Dissidents of the International Left. Andy Heintz
at all.
What is the best way to support progressive elements like the Kurds in Syria?
Give them a voice, act like they exist! I’ve got friends who are organizing a book drive so they can send books to the university the Rojava Kurds have established in their territory, and that’s great. But what’s more important about it is the fact that by doing the book drive here, we are affirming that this social experiment in Syria actually exists and countering the stupid Left bullshit that all of the Syrian rebels are jihadists and therefore we should be backing Assad.
Who do you admire on the Left in America?
It’s kind of a desert out there. I like the Marxist-Humanists Kevin Anderson and Peter Hudis. I like my buds in the Rojava Solidarity effort, and the followers of the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin. I like Meredith Tax, who I believe first coined the term ‘imperial narcissism’. As for David Graeber, I have my criticisms of him, too, but he’s supporting the Rojava Kurds and I appreciate that. Many of the voices that most inspire me are not on the American Left but are Left and secularist figures in what is called the ‘Muslim world’. I’m talking about genuinely heroic figures such as Iraq’s Houzan Mahmoud, Iran’s Maryam Namazie and Algeria’s Karima Bennoune and Marieme Helie Lucas. These women intransigently oppose Western imperialism and political Islam alike, and speak with the moral authority of those who have placed themselves at risk.
You identify as an anarchist. Can you speak about what anarchism means to you?
Some people call it democracy taken seriously. About 25 years ago, when I was more dogmatic, I would have considered myself an anarchist and a pacifist. So, anarchism to me was not about violence, it was about nonviolence. I wanted to see a nonviolent revolution: people putting themselves in harm’s way to stop the war machine; and people dropping out of the system as a form of non-cooperation and eventually building a society based on decentralized co-operatives instead of centralized top-down structures. That’s what anarchism meant to me. Now, a generation later, I still consider myself an anarchist, although I feel the need to add the caveat that I’m not a dogmatic one: I’m a pragmatic anarchist.
Most of the forces I’m supporting in Iraq and Syria are not anarchist, although the Rojava Kurds sort of are. They don’t call themselves anarchists, but they are influenced by Murray Bookchin and his theory of ‘Social Ecology’, and they’re trying to put in place anarchistic experiments like direct democracy and so on, so they are anarchist-leaning and anarchist-influenced. The Local Coordination Committees that started the Syrian revolution in 2011 are a mix. Some are more consciously leftwing than others – there are anarchists amongst them. But for the most part they are basically pro-democratic, pro-secular – and I will take that, that’s good enough for me. In a dystopian context like this, that’s damn good, and to continue to advocate that in the face of everything from the regime and the jihadists is heroic. The people I’ve supported in Iraq for the past 10 years now – the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and the labor unions – they are feminist and Marxist and they are coming out of the
Marxist-Humanist tradition. They are followers of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, and the late theorist Hekmat Mansour, who founded its sibling organization, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. And they are, by the way, very anti-imperialist in their politics. You don’t have to pass my anarchist litmus test to get my support.
I no longer can call myself a pacifist. I grappled with it long and hard. The year of 1994 was the turnaround for me. Two things happened that year that cured me of my pacifism: the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas [Mexico] that I went down to and covered and experienced. And at the same time the siege of Sarajevo was going on in Bosnia. And I thought: ‘You know it’s kind of condescending for me to preach pacifist purity from my privileged position.’ No-one was coming to burn down my village, so I couldn’t deny other people the right to self-defense. I believe in the power of nonviolence, but I don’t believe in turning it into an ossified dogma, and I do believe there are situations where getting your hands dirty in armed resistance is forced upon you and your choice is to do that or get exterminated.
Postscript by Bill Weinberg:
Since this interview took place in 2015, things have changed considerably in Syria – mostly for the worse. Thanks to massive Russian military intervention, Assad has reconquered nearly all of the country from the opposition and has arguably escalated the genocide. ISIS has been largely defeated, but through US military intervention, with the Rojava Kurds groomed as a proxy force by the Pentagon. In those areas (principally Idlib) still under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebels, Turkey has stepped in to protect these opposition forces. Yet Turkey is intransigently opposed to the Rojava Kurds. So this has had the tragic effect of pitting the FSA against the Rojava Kurds.
I hope the Syrians can rebuild Arab-Kurdish solidarity against Assad, ISIS and the imperial powers alike. And I hope that progressives in the West can find some way to play a constructive role – which thus far they have overwhelmingly failed to do. ■
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