The Left v Political Islam

Soumaya Ghannoushi says socialists and Islamists should unite for change in Tunisia (Tunisians must dismantle the monster Ben Ali built, 18 January). No they should not. Socialists and Islamists both opposed Ben Ali, true – but they disagree about what should be done next.

The real left is democratic, secular, in favour of women's equality, opposed to antisemitism and sees the united working class as an agency for change. Many Muslims are leftists on this basis; but Islamist parties stand for something radically different.

This attempt to blur the lines between the left and Islamism is a feature of politics in this country too. For 10 years parts of the far left (for reasons of opportunism and lack of political confidence) have allied with Islamists in the anti-war movement, with disastrous consequences for the political health of the socialists.

It is time to get back to constructing alliances on the basis of what we are for, not simply on what we are against.

Mark Osborn

London

• Soumaya Ghannoushi's call for an alliance between socialists and Islamists is a disaster from the point of view of the left. In 1978-80, many Iranian leftists thought they and the Islamists shared a common struggle against the Shah. The result was the crushing of the left, the destruction of the workers' movement and the installation of an Islamist tyranny just as bad as what went before. Islamists may use democratic slogans against secular and western-backed regimes, but their real goal is to destroy all elements of democracy and workers' self-organisation in society. The left should make solidarity with democratic, secularist and socialist forces in Tunisia, not political Islam.

Sacha Ismail

Alliance for Workers' Liberty

Lessons From Latin America

Unlike in Europe, the left in Latin America is still winning elections – albeit with difficulty. After 12 years in power, President Hugo Chávez has just seen his party win Venezuela's election with a much reduced majority. In Brazil the Workers' party is on the way to its third presidency in a row – though Dilma Rousseff must run off against the centre-right José Serra. And Ecuador's Rafael Correa has survived an attempted coup. They all face similar challenges – heavy pressure from regional oligarchs, and civil unrest from their grassroots social base. To understand this, look at how the left came to power in the first place.

In the 80s Latin America emerged from the dark days of military dictatorship with the hope that democracy would bring social justice. It was not to be. Forced to accept the free-trade doctrines of the Washington consensus, the weak and ill-prepared governments of the day auctioned off public resources at bargain-basement prices, mainly to Spanish capital and were drawn into global capitalism. The elite benefited, while the majority gained nothing. Jobs barely increased, public sector wages were "readjusted", and poverty rose dramatically. Workers suffered a double disadvantage: their labour cost more than that of their Chinese counterparts, and they were less well educated than eastern Europeans.

As the redistributive and welfare roles of government were progressively abandoned, the image of the old nation state began to erode. Poorer sectors of society dissociated their idea of national identity from the state. There was a deep crisis of political representation: traditional parties alienated voters, and the politicians who replaced the military quickly exhausted their credibility.

This was the context in which the left came to power. In the last two decades mass mobilisations – particularly of indigenous peoples – brought down four presidents in Argentina, three in Ecuador, and one each in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Social movements challenged US hegemony and stopped the privatisation of state enterprises and natural resources, building a new sense of identity forged by ethnic and regional demands and uniting the excluded and marginalised. Before the centre-left's electoral victories, a cultural victory had already been won.

In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador new constitutions were the expression of these new pacts: a legal framework recognising collective social and environmental rights and creating the conditions for radical democracy, emerging from the decolonization of states.

These progressive governments have driven a reconstruction of the architecture of power and geopolitics. Throughout the continent there has been a profound redefinition of the relationship with the US and global financial organisations, expressed in the rejection of the policies of the White House and the emergence of new institutional arrangements favouring regional integration on the continent's own terms.

It was no accident that the ambitious US-backed initiative for a free-market framework – the Free Trade Area of the Americas – was torpedoed, or that Ecuador did not renew the contract for a US military base at Manta. Foreign relations are flourishing in other directions, however: solidarity with Cuba and active diplomatic ties with Iran, and growing Chinese investment.

The central element of this redefinition has been the demand for national control of natural resources – which has produced major conflicts with multinationals. Today the states have greater control over resources, but social and indigenous organisations have criticised governments for continuing to base their strategies on an "extractivist" model – in which they remain primarily producers and exporters of raw materials.

