Guerrilla History - Islam, the Commons, and (Democratic) Socialism w/ Ali Al-Assam

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

In this wonderful crossover episode between Guerrilla History and The Majlis, we bring on Dr. Ali Al-Assam to discuss the legendary Iraqi Communist leader Ibrahim Allawi's work Al-Mushtarak (The Commons), which Ali has just translated an edited edition in English, available from Iskra Books!  This conversation covers the life and work of Allawi, his book Al-Mushtarak, and the fascinating fusion of Islamic culture and socialist politics contained within.  Really a great discussion, you're going to want to check this out (and pick up the book!). Ali Al-Assam is founder and Secretary of NewsSocial Cooperative and member of the Friends of Socialist China - Britain Committee.  Be sure to check out the Mushtarek platform and the NewsSocial Cooperative.  You can follow Ali on twitter @aliassam, and get the book Reading In Al-Mushtarak from Iskra Books.  Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Den Ben-Brew? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckumacki,

joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University on Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's good to be with you. Of course. It's nice to see you as always. We have a terrific guest that's going to be joining us today, but before, before I introduced the guest, I would like to announce two things. One, this episode is an episode in conjunction with the Mudgellis, which listeners will be familiar is the podcast that you host as well, Adnan. It's your other podcasts that you do, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later in the closing bits,

but listeners, you should be sure to subscribe to the Mudge list wherever you get your podcasts. And I also want to remind the listeners that they can help support this show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com. forward slash guerrilla history, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing by following us on Twitter at Gorilla-U-Pod. That's G-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-Pod. As I mentioned, we have a terrific guest today, and we're going to be talking about a fascinating

new book. We're joined by Dr. Ali al-Assam managing, sorry, founder and secretary of new social cooperative and member of the Friends of Socialist China, Britain Committee. Hello, Ali. It's nice to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Thank you. And it's really pleasure to be with you and to discuss these important topics together.

Indeed. I've been forward to it. Indeed, we are as well. Well, perhaps you can introduce yourself to listeners. Yes, I'm Ali al-Assam. I come from Iraq, but been in the UK for a long time. In terms of my activities, I've been actually a member of our active in the communist movement near access at very early age. I was distributing leaflet at the age of eight.

So I have a long history in that one. And in Britain, I was educated as an engineer, and we went into developing software for publishing. and the main motive early on from the late 70s is that we make publishing available to the masses in the Arab world because it was very expensive then, so we created the desktop revolution. And so really, so my history is both politics in the left-wing communist movement,

Marxist movement, and in terms of organization in the cooperative movement, because we think this is a good method of organizing people working together. Excellent. Well, we're really looking forward to your perspective as a translator of this text. But before we start talking about it, we were thinking perhaps it would be useful for listeners to know who the author was, Ibrahim Alawi. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about him.

Yes, Abraham Alawi was a leading communist cedar in the Communist Party of Iraq. And he played a big role in the organization of the Communist Party, especially in Baghdad, especially within the engineering class and within the student movement. He was educated in Britain as an architect, and then he went back and went into underground political work very quickly. and when the CIA inspired coup of 963 that brought the original bath then

probably you know about 7,000 communists were executed in a few days but he survived in the underground and he was instrumental rebuilding the party apartheists in Baghdad

especially with his co-comrades and the Communist Party managed to re-emerge again after that coup, but he realized very quickly what caused this catastrophe for a

communist movement that was dominant in Iraq and in the whole of Asia, it was probably the biggest political party in Asia at one time, a communist movement and he started arguing for a change of policy within the Communist Party and

then we could talk about the history as we go along But Abraham Ali not only was then he when Saddam Hussein issued the sentence for him officially he went to the mountains of Iraq and they continued the political

and military struggle from bases of the Communist Party in Iraq and the mountains from 1970 basically but also he wasn't only a revolutionary communist leader, he was a prolific writer and a philosopher. He would spend large amount of his time reading and researching. So he was really more of a philosopher than a communist, you know,

activist. And he wrote his first book, which was published by US publisher at the age of 25 in 1959. I found this book by accident, actually, where he was talking about the changes in Iraq in 1958 and the 1950s revolution. So that was his first book. But then he went on and produced many books. A lot of them are party studies. But

there are two main books which are very interesting. One of them in Mushtarach, which is the subject of our talk today, which we have edited and published. And I'll talk later about why we call it edited. And the other one which we hope to, and

I must say that Eskra books have been fantastic in supporting the publishing of this book. And David was a tremendous editor, helping with editing and making sure that the context is useful to the reader here in the West. So not only this book, El Mistar, Reading and Mouchter, but there is another one which is called The Barter, the Barter, Berlin, Baghdad. It's a very interesting book. It's a classic book about geopolitics.

the geopolitics of the 50s and 60s and how Khrushchev had all kind of dealings, wheelings with the U.S. and Britain regarding Germany, regarding Iraq, regarding other area. And Abraham, like many of his books, he doesn't write a book in a year.

He would spend three, four years, rewriting it, researching it, discussing it with many people. His method of writing was to go into big discussion circles while researching and so these are two big books of him

and but when the when the when the Kurdish when the Kurdish movement collapsed in 1975 as part of a deal that the US part

did between Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein the communist bases in the Kurdish area also collapsed with it And that was a big setback. Abraham went to China twice, at least twice, actually, in the, in 1975, 76, and met senior political bureau members of the Communist Party of China asking to support, you know, military uprising in Baghdad, in Iraq, sorry, not in Baghdad, in the countryside of Iraq. and the Chinese were reluctant and in hindsight

we know that they were right actually because the movement wasn't ready and the whole of the China approach was different, the whole political struggle globally was different so then this is when Brahim

went back disappointed and he thought that really there is a need for reflection there is a need for deep study there is a need to understand why the communist movement in Iraq collapse and why the communist movement in the whole world in the Soviet Union collapse,

why the social system in the Soviet Union collapse. And he spent many years, but he engaged all of us, you know, everywhere in all the Communist Party organizations abroad and in Iraq in his book, El Mshdarak. So I remember, you know, I mean, he started this book Musharak in 79,

writing 79. We had our first meetings with him, but he published in 1983 and then he produced a barter in 1990 but actually he went on from being an active political leader into more of a researcher into study and he continued like this until his death about in 2014 but but he became very ill from 2010 And so really he became unable to do anything from 2010. So this is where he stopped doing anything. But Brahim is extremely respected, very well remember.

I mean, because he was always very principled. He refused to, I mean, although Saddam have offered him underparty places in the cabinet and so on, he refused. But when the U.S. started doing the embargo on Iraq from 1990 and then the invasion of 2003, while many other parties said because Saddam is evil, we could cooperate with the U.S. He was steadfast and saying, look, this is a national struggle. There's nothing to do Saddam. So we have to stand with Iraq. So he was always very principled, always take the tough decisions, the difficult ones.

