Thanks for your #solidarity, Socialist Workers

Below is a poster a godless friend at LSE saw, and was thoughtful enough to photograph. It advertises an event which happened there last night with the Socialist Worker Student Society on campus, titled ‘More than opium – why the left defend religious rights’.

Forgive me for using such a bleed-heart leftist adjective, but the odour of bullshit here is frankly oppressive .

‘Religious rights’ – excuse me? Even assuming the pursuit of justice is best served by a rights-based discourse, what rights do the religious have that the rest of us don’t? Particularly when discussing the attempted quietening of secular voices deemed profane or blasphemous, there aren’t religious and non-religious sets of rights. There are things people get to do, and things they don’t.

‘Satirical’, too, in tabloid quotation marks? Jesus and Mo is satirical whether or not you personally find it amusing, and as the author of the cartoons has repeatedly stated, amusing atheists is the sole aim of the series. You’d think that if atheists at LSE, or at any of the universities where J&M was reposted online, had set out to offend Muslims, they might have gone out of their way to make sure Muslims (rather than people who’d asked to join atheist Facebook groups) had a chance to see them. As for discrimination, I’d make perfectly clear that images on groups like theirs mock the religions of the world in equal measure – as well as secular ideologies, as in this most recent and most relevant case.

Of course religious communities can be the targets of racists. If a black church in Hackney or Peckham is firebombed by the BNP, we need not doubt for a moment that we’re witnessing racism. But precisely for that reason, why bring religion into it ? As with pentecostal Christians in UK cities, the faith of Muslims targeted by racists or the far right is a convenient incidence. If Islam were not in practical terms a monoethnic creed – and I make no apology for saying a recidivating capitalism is to blame, as socialists should realise – no one would for a moment view mockery of it as racist.

Revealing, too, that we’re asked if atheism is a road to social progress. It is anyway, but shouldn’t the first question be whether facts support it? A visceral hatred for gods and prophets and a particular animus for Christianity are the reasons I like being an atheist. They’re not the reasons I am one. Would it be revoltingly bourgeois and Enlightenment-blinkered to suggest, for just one moment, that the issue is what’s true?

Speaking of the bourgeoisie, I’m told by a friend who went along that Alex Callinicos – who I generally like, his views here and his partisan rhetoric not withstanding – argued religion is ‘a lesser evil compared to bourgeousie rule’, hence should be ignored by the left. There’s an adage that SWP members aren’t socialists, aren’t workers, and don’t know how to party, and I feel I should ask: do they know nothing of the proletarian left who’ve spent decades fighting Islamism in Iran? In Iraq? In Kurdistan? Of Mansoor Hekmat , who fought the Islamic Republic tooth and nail on religious grounds as well as economic ones?

To appropriate Marx’s name and ideas in defence of God is an insult to his legacy. It requires only the most basic structural understanding of the class system, and only a loose idea of theocracy’s treatment of the poor, to acknowledge that disentangling the two is a fool’s errand – and it reveals tremendous privilege, as well as tunnel vision, to exclude the one from any struggle against the other.

It troubles me that the left will only complain about Christianity, and the right will only complain about Islam. It troubles me that when we rally for free speech in London next Saturday, I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with libertarians. It troubles me even more that the far right, and specifically the EDL, are attempting to justify their lunacy by piggybacking on a secularist bandwagon. (Excuse the mixed metaphor, if you can.) And it troubles me most of all that a naïve, pro-Islamist and dare I say it middle class left with no concept of religion’s wider presence in the world thinks it simply knows better than the who are on my side.

But if I have to have arguments with all of you, and win them, then I will.

Alex Gabriel