An article written for Solidarity
25,000 dockers at all 29 ports across the West Coast of the USA staged an 8-hour strike on 1 May calling for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq. The action was not only supported by significant demonstrations in the USA but also by a solidarity strike staged by Iraqi port workers in Umm Qasr and Khor Alzubair.
When the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) called the strike in February it was widely reported that it was a mere demonstration, and that the union had one day at its disposal each month for its own purposes. In fact the Pacific Maritime Association tried to use the courts to stop the strike, while trucks and port traffic (10,000 cargo containers are unloaded per shift) were brought to an absolute standstill for the whole shift. The dockers have a powerful union and are in a strong position to defy management.
Of course, we should not give carte blanche credit to the politics of the ILWU leadership. In a typical move to channel working-class radicalism into bourgeois politicking, the union is supporting millionaire lawyer Barack Obama in the upcoming election. And at the strike rally on 1 May the ILWU President McEllrath stressed his American patriotism, “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country. For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of three trillion dollars” in a speech full of the same “Bring our boys home” effluent spouted by the SWP-led Stop the War Coalition in the UK.
But the Iraqi dockers took heart from the strike, and staged their own action to demand the withdrawal of troops in an excellent display of international working-class solidarity. Indeed, on 1 May the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions and the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions and Iraq published a joint May Day address calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops, new laws guaranteeing workers’ right to organise and an end to IMF diktats. Similarly, the FWCUI-affiliated General Union of Port Workers in Iraq wrote a letter to the American ILWU welcoming their strike, exalting the principle of working class unity and denouncing both the sectarian gangs and the occupying troops.
The strike shows the possibility of international working-class action against the imperialist occupation of Iraq and offers an important glimmer of hope for the building of a “third camp” independent of both the US-UK armies and the Islamist militias.
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
No deportations to Iraq
The first two weeks of March saw dozens of shootings, roadside bombs, car bombs and discoveries of mass graves in Iraq. Five years into the war, the country remains torn apart by sectarian violence, which marks its toll not only in bodies but also in destroyed basic infrastructure, power and supplies shortages and a grave lack of hospital beds. Yet on March 13 it was revealed that the Home Office now considers Iraq ‘safe’, and will therefore give 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers an ultimatum – go back, or stay in Britain but with no benefits and no home. They have three weeks to make up their minds.
The claim that Iraq is safe is highly troubling, and displays the government’s complete lack of concern for the people it expels from the UK. As if to underline the stupidity of their assertion, the government will also ask them to sign a waiver form which says that the Home Office will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraq.
Of course, as everyone knows, millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee from their homes by the invasion and civil war, either to find solace in another community in Iraq among their co-religionists, or to seek refuge in neighbouring Jordan or Syria. The UN estimates that 2.2 million people have escaped from Iraq since 2003 –few of these millions, so desperate as to have to leave their country, would corroborate the government’s claim that Iraq is safe.
This is not the first time the British government has deported people to Iraq, although previous flights carrying asylum seekers have headed for the Kurdish north - which except the recent Turkish invasion has been relatively stable – rather than southern Iraq itself. We also strongly condemned those removals, since they are nothing other than part of the Home Office’s racist demonisation of immigrants and their constant effort to pander to far-right prejudices against people of Middle Eastern background, no matter how worthy their asylum case.
Indeed, even the 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers concerned had in 2005 been refused the right to stay in Britain and were only spared deportation because it was impossible to find a plausibly safe route back. They were therefore only entitled to the meagre "section four” state support which includes basic "no-choice" accommodation, three meals a day, vouchers for essential items and utility bills.
No matter whether the government needs to pretend for its own reasons that Iraq is safe and free, we are unconditionally for the right for anyone who so pleases to make the UK their home. We furthermore demand that all immigrants have the same welfare rights as anyone else who lives in this country, and are absolutely opposed to racist two-tier benefits system which keeps people in poverty just because they were born abroad.
The claim that Iraq is safe is highly troubling, and displays the government’s complete lack of concern for the people it expels from the UK. As if to underline the stupidity of their assertion, the government will also ask them to sign a waiver form which says that the Home Office will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraq.
Of course, as everyone knows, millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee from their homes by the invasion and civil war, either to find solace in another community in Iraq among their co-religionists, or to seek refuge in neighbouring Jordan or Syria. The UN estimates that 2.2 million people have escaped from Iraq since 2003 –few of these millions, so desperate as to have to leave their country, would corroborate the government’s claim that Iraq is safe.
This is not the first time the British government has deported people to Iraq, although previous flights carrying asylum seekers have headed for the Kurdish north - which except the recent Turkish invasion has been relatively stable – rather than southern Iraq itself. We also strongly condemned those removals, since they are nothing other than part of the Home Office’s racist demonisation of immigrants and their constant effort to pander to far-right prejudices against people of Middle Eastern background, no matter how worthy their asylum case.
Indeed, even the 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers concerned had in 2005 been refused the right to stay in Britain and were only spared deportation because it was impossible to find a plausibly safe route back. They were therefore only entitled to the meagre "section four” state support which includes basic "no-choice" accommodation, three meals a day, vouchers for essential items and utility bills.
No matter whether the government needs to pretend for its own reasons that Iraq is safe and free, we are unconditionally for the right for anyone who so pleases to make the UK their home. We furthermore demand that all immigrants have the same welfare rights as anyone else who lives in this country, and are absolutely opposed to racist two-tier benefits system which keeps people in poverty just because they were born abroad.
Friday, March 7, 2008
US dockers call for strike to end occupation of Iraq
Middle East Workers' Solidarity
A motion passed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union conference
FOR WORKERS' ACTION TO STOP THE WAR
WHEREAS: On May 1, 2003, at the ILWU Convention in San Francisco
resolutions were passed calling for an end to the war and occupation
in Iraq; and
WHEREAS: ILWU took the lead among labor unions in opposing this bloody
war and occupation for imperial domination; and
WHEREAS: Many unions and the overwhelming majority of the American
people now oppose this bipartisan and unjustifiable war in Iraq and
Afghanistan but the two major political parties, Democrats and
Republicans continue to fund the war; and
WHEREAS: Millions worldwide have marched and demonstrated against the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but have been unable to stop the wars; and
WHEREAS: ILWU's historic dock actions,
1) like the refusal of Local 10 longshoremen to load bombs for the
military dictatorship in Chile in 1978 and military cargo to the
Salvadoran military dictatorship in 1981 and
2) the honoring of the teachers' union antiwar picket May 19, 2007
against SSA in the port of Oakland stand as a limited but shining
example of how to oppose these wars; and
WHEREAS: The spread of war in the Middle East is threatened with U. S.
air strikes in Iran or possible military intervention in Syria or the
destabilized Pakistan;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:
That it is time to take labor's protest to a more powerful level of
struggle by calling on unions and working people in the U. S. and
internationally to mobilize for a "No Peace No Work Holiday" May 1,
2008 for 8 hours to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U. S. troops from the
Middle East; and
FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED:
That a clarion call from the ILWU be sent with an urgent appeal for
unity of action to the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition and all of
the international labor organizations to which we are affiliated to
bring an end to this bloody war once and for all.