And actually, he educated a whole group of cadres. on the future. And probably this is, we could talk more about him, but this is really a summary of him as a man. Well, turning from him as a man to a little bit more of the historical context and the theoretical context in which he emerged and that which was being fostered in Iraq at that time, it's also interesting to understand and to look at the communist movement within Iraq and the way in which it was changing in his earlier life, as well as in the time when this book was originally written. So this book was written in 1983. And as you mentioned, there was some different movements that happened prior to that. So there was the communist movement under the rule

of the monarchy. You also had changes that were happening in the aftermath of the fall of the monarchy, as well as changes that were then enforced by the Bathist coup. And up until the book was written in 1983, there was various pressures that were exerted, and then various struggles within the Communist Party theoretically, where Alawi eventually came to the forefront with his works and his specific thought within the communist movement. So before we turn to the contents of this book specifically, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the historical context that led up to the creation of this book, as well as the historical context that this book was written with a particular focus

on the ideological formations within the Communist Party and how those formations then morphed and changed leading to the creation of this book by Ibrahim Alawi. Okay, that's very interesting and really a very good question and very necessary. So I will try to do a long answer to that one. That goes back even to pre-Islam in Iraq. I mean, as you know, Iraq. Oh, well, you don't have to take it that far for the context of 1983. We're going to talk about that early Islamic period since it's discussed in the book.

Maybe just talk a little bit about the context of a lot. Laowie in 1983 and the immediate backdrop in the Iraqi parties, communist parties, kind of formations and discussions. Okay. I'll do it. I'll say it very briefly. You know, I went to China twice this year. And before that, I read, I thought, let me know more. I mean, although I've been studying China all of us and following it for many years, I came across this book called Concise History of the Communist Party of China. which is quite a thick book, and it's a fantastic study. I mean, I advise otherwise to read it, really. I was very impressed by a truly scientific study of the Communist Party of China and the conditions. But what emerged from it, and the reason I mentioned it, because I saw a lot of resemblance between what's happened in Iraq and what happened in China.

But although they started exactly the same, although one is a very big country and one of a very small country, what's similar between them is that both of them they have interested. civilization and this civilization traded with each other. They cooperate with each other. So there is a merger of thoughts and philosophies between the two civilizations. But in China, when the Communist Party was formed in 1921, it was mostly intellectuals who hesitated when the common tank attacking them, and there was a sphere repression, Mastitong, of course, understood the problem. In 1927, he went to the countryside, started organizing the pest, and he started organizing the pest,

and started depending on poor people and going immediately into organizing party bases and its own strength. So this is, in Iraq, we have similar things. We had in the 20s, the first communist cells started in Basra and in Baghdad, but mostly in the south, actually. And while the intellectuals, there were some intellectuals. there was one communist leader, the founder of the Communist Party Iraqi Fahed, who was a worker from Basra. He was a worker in a factory for making ice factory. And he also saw the hesitation

of the early intellectuals in Baghdad, and he started organizing the Communist Party's in Nasriya, in Imara, and in Basra in the South, mostly peasants and workers. And he focused very much on the patriotic front, on the British occupation of Iraq, on the need to, you know, national salvation. And he, and one of his famous saying, Fahed, he said, I was a patriot, but when I became a communist, I became even more of a patriot. So he was focusing very much on uniting the people. But like in China and Iraq, we have many nationalities, many, many religions. So Marxism was a tool not only for organizing, but also it was a tool for uniting the people. You know, we have like 20, 25 nationalities in Iraq. You know, that goes back to

thousands of years. Fahed himself was originally a Christian, but we are Jews, we had Muslims, you have veteran Muslims, and we have various nationalities. So Fahed managed to create very quickly from the 1934 when the Communist Party was officially formed and in the 40s, a very big communist movement and right from the basis. It's different from the communist movements in the rest of the Arab world. Maybe Sudan is a slight exception, but different for the communist movement in the Arab world, by which is really its truth is in uniting the people on the national struggle.

Shrews are with the people and he understood Marxism very well. He was a really superb communist leader. But he was arrested in 1947 by the monarchy who was, you know, with investigation of Britain because Britain was the de facto ruler in Iraq then. And he was arrested, accused of, you know, there was no real thing, of just being an anarchist or something. And sent us to death. Then there was a big mass move but in 1948 and it was commuted to life imprisonment. Then he was executed with his political bureau in 1949.

But he laid the ruse for a big communist movement in Iraq. And despite, but it was a great loss, actually, we lost a very important leadership. And probably that was the origin of the setback in the Communist Party in the years that follow. So although the Communist Party expanded, it became a very big movement. And when the 1958 revolution that dropped, that knock down, the monarchy was done and the communist movement became in control of everything. So not only in the trade unions and the mass movement, I mean, I went in demonstration in Iraq in 1954, in 1959, we were on workers, they were one million, and the population of Iraq then was seven million. So you can see how effective, how powerful it is. but the Communist Party was in control

and everything and it could have taken power easily without a bullet being shot without any bloodshed. It was really in control. But then I mean I'm trying to do with a context for Brahim writing this book but then

the Khrushchev who was actually governing to various barter deals with American advocating what they called it peaceful coexistence. then, didn't want a communist victory in Iraq, didn't want a communist rule, because that would have meant direct confederation with the U.S., the U.S., the U.S. regarded Iraq as, you know, really so important for its whole presence in the Middle East and the fall of Iraq and their communist

rule would have been devastating. I mean, the revolution in Iraq, which toppled the monarchy, was on the 14th of July and 58, and after 10 days, American troops landed in Beirut, and British troops were moving in Jordan. And they were trying to, and the plan was to invade Iraq. Very interestingly then, is that China actually took a very strong position with Iraq. You know, the Chinese Communist Party General will say, look, America, we don't want war. And I quoted it in one of my things,

you know, one of the Chinese newspapers, he said, you know, we don't want war, but if America goes with its embargo, with its attack on Iraq, then we will go into war. So China was really very strongly on Iraq, and they were in the Chinese press then, there were talks about thousands of soldiers and officers, Chinese soldier officers, volunteering to fight in Iraq.

And that made China very popular in Iraq, by the way, from then. And with the Communist Party, because they could see the Soviet Union one hesitating, and that China was on the side of Iraq. Anyway, America did not invade because the movement was so strong, they knew they could not invade. There were millions in the street. You know, it was re-revolution. It wasn't just a coup.

and the communist movement was at the top of it. You know, the head of the Air Force was communist, who was then killed by the CIA Cup later. Most of the loss of the officers were communist. The rank and file soldiers were communist. You name it, all the mass movement, all the union organizations, the engineering, the engineers, the students, the women, everywhere they were communist. You know, the communist part was really strong.

and they could have taken power on the Secretary General Salam Adel, Jamal Haydari, his co-host in the Political Bureau, advocated taking power. Then instructions came from Moscow that, no, you cannot take power. They held a meeting with Russian institutions and they accused the general secretary

and Jamal Haydari of being left-wing, devious. revisionist, whatever, and they must, and they were taken to Moscow for re-education. And the Communist Party then said, officially, we are not going to take power. Okay, so you have a situation in a country where you have a revolutionary situation, where the masses actually have had confidence in the Communist Party. They were ready to sacrifice themselves for the Communist Party. they were going the streets and their millions. But then that party that they all support suddenly say,

no, we are not going to take power. Imagine, I mean, how can any political party, whether it is a left wing or right wing, says, well, I'm a political party, but I'm not going to take power. So why are you there then? Okay. So what happens right from then, even when the Communist Party was very strong,

and I remember it when I was in Baghdad, assassinations started. Because the reactionary forces felt emboldened. That's our moment. So in the Arab part, the right-wing nationalist were supported by America and Britain, started assassinating from them. The Kurdish part, Barizani, who was actually in exile on the Soviet Union during Stalin time, and he was

because the British fought the Kurdish movement in Iraq and he and his followers had to escape to the Soviet Union in the 40s and he came back and he was with the patriotic movement against imperialism and so on

even Berazani started hesitating because he sees that the communists don't want to take power the Soviet Union doesn't really want to do anything in Iraq while the Americans were very strongly coming and saying look, we'll support you, we'll give you what you want in Kurdish, just fight

Qasem, just go on the counter-reribution. So you had a situation where when the left says I don't want to take power, people who are hesitating will go to the other side and the counter-rejuditionaries will be more emboldened.

