The Iraqi Communist Party‘s leadership and Lacan’s imaginary discourse

I am writing this article, partly as a response to Mr. Tabla’s article http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=231260, and partly as a brief psychological elaboration of the current political discourse adopted by the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP).
I have to start by indicating that I agree with many views of Mr. Tabla’s, and we are all very saddened and disappointed with the politics of the ICP’s leadership. The leadership seems to be stubbornly following an agenda of weakening the party and turning it more and more into a marginal, insignificant force. It is turning a blind eye and deaf ear to any constructive criticism and is, unfortunately, collectively using an infamous (Saddam’s) language, labeling the critics as traitors, enemies etc, instead of engaging with them into a political and intellectual dialogue. What is democracy otherwise? And how is silencing others reconciled with democracy?
In an interview with Mr. Hamid Majid, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, several weeks ago, he said that he was prepared to become a prime minister if people saw that fit.. Mr. Majid’s assertion amounts to a manic grandiosity, and one can hardly avoid seeing it as a symptom indicative of (psychotic) detachment from reality. The paradox is that when the ICP had not even won a seat in parliament, he, Mr. Majid, asserts his willingness and ambitions to become a prime minster, bypassing democracy and showing a mastership in showing off. Instead, he would have rather focused on getting in touch with the poor and oppressed people of Iraq and embarked on addressing the multiple crises the party, and particularly its leadership, is suffering from. A similarly manic detachment from reality was evident when Mr. Majid called the defeat of the party in the last local elections as a victory. Obviously, I am not concerned here at all with the person of Mr. Majid as such, my concerns are solely confined to his political assertions as the Secretary.
The leadership’s exclusion of dissenting voices and its, directly or indirectly, equating the party with the leadership is not only dismissive of other members and betrayal of the party charter, but it is also evidence of a patriarchal discourse that worships the hegemony of the powerful and despises the disempowered and unprivileged. The leadership displays a seemingly schizoid attitude, as, on one hand, it pretends to be on the side of the oppressed and unprivileged, but its actual discourse and actions are one of being consistent with that of oppressor and the privileged on the other. Paying a lip service to the contrary by the leadership will only confirm the existence of such a schizoid stance.
The leadership and the rest of the party had been for more than 30 years or even longer the victim of brutal abuses by Saddam and his predecessors, and we know from social psychology that the abused might become abuser through the unconscious mechanism of identification that serves to give the abused a false sense of imaginary empowerment, a sense of empowerment akin to that which the child would have, according to the psychoanalyst Lacan, when viewing itself in the mirror and seeing a coherent image, an image that is only reflected in the mirror and has no basis whatsoever in reality. The maturation of the child, and implicitly of the leadership, is dictated through abandoning the imaginary falsehood of empowerment, self-aggrandization and self-complacency. It needs to mourn the loss of the imaginary empowerment, to reconcile itself with the loss, and to goes through the mourning process, a process which the leadership is stubbornly and psychotically defending itself against through a manic denial. The leadership has fallen prey to the belief that word acrobatics could do away with the reality. It is a psychotic maneuver that only perpetuates loss and destruction.
The leadership has to cure itself, or be cured, of the ills of Saddam regime, or perhaps ills that had been existing even before.
The leadership is to replace its psychotic and infantile discourse by a mature one that is derived from tolerance and acknowledgement of others (particularly those who are disempowered and marginalized), and seeing such an acknowledgment not as weakness, but rather as strength. Failing to do that, the leadership will drag the party and perhaps the whole democratic movement in Iraq more and more into insignificance, isolation and marginalization. The change is not only a political necessity; it is rather a moral imperative.

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