These grassroots challenges over the exploitation of natural resources are gaining in strength, despite the international boom in the price of raw materials. Additional challenges have emerged – the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador accused Correa of being authoritarian, and environmental groups argue that he has given undue concessions to large mining companies. In Brazil the MST – the landless workers' movement – has criticised President Lula for failing to make advances in land reform. In Venezuela there is discontent with the ruling bureaucracy and the "Bolibourgeoisie" – those who have become wealthy under Chávez's socialism, which reveres Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who won Venezuela's freedom from Spain. In Bolivia, the more radical indigenous groups have criticised new gas exploration projects.

The extraction of natural resources has brought considerable new income to the continent, which these governments have used to finance social programmes and to combat poverty. During Lula's two terms his family plan has reached 50 million of Brazil's poorest people. In Venezuela 60% of tax income was dedicated to social programmes between 1999 and 2009; the poverty index fell from 49% to 24%, and the level of extreme poverty from 30% to 7%. Economic elites in each country have attacked this social spending, but corporate profits have actually increased – in Brazil under Lula, three banks earned $95bn in eight years.

The social transformation under way in Latin America has not yet produced definitive results. Disputes over the role of the state and the direction of regional integration and development policy have not been resolved. The waters of change are turbulent – and are likely to remain so for several years to come.

End Of A Dream?

The Swedish Social Democrats are no ordinary party. If Mona Sahlin, their leader, loses tomorrow's election, as seems almost certain, she will become the first leader in the party's history never to have been prime minister. The party has been in government for 65 of the last 78 years, and in that time no non-socialist government has ever been re-elected. But today a far-right party that blames Muslim immigration for almost all the country's ills is poised to enter parliament and hold the balance of power. It already has members in local government across more than half the country. The local paper in Malmö, the country's third-largest city, publishes a Google Map marking all the shootings in the city – there have been 46 this year, though no one has been killed. What on earth is going on in this tranquil, ordered and progressive country?

If you believe the international rightwing press, the answer is simple, and has been since 2004, when Fox News made a special report on the subject: Sweden, and especially Malmö, has become a laboratory for the creeping Islamisation of Europe. The most common child's name there is now Muhammad; police dare not go into immigrant districts, where only sharia law is respected; and soon all the Jews will be driven from the city. All this, flecked with varying amounts of spittle, is recounted as fact on the net and in US papers.

Paulina Neuding, a neoliberal Swedish commentator, wrote in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, "Too many of the country's Arab immigrants have brought anti-democratic values from their home countries; values that neither 'dialogue police' nor the world's most generous welfare system has been able to cure. And [Sweden] is also becoming a symbol of a western country that is prepared to compromise with those values."

The centre for all this fear is the Rosengård estate in Malmö. It is the nearest Sweden gets to a slum. "It doesn't feel like Sweden at all," said a horrified sociologist in a nearby university. "There are cockroaches there! People live 12 to a two-room flat. No one should have to live like that." In early September, police searched the bedroom of a local teenager who had been acting drugged in public, and found a submachine gun. Then they let him go, because he was only 15.

About 25,000 of Malmö's 300,000 people live on the estate; the actual figure is unknown because of overcrowding in the worst section, Herrgården, where adult unemployment runs at 90% (it is 30% on the estate as a whole). Thousands of new immigrants arrive every year. Of the 1,200 students in the secondary school, eight are native Swedes.

Like almost everywhere else that immigrants live in Sweden, Rosengård was built in the late 60s and early 70s as model housing for workers. But whereas most of these new settlements were located five or 10 miles outside the cities they served, and separated from them by belts of forest or farmland, Rosengård is an integral part of Malmö. It lies within the inner ring road. You can cycle there in 15 minutes from the station.

A 2008 government report, which drew entirely on the experiences of teachers, police and social workers, described a place where Islamic orthodoxy was enforced by young thugs; women were forced to wear headscarves and children segregated in religious free schools. There was a small riot after one of the 20 or 30 unofficial mosques in cellars was closed when its lease was not renewed, and nastier riots when the Israeli tennis team played a Davis Cup match in the city last summer.

But this isn't Beirut or Baltimore. It isn't even Tower Hamlets. I was told at Lund University that a foreign graduate student who lived in Rosengård for a couple of years couldn't understand why anyone would call it a ghetto. He came from Liverpool. Certainly, I can't think of another slum in Europe that has broad, well-signposted cycle paths on which stately middle-aged women in headscarves pedal their groceries home.

The houses are for the most part low blocks arranged in squares around playgrounds, on a familiar Swedish model. Even in Herrgården, where there are a few boarded-up windows, the play areas are clean and well-maintained.