Submitted by:
ILWU Local 10
passed overwhelmingly after thorough debate
A motion passed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union conference
FOR WORKERS' ACTION TO STOP THE WAR
WHEREAS: On May 1, 2003, at the ILWU Convention in San Francisco
resolutions were passed calling for an end to the war and occupation
in Iraq; and
WHEREAS: ILWU took the lead among labor unions in opposing this bloody
war and occupation for imperial domination; and
WHEREAS: Many unions and the overwhelming majority of the American
people now oppose this bipartisan and unjustifiable war in Iraq and
Afghanistan but the two major political parties, Democrats and
Republicans continue to fund the war; and
WHEREAS: Millions worldwide have marched and demonstrated against the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but have been unable to stop the wars; and
WHEREAS: ILWU's historic dock actions,
1) like the refusal of Local 10 longshoremen to load bombs for the
military dictatorship in Chile in 1978 and military cargo to the
Salvadoran military dictatorship in 1981 and
2) the honoring of the teachers' union antiwar picket May 19, 2007
against SSA in the port of Oakland stand as a limited but shining
example of how to oppose these wars; and
WHEREAS: The spread of war in the Middle East is threatened with U. S.
air strikes in Iran or possible military intervention in Syria or the
destabilized Pakistan;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:
That it is time to take labor's protest to a more powerful level of
struggle by calling on unions and working people in the U. S. and
internationally to mobilize for a "No Peace No Work Holiday" May 1,
2008 for 8 hours to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U. S. troops from the
Middle East; and
FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED:
That a clarion call from the ILWU be sent with an urgent appeal for
unity of action to the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition and all of
the international labor organizations to which we are affiliated to
bring an end to this bloody war once and for all.
Submitted by:
ILWU Local 10
passed overwhelmingly after thorough debate
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Solidarity and "troops out now"
Among other issues the upcoming Alliance for Workers' Liberty conference will debate our position on Iraq and Iran. This piece is intended to contribute to that discussion and explain some of the views of minority comrades.
Within our organisation there is a substantial minority grouping critical of the leadership's attitude to the occupation of Iraq. We argue that the only principled line on the conflict, and only chance to build independent working-class forces, is to stand sharply opposed to US-UK intervention in the region as well as Islamism. In contrast, the majority argue that we should acquiesce to the occupation of Iraq, since if we demanded that the troops leave and they did, Islamist militias would win out and crush democratic space in Iraq.
All of our comrades say they are for solidarity with Iraqi workers, and the debate is normally posed in terms of what slogans we should add to this position - demands like "troops out now", "troops out" or just a general sentiment "against the occupation". But is apparent that there is more to the disagreement than superficial differences in wording. The real divide is between those who believe that US 'globocop' actions are progressive but that socialists shouldn't "give them any credit in advance", and those who think that this misses the point of how to build an independent "third camp" of working-class forces which can stand on its own two feet.
My own differences with Martin Thomas's conference document for the majority are only partly about analysis of what is going on in Iraq. While I have stressed the idea that the Mahdi Army - backed by the Iranian regime - and sectarian militias are increasingly integrated into the occupation government already, and deny that the imperialist troops protect Iraqi workers (the Iraqi government's Decree 8750 renders unions semi-illegal and gives it the right to confiscate all of their funds; the US Army have attacked trade union offices; while all of the British troops are safely ensconced near Basra airport, since Brown is too embarrassed to remove them even though Moqtada al-Sadr already controls the streets), Martin focuses on what would happen if the troops left. I do not deny his assertion that if all the troops magically "disappeared" and the Iraqi government collapsed, the consequence would just be the victory of the best-armed militias. I do not say “troops out now” because I want that to happen. But nor can I accept Martin's terms of argument.
In his only reference to the idea that we should call for "troops out now" he writes,
"...if "troops out now" were somehow to happen, the result would almost certainly be full-scale war between different sectarian clerical fascist militias and then the destruction of the labour movement; the chopping-up of the country; the probable liquidation of any chances of Iraqi (or Arab-Iraqi) national self determination; and the destruction of any elements of democracy (free press, etc.)
"Solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement against both the US/UK occupation and the sectarian militias remains the indicated policy for socialists internationally. We reject negative slogans like "troops out now" which the actual balance of forces would fill with a reactionary political content".
This kind of schematic logic is no good. Marxists understand that social forces and classes do not exist in the abstract, isolated from one another, but instead that they are in struggle, and the subjective factor of political struggle can change the "balance of forces", which is neither fixed nor controlled by some ethereal hand of history. Martin's reference to "if "troops out now" were somehow to happen" makes no sense - in reality slogans do not mysteriously "happen" out of the blue, but are demands raised and fought for by real people. What interests us here is the slogans of the international workers' movement, the forces to which we are aligned and hope to influence.
Our politics, our programme and the slogans which crystallise them are agitational, designed to organise the working-class as well as forces such as women's, LGBT and student movements for struggle. If the workers' movement raised the demand "troops out now", it would not be some magic wand to make the troops "disappear", but a basis for the working class to organise in sharp hostility to US-UK imperialism as well as confronting Islamists and Iranian regional imperialism intervening in Iraq. As Sean Matgamna has written,
"One makes all kinds of educational agitation and propaganda demands, despite knowing that they will not be implemented immediately or precisely. Agitation, the spotlight of the steady beam of propaganda, is seen as preparing the way. The implementation of the demand presupposes a whole series of changes, which the raising of the demand will help to bring about. As strength is built up it becomes possible to act, to plan.”
“Troops out now" is not merely a radical posture. Clearly, we do not raise the slogan because we are comfortable in the belief that we are so weak that the demand will never be realised and so it doesn't matter what we say. Yet we also know that if we ever did organise enough workers around our demands to force the troops out, then the balance of forces would have changed and so the consequences of withdrawal would be different to the troops just "disappearing" tomorrow.
The problem with "troops out", i.e. missing out the word "now", is that in the context of the world we live in it would be seen to deliberately avoid saying "now" and give free rein for the troops to stay indefinitely. This looks like a variant of the majority view that we should accept the presence of troops until the trade unions do not need their protection. But the whole point is that the workers' movement will never grow to be in that position if it takes sides with the occupiers. While we may approve of some democratic side effects of the occupation, "refusing to grant it political support" at the same time as you go round telling people that you also "refuse to demand that the troops leave" is tonally and operationally nothing other than fostering illusions in the democratic credentials of the occupiers.
In the case of the majority, this is worsened by clumsy formulations which, for all of the qualifications and equivocation which surround them, imply taking sides with US imperialism. Martin, whose conference motion presented to National Committee on 1 March avoided any reference to sanctions and the threat of "surgical" air strikes in Iran, had written in October that although plans for war against Iran were "crazy", it was possible to imagine that "if it were possible to imagine some "surgical" operation that would stop Iran's hideous regime acquiring nuclear weapons, and take out the foul Ahmedinejad, it would be good", which is precisely the wrong argument to be making at a time when US threats strengthen the hand of the Iranian regime against our comrades, since it is able to appeal to nationalism and portray itself as "anti-imperialist".