And when the 1963 coup, Now, Abraheem Ali then, who was already, you know, in opposition within the Communist Party, he says, look, we are going to be hammed from the poles, from the electric poles and the trades. The counter-revolution is moving. The Communist Party is doing nothing to defend itself, is doing nothing to counter what it is. We are going to be massacred. And they accuse him of pessimism.

and he was put on the side. He was already senior within the park, but he was shelved on the side. And when the coup happened, the coup actually happened by a small number of officers, by a very small number. But two or three years of paralysis meant that the Communist Party couldn't even counter the opposition,

counter the coup. So the coup was a tragedy, a tragedy. I mean, you can't compare it, for example, with the coup in Chile. In Chile, when you had Elendi and the forces, actually the people against Elendi, the military establishment was very big, was established, and was the whole military establishment that moved against Alendi.

So Alendi and his supporters had to fight big force. In Iraq, the tragedy is that most of the military was on the side of the communist, but they were not organized and they were all told, you don't do anything, you don't move, you don't, or you don't antagonize Kassim. So they were all paralyzed, and that's why the tragedy is.

The tragedy is that a small number of officers completely counter-organized, you know, supported by the CIA. Actually, King Hussein in his memoir, when he was talking about the 1963 coup, the CIA supported by the

Batas, he was saying that there was the CIA radio station from Kuwait was broadcasting hour by hour the dresses of the communist people to be to be to be to be to be to be visited and addressed and arrested CIA and so the CIA was really instrumental in organizing and the Baptist admitted it later the CIA was really instrumental in organizing and leading the coup and it left in all these massacres so So, Abraham saw the role of the Soviet Union.

First of all, he saw how a communist movement actually descended into a situation where it couldn't take power and failed the people, was not looked to the people, had no ties to the people, mostly the intellectuals, the right wingers were mostly intellectual. So he saw this one direction, and then he saw the Soviet Union playing a big role against the Iraq Revolution. So this is, he started

becoming very critical of the Soviet Union. And of course he understood there was division in the communist movement between China and the Soviet Union then. So it linked to it. China was,

but, but, but, Brahms wasn't in a sense wasn't what you call it pro-China Maoist. He was an Iraqi a communist who saw for himself the role of the Soviet Union in Iraq, and he saw what China is doing. And of course, he was in the same direction as China, because China was attacking Soviet revisionism at the time. And so that went started, and then he was instrumental

after the coup and reorganized the communist movement in Iraq. Then, in, in, in, in In August 1964, the leadership of the Communist Party, mostly abroad Central Committee, mostly above which were all pro-Moscow issued with the famous abductoran, which we said the Communist Party should dissolve itself and link to the nationalist socialist movements in the Arab countries. Khrushov was in alliance with Nasser at the time and he didn't want to fight, he didn't want any communist movements, especially in Iraq, especially because it is pro-China. And so, and that, that led to the split in the communist movement in 1967 in Iraq.

Abraham and Lally when the split happened Abraham and his comrades were hesitant to start with they didn't like the split they didn't want the split in the communist movement and they were not they didn't they didn't organize the split actually I mean they had a big big

group called the revolutionary cater within the Communist Party but they didn't want the split and one of his comrades was Khaled Ahmad Zaki Khalid Ahmad Ahmad Zaki was a great, another great communist leader who was secretary to the philosopher, Bertrand Dressel, in Britain. He was also a philosopher very, but he went back to Iraq,

and he was martyred in the marches of Iraq. And that was a huge blow to Abraham, because he was his comrade in arms, they were very close together on the personal and political thing, and for him to be killed in 1968, was a big blow to Abraham. And I mean, I see him even when I met him, you know, when we used to meet in the 80s and 90s, always you could see the expression on his face once that, when was the name of Khaled Ahmad Zaki get mentioned. So, so Khaled Ahmad Zaki was marked

in the 1960s, and the Communist Party split. Then they had to join one wing, the wing against the revisionist, reluctantly. Then Braheem became leader of the Central Command. So there was the Communist Party's central leadership and the Communist Party's Central Command. Central leadership went into front of Saddam Hussein, and the central command was oppressed by Saddam Hussein. About 300 were killed by Saddam and tortured.

And his palace, the famous palace called the Qasred Nahay and Arabic, which means the palace of the end. That means whoever goes there doesn't come out. It's a palace for torture. And Abraham had a dissentist, but he managed to go to the mountains. So the back drop to Abraham thing is he saw the setbacks in the communist movement in Iraq, and he saw the reason for it mainly not only the lack of understanding Marxism and the lack of link to the people, the lack of understanding Islam.

because our society is basically an Islamic society and if you don't understand the culture of the people and the Islamic heritage is strength and its weaknesses you can never be a truly a communist movement so he saw a communist leadership in Iraq who some of them are good, some of them, but all of them lack a deep knowledge of historical materialism and he saw it as one reason.

So weakness in Marxist thought was one big thing he recognized. The other one, he recognized that the Soviet Union actually has degenerated into a bureaucratic state, nothing to do with socialism, and then, of course, we knew what the Soviet Union collapsed in the end and so on. So these were the drivers. His question is, why did we fail in Iraq? And the second question is, why did the socialist movement have this huge setback? He didn't see China emerging then. So to him and very few of us probably saw China emerging and what was happening in China exactly.

So he wrote his book in a period of setbacks. Big setbacks in the Arab world, big setbacks in the communist movement. in Iraq, Bixit Bank, the communist movement globally. And he then reached the central conclusion that the main evil for all this in terms of the communist movement going forward is the state. And the whole book is focused on the question of the state. The question of the state in Islamic societies, the question of the state in the socialist systems, and how to counter this one. So his main challenge is that that the theme that of the withering way of the state is false.

And you cannot, you have to consciously do that. But anyway, so the context is for him is saying, we have to understand why we failed, and we have to create a new communist culture for democratic socialism and in Iraq linked to our Islamic heritage. Not as a religion, and he made it very clear in the book. He's not talking about the Islam as religion. He's really talking about the Islam as political system and culture.