The shops have Arabic signage as often as Swedish. The greengrocer's has a huge Ramadan calendar outside, but in the middle of a bright afternoon there are a great many people eating and drinking in public. In the middle of the estate is a shopping centre where a headscarfed woman is collecting for orphans in Iraq, Gaza and Pakistan. She came to Rosengård 16 years ago and says her children are happy on the estate, too. Her stall is an interesting mixture of Swedish and Islamic charity: the language is all Swedish, but the money referred to as zakat. All the distribution, the signs explain, will be handled by the Nordic aid organisation, which will guarantee the money ends up being used peacefully and responsibly.

The Islamology department at Lund University reckons the number of active Muslims in Rosengård and Sweden generally is greatly overestimated. "Most Muslims in Sweden are as unobservant as the Christians," says department head Leif Stenberg. "If you count the number of worshippers in the mosques, there are seldom more than 300 in the big ones, even at Friday prayers. The smaller ones will have 100, if that."

No one in Sweden believes there is any serious terrorist threat there, but Islam has become the symbol of all that is strange and menacing and un-Swedish about immigration. There is a film on YouTube that sums it up perfectly. In an industrial-looking warehouse, an old woman pushes her walking frame bravely across the floor towards two bureaucrats dispensing piles of cash. The camera cuts back to show that alongside her in the gloom are other figures – but these are swathed in burkas, pushing prams. You realise the old woman and the Muslims are all racing to reach red handles that hang from the ceiling, like the emergency brakes on trains. One is marked "Immigration", the other "Pensions". "You have a choice," says a woman's voice. "On September 19 you can slam the brakes on pensions or slam the brakes on immigration. Vote for the Sweden Democrats."

This is the banned party political broadcast for the Sweden Democrats, which the commercial television channel refused to show on the grounds that it was illegal to stand for election and be so flagrantly against ideals of equality. Instead, the Sweden Democrats may show an ad that directs people to their YouTube site. It's typical of the way in which this deeply conservative party has used new media to circumvent the old.

In another publicity stunt, the party released a report claiming to prove, from government statistics, that immigrants were five times more likely than native Swedes to be convicted of rape. What the statistics actually show is that they are five times as likely to be investigated for rape, but experts point out that this may be due in part to racism in the criminal justice system, and that the absolute numbers are very small: when the Sweden Democrats claimed that 10% of the rapists convicted in their survey were Iraqi, they were talking about 12 men. If 0.04% of native Swedes are investigated for rape in one year, the corresponding figure for immigrants is 0.22%."

Though rural Nazis are a staple of Swedish crime fiction, a few do, in fact, exist. Some years ago, one was pointed out to me on the island of Tjörn: "Look," my friend Rolf said as we passed an old man pushing his bicycle uphill, "there's the only Nazi on the island." The day was very hot, but the old man was wearing a heavy black suit, white collar and tie. "He really believes it," Rolf said. "He can argue it all out logically, though I have got him to admit Hitler went a little far with the Jews."

There has always been a streak of romantic nationalism in Swedish life. For most of the Social Democratic years, it took a paradoxical form: people here believed Sweden was the best country in the world because it was the most internationalist. This led to a fantastically generous policy on asylum and integration. Nearly a third of Sweden's population today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are more Iranians living in Sweden than there are Danes. In 2007, one small town outside Stockholm took in more Iraqi refugees than the whole of the US. Professor Jan Ekberg at Linné University has calculated that unemployment among immigrants means the excess cost of their welfare payments over the tax they pay is at least as high as the defence budget, and possibly 50% higher. Although all measurements show that Swedish tolerance towards immigrants is increasing, it's not surprising that there has been a backlash.

Thirty years ago, the Sweden Democrats were a tiny fringe group of straightforward fascists – openly racist skinheads and a few old ideological Nazis. Anti-immigrant sentiment then was concentrated on a short-lived but successful protest party that entered parliament with nearly 7% of the vote in 1991 and soon after imploded and disappeared in the 1994 election.

Two years later, a group of four nationalist students at Lund University joined the Sweden Democrats. They all came from the backwoods of the province of Skåne, the country's southern tip – in Sweden, "backwoods" is a literal term. "There are really three countries here," says Peter Ekelund, a Stockholm businessman. "There is the region around here, with companies like mine where everyone speaks English in the office all the time. There is an international region around Malmö, and another around Gothenburg. And then there are the elk – that's all the rest."