The same goes for the argument that we should not call ourselves "anti-imperialist" since clerical reactionaries have adopted the label too. Firstly, if everyone followed the AWL's majority line, the result would be to buttress sectarian Islamist militias by allowing them to present themselves as the consistent opponents of the US Army, and by saying nothing about the need for Iraqi-Arab self determination we would concede an enormous amount of political territory to Islamists who claim that self determination should mean a patchwork of statelets run by clerical fascist mafias. And secondly, just because the words have been dragged through the mud is not a reason to abandon our politics - why should we not also dispense with the word "socialism", which for most people means something between Harold Wilson and Joseph Stalin?
The question of working-class agency is of vital importance for the minority. Articles by comrades such as Daniel Randall and myself have stressed the need for a working-class anti-war movement demonstrating that only the workers' movement - and not Iranian regional imperialism and Moqtada al-Sadr - can fight for both democratic rights (including national self-determination) and social liberation. Rather than imagining that occupying troops will protect the working-class, we should be calling for the arming of the workers and supporting efforts at community self-defense.
Also important here is working-class action at home - while actions such as those of the Motherwell train crew and the Italian dockers who refused to transport weapons for use in Iraq are occasional and receive little coverage in the Guardian, we must vocally propagandise about them as a means to undermine the war effort, and argue that they are necessarily the same struggle as oil workers in Iraq who strike against the looting of the country's oil by Halliburton. While in the lead-up to conference the majority have co-opted some of that point into their position, it does not sit well - if you think the occupiers' democratic war effort is the only hope for the Iraqi trade unions, how can you also be in favour of attempts to sabotage the troops carrying out that mission?
To refuse to call for the withdrawal of troops is to refuse to pose yourself sharply against the occupation, and so weakens efforts to organise anti-war workers' action. The majority's position reflects an unwillingness to take on this important question and acquiesces to US imperialism as a guarantor of democracy for a supposedly eternally weak working class. In contrast, the minority argue that we must struggle for a strong and independent third camp, with the international left and workers' movement organising around the slogans "Solidarity with Iraqi workers against the occupation and Islamism. Troops out now".
Within our organisation there is a substantial minority grouping critical of the leadership's attitude to the occupation of Iraq. We argue that the only principled line on the conflict, and only chance to build independent working-class forces, is to stand sharply opposed to US-UK intervention in the region as well as Islamism. In contrast, the majority argue that we should acquiesce to the occupation of Iraq, since if we demanded that the troops leave and they did, Islamist militias would win out and crush democratic space in Iraq.All of our comrades say they are for solidarity with Iraqi workers, and the debate is normally posed in terms of what slogans we should add to this position - demands like "troops out now", "troops out" or just a general sentiment "against the occupation". But is apparent that there is more to the disagreement than superficial differences in wording. The real divide is between those who believe that US 'globocop' actions are progressive but that socialists shouldn't "give them any credit in advance", and those who think that this misses the point of how to build an independent "third camp" of working-class forces which can stand on its own two feet.
My own differences with Martin Thomas's conference document for the majority are only partly about analysis of what is going on in Iraq. While I have stressed the idea that the Mahdi Army - backed by the Iranian regime - and sectarian militias are increasingly integrated into the occupation government already, and deny that the imperialist troops protect Iraqi workers (the Iraqi government's Decree 8750 renders unions semi-illegal and gives it the right to confiscate all of their funds; the US Army have attacked trade union offices; while all of the British troops are safely ensconced near Basra airport, since Brown is too embarrassed to remove them even though Moqtada al-Sadr already controls the streets), Martin focuses on what would happen if the troops left. I do not deny his assertion that if all the troops magically "disappeared" and the Iraqi government collapsed, the consequence would just be the victory of the best-armed militias. I do not say “troops out now” because I want that to happen. But nor can I accept Martin's terms of argument.
In his only reference to the idea that we should call for "troops out now" he writes,
"...if "troops out now" were somehow to happen, the result would almost certainly be full-scale war between different sectarian clerical fascist militias and then the destruction of the labour movement; the chopping-up of the country; the probable liquidation of any chances of Iraqi (or Arab-Iraqi) national self determination; and the destruction of any elements of democracy (free press, etc.)
"Solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement against both the US/UK occupation and the sectarian militias remains the indicated policy for socialists internationally. We reject negative slogans like "troops out now" which the actual balance of forces would fill with a reactionary political content".
This kind of schematic logic is no good. Marxists understand that social forces and classes do not exist in the abstract, isolated from one another, but instead that they are in struggle, and the subjective factor of political struggle can change the "balance of forces", which is neither fixed nor controlled by some ethereal hand of history. Martin's reference to "if "troops out now" were somehow to happen" makes no sense - in reality slogans do not mysteriously "happen" out of the blue, but are demands raised and fought for by real people. What interests us here is the slogans of the international workers' movement, the forces to which we are aligned and hope to influence.
Our politics, our programme and the slogans which crystallise them are agitational, designed to organise the working-class as well as forces such as women's, LGBT and student movements for struggle. If the workers' movement raised the demand "troops out now", it would not be some magic wand to make the troops "disappear", but a basis for the working class to organise in sharp hostility to US-UK imperialism as well as confronting Islamists and Iranian regional imperialism intervening in Iraq. As Sean Matgamna has written,
"One makes all kinds of educational agitation and propaganda demands, despite knowing that they will not be implemented immediately or precisely. Agitation, the spotlight of the steady beam of propaganda, is seen as preparing the way. The implementation of the demand presupposes a whole series of changes, which the raising of the demand will help to bring about. As strength is built up it becomes possible to act, to plan.”
“Troops out now" is not merely a radical posture. Clearly, we do not raise the slogan because we are comfortable in the belief that we are so weak that the demand will never be realised and so it doesn't matter what we say. Yet we also know that if we ever did organise enough workers around our demands to force the troops out, then the balance of forces would have changed and so the consequences of withdrawal would be different to the troops just "disappearing" tomorrow.
The problem with "troops out", i.e. missing out the word "now", is that in the context of the world we live in it would be seen to deliberately avoid saying "now" and give free rein for the troops to stay indefinitely. This looks like a variant of the majority view that we should accept the presence of troops until the trade unions do not need their protection. But the whole point is that the workers' movement will never grow to be in that position if it takes sides with the occupiers. While we may approve of some democratic side effects of the occupation, "refusing to grant it political support" at the same time as you go round telling people that you also "refuse to demand that the troops leave" is tonally and operationally nothing other than fostering illusions in the democratic credentials of the occupiers.