That was a wonderful summary of the context in which the book came about and the context in which Alawi was coming up through the ranks of the Communist Party. Before Adnan goes in with the next questions, I would just like to remind the listeners that we have an episode that was very apropos of some of the things that you mentioned. Within your answer, you mentioned several times about the various coups that were taking place in the 60s, and you talked about CIA involvement in American foreign policy involvement with Iraqi politics. We have an episode with our friend Brandon Wolf Honeycutt on his terrific book, The Paranoid Style of American Diplomacy, which focuses on what was going on inside Iraq

and with a particular focus on the communist movement in Iraq from the 50s through the 70s, as well as a particular focus on American foreign policy and how that, that related to that context of what was happening in Iraq from that period from the 1950s through the 1970s. So listeners, if you haven't listened to that episode already, I recommend you go back and listen to that one after you listen to this one because that period of history is going to be more explored within that episode that we had with Brandon. And it's also worth mentioning that Brandon writes one of the two forwards for this book that we're talking about today. So another reason to read the book because I know that our listeners are all fans of Brandon's work and he's

been on the show several times and is going to be back on again relatively soon. So be sure to listen to that episode and make sure to read us forward on this book. But not, I'll turn it over to you now for the next questions. Yeah, great. I wanted to pick up on some things that you started to get into here in your broad kind of overview of the various contexts and issues and controversies that may have stimulated the particular concerns of Al-Awi when he produced this book. But it occurred to me also that, you know, one thing, when it comes to dealing with the interesting place of Islam and Islamic history in his work, I mean, the first section of this book really does a kind of investigation of early Islam, and we'll talk specifically about it. that, but in terms of context, surely there must have been, you didn't mention this, but surely there must have been some sense of the importance of recognizing not only that there had been failures of socialist movements and projects in the Arab world, but also as a consequence of that, the imposition of neoliberal policies in Fittah in Egypt, you know, starting in the 70s and so on. that seemed to also correspond with the emergence of social movements that in the Arab and Islamic world that looked to Islamic revival parties and the emergence of something the so-called political Islam, you know, Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations and groupings that we might say in some ways borrowed from leftist organization or organizing strategies.

also had a kind of social mission in terms of trying to, you know, perform social services in the era of the contracting of the state, you know, somebody had to pick it up and a lot of these charitable works had inroads into society as a result of that. That happened a lot in the 1970s and early 80s. And of course, there was the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the start of the Iranian-Iraq war, that surely the, you know, those must have also been in the political background of recognizing that, you know, some kind of simple adoption of Occidental Marxist models and just trying to, you know, do them in the kind of Middle East and Islamic world hadn't proven necessarily to always be successful.

although it is noteworthy, as you pointed out, that Iraq had a huge communist party. So there was an opportunity there. But if those opportunities were missed, the alternatives that could be framed in more conservative reactionary kind of sources was available also that something had to be done in a way to revive leftist thought and leftist thinking in response to the emergence of political Islamic movements and the revolutionary kind of character getting rid of the Shah in Iran. And I wonder if that stimulated some sense that, okay, we're not talking about a fundamentalist, you know, union with Marxism, but that there's something that has to be developed that's, you know, some kind of socialism with Islamic characteristics, you know, that seems that that would have been a dialectical response in a way to changing political circumstances in the political culture of the Middle East during that time. it's not really discussed in the book, or at least in the excerpts that we have that you've translated, but I'm wondering if you think that was something that in leftist and Marxist thought was a, you know, was developing as like, well, you know, there's an initiative being taken by these penitigious organizations, then there needs to be some kind of response during this

period where there's a lot of persecution of, you know, the communist and socialist movements and reformulating something to build a mass base. Was that something in the kind of atmosphere of leftist-Marxist thought in the Arab world during this period? I could talk about Iraq in particular. Okay, so in Iraq, of course, in terms of, in terms of, in terms of the book itself, when he refers to Islam, he refers to two things. One of them that early Islam, which copied a lot of commons ideas of social and sharing ideas from the pre-Islam period, actually was quite revolutionary in the way that it says

and Marx and angels in the Communist Manifesto referred to it, that Islam was the first system in Asia that said that the land and its treasures belong to the people, to the Allah. And that land cannot be given to people can be leased. Very similar to what China was being the system in China. But that was quite revolutionary. And Nathamid Jazea, they call it Jazeera, the tax system that imposed on Iraq and Syria and in the areas that was occupied by Islam. They employed Gisian.

They employed the system by which taxes are collected into Beital Mal, the house of the money for the people, and it was the Caliphate, the one who was chosen by the people. His role was to manage that

money for the people. What happened, of course, that so there is a lot of, there is our comments in Islam, there's a lot of socialists ideas in early Islam which filtered to the people you know for the centuries but also

in the same time you had the degeneration of Islam cruising to hereditary system and the state especially during speak power you know the golden times and of the Abbasites in Baghdad and so on which which had a huge amount of wealth from the big Islamic empire coming in

became a disparate postic state. So you had a state which was very centralized in the Caliph and his sons and so on with a huge amount of money that they were using it

for their own benefit. So you had a disposic state and you had a lot of Islam revolutionary movements from Karamata, from the slaves' revolts in Iraq, you know, the Karamai

We call them in Arabic, Tarameter Karamaius, we went to Bahrain, establish the social system, through Al-Mahari, through Juan Sufad. The book referred to it. The philosophical movement was in Islam, were actually all advocating a revolution and social change against a centralized despotic state. And this is a theme of Abraham book all the time. So not only you have a despotic state and bureaucratic state in the Soviet Union then, but you had it in Islam before. But so he says in Islam you have two things. You have a very powerful centralized state and revolutionary movements which affected our culture down the line, especially in the Shia movement, especially in the Shia sect of Islam, and you had also centralized state. So that's one thing. But in Iraq itself, when the communist movement became very popular, one reason.

The reason it became popular is because you don't have one sect of Islam like you have in Saudi Arabia or in Egypt. You have Shia and Sunnis. Well, even in Saudi Arabia, they don't have one sect. It's just they dominate and oppress all the other group. They have a very large Shia population. Yeah, they have a very large Shia population. I start to be corrected in here, yeah. But in Iraq is much more diverse.

know, you have various Islamic ones, and you have Christians and Jews and Sabia and Yazidi, and, you know, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so racism actually was the unifying factor. That's one reason why the communist movement became popular. But then, with the failure of the communist movement, with the, with the, with the, with the fact that you can't have an Arabic nationalist movement in Iraq, because you have different nationalities, the nationalism was right-wing, Russia, a most, and failed, there was a small sector that supported Abdel Nasser, Nassar in Egypt

and became anti-British and so on. But actually, that was a small thing. The main movements in Iraq were either communism or Islam. And in Islam, you had two directions that emerged from the 60s. There was Sunni Islam direction that actually was supported by the U.S. US, the US and Britain started working on Islam right from the late 50s, by the way, in

Pakistan everywhere. I mean, you know, Tariq Ali mentioned it in his book on Pakistan, you know, really in great detail, right from the 40s, actually, in Pakistan. So British were quite pioneers in that. So you had the fundamentalist Islamic movements, which are Sunni mostly, and that started from 60s and it was weak, and it was anti-communist, very anti-communist. It was very much CIA directed, and then it flourished in the 70s, with Saudi Arabia money and so on. That was one direction. The other one was the Shia movement. The communist

leaders in Iraq, after Fahed, did not understand Islam. They never studied our history, and in a state of adopting it with the Marxist ideas and for they actually fought religion. Even our families, I remember when I was young, you know, you know, my brothers and sisters were attacking a slab like there is not tomorrow. You know, so it was really the wrong direction. It was completely the wrong policy. And then when the communist movement felt,

The vacuum had to be filled, and the vacuum was filled by the Shia movement. It was mostly in Iraq, the Shia, I mean, most of the population of Iraq are Shias in the Arab region, in the Arab section. And it was filled by the Shia, and the Islamic movement with the Shiaa was also anti-communist because they saw communism as a danger to them. And one of the main field officers probably heard of him, Mohamed Baqar Sadr. You know, he wrote his two. A very important alim, yes. Very important, Alam.

