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Title: The Gates of Orthodox Ijtihad Author: Sidewinder Date: 2010-01-15 Language: en Topics: capital, labor, Islam, marxism, value Source: Retrieved 12/01/2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120309050349/http://anarchism.pageabode.com/sidewinder/the-gates-of-orthodox-ijtihad
Like Judaism, Islam is not only a community of faith but a system of law
and jurisprudence. Islamic jurisprudence is based upon the
interpretation of the texts of the Qur’an, the Hadith and Sunnah.
Various schools or madhabs of past interpretations have built up over
time such that coming to a ruling can come through two main routes — the
imitation (taqlid) of past scholars and the traditional schools, or
original interpretation of the source texts. This is ijtihad, a word
derived from the same 3-letter root (j-h-d, jahada — “struggle”) as
jihad, meaning “struggle with yourself”. It contains the idea that
original interpretation is a product of struggle, arduous and
potentially a mortal danger to body and soul.
Whilst in the Shia tradition of ijtihad continues to be a central part
of jurisprudence, it is much less in evidence in contemporary Sunni
tradition where following the madhabs is the conventional route. The
dominant story until recently was that this was because at some time
between the 10^(th) to 12^(th) centuries (CE) the dominant Sunni view
came to be that contemporary scholars were too remote from the “rightly
guided” followers of Mohammed to any longer be capable of righteous new
interpretations. This story was called the closing of the gates of
ijtihad, and is associated with the ascendance of the “anti-philosophy”
Asharite school, principally lead by Al-Ghazali, over the more
Aristotlean and Neo-Platonic inspired Mutazilites.
Now it must be said that this account was principally one devised by
Western Orientalists, often associated with a search for idealist or
culturalist explanations for the perceived decline of Muslim
civilisation (specifically the Ottoman empire) relative to the West.
Unsurprisingly there are now challenges by muslim historians sceptical
of these Orientalist meta-narratives, pointing out that the death of
ijtihad in the Sunni tradition has been exaggerated and the “closing of
the gates” is a nice story but not really adequate to the complexities
of the actual history in which material economic, military, political
and inter-imperialist conflicts have a much larger part.
If the story of the closing of the gates of ijtihad is today suspect as
an account of the development of Sunni orthodoxy, it does have an
irresistible draw as a metaphor for the contemporary stagnation of
Marxist orthodoxy. While the gates of orthodox Marxist ijtihad are not
officially closed, many people who have tried to progress the struggle
for new interpretations of the 21^(st) century capitalist world system
find their way blocked by a number of gates sealed with orthodox
shibboleths by those who believe Lenin’s “Imperialism, The Highest Stage
of Capitalism” to be the final word on “the Epoch” (see previous post
“Orthodoxy and Time”). Collectively these seals represent a
comprehensive block on the directions new interpretations must travel to
understand the workings of the financialised system of “Capitalism with
Derivatives” that Neoliberalism has (partly inadvertantly) built and has
so recently plunged us into the first major global economic crisis of
the 21^(st) century. These seals must be broken.
Here we look at 5 sealed gates.
This is a perennial favourite, so many forests have been cut down to
print the volume of diatribes between Marxists about the true
distinction between what types of labour are productive of value and
what are not, to the complete ignorance and indifference of the outside
world, that it is tempting to say that this debate is itself the primary
examplar of unproductive labour. Candidates for “unproductive labour”
range from the usual “luxury” personal services providers from
prostitutes, dog-walkers, shopping assistants, to nurses, teachers,
doctors, train and bus drivers. The notion that, say, London’s tube,
bus, train and taxi drivers are not productive of value rather begs the
question of why, if they all went on strike for a week, the losses to
capitalist accumulated would be calculated in the billions. The
dependence of the pharmaceutical industry, one of global capitalism’s
bigger earners, on doctors telling patients what drugs supposedly answer
their needs is another case that finds the “unproductive labour” tag
inadequate. But above all, the notion of the financial industry,
accounting for getting towards a third of UK economic activity before
the crash, is unproductive in toto is a hopeless starting point for any
attempt to analyse the causes of the current crisis.
If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, flys like a duck and quacks
like a duck then it’s a ... fictitious duck? The notion of fictitious
capital is bandied around a good deal these days. The problem is that
this necessarily raises the necessity of making a distinction between
fictitious and real capitals in a way that is analytical rather than
being simply either a lazy moral category masquerading as economic
analysis or, perhaps worse, indicative of a pre-Marxist conception of a
non-relational, substantial capital. Horses are real, unicorns are
fictional, but capital is as capital does. If it’s a volume of money
actively engaged in the money capital cycle M-C-M’, it’s capital plain
and simple.
In itself, this is simply a core statement of Marx’s analysis. It
becomes a orthodox shibboleth in what areas of capitalist activity are
lumped into the category of sphere of circulation. In many ways this is
another side of the unproductive labour coin. When entire industries
such as finance are dumped into the “sphere of circulation” bin, entire,
then this analytical statement becomes a canon of dogma obstructing
proper analysis of capitalist activity in these industries.
As many commentators have already pointed out, the orthodox
base/superstructure dogma is based on a tendentious reading of a couple
of paragraphs in the preface of the “Contribution to a Critique of
Political Economy”, the notorious “handmill” passage from “Poverty of
Philosophy” and the odd letter. Regardless of the weakness of it
justification, what must be avoided at all costs is any possibility of
being drawn into the utterly irrelevant debate over “the correct reading
of Marx”, itself an orthodox shibboleth (see “What is Orthodoxy” notes).
Where the notion that the relations of society can be divided into two
sections, one derivative of the other and thus negligeable, becomes an
obstacle to proper analysis is when it focus on “the forces of
production” to the exclusion of all else. No better example of this
tendency is the case of China where most orthodox commentators appear to
accepted that it has somehow crossed a threshold from some form of
socialism to a capitalist society on the basis of the presence of
capitalist looking industry and market forms, but in a way unable to
theorise the real differences still remaining between China, the US and
other Western capitalist countries on the unspoken assumption that these
differences of political structure are “superstructural”, thus somehow
secondary. Analysis cannot proceed on this basis.
In his preface to the first German edition of Marx’s “Philosophy of
Poverty” published after Marx’s death, Engels makes clear the effort in
their project to disentangle the critique economic categories from moral
criticisms, the confusion of which had obstructed previous socialists.
It must be made clear that today, under the guise of dismissing vast
tracts of the contemporary capitalist economy under the anti-categories
of unproductive labour, fictitious capital and so on, the conventional
moral landscape of “good capitalist” vs. “bad capitalist” is being
reproduced lock, stock and barrel. The tabloids scream about greedy
bankers and parasitic speculators ruining capitalism for honest workers
and their productive business men employers and decent investors. The
orthodox join in the hue and cry with the same aunt sally figures
dressed up in Marxist-sounding jargon. To rail against parasitic
speculators, is to provide an alibi for the workings of the capitalist
system itself of which these periodic crises are an integral part of its
functioning.