In the case of the majority, this is worsened by clumsy formulations which, for all of the qualifications and equivocation which surround them, imply taking sides with US imperialism. Martin, whose conference motion presented to National Committee on 1 March avoided any reference to sanctions and the threat of "surgical" air strikes in Iran, had written in October that although plans for war against Iran were "crazy", it was possible to imagine that "if it were possible to imagine some "surgical" operation that would stop Iran's hideous regime acquiring nuclear weapons, and take out the foul Ahmedinejad, it would be good", which is precisely the wrong argument to be making at a time when US threats strengthen the hand of the Iranian regime against our comrades, since it is able to appeal to nationalism and portray itself as "anti-imperialist".
The same goes for the argument that we should not call ourselves "anti-imperialist" since clerical reactionaries have adopted the label too. Firstly, if everyone followed the AWL's majority line, the result would be to buttress sectarian Islamist militias by allowing them to present themselves as the consistent opponents of the US Army, and by saying nothing about the need for Iraqi-Arab self determination we would concede an enormous amount of political territory to Islamists who claim that self determination should mean a patchwork of statelets run by clerical fascist mafias. And secondly, just because the words have been dragged through the mud is not a reason to abandon our politics - why should we not also dispense with the word "socialism", which for most people means something between Harold Wilson and Joseph Stalin?
The question of working-class agency is of vital importance for the minority. Articles by comrades such as Daniel Randall and myself have stressed the need for a working-class anti-war movement demonstrating that only the workers' movement - and not Iranian regional imperialism and Moqtada al-Sadr - can fight for both democratic rights (including national self-determination) and social liberation. Rather than imagining that occupying troops will protect the working-class, we should be calling for the arming of the workers and supporting efforts at community self-defense.
Also important here is working-class action at home - while actions such as those of the Motherwell train crew and the Italian dockers who refused to transport weapons for use in Iraq are occasional and receive little coverage in the Guardian, we must vocally propagandise about them as a means to undermine the war effort, and argue that they are necessarily the same struggle as oil workers in Iraq who strike against the looting of the country's oil by Halliburton. While in the lead-up to conference the majority have co-opted some of that point into their position, it does not sit well - if you think the occupiers' democratic war effort is the only hope for the Iraqi trade unions, how can you also be in favour of attempts to sabotage the troops carrying out that mission?
To refuse to call for the withdrawal of troops is to refuse to pose yourself sharply against the occupation, and so weakens efforts to organise anti-war workers' action. The majority's position reflects an unwillingness to take on this important question and acquiesces to US imperialism as a guarantor of democracy for a supposedly eternally weak working class. In contrast, the minority argue that we must struggle for a strong and independent third camp, with the international left and workers' movement organising around the slogans "Solidarity with Iraqi workers against the occupation and Islamism. Troops out now".
Monday, March 3, 2008
World Against War rally
Hezbollah were among the organisations represented at the 'World Against War' rally in Friends' Meeting House, London on 25 February, with the Stop the War Coalition seeing fit to give a platform to the clerical fascist Lebanese militia. Reflecting the StWC's eclecticism, this utter reactionary was speaking alongside Tony Benn, who gave his usual upper-class liberal speech about why the United Nations should be stronger and why we should learn from the Bible's lessons of contrition.
Introduced by Communist Party of Britain commissar Andrew Murray to rapturous applause from the 250-strong audience, the Hezbollah speaker Ibrahim Mousawi shied away from the Shia-supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-trade union rhetoric which his organisation peddles in the shanty towns of Beirut. Instead, he told us that Hezbollah are oh-so reasonable - "why do the Americans ignore the real terrorists at the expense of us, the bridge-builders?". Hezbollah are not led by a bunch of gangsters, but "engineers, lecturers and people from all walks of life".
Indeed, Hezbollah are fully willing to arrange a lash-up with the rest of the Lebanese ruling class, for example the pro-Western parties behind Prime Minister Siniora, to resolve the political crisis which has seen the country without a president for three months. Mousawi said that all Hezbollah want is to be able to veto anything the government tries to do - isn't that reasonable? Along with this, Hezbollah are strong proponents of Lebanon's sectarian political order, whereby seats in parliament are distributed according to religious group and politics is staged at the level of horse-trading between the leaders of competing faith and ethnic communities.
Crashing full frontal into Bond villain-esque self-parody with his long leather coat and black shirt, Mousawi - editor of a Hezbollah newspaper and former manager of a TV station which put out soap operas about the Jewish World Conspiracy - claimed that the problem in his country was the lack of a strong government, and argued that since the Lebanese government cannot be relied on to keep order and stand up to the Israelis, Hezbollah have every right to arm themselves and patrol the streets. At pains to deny that he hated the Jews (the western Trots don't really like that kind of thing, but it's fine for Lebanese TV), he appealed to "a man's right to protect his family" from Zionism.
The other speeches were rather less spicy. Lindsey German, the Socialist Workers' Party candidate for the London mayoral election, gave a dull talk about the hypocrisy of the British establishment and echoed much of Benn's liberal sentiment. For example, she talked at length about the "dodgy dossier" used by Tony Blair to make the case for war, and why he should be "taken to a war crimes trial in the Hague". But who does she think polices "international law"? Last time I checked, the United Nations was a cartel run by the imperialist powers victorious in World War II. Making no reference to socialism or workers in the Middle East, she did however attempt a 'radical' pitch - "Those who support the right of Hezbollah and Hamas to fight back are characterised as extremists. If opposing the government is extremist, then we're all extremists".
The only person on the platform whose views were worthy of respect was Hassan Jumaa, leader of the militant Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions which has waged several strikes against privatisation and looting of Iraq's major resource, demonstrating the potential of the working-class movement despite nightmarish circumstances. Although the union is non-sectarian and organises all oil workers, Juma'a is influenced by the soft-Islamist Shi'ite Fadila group, and so said little about the workers' movement's opposition to clerical reaction in Iraq.
Instead, he focused on the question of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the destruction the US and UK have unleashed. He commented that "the Iraqi workers will win victory for the oppressed Iraqi people" - given that the American mission's success is reliant on stable control of Iraqi resources, strikes represent a significant challenge for the occupiers. Indeed, Jumaa's attitude to the troops was stark, "you should not be taken in by those who say that the withdrawal of troops will bring death and destruction. The longer they, the source of death, stay, the worse it will get", and said that at the last two May Days the union had raised a call for the troops to leave Iraq. Without doubt, this was an optimistic characterisation of events, but Jumaa's understanding of the situation is certainly worthy of our attention.
Unfortunately, the audience was not allowed to ask any questions or make any comments, so we could not find out more about Jumaa's support for political Islam or how workers organise against the home-grown bourgeoisie. After all, in the eyes of the Stop the War Coalition and its SWP and Stalinist leadership, letting activists talk to the leading trade unionist in Iraq is not as exciting as giving a platform for a fascist to rant in defence of Hezbollah. It seems that for these "socialists", the workers' movement is just one part of the cross-class spectrum of "The Movement", and so giving a token ten minutes to someone like Hassan Jumaa is sufficient to cover their left flank.