And he affected Khomeini, he affected Iran, he affected Lebanon, you know, everywhere. And he got his two famous books of Tosadana, our economy, and Falsafetta, our philosophy. And, you know, it was used as being anti-communist. But actually, when you study Tassadana in details, it's actually it, again, degrees the Marxism in about 95% of what it says. So, the Saddana is quite a powerful tool. And, you know,

and now in our dialogues and so on, now with Islamists in Iraq, for example, we say, look, before you do anything, why don't you study uptisadana? You know, why are you going to, you know, because the Shia are ruling classes in Iraq now supported by the U.S. are going for liberal, a new liberal capitalism.

But they claim to support the Shia movement. Yet the main philosopher of the Shia movement who was killed by Saddam, Mahmah al-Sadr in his book, actually he put the foundation for quite strong socialist principles. And certainly, the Marxist movement in Iraq and the communist movement of the future has to go into strong alliance with such Islamic movements. I mean, the end result is to create a socialist system. It doesn't matter what you call it.

You want to end exploitation of the human being by a human being and create a socialist democratic system. That's the aim. So how you do it, it doesn't matter. What you call it, it doesn't matter. That's the aim. So really, you know, we have to be very open. And Marxism is a tool.

It's not a religion. So really as Marxism, we have to study our history and our culture very strongly and use it to create a society that has no exploitation of people by people. Absolutely. I mean, and that's one of the things that I thought was so stunning and interesting about this work is that it was very conscious about trying to build some of these conceptions about egalitarianism, about the commons, about what's shared. through language and through, you know, the cultural history that people have, but introducing them in some ways to topics and themes that are not a part of the usual official characterization of early Islamic history or of these early dissident movements that rose up. They're just seen as heretical zindiet, you know, their perversions of Islam,

but he actually used them to try and establish a base of continuities to say that we have some resources within our own tradition. This is not just some portation. We have this aspiration for a shared, equal, just world. And actually, if we're going to build it, we have to connect with our own history. And so I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of those early sections. both because it's kind of an interesting way of trying to fuse some sense of tribal egalitarianism that you see in, you know, societies before they're industrialized and so on, that there is this cooperative and collective dimension, but to also kind of balance the kind of sense that early Islam didn't change absolutely everything. about the so-called period of Jahiliah. It took some things and it was working with that culture, but that it did something different than what the tribal groups do, which is that it forged a kind of

identity across tribal groupings, which is what was powerful about it in uniting people from many different tribes. And you did point out also the quotation and the citation here that even if you think about the theology or at least the values of Islamic ethics, that there are a lot of resources there about how natural resources don't belong to anybody. You know, what's under the ground, you may have rights to use the land, but what's under the ground belongs to everyone. So the mineral rights, all these things. And of course, you know, he builds on some of these notions and principles, that there is a kind of primitive communism, as it were, a primitive, you know, kind of ethical one that maybe not be expressed in scientific language about

modes of production and, you know, language of exploitation, but there is a deep ethical kind of commitment already in Islam to recognize that egalitarianism is a core sort of value. So I'm wondering if like, you know, what? What's the reception, you know, about using some of this early religious sources like, you know, Quranic verses and Hadith, you know, quotations and some of these, you know, early Islamic philosophical and religious movements that were dissidents? How was the reception in the Iraqi Communist Party when they're discussing these ideas? Did they see this as valuable or did they kind of, you know, think that this is kind of history that is outmoded and just isn't relevant? That's often the perspective of, you know, what matters is modern kind of history of materialist relations.

How did these discussions go? Were people invested and interested in this kind of engagement with this early, early past? from the 80th and 9th centuries? How did they use them? How did they engage these ideas? Yeah. Don't forget that the communist movement in Iraq is split since 1967. Right.

There's the official commerce party which went into a coalition with Saddam first. Then when the Americans came to, went into coalition with the Americans. So they have a terrible history because, you know, when Bremer formed his first cabinet in the U.S. occupation, the leader of the Communist Party became part of the American cabinet. So there was one, and they are a dying force. We don't regard them as important. And they have very limited residence in Iraq. And then there is the Communist Party Central Command, which is actually also. diminished force. You know,

both communist movement in Iraq are diminished force. We had a setback. The main direction in Iraq is actually the Muslim forces. You know, and where there's the Shia

and the other one is the Sunni. The Sunni went ISIS's way, a lot of it, not, I mean, not as Sunni, but ISIS be the leader of the Sunni movement and then resolve. But the

The majority of the Sunni people are against it. So it had nothing to it with the Sunni faiths in Iraq. But you have the Shia, which is dominant. The communist movement is not as big. It's really quite a diminished force, and comparing with what we were in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. So what remains between us of the communist people in Iraq and abroad so that I give you reality?

What remained between us is all, everybody is actually understanding that the gravity of the situation and the need to understand history, they need to understand our culture. So when Abraham started talking about it, first of all, he didn't just publish a book. You know, the book was published in 1983. The discussion started from 1979 in various places about anything. elements of the book and about Islam. So there was lots of discussions. So when it emerged, there were tens and tens of people who already knew about elements of the book. So it didn't come as a shock. And there's no problem.

