religious lines but it never wanted to stop the process either. The hatred and fear are the tools of an exchange society, when realization of capital has no obstacle they ought to hibernate in the dark recesses of society to be recalled to life during recession. Under neo-liberalism capitalist class barely bothers to hide its control on the means of production, ever since the red fear eclipsed, capitalism has gone back to its old tactics of reincarnating the race and religious others. Muslims who enthusiastically participated in the destruction of the Godless red empire have become the modern day’s Jews. Their persecution is inherent in the system, and force is its essential order.

Despite becoming the part of international capitalism the Muslim world has not paved its way out of its Lutheranism. Using technology without possessing the means to manufacture technology has denied them the technological culture both in thinking and working. For dominant feudal relations and economic backwardness, they regulate themselves through their emotions. Muslims living in the western countries are no different. In the absence of a glorious future they look back to the admirable past when muscles and not machine dominated the battleground.

Freedom demands the consciousness of servitude, those who consider servitude as freedom; their demand for freedom loses its meanings and its dignity. By shoving the minorities in their own backyard into inferno, lynching them and pushing them into ghettos, they not only lose the moral justification of launching a protest against an Orwellian form of western freedom of expression but conform to the drab form of their own existence.

Muslims need to rethink their position in the current scenario. Muslim population, colonized by its ruling class, the direct beneficiary of imperialism is already dispossessed. The lumpen element alone has made the blasphemy the only issue worth fighting for without putting up a concrete fight against the economic inequality proving that the fight is about control and not conviction. Firmly believing in God as the guardian of religion and the Ummah comprising the chosen people, it is time to leave these matters to Him and to work to change the destiny by embracing science and technology. If we cannot become the saints of knowledge, we should at least try to be its warriors. The world is not our oyster, to make it one we have to change the methods of our madness.

The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com