Introduced by Communist Party of Britain commissar Andrew Murray to rapturous applause from the 250-strong audience, the Hezbollah speaker Ibrahim Mousawi shied away from the Shia-supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-trade union rhetoric which his organisation peddles in the shanty towns of Beirut. Instead, he told us that Hezbollah are oh-so reasonable - "why do the Americans ignore the real terrorists at the expense of us, the bridge-builders?". Hezbollah are not led by a bunch of gangsters, but "engineers, lecturers and people from all walks of life".
Indeed, Hezbollah are fully willing to arrange a lash-up with the rest of the Lebanese ruling class, for example the pro-Western parties behind Prime Minister Siniora, to resolve the political crisis which has seen the country without a president for three months. Mousawi said that all Hezbollah want is to be able to veto anything the government tries to do - isn't that reasonable? Along with this, Hezbollah are strong proponents of Lebanon's sectarian political order, whereby seats in parliament are distributed according to religious group and politics is staged at the level of horse-trading between the leaders of competing faith and ethnic communities.
Crashing full frontal into Bond villain-esque self-parody with his long leather coat and black shirt, Mousawi - editor of a Hezbollah newspaper and former manager of a TV station which put out soap operas about the Jewish World Conspiracy - claimed that the problem in his country was the lack of a strong government, and argued that since the Lebanese government cannot be relied on to keep order and stand up to the Israelis, Hezbollah have every right to arm themselves and patrol the streets. At pains to deny that he hated the Jews (the western Trots don't really like that kind of thing, but it's fine for Lebanese TV), he appealed to "a man's right to protect his family" from Zionism.
The other speeches were rather less spicy. Lindsey German, the Socialist Workers' Party candidate for the London mayoral election, gave a dull talk about the hypocrisy of the British establishment and echoed much of Benn's liberal sentiment. For example, she talked at length about the "dodgy dossier" used by Tony Blair to make the case for war, and why he should be "taken to a war crimes trial in the Hague". But who does she think polices "international law"? Last time I checked, the United Nations was a cartel run by the imperialist powers victorious in World War II. Making no reference to socialism or workers in the Middle East, she did however attempt a 'radical' pitch - "Those who support the right of Hezbollah and Hamas to fight back are characterised as extremists. If opposing the government is extremist, then we're all extremists".
The only person on the platform whose views were worthy of respect was Hassan Jumaa, leader of the militant Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions which has waged several strikes against privatisation and looting of Iraq's major resource, demonstrating the potential of the working-class movement despite nightmarish circumstances. Although the union is non-sectarian and organises all oil workers, Juma'a is influenced by the soft-Islamist Shi'ite Fadila group, and so said little about the workers' movement's opposition to clerical reaction in Iraq.
Instead, he focused on the question of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the destruction the US and UK have unleashed. He commented that "the Iraqi workers will win victory for the oppressed Iraqi people" - given that the American mission's success is reliant on stable control of Iraqi resources, strikes represent a significant challenge for the occupiers. Indeed, Jumaa's attitude to the troops was stark, "you should not be taken in by those who say that the withdrawal of troops will bring death and destruction. The longer they, the source of death, stay, the worse it will get", and said that at the last two May Days the union had raised a call for the troops to leave Iraq. Without doubt, this was an optimistic characterisation of events, but Jumaa's understanding of the situation is certainly worthy of our attention.
Unfortunately, the audience was not allowed to ask any questions or make any comments, so we could not find out more about Jumaa's support for political Islam or how workers organise against the home-grown bourgeoisie. After all, in the eyes of the Stop the War Coalition and its SWP and Stalinist leadership, letting activists talk to the leading trade unionist in Iraq is not as exciting as giving a platform for a fascist to rant in defence of Hezbollah. It seems that for these "socialists", the workers' movement is just one part of the cross-class spectrum of "The Movement", and so giving a token ten minutes to someone like Hassan Jumaa is sufficient to cover their left flank.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Capitalism and War
Yesterday I attended a Socialist Worker Student Society meeting at King's College London, with Alex Callinicos speaking on 'Capitalism and War'.
Callincos's lead off, arguing that the logic of capitalism inevitably leads to wars, was extremely bland, and furthermore failed to explain why war is inherent to capitalism. Instead, he simply gave various examples of the argument that 'big capitalist powers have a record of launching wars, ergo capitalism means war'.
Unsurprisingly, the result of this argument-by-correlation was that many confused members of the audience asked questions along the lines of "surely it's not just capitalism that causes war, but also religion and national conflicts" while others said that war had always existed. Since Callinicos had neither said that war is the logical product of class societies, nor argued that other oppressive ideas such as nationalism and religious chauvinism are rooted in class exploitation, he was forced to backtrack by these in fact rather facile questions and start again from scratch. Bizarrely, he angrily tore into one student who had said that there had always been conflicts, telling him "you should think twice about coming to a meeting and saying that before you've studied it".
This was pathetic, as was his speech about how for the majority of human history people had lived in egalitarian "primitive communist" societies where there was no war and all lived happily, and then extrapolated from this that "class is in fact a marginal factor in human history". Of course, even though it is true that class societies have existed for only fifteen thousand years or so, the large majority of humans in history have lived in class society, and "primitive communism" is certainly not what we are fighting for. In any case, it was silly of Callinicos to get drawn into such sophistry rather than try and talk about how class impacts other factors as well as class's relationship with imperialism.
Indeed, I posed the question of how it was possible to fight against imperialism on the level of supporting the ruling class of Iran against the United States (and its own working class), given that it is far from anti-capitalist. Its relationship with imperialism is contradictory - much as Iran faces sanctions and threats, its regime is willing to implement IMF reforms and support the occupation of Iraq in the hope of grabbing its slice of the pie. Disingenuously I also asked if he could 'expand' on the issue workers', women's and student's struggles in Iran, which he had neglected to mention.
Callinicos in fact has no perspective whatsoever for working-class opposition to imperialism, as he demonstrated when he responded (at the second time of asking), telling me that while he supports "petitions for democracy" in Iran, the fact that the Iranian government is not consistently anti-imperialist is no reason for the USA to invade it (!) Interrupting, I repeated my question about whether Callinicos supports strikes in Iran and the imprisoned students, but he again ignored the question - clearly, for him "petitions for democracy" and supporting "reformists" within the elite is sufficient.
Therefore, we had a meeting on 'Capitalism and War' where the SWP speaker said that war was the result of capitalism - yet then told his audience that rather than opposing capitalism or supporting working class struggle, we should simply devote our efforts into Grand Old Duke of York demo-building in "solidarity" with the rulers of Iran.
Callincos's lead off, arguing that the logic of capitalism inevitably leads to wars, was extremely bland, and furthermore failed to explain why war is inherent to capitalism. Instead, he simply gave various examples of the argument that 'big capitalist powers have a record of launching wars, ergo capitalism means war'.
Unsurprisingly, the result of this argument-by-correlation was that many confused members of the audience asked questions along the lines of "surely it's not just capitalism that causes war, but also religion and national conflicts" while others said that war had always existed. Since Callinicos had neither said that war is the logical product of class societies, nor argued that other oppressive ideas such as nationalism and religious chauvinism are rooted in class exploitation, he was forced to backtrack by these in fact rather facile questions and start again from scratch. Bizarrely, he angrily tore into one student who had said that there had always been conflicts, telling him "you should think twice about coming to a meeting and saying that before you've studied it".