Well, okay, maybe my guess maybe the better question is to ask, was it useful in outreach in communicating and radical ideas and materialist analysis? to the, say, wider Shia community and intellectuals. Did this kind of create a bridge and an interesting, you know, dialogue with those sorts of figures to broaden, you might say, the base of kind of critique, economic and social critique? Yes, to some extent, some extent. I mean, we are in continuous dialogue, you know, with the patriotic elements of the Shia movement. in particular about all these aspects of social change, the dangers of neoliberalism,

the need to create a different type of social organization. We are a complete dialogue. And the dialogue is very good, very positive. There is a big reception on it. But it is different. the Shia movement and Islamic movement in Iraq is slightly different than in Iran for example or in other countries

in Iran is much more radical much more thorough in Iraq we have a particular situation so that we have to understand reality we have a particular situation where when the Americans came in Iraq

a lot of the Shia leaders came with American forces. And they claim to support the Shia institution. So on the one hand, they are anti-American. On the other hand, they work within the American umbrella. It's quite a funny situation, by the way. In Iraq is a very particular situation. But currently, currently there is in Iraq, there is a very strong, millions of mass movement who are actually very much anti-American domination, looking for a different system, looking for a difference of organization, and we are working with them. And we are working with them from a, you know, from a position of not dogma, of scientifically working. This is, there is a marcus heritage

of a humanity. There is our own Iraqi-Marcus heritage. There is the Islamic heritage for societies. The end is we want to create a society where there is no exploitation in it. the social society, whatever you call it, and the common front is on this basis. So, I'm very optimistic, and realistically optimistic, really, is that the Islamic movement in Iraq, and you can see it when you talk to Islamists all the time,

that the Islamic movement of Iraq is extremely susceptible to social thoughts, and look forward to it. And very much anti-the-new-lawful. liberalism in the world, but on the communist movement, you know, from all new, you know, young generations of communists, they have no, you know, no problem with actually understanding of Islamic heritage. So I think in terms of the Islamic Foundation is there provided, we can create this solid Marxist understanding of our history and thus the challenge we face. and publishing this book

in English, Mouhterak, is part of it, part of linking to the word socialist movement, word-marcus movement. That was the attempt of it. And we called reading an Mishhtarak because the original Mishhtarak book,

I mean, we haven't come up to the program, by the way. We'll have to come to WERC to the end of the program for Mishderick, but the original Mishhtrik book had two sections, had the core three chapters which are in this, not change, and that had lots of things about politics of the time which are not relevant at all now

so that's why we call the treating and in Wistarak that we are you know we removed the necessary parts and we kept the core and we are publishing in Arabic now as well in a big way

so that we want to spread this knowledge in the Iraq society much more although it was published in a year three, we want to publish it on a much bigger scale. And we are starting new programs, which I could tell you later related to it. But certainly, I think, answering your question in terms of the readiness of the Islamist movement in Iraq

and the readiness of Marxists to understand history is there. And there is no real movement against it. taking up one of the conceptual questions, which comes up early in the book when we're talking about the history, but also comes into play when we talk about the title, which I guess we should talk about itself, is this conceptualization of the commons that Allahi undertakes within this book and the importance of the understanding of the commons. So we should also mention what al-Mushterak means in English, and you know, you have a note at the beginning of the book about the translation of the title, which might be interesting to mention

for the listeners, most of whom are not Arabic speakers. But in addition to talking about how you decided to translate al-Mushtarek, could you also talk about Al-Awi's conceptualization of the commons and how that does take into play these various influences on that conceptualization of the commons and the importance of that particular conceptualization for of the commons within this text and in terms of building a political program.

Yeah, okay. I'll try to understand as much as I can. I'm not a specialist on this one. I'm on Islamic history, I'm not telling you. This is a warning. And I hope my colleague in the book, Majid Alawi, was with us because he's the specialist on this one.

But so really, I my knowledge is limited on that, on that front. But, but, but, but the, uh, as muchterak in Arabic, is really means, it is, it means the common, that's the nearest thing to it, is, is people sharing the, the, the fruits of, of nature. And, and, and, and, and in terms of, so it is the commons and in terms of, so it is the commons and in terms of political organization, probably the nearest to it is the communes. So Wichdrak is not only the commons but is a system of organization

and that comes up in chapter 3 in the last chapter when in the program where really he sees it as similar to the original Soviets in the early communist Soviet Union he sees it as similar to the communes as a political system but it is the general translation of Mwhterak is the commons if this is if I'm clear what I meant,

if this is enough sufficient answer. Yeah, in terms of the translation, but I also think that the way that it is conceptualized within the book is quite important for understanding the program. So if you can talk a little bit about

how Alawi conceptualized the commons within this text, that would be very useful, I think. Okay, so he thinks of much or he calls the Mischarakat as a kind of political democratic social

system that intends right from the beginning to weaken the state because his theme that even in a socialist system where you have a red state coming up it is nevertheless a state and if the state is not

challenge all the time is not we can write from day one, then you could have a very strong authoritarian state. And this is the central theme of his book. So he goes, so in Meshacharakat, he sees them as the way of the working people governing themselves, both economically and politically, in the various regions, in the villages and towns and cities, democratically ruling their own affair as a way of reducing the power of the red state.

So he sees it as a political instrument. So, for example, one of the things that he advocates is that if you take, you know, if you take a musterac in a little town, first of all, the musterac meets all the time, and it is a way by which the people decide how their town is round. Also, he advocates two things. One was in the book and one was the discussion with us. In the book, he says that, for example, elected officials, you don't have, you know, full-time officials that rules the bureaucracy in that little town.

People work three days a week and only, and the other day, days actually they are elected to run the housing department and the and the and other departments in the council by which there are no people who are full time in control of other people destiny and you could have corruption you could have bureaucracy so his team is always how to awaken democracy in bureaucracy okay but then a question comes and so there's the distribution of power and distribution of economic power and these mustericat elect representative

or elect representative of the regionals all the way to the central musteric that rules the country so then he says another another important instrument of authoritarian state is the army so you could have some wonderful thing but if the army becomes a unit of itself

and the army has a gun then the army could rule in the future. So he advocated as part of his program that the army is very, very small, but everybody is actually armed. So the army, like the pilot and the one who drive the tankard, like engineers, like professionals. But they only come when they are needed.

But everybody is armed, and he says we could learn from the experience of the Swiss system and this. So he's quite open and experimental. But then he raised the point to say, look, if we are everything distributed, how can we fight an invasion?

How can we fight conspiracies by imperialism and so on? How can we keep the country alone? And then he talked about the power of the Communist Party. And thus, there is an analogy in here with what's happening in China. In China, I mean, One thing I discovered in China is that they are extremely scientific and experimental.

They will try things all the time, and then some things don't wear, some of the system work. But actually, while in China they had the distribution of economic power, they have a Communist Party, which is very democratic, which has 100 million members, and actually the Communist Party ensure the rule that you have a socialist system, although you have capitalism, market economy, have everything. He was advocating the same, but it was not in the book, but it was in a discussion with us,

where he said, why should we nationalize everything? Why don't we allow market forces to work as well? But the main economic systems and the political power has to be socialist, but we have to prove to the people that social system is better than private system. And we can't just say it is better

and try to run everything. So he was quite experimentalist in this. But his main theme is you have to weaken the state, but you have to keep the rule of the proletariat and the peasant very strong through their party, which has to be democratic. And of course, so that, so in Wistak, he sees it as a political,

socio-economic instrument to ensure democracy on the local level and on the state level. And that's how we see Mushtarik. So in a similar to the early Soviets

but people ruling themselves. That's an essential part of it. But ruling themselves with a social system. So the socialist doctor has to be dominant, of course. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up because you've alluded a couple of times to the fact that a major strand of his thinking and what he was responding to as well is

the despotic features of the state as a real danger and then trying to find some other way to ground a more democratic sort of approach to avoid some of the pitfalls of previous socialist experiments in history. And I think the second section is really an analysis of Western Marxism and modern history, you know, and a critique, you might say, or what can we learn as an Iraqi intellectual invested in transformation of his society? He has a critical view. This is a tradition. We have our own history. We have, you know, this history of socialist experiments that took place in Europe.

starting in the 19th and then through the 20th centuries. And we have some experience with the state. And so this was a key point of theorization is what's the place of the state in socialism and particularly in the context of, you know, the Middle East Islamic world. And it does seem that he is very suspicious of these authoritarian despotic tendencies, even if there is, you know, if there's a critique of anarchism. He's not an anarchist, right? is it's clear that there's problems with the anarchist point of view.

