One requires a general analysis of Islamism as a phenomenon of late late capitalism. At the end of the 1980s Chris Harman, then pre-eminent theorist of the International Socialist Tendency, sought to elucidate such a Marxist position on Islamism, which came to be politically relevant, especially in Egypt (the country in which he was to die suddenly, by cardiac arrest, in 2009). His starting point – that analysis should start from the political economy of capitalist imperialism, and the relations between dominant and dominated classes rather than an opposition in thought between belief and un-belief – holds true. However, the argument that follows from that starting point must necessarily change as the external world does.

More than the expression of the politics of a particular class, ISIS are the noxious by-product of the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’. The political project of disaster.

It is unfortunate that the myth of ISIS as US creation has spread so widely, since it forces serious discussion of the topic to begin with a lengthy rebuttal. More fruitful is to understand the organisation through the political theology it practices, its relationship to the state and exploiting classes in the countries in which it operates, and the lineage of Islamism from which it both derives and departs. But to begin with the necessary myth debunking.

A procrustean definition of fascism will not help here.

One requires no special political nous to understand that the second decade of the twenty-first century is witnessing the collapse of political orders in a fashion reminiscent of that of Europe between the two world wars