This was pathetic, as was his speech about how for the majority of human history people had lived in egalitarian "primitive communist" societies where there was no war and all lived happily, and then extrapolated from this that "class is in fact a marginal factor in human history". Of course, even though it is true that class societies have existed for only fifteen thousand years or so, the large majority of humans in history have lived in class society, and "primitive communism" is certainly not what we are fighting for. In any case, it was silly of Callinicos to get drawn into such sophistry rather than try and talk about how class impacts other factors as well as class's relationship with imperialism.
Indeed, I posed the question of how it was possible to fight against imperialism on the level of supporting the ruling class of Iran against the United States (and its own working class), given that it is far from anti-capitalist. Its relationship with imperialism is contradictory - much as Iran faces sanctions and threats, its regime is willing to implement IMF reforms and support the occupation of Iraq in the hope of grabbing its slice of the pie. Disingenuously I also asked if he could 'expand' on the issue workers', women's and student's struggles in Iran, which he had neglected to mention.
Callinicos in fact has no perspective whatsoever for working-class opposition to imperialism, as he demonstrated when he responded (at the second time of asking), telling me that while he supports "petitions for democracy" in Iran, the fact that the Iranian government is not consistently anti-imperialist is no reason for the USA to invade it (!) Interrupting, I repeated my question about whether Callinicos supports strikes in Iran and the imprisoned students, but he again ignored the question - clearly, for him "petitions for democracy" and supporting "reformists" within the elite is sufficient.
Therefore, we had a meeting on 'Capitalism and War' where the SWP speaker said that war was the result of capitalism - yet then told his audience that rather than opposing capitalism or supporting working class struggle, we should simply devote our efforts into Grand Old Duke of York demo-building in "solidarity" with the rulers of Iran.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Working class internationalism and the Middle East
The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments. However, in order to effectively combat imperialism and war, it is necessary that we understand what ‘anti-imperialism’ means, who is anti-imperialist, and what relationship that has with working-class politics.
Unfortunately, the dominant conception of ‘anti-imperialism’ on the British left today, as schooled to thousands of young new activists by organisations such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, is wholly inadequate. As I shall explain, rather than taking imperialism on at a structural level, i.e. by understanding it as the logic of modern capitalism, the SWP along with orthodox Trotskyist and Stalinist groups take an anti-war stance entirely abstract from any analysis of class relations or democratic rights such as self determination. For this reason, they take the position that any opponent or competitor of the largest imperialist power – the United States – is therefore ‘anti-imperialist’ and therefore worthy of support.
In order to sustain this illusion, they exaggerate or falsify the progressive characteristics of the forces they support. For example, they claim that that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and wax lyrical about the welfare programmes and "women's participation" in Hamas. At Stop the War conference these ‘anti-imperialists’ entertained Somaye Zadeh, who lied outrageously to play down the human rights abuses of the Tehran regime. In the NUS left unity discussions the SWP were unwilling to raise slogans to support workers in Iran but happy to make vague gestures of support for "democratic forces". Claiming that the existence of pro-reform elements within the elite is itself evidence that Iran is democratic, they look to sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change rather than encouraging the working class to overthrow it.
They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba. Indeed, so progressive do they deem these ‘anti-imperialist’ friends in the Middle East that they see fit to deny the existence of a working-class movement opposed to both imperialism and political Islam. But this attitude is not just a betrayal of our comrades in the Middle East, who so badly need solidarity from the international labour movement – it is also a completely wrong-headed understanding of what forces are able to challenge imperialism.
Of course, helped by the sabre-rattling of George Bush and Western sanctions, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is plenty able to speechify with anti-imperialist rhetoric - and yet not only did the Iranian regime ban demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, but it supported the invasion, and furthermore supports the occupation of Afghanistan. Ahmedinejad has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise the Iranian economy and at the same time has clamped down on trade unions, with long periods in jail for activists in the militant bus workers’ union. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr, which all call for the immediate withdrawal of troops, are not even sufficiently ‘anti-imperialist’ as to refuse to participate in the occupation government. Hezbollah are Shia sectarians and radical Islamists, but their row with Prime Minister Siniora in fact has the aim of grabbing a few posts in a coalition government. On the other side of the conflict, the Americans have their own Islamist allies and militias in Iraq, and, indeed, as in the past with Saddam Hussein, are perfectly willing to deal with any local despot.
While all the organisations I have mentioned have at times been in direct conflict with US imperialism, and their relations with the US bourgeoisie are complex, they are far from consistently anti-imperialist. They are little but sections of the ruling class looking to grab a slice of the action, yet the Socialist Workers’ Party characterises them as relatively progressive since they are not the ‘main’ enemy. A logical extension of the same idea, as employed by Socialist Action and the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist), is that the Chinese government is (or “remains”) ‘anti-imperialist’ since it is in competition with the USA, or liberal support for the European Union as some sort of counterweight to George Bush.
What is missing from all of these ideas is any notion of class, with barely even the suggestion that imperialism is premised on a set of class relations. The Middle Eastern labour movement, which is mostly relatively weak, obviously disappoints these people. We can see the same mistake being made by such people as Nick Cohen, the Euston Manifesto group and ex-Marxists like Norman Geras who, thinking that the working-class is dead after the fall of the Soviet bureaucracy, support “humanitarian” interventions or imperialist missions to spread democracy, with the US Army staging a Bonaparte-like fight to spread the French Revolution by the sword. They deprive words like ‘democracy’ (and they even speak of ‘workers’ rights’) of any meaningful content, substituting liberation-from-above by imperialist powers for the idea that people should take control over their own lives. Operationally, these people are not left-wing in any real sense, since they have no understanding of agency other than that US troops can be an effective force for ‘change’.
For those who have stuck by Marxism, the recent conflicts in the Middle East have just offered further bloody proof of the absolute impossibility of imperialism serving the cause of democracy. We stick unfailingly by the idea that it is the working class which fights for social liberation, and even if it is weak in the here and now we must seek to build its organisations, not rely on some two-bit democrat in a smart suit or a general’s epaulettes.
The stance of the majority group in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, whose ideas are explicitly based on the “third camp” of the working class, is not the same as Cohen and his ilk. Engaging in real solidarity work with comrades in the Middle East, the AWL’s refusal to call for the occupying troops to leave Iraq is predicated on the understanding that their withdrawal would destroy the Iraqi labour movement, since if Islamists came to power they would not tolerate trade unions, or indeed women’s or LGBT organisations. If you believe the AWL majority, the call for “troops out now” is counterposed to defence of the Iraqi workers’ movement.