The forest and farmland goes on for hundreds of kilometres in the interior, broken occasionally by farms and small towns. I lived in such towns myself for five years as a young man, and the sense of isolation from the outside world was very deep. Stockholm seemed like a foreign country, in some ways farther than small-town America.

This is the background from which the new Sweden Democrats emerged. The young men from Lund had taken over the party entirely within 10 years. By 2005, one of them, Jimmie Åkesson, had become the party leader at the age of 26. He moved the party away from Nazism and some forms of racism, but they were still pariahs. "No one would vote for them because they were seen as fascist yokels," says Niklas Orrenius, a journalist who has studied the movement for years. To be a known member was to risk sacking from any kind of job. Far-left activists beat them up, on one occasion breaking into a party gathering with iron bars. Last Friday two masked men attacked David von Arnold, a party candidate in Malmö, outside his flat and carved a swastika into his forehead. The respectable media largely ignored this as it ignores the party as a whole.

"Most journalists detest them, so they don't write about them seriously," Orrenius says. Sweden is still an extremely conformist, authoritarian society, where opinion formers and politicians move together like a shoal of herring. The whole shoal can change direction in a flash, but not one herring dares swim anywhere on its own.

In the elections of 2008, opinion polls gave the party only about 1.8% of the national vote. In the event, it got 2.9%, which represented a huge breakthrough, because any party above 2.5% is eligible for state funding. In Skåne, it became the fourth largest party, and part of local government in many towns, but it was still well below the magic 4% threshold that would get it into parliament. Today it is now above that level in all the polls.

The party owes its success to an appeal that seems to cross political boundaries. Hostility to immigrants, especially to Muslims, is certainly a very large part of it, but its slogan for this election, "Tradition and Security", represents two things the Social Democrats once delivered (they always carried the Swedish flag in their May Day parades), but that no party has been able to offer convincingly since the economic storms of the mid-80s when the "Swedish model" went bankrupt.

None of the people who runs Sweden thinks these things will ever come back. All the herring agree the free market is the way forward. The result can be bewildering to English ears: Swedish Conservatives sounding to the left of New Labour when they talk about social mobility, Swedish Social Democrats sounding to the right of Cameron's Conservatives when they talk about the benefits of competition.

Ekelund speaks with unusual frankness, but his views are common: "Sweden is an export-dependent economy, and that is why it is the most successful in Europe. A company like Ericsson does business in 180 countries. It's unthinkable for them to go along with a politics of prejudice. Actually, we need far more immigration, not less."

A few hundred metres from his offices in central Stockholm, the Sweden Democrats have set out their stall. It's an electioneering tradition: all the parties set little wooden huts in the city's central square, where they hand out sweets and leaflets, and talk to voters. Most are as ignored as chuggers, but the Sweden Democrats usually have an angry group of schoolchildren around them.

Ulf Oscarsson, a sturdy man in his late 60s, is minding the stall when I enter. Why has he joined the party? "My daughter was the victim of a serious attempted rape by a Muslim minicab driver. Here, in the centre of the city. He was a married man with three children. When it came to trial, he got a two-month suspended sentence and a £700 fine. They told us we needed to have a certain sympathy for his culture. Well, shit on that."

Behind him, a poster asks, "Which do you want: bigger locks on your front door or bigger locks on the prison doors?"

Oscarsson doesn't want new laws; he just wants the laws that exist to be enforced. Nor is he racist, he says, and I believe him. It's obviously not true of all party members, but the belief that everyone should play by the rules is fundamental to the Swedish sense of justice. He is just as angry about a scandal in provincial local government that did not involve immigrants. Oscarsson claims 20% of the party's membership are immigrants, and while this seems improbable, they certainly have some. I saw a young Indian man running the stall when I passed it on the way to Ekelund's office.

Outside the hut, a group of teenagers in from the suburbs for the day are arguing with the Sweden Democrat on duty. Parand Saumloo, a 17-year-old Swede with one Iranian parent and one Bulgarian, is furious. "Of course you're racists," she says. "This country is full of it." Jabbing her finger, she asks, "When did you ever see a Swede behind the counter of a pizza joint? The country absolutely depends on immigrants. It's lunacy to cut down immigration."

But later it becomes clear she doesn't see herself as a pizza seller: her father is a psychologist, and that is the profession towards which she is studying. "I can even understand that we have to do something about the ones who just live on benefits," she says.

