1 March 2007: Nigel Harris, The Terrorist

Along with David Harvey and Mike Davis, I find Nigel Harris one of the most interesting writers still working - if loosely - in a tradition of Marxist political economy. It is not hard then to convey the pleasure, then, with which I saw that his new book is a novel, and more than that, a serious attempt to explain the tradition of contemporary Islamist terrorism. Nigel lectured at the American University in Cairo in 1998, and has been a strong influence on a generation of activists in that city. You couldn't find a more interesting topic, or a person better placed to write about it.

The central character of The Terrorist, Michael, is a British academic who teaches (in the year from September 2000 to June 2001) at AUC, and who belongs to the same political generation as Nigel himself. The only significant difference between fiction and real life is that Michael in the novel is a long-term sympathiser with Bakunin; whereas Nigel in real life was for some years an editor of International Socialism, in that journal's heroic period. Beyond Michael, the next two most important characters are conveniently a 'Leila' and a 'Khaled'. (Perhaps a follow-up is planned in which a man called Che falls in love with a woman named Guevara).

Khaled, who is plausibly drawn, is a former Marxist, born into a family of Coptic Stalinists, he later converts to anarchism, Maoism, and then (by way on an ongoing belief in turning to the people) to political Islam. There, he comes to lead a terrorist cell ('the assassins'), for whom Michael comes to work as a sort of courier. Khaled's wife Leila, a less successful creation, is a beautiful young militant (in other words Michael falls in love with her: if the chronology was consistent, she should be a woman in her late 40s). Following loosely in Michael's political trajectory from militant Communism to Islamism, she ultimately kills her husband - a crime for which Michael is blamed - the act is unexplained, but a parallel is drawn with the Russian anarchist Nechaev who organised a similar murder in the 1860s, as a means of drawing together a cell of his contemporaries. The parallel is developed by means of certain letters sent between Natalie a member of Marx's extended family, and her brother, an admirer of Bakunin, in the period following the demise of the Paris Commune. The novel ends with the September 11 bombings: events in Cairo are presented as a necessary corollary (a preparation?) to that greater terrorist outrage.

Even this short summary indicates, I suspect, that the book grates as much as it pleases. Too many things happen, of too great a significance: inevitably then, too much of the writing serves no other function other than to hurry the plot along. To take two simple lines, of no great significance: "Nechaev? he died in 1882, in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg", one character narrates, "what sort of history do you teach?", asks another. People don't talk like that, not the sorts of people that Nigel describes. The characters barely breathe at all: Leila, given her function in the plot, is the most important, and the least convincing.

Having spent a few weeks in Cairo, and in similar circles to those experienced by Nigel, I was simply unconvinced by any of the scenes he described: the men and the women are the wrong ages, they wear the wrong clothes, they are involved in the wrong alliances.

The novel's drawing together of different Islamist tendencies is equally implausible. Without wishing to labour a point with which many people will be familiar: Sunni is not Shia, Afghanistan is not Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Britain. To treat Islamism in all its contemporary faces (the terrorist cell, the political party, the charitable organisation) as one movement with a common politics a common history and a common trajectory, makes just as little (and as much sense) as treating members of the British Labour Party, supporters of the Cuban military uprising and terrorists in Peru all as "Marxists": the occasionally-common language masks enormous differences in practices.

There are mistakes of time and place: the very worst is the cover (which, while the author could hardly have chosen, he could at least have vetoed). It shows a woman wearing a belly dancer's outfit, including make up and and a spangly head covering. That is not how Islamists (or indeed any ordinary Egyptians) dress.  Now, of course, the narrator could deliberately get things wrong: could be baffled by the careful sensuality of a world which relies on code rather than direct expression. The typical form of the contemporary novel is one in which a bathetic narrator stands as a foil to a central, perhaps heroic, protagonist. In an ironic mode, the 'mistakes' of the narrator project, by partially revealing and partially hiding, a more subtle and coded authorial voice. But that can't be done where the narrator's political judgments, stand (unchallenged) as they do here for the views of the author. If the narrator misreads turn of the millennium Cairo, any reader will surely ask, why should we trust their expertise on the other world of Marx and his co-conspirators? Or their analysis of how the shape of the world 130 years ago points to truths about today's developments?

Natalie's letters from the 1870s are the very best parts of the book: developed in the genre of the original Marx letters (and in a style copied notably by other historians - I think for example of a recent Sheila Rowbotham piece for the Socialist Register), the narrator Natalie comes over as a full woman, intelligent, partial, humorous, with friendships and a life of her own. The writings in these passages is underdone and convincing. Natalie is not merely the cipher for a discussion of ideas. The artistic contrast with the wooden figure of Leila could not be stronger.

There is a long tradition of novels in which characterisation gives way to the development of big ideas - Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? being just one obvious example. The book should be read in these terms. Nigel's two major these are as follows. First, he argues that the Islamic terrorism of the current period is merely the counterpart to the anarchist ideas of 130 years ago. It has in common with its parent a belief in the morality of the spectacular deed, an idealisation of violence, an emphasis on the revolutionary cell, and a bitter hostility to a certain type of state.

This analysis suggests that terrorism is not in essence an act of those who hate - but of those who love, of those who care too much, and who in the wrong following of an initial ideal make themselves and their cause hideous. (Natalie hints at the latter analysis, by speaking of the connection between means and ends: an argument which would pre-empt Trotsky's writings on Terrorism, or indeed his book on Bolshevik morality).

Second, the narrator / Nigel argues that Marx's political perspectives were wrong and Bakunin's more compelling. The future belongs not to great armies of organised labour in the developed world - capitalism offers too much to workers, who are reformist at best - but rather to small groups of professional revolutionaries in the developed world, who will rise in fury against the anger of their fellow people, and commission further acts of revolt which will shade from gestures into greater rebellions.

I can see how this argument connects to the arguments of Nigel's accompanying works of political economy (including his most recent book, The Return of Cosmopolitan Capitalism), in which he has idealised the functions of the cosmopolitan economy (the true antagonist of the war-like state). But if Bakunin (meaning the Bakunin of Nigel's political economy) is right and the market economy is triumphant, then the majority of us have no shield against the encroachment of speed-up and overwork.

If, alternatively, Bakunin is right (the Bakunin of Nigel's political fiction) and revolutionary gestures are all, then the first world has no significant historical role to play: the future belongs to the revolutionaries of the third. But these 'revolutionaries' are purely nihilistic, they have no alternative utopian ambition beyond that of answering the Western crimes in Palestine and Chechnya with more killing of their own.

The absence in both accounts is a working-class: not the heroic proletarians of Marxist myth, marching onward, without setback or doubt, but the patient working-class people of Britain and France and Italy and many other countries in the past fifty years, whose trade unions warrened western capitalism, requiring the invention of the welfare state, and whose demands continue to shape - however partially - the continued existence of such institutions against the market as the NHS or social housing.

It is true of course that the workplaces are smaller than once they were, and the unions less combative, that working class hegemony is harder to visualise, and that the transition of politics from one generation to a next has been broken by political set-backs and a still largely under-analysed process of economic transformation. The last 30 years show that class organisation and consciousness are capable of a rapid decomposition. There is nothing inevitable in history. All those processes make any positive outcome harder than previous generations would have guessed. But not impossible. The task itself is largely the same as it ever was.

Without this vision we are left in the world of The Terrorist, with real and phantom armies clashingly indefinitely into the future by night.