However, this understanding of events, along with the AWL’s positions on Iran and Palestine, belies some of the same problems as both the SWP and their allies and the Eustonites. The question of class independence is not always in the forefront of their minds. In practice, pessimistic about the prospects for the working class to stand up for itself, the AWL acquiesces to imperialist involvement in the region in the here and now the belief that it will be able to hold Islamism at bay and so create breathing space for the workers’ movement to grow. Of course, we are always living in the “here and now”, while the question of how and why the Iraqi left and trade unions are meant to grow in the “meantime” before the troops leave is barely considered.
Yet it is apparent that the occupation is not a bulwark against Islamism – as I have said, there are numerous Islamist parties and associated militias in the seat of power under the occupation, while most trade union activity is illegal. The imperialist occupiers would far rather make backroom deals to put the Islamists in charge than devote their time to defending workers’ organisations from the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr and his forces.
Furthermore, it is quite clear that if the workers’ movement fails to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops, it will help Islamist groups foster illusions in their own ‘anti-imperialist’ character and abstain from having anything to say about the question of Iraqi self-determination, which should hardly be left for Shia or Sunni supremacists to carve up. If the labour movement did reach the position where it could force the realisation of the slogan “troops out now”, then clearly the balance of forces would shift in favour of working-class internationalism and against clerical fascist reaction.
But not only does the AWL refuse to call for “troops out of Iraq now” in the understanding that the workers’ movement will be crushed if they are withdrawn, but it supports the US-EU-backed Fatah to stave off Hamas and has even taken a soft stance on US aggression against Iran. In Solidarity Mark Osborn has played down the idea that Palestinian workers could act independently of Fatah, “under Fatah there is some freedom for a third camp to develop; under Hamas there is none. David doesn’t like the choice, Fatah or Hamas. I don’t like it much myself. But during the fighting in Gaza that’s what it came down to”, while Martin Thomas made the hypothesis “if it were possible to imagine some ‘surgical’ operation that would stop Iran’s hideous regime acquiring nuclear weapons, and take out the foul Ahmadinejad, it would be good”, as if it were even vaguely plausible that such an eventuality could a) not kill thousands of people b) not strengthen the hand of the regime to crush internal dissent and c) replace the Ahmedinejad government with anything better. This is not a consistent third camp position, but one which veers towards support for non-working class forces who happen to use the right catchphrases about “democracy”, “two states” and so on.
I refute the suggestion that we must prioritise opposing the occupation of Iraq or war and sanctions against Iran over direct solidarity with workers, women and students in those countries, or indeed vice-versa. This idea concedes an awful lot of ground to the Stalinist worldview which sees all Middle Eastern workers with democratic or secular goals as ‘objective’ allies of imperialism, and claiming that any talk of democracy is siding with George Bush, seeks to set a dividing line between anti-war and workers’ solidarity efforts. Equally, I do not accept that we should "prioritise" either opposition to imperialism or opposition to Islamists over the other - we shouldn't be allying with either.
Far from being counterposed, these two fronts of struggle are inextricably linked. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and force the realisation of that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable, so it doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Even if they do not receive prominent coverage in the international pages of the bourgeois media, actions like those of the train crew in Scotland or dockers in the United States who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can achieve through its own struggles
This idea of working-class internationalism does not just mean trade union conferences passing resolutions about the war, or bureaucrats in suits speechifying about the need to give a bit of money to the Stop the War Coalition, but practical solidarity action with our comrades abroad, critical engagement with the ideas of the Middle Eastern left (including encouraging exile communities to assimilate into the local left) and propaganda which sharply poses the question of how workers in countries like Britain can fight in common with their counterparts abroad.
The defining characteristic of most of the far left’s stance on imperialism is a profound retreat from class, looking to any number of reactionaries and local bourgeoisies to resist the influence of the US hyperpower. Of course, it is true that despite large strikes in the Iraqi oil fields and Egyptian textile factories, the Middle Eastern working class is far from being in a position to defeat imperialism and Islamism. But that does not mean that we can loosen our grip on the Marxist understanding of class independence – the growth of our forces, which currently appear weak, is the only hope we have for democracy and peace in the Middle East, and – worldwide - we must strive unerringly to develop workers’ understanding of their independent agency. The AWL does have a much stronger class focus than other left groups, yet has still failed to develop a real understanding of working-class internationalism and what exactly constitutes an anti-imperialist workers’ movement.
Solidarity with Iraqi workers!
Troops out now!
Unfortunately, the dominant conception of ‘anti-imperialism’ on the British left today, as schooled to thousands of young new activists by organisations such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, is wholly inadequate. As I shall explain, rather than taking imperialism on at a structural level, i.e. by understanding it as the logic of modern capitalism, the SWP along with orthodox Trotskyist and Stalinist groups take an anti-war stance entirely abstract from any analysis of class relations or democratic rights such as self determination. For this reason, they take the position that any opponent or competitor of the largest imperialist power – the United States – is therefore ‘anti-imperialist’ and therefore worthy of support.
In order to sustain this illusion, they exaggerate or falsify the progressive characteristics of the forces they support. For example, they claim that that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and wax lyrical about the welfare programmes and "women's participation" in Hamas. At Stop the War conference these ‘anti-imperialists’ entertained Somaye Zadeh, who lied outrageously to play down the human rights abuses of the Tehran regime. In the NUS left unity discussions the SWP were unwilling to raise slogans to support workers in Iran but happy to make vague gestures of support for "democratic forces". Claiming that the existence of pro-reform elements within the elite is itself evidence that Iran is democratic, they look to sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change rather than encouraging the working class to overthrow it.
They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba. Indeed, so progressive do they deem these ‘anti-imperialist’ friends in the Middle East that they see fit to deny the existence of a working-class movement opposed to both imperialism and political Islam. But this attitude is not just a betrayal of our comrades in the Middle East, who so badly need solidarity from the international labour movement – it is also a completely wrong-headed understanding of what forces are able to challenge imperialism.
Of course, helped by the sabre-rattling of George Bush and Western sanctions, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is plenty able to speechify with anti-imperialist rhetoric - and yet not only did the Iranian regime ban demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, but it supported the invasion, and furthermore supports the occupation of Afghanistan. Ahmedinejad has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise the Iranian economy and at the same time has clamped down on trade unions, with long periods in jail for activists in the militant bus workers’ union. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr, which all call for the immediate withdrawal of troops, are not even sufficiently ‘anti-imperialist’ as to refuse to participate in the occupation government. Hezbollah are Shia sectarians and radical Islamists, but their row with Prime Minister Siniora in fact has the aim of grabbing a few posts in a coalition government. On the other side of the conflict, the Americans have their own Islamist allies and militias in Iraq, and, indeed, as in the past with Saddam Hussein, are perfectly willing to deal with any local despot.
While all the organisations I have mentioned have at times been in direct conflict with US imperialism, and their relations with the US bourgeoisie are complex, they are far from consistently anti-imperialist. They are little but sections of the ruling class looking to grab a slice of the action, yet the Socialist Workers’ Party characterises them as relatively progressive since they are not the ‘main’ enemy. A logical extension of the same idea, as employed by Socialist Action and the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist), is that the Chinese government is (or “remains”) ‘anti-imperialist’ since it is in competition with the USA, or liberal support for the European Union as some sort of counterweight to George Bush.