But then so where is the place of the critique of the state? What do we learn about the problems that have happened before in it? And it seems that maybe the key thing he seems to focus on here is that the possibility for, you know, using the state is that this, I thought this was a very interesting and important insight, is that even though there was a confidence that the state, is that even though there was a confidence that the state, state may wither away when the conditions of class society are no longer in existence to it to be a technology for enforcing class interest, essentially class war against, you know, workers or whoever controls the state. And that the democracy, you know, the dictatorship of the proletariat, you know, is a necessary stage, but that there are interests that are created in the bureaucracy, in the management of state apparatus.

that themselves become interests. It's almost as if there's a new class that emerges as a governing class that uses the state to perpetuate its interests even after the social and economic conditions of class society have disappeared and that that has to be combated. It seemed that his solution in identifying that as a problem that had occurred, is a very interesting critique, is that you have to have democratic sorts of training and forces present in the rest of society that are strong enough to overturn the inertia, you might say, of new interests formed by, you know, proletariat to takeover of the state. And so I thought that was a very interesting point that he made. You know, the key to his to his analysis was that you have to have those democratic training

experiences embedded in society. Otherwise, you don't have forces that are organized. There may be this egalitarian ethics. There may be the ideology of ending class struggle, but if you don't have practically speaking training in democratic governance and self-governance, then you're going to be overwhelmed by the power that the state has. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more about that insight and how he tried to develop that insight with the solution of the muchtadak of organized communes and democratic forces and whether and how that can be done before the revolutionary moment. Is that the importance of having these cooperatives now is not because they're going to be a utopian alternative to, you know, kind of class society, but that they are

training grounds for when you actually have revolutionary opportunity for greater social change, you have cadres of people who understand local governance. If they don't have that in their experience, then they're going to be susceptible to, you know, the authoritarian tendencies of the state form. Right. I mean, now you explained it very well. And there isn't much to add. Sorry, I got excited thinking about how robust his ideas are here. But actually, I'm right. He argues that the theme of the withering away of the state by itself and the social system is false. That unless you pragmatically and consciously build the democratic institution and social system,

then for under the dictatorship of authoritarian, then you could have the state taking over. So in a sense, you have the party and the people and the party represent the political system, the political direction, the party and the people on one hand, and you have the state, and you could have a system

like you could have what happened in the subpoetunia where actually the state takes cover. and the party and the people became the opposite, become an instrument of the state, and the people become subjected to the mercy of the state, and not vice versa. And he says, this has to be done consciously through these musterakat, through these musterracks,

as a way of political, democratic organization for a socialist system, and gradually reduce the power of the state by making all instrument of the state's democratic. And that's why he advocated. And of course, what he's advocating is the elements of a system that has to be studied by the socialist movement. Because I think there's need to be,

and I'm sure there's a lot of people start writing on the same subject, and probably we have to put it all together. But of course, he just started something that's important, but something else he mentions. He started advocating the EU building cooperative ecosystems, not as cooperative, they're all right, but as cooperative for self-help organization for the people. Why are they are struggling for emancipation?

Because what he argued is that when the people in Iraq or in any country, or even in capital state, are fighting. And we are doing experiments here in the UK ourselves, you know, with our cooperatives, is that, you know, when you face the power of the powerful state economically, and when you face the power of their media system and their narrative of what is right, you have to counter it. And you can only counter it by building something at a scale from the base down. and what you can build it from the scale based down is an ecosystem of cooperatives where people help themselves in creating businesses which are self-help economically and socially building from the base up a model for people owning their destiny

and creating a socialist economy. And this is very interesting. So you have in the West a very big cooperative movement but actually it's not politically inclined but there are tendency now to make it a polity inclined. If it's not politically inclined it's actually the capitalism doesn't mind it because it solves some social problem

that capitalism doesn't solve and capitalism is busy making money so you say well we are busy making money unless these co-ops solve a problem of two for us and make our system look better but they are not threatening us but when but if the co-ops started building an ecosystem for self-governance in the regions

with creating their own power, then it becomes a threat. And, you know, when you have the state and a repressive state, especially in the third, we're attacking the people. If the people are strong economically, they could resist better. And one method of organizations, though, corporate, and that's what he advocated. So that's a very interesting model in here. One of the things that, oh, sorry, I just wanted to add in.

One of the things that I think that's really interesting that you mentioned is about the non-political nature of the cooperative movement in the West historically. Listeners will be familiar with the fact that I live in Russia now, but I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there was, and there still are a few co-ops left, but there was a big movement of cooperatives. All of the towns had their own little cooperative. stores and whatnot.

And you mentioned that it was not politically inclined. That was something that in my region in particular, and I'm guessing also is also common in some places that were very immigrant heavy into the United States. My region was very heavily Finnish immigrants and a lot of socialist and even some communist Finnish immigrants came to my region. We had newspapers in my region, which has very few people, but we had newspapers affiliated with the Socialist Party and newspapers affiliated with the Communist Party

that were written in the Finnish language. In the Finnish language? In the Finnish language. We had Finnish language newspapers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, newspapers that were explicitly affiliated with the Socialist Party and the Communist Party of the United States, but they were written in the Finnish language.

Listeners, you know, if you want, I can get you those resources, but, you know, that's a project that's beyond the scope of this episode. But what I wanted to say is that If you look at those early days of the cooperative movement, we're talking about the early 1900s. There was a political component associated with it because those Finnish immigrants largely were socialists and communists in the region. And so when they were founding their cooperatives, the people that were founding the cooperatives was the Finnish immigrants within the region, which they comprised about 30% of the population of the region.

And so there was that political component in terms of the justification for creating the cooperatives. But as time went by and particularly as the unions within the region were destroyed, and again, this goes back to labor history. I know I've talked about the Italian Hall disaster on the show before when the mines, you know, not only crushed the unions, but also literally killed the workers by, you know, barricades. the doors and yelling fire and causing stampedes and having people get trampled and then disbanding the unions and blaming it on on bad practices of the unions and all of these sorts of things. As the unions fell out of favor and the socialist and communist inflection within those communities started to die out, the cooperatives remained, but the political character ended. And for decades, the political character of the cooperatives was not existent, essentially.

Up until the point where most of the cooperatives then fell apart because there was no longer that political justification for their existence. And within my region, it also wasn't particularly economically viable. And so without that political justification to really drive on the perpetuation of the cooperatives, we now only have a few of them left in the entire region. But as you mentioned, within the United States more broadly, now, there is this more political aspect to the upcoming cooperative movement that had been missing for the last several decades. So it was something interesting that you mentioned that

reminded me of my upbringing. And so I just figured I would throw it out there. Yeah, very useful. Very, very useful. And probably that's the cop movement could start in this direction or could continue. But it's a big struggle for us. I mean, talking to the corporate movement, it's quite a big struggle. Yeah, so I wanted to turn to the final section of the book as we get closer to the end of this conversation. The final section of the book is Omustraq as an essential component of democratic socialism. And you had mentioned previously that this is essentially the program that was set forth. Some of the components of this program, the five main components of this program you've talked about a little bit during this conversation.

But I would like to open the floor to you to discuss the program that was set forth within this book in an open-ended way. so that you feel free to address the program in any way that you see FET. Yes, actually, actually, it is, I mean, it is not, let's call it the beginning of the program. Yes, the, let's, yeah, the theoretical underpinnings of a program rather than a program itself. Yes, so the, that is that the basis of it is that the working people in every town and region of Iraq, govern themselves through these commons, through these communes. You call them communes of Shurka. And they run their political and economic direction.

And that the political force, although you have a big distribution of political and economic power, he argues in a country like in Iraq, the political force remains centralized through the Communist Party, but he argues that the Communist Party itself has to be very democratic and he talks about the relationship between the Communist Party and the people in every region and how there must be various controls

regarding the democratic nature of the party. So he talks about centralized power by the Communist Party but distribution of economic political power by the people. And he only is only the beginning. So he puts them principles, but the details, really, is subject to a lot of studies. So he didn't claim that there is a complete program in there. Let's call he's putting the elements of putting the essentials of a program for democratic socialism. And so part of it, there is the regional power.

There is part of it the question of the army, which he gives us. it a big part. The army must not be a professional centralized army. It has to be people's army where the professionals are very, very small number, like pilots and so on. So the army is very important. The power of the state its reduction and the and the role of the of the communes of the Wichitaqat. These are these are the essential elements of the beginning of a program

with a view that and the fact that our in the regions is not as much as possible as not controlled by full-time officials but by elected officials who spend part of their time being teachers or nurses

or engineers or cleaners in the factory floor but they go and do other state duties when they are not working and there are lots of books coming up globally about it and one has to study it and also we have to study what's happening in China

because in China they are doing lots of experiments lots of things which are very interesting and worth learning from but I wouldn't call it a program yeah it's the basis for for thinking through a new program and I just wanted to by way of conclusion, which I think you've touched upon, but maybe the importance

and the urgency of doing this translation now, you know, what did you hope to accomplish with it? And also perhaps you can tell us how people can, you know, engage with, you know, thinking through with this program. Obviously not for Iraq. That's for Iraqis to do. But some of the ideas in this may be useful for comrades in many locations in terms of this theory of the commons and how to, you know, how to build it. So, you know, what's the value of this translation in its urgency now? Yes. I mean, we thought is, you know, the main thing is that in the, in the discussions, I mean, we are seeing as I think we agree, there is a complete failure of financial capital

and neoliberal capitalism and causing a major crisis in the world or that caused a danger of war and so on. But there is a complete failure and what you could see that there are millions of people now who are young people

who come up on demonstrations in the States, in Britain, in France, everywhere in the West. Like in Britain we have a demonstration every two weeks on Palestine, but really is not about Palestine. Quarter of a million people come at least in every demonstration, apart of the demonstrations all over Britain.

So there are millions, actually, and the young people, they are talking about Palestine and Gaza, but actually they are protesting the decadence of financial capital and the reason for a new world when there is justice and end of exploitation and the financial greed. So these big movements are emerging, but it needs the it needs the,

the theoretical and they're pinning for it in terms of a global let's call it a global socialist movement against the decaying power of the financial capital and we think we thought publishing this book is part of this contribution

we think that has fresh ideas about how do you create democratic socialism how do you create a model because people can protest but for them to turn their protest into a political movement for change, they need models for what to create. And it is contributing in a small way to this big movement globally for how to create democratic socialism, how to create an alternative system. And that's it. That's really the reason

for publishing this book now. Because we thought that Brahim had some good ideas and something that and of course we'd like the people to understand the history of the communist movement in Iraq because of a big movement and could come back again whatever name it will have. Right, it might inspire more movement, yes.

But I think, you know, as you pointed out, you reference the upsurge in activism you know, on behalf of Palestine, pro Palestine solidarity movements and demonstrations taking

place in the West. But of course, there's something larger at stake. And in fact, actually, part of the enduring relevance, you might say, of this text that you translated is that it does conclude with thinking a little bit about the importance of, you know, resistance to colonialism in the region. The wider implications of the struggle for freeing Palestine is that it it is part of freeing the whole region. And now I think increasingly people across the world and the West are seeing that it means opposing the system that's oppressing us globally. And so that's very important. And I'm glad that it concluded on that level.

And, you know, I hope that this book will make a big contribution in the dialogues and discussions to direct us towards things we can do, both for, you know, Palestine, for liberation in our own area. but, you know, broadly in defeating capitalism. So I thank you so much for the work that you've done in bringing this to a wider audience of people who I think will be interested to engage in its, you know, ideas. And of course, it's worth mentioning that the book is available from Iskra books and like all books at Iskra, the PDF is available for free for those of you who are unable to purchase a physical copy

or you can get physical copies, but I should just, you know, disclaimer, I'm on the editorial board of Isker Books. It's in our mission that we provide materials for free in order to spread this information as widely as possible and to make it as useful as possible for as many people as possible for our movements and for our future. So again, listeners, our guest was Dr. Ali al-Assam, who is founder and secretary of new social cooperative

and member of the Friends of Socialist China, Britain Committee, one of the translators of the terrific new book that we have been discussing, readings in al-Mushterak, a system for democratic socialism. Ali, thank you for coming on the show. It was a great pleasure to speak with you today. Is there anything that you would like to direct the listeners to in order to find you and engage with you and your work?

Well, I would like to thank you very much for the opportunity to what was really, very useful, interesting discussions. and I learned from talking to you both. That was very useful. So thank you. As you said, I mean, you know, the books is available from Eskra books and PDF. We also have a much network platform, actually, which we built as a software cooperative. And there are lots of discussions on it.

There are the apps one can download. So as I said, we are part of the global socials movement. We are trying to unify a program that makes our movement move forward, and we welcome any thoughts and discussions and ideas on the book, and we hope that this book will contribute in some way toward the discussion happening globally on have to move forward. Absolutely. Exactly.

Adnan, how can the listeners find you and the modulus, which they could also be listening to this on your platform? You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and please do check out the Mudgellis for future episodes that we'll be having on topics related to the Islamic world, Middle East, Muslim diasporic populations. That's M-A-J-L-I-S available on all the usual platforms. Yeah, absolutely. Of course, recommend the listeners. Check that out. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. That's H-U-C-K-1-995. Follow Isker Books as well, the publisher of this book,

and of course, you can download it at IskraBooks.org. As for guerrilla history, you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Histery. sorry, guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A history, you can follow us on Twitter at Gorilla-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-L-A-U-R-L-A-U-N-Score pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity.

You know, Oh, Oh! Oh! So, you Thank you.