The respectable parties have all said they will not cooperate with the Sweden Democrats should they get into parliament. But if, or when, they do, the party will almost certainly hold the balance of power between the centre-right parties and the opposing bloc of Social Democrats, Greens and former communists. If they are kept out, perhaps by the defection of the Greens to the centre-right, they can convincingly portray themselves as the only real opposition in the country.

But they have no real policies, only longings. A friend who works in Ystad on what would be Wallander's local paper sums up the Sweden Democrats' programme: "They want to move to a country where there aren't any immigrants."

I doubt they will even manage to drag Swedish politics towards xenophobia the way their Danish counterparts, who now sit in government, have done. A tougher sentencing policy is possible. Better enforcement of existing rules on immigration, coupled with measures to ensure immigrant mothers go out to work and don't just live on child benefit, is already the policy of the Burundi-born minister of integration, Nyamko Sabuni. But, in the end, the Sweden Democrats' dream of a world of "tradition and security" cannot be fulfilled. It is a longing for an illusory past to replace the illusory future of endless prosperity and justice into which the Social Democrats seemed for years to be leading their country.

Jose Saramago (RIP)

Ralph Miliband & Son

Corin Redgrave (RIP)

Michael Foot (RIP)

Coffee Party Intro

Cofee v Tea Party movement

Just when the Tea Party movement appeared to be spreading across the US, a radically different vision of America has emerged, courtesy of Facebook.

Its title might not be imaginative, but the Coffee Party USA is making waves. In just a month its Facebook page has acquired more than 50,000 fans; and supporters of this left-of-centre alternative were logging their interest at a rate of a thousand an hour today.

On the face of it, the rivals share features beyond their beverage titles: offspring of social networking websites; self-consciously harnessing energy unleashed by populist frustrations with the political establishment; and strong views on the nature and role of government.

There the similarity ends. The Coffee Party crowd believe government is not an enemy of the people but the voice of the people. Annabel Park, a documentary filmmaker who started up the Facebook page from Silver Spring, Maryland, said: "We want to see people representing us moving towards solutions to problems rather than strategically obstructing any form of progress." In a video on www.coffeepartyusa.org (motto: wake up and stand up) she says she decided to act after "listening to news coverage that made it seem the Tea Party was representative of America. I completely disagree with this."movement, it is clearly adopting a pro-Obama stance in contrast to relentless and often virulent opposition extended to the president

Though she wants the phenomenon to be seen as a bottom-up movement, it is clearly adopting a pro-Obama stance in contrast to relentless and often virulent opposition extended to the president by the opposition. . Park herself has campaigned with Asians for Obama and on behalf of the Democratic senator Jim Webb.

The Coffee Party is yet another example of the democratising potential of the internet . Over the past two years it has allowed the political energy to swing wildly between opposite ends of the spectrum to a degree and at a speed unthinkable in pre-digital times. At first Barack Obama appeared to have a dominant grip over theweb, using social networking to attract enormous financial and organisational support.

Barely had he been sworn into office, however, but the Tea Party activists grabbed the initiative and applied it to their own purposes. Now the Coffee Party is attempting to seize it back.

Like the Tea Party groups, it is using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word and to encourage individuals to form local outposts. Already some 45 Coffee Party chapters in at least 30 states have been set up, and meetings are being staged in several cities from Martinsville in Virginia, to Oak Ridge,Tennessee, and Los Angeles.

The coffee metaphor helps: "It's unfortunate that Tea is no longer soothing," posts one supporter on Twitter. "It now makes me tense."

Howard Zinn (RIP)

Mercedes Sosa (RIP)

All Dyslexic Now? (A Letter)

SIR – Wandering down a street in London is a nightmare for walkers trying to determine on which side to pass, with oncoming pedestrians as likely to veer to the right as the left (in North America, people usually extend the rules of driving to the sidewalk and stick to the right). The escalator signs on the Underground read: “Stand on the Right Except to Pass”. London’s street-crossings alert us to “Look Right” and “Look Left”, but the warnings are presumably for foreigners. Leave London and the rules are more haphazard.

Cultural left-right chaos abounds. Drive on the left, stand on the right, and walk somewhere in between. Labour frees the central bank, balances budgets, and invades Iraq. Conservatives support universal health care, gay rights, and are concerned for the poor. Is New Labour dead? If Britain has no rules for left or right, how can it even identify the body?

John Swettenham
Ottawa