What is missing from all of these ideas is any notion of class, with barely even the suggestion that imperialism is premised on a set of class relations. The Middle Eastern labour movement, which is mostly relatively weak, obviously disappoints these people. We can see the same mistake being made by such people as Nick Cohen, the Euston Manifesto group and ex-Marxists like Norman Geras who, thinking that the working-class is dead after the fall of the Soviet bureaucracy, support “humanitarian” interventions or imperialist missions to spread democracy, with the US Army staging a Bonaparte-like fight to spread the French Revolution by the sword. They deprive words like ‘democracy’ (and they even speak of ‘workers’ rights’) of any meaningful content, substituting liberation-from-above by imperialist powers for the idea that people should take control over their own lives. Operationally, these people are not left-wing in any real sense, since they have no understanding of agency other than that US troops can be an effective force for ‘change’.
For those who have stuck by Marxism, the recent conflicts in the Middle East have just offered further bloody proof of the absolute impossibility of imperialism serving the cause of democracy. We stick unfailingly by the idea that it is the working class which fights for social liberation, and even if it is weak in the here and now we must seek to build its organisations, not rely on some two-bit democrat in a smart suit or a general’s epaulettes.
The stance of the majority group in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, whose ideas are explicitly based on the “third camp” of the working class, is not the same as Cohen and his ilk. Engaging in real solidarity work with comrades in the Middle East, the AWL’s refusal to call for the occupying troops to leave Iraq is predicated on the understanding that their withdrawal would destroy the Iraqi labour movement, since if Islamists came to power they would not tolerate trade unions, or indeed women’s or LGBT organisations. If you believe the AWL majority, the call for “troops out now” is counterposed to defence of the Iraqi workers’ movement.
However, this understanding of events, along with the AWL’s positions on Iran and Palestine, belies some of the same problems as both the SWP and their allies and the Eustonites. The question of class independence is not always in the forefront of their minds. In practice, pessimistic about the prospects for the working class to stand up for itself, the AWL acquiesces to imperialist involvement in the region in the here and now the belief that it will be able to hold Islamism at bay and so create breathing space for the workers’ movement to grow. Of course, we are always living in the “here and now”, while the question of how and why the Iraqi left and trade unions are meant to grow in the “meantime” before the troops leave is barely considered.
Yet it is apparent that the occupation is not a bulwark against Islamism – as I have said, there are numerous Islamist parties and associated militias in the seat of power under the occupation, while most trade union activity is illegal. The imperialist occupiers would far rather make backroom deals to put the Islamists in charge than devote their time to defending workers’ organisations from the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr and his forces.
Furthermore, it is quite clear that if the workers’ movement fails to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops, it will help Islamist groups foster illusions in their own ‘anti-imperialist’ character and abstain from having anything to say about the question of Iraqi self-determination, which should hardly be left for Shia or Sunni supremacists to carve up. If the labour movement did reach the position where it could force the realisation of the slogan “troops out now”, then clearly the balance of forces would shift in favour of working-class internationalism and against clerical fascist reaction.
But not only does the AWL refuse to call for “troops out of Iraq now” in the understanding that the workers’ movement will be crushed if they are withdrawn, but it supports the US-EU-backed Fatah to stave off Hamas and has even taken a soft stance on US aggression against Iran. In Solidarity Mark Osborn has played down the idea that Palestinian workers could act independently of Fatah, “under Fatah there is some freedom for a third camp to develop; under Hamas there is none. David doesn’t like the choice, Fatah or Hamas. I don’t like it much myself. But during the fighting in Gaza that’s what it came down to”, while Martin Thomas made the hypothesis “if it were possible to imagine some ‘surgical’ operation that would stop Iran’s hideous regime acquiring nuclear weapons, and take out the foul Ahmadinejad, it would be good”, as if it were even vaguely plausible that such an eventuality could a) not kill thousands of people b) not strengthen the hand of the regime to crush internal dissent and c) replace the Ahmedinejad government with anything better. This is not a consistent third camp position, but one which veers towards support for non-working class forces who happen to use the right catchphrases about “democracy”, “two states” and so on.
I refute the suggestion that we must prioritise opposing the occupation of Iraq or war and sanctions against Iran over direct solidarity with workers, women and students in those countries, or indeed vice-versa. This idea concedes an awful lot of ground to the Stalinist worldview which sees all Middle Eastern workers with democratic or secular goals as ‘objective’ allies of imperialism, and claiming that any talk of democracy is siding with George Bush, seeks to set a dividing line between anti-war and workers’ solidarity efforts. Equally, I do not accept that we should "prioritise" either opposition to imperialism or opposition to Islamists over the other - we shouldn't be allying with either.
Far from being counterposed, these two fronts of struggle are inextricably linked. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and force the realisation of that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable, so it doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Even if they do not receive prominent coverage in the international pages of the bourgeois media, actions like those of the train crew in Scotland or dockers in the United States who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can achieve through its own struggles
This idea of working-class internationalism does not just mean trade union conferences passing resolutions about the war, or bureaucrats in suits speechifying about the need to give a bit of money to the Stop the War Coalition, but practical solidarity action with our comrades abroad, critical engagement with the ideas of the Middle Eastern left (including encouraging exile communities to assimilate into the local left) and propaganda which sharply poses the question of how workers in countries like Britain can fight in common with their counterparts abroad.
The defining characteristic of most of the far left’s stance on imperialism is a profound retreat from class, looking to any number of reactionaries and local bourgeoisies to resist the influence of the US hyperpower. Of course, it is true that despite large strikes in the Iraqi oil fields and Egyptian textile factories, the Middle Eastern working class is far from being in a position to defeat imperialism and Islamism. But that does not mean that we can loosen our grip on the Marxist understanding of class independence – the growth of our forces, which currently appear weak, is the only hope we have for democracy and peace in the Middle East, and – worldwide - we must strive unerringly to develop workers’ understanding of their independent agency. The AWL does have a much stronger class focus than other left groups, yet has still failed to develop a real understanding of working-class internationalism and what exactly constitutes an anti-imperialist workers’ movement.
Solidarity with Iraqi workers!
Troops out now!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Communist Students conference
On Saturday 16th I attended the conference of Communist Students, the autonomous student organisation connected to the CPGB/Weekly Worker group. Around 25 people attended, of whom only around a quarter were actual CPGB members (as far as I could tell). Most of those attending were members of CS, but there were also a few of their contacts who I hadn't met before, as well as Bill Jefferies of Permanent Revolution.
The first significant discussion was on how we should fight against the British National Party, a debate which has recently had significant coverage in the Weekly Worker. While Ben Lewis, who led off the session, believes that we should be flexible in our tactics as regards the BNP, and although not necessarily seeking to organise meetings with the far right we should sometimes be prepared to debate them, others such as the Permanent Revolution group think that any debate legitimises the ideas of 'fascists' (there was a subordinate debate as to whether the BNP are actually fascists).
Ben talked about the way in which the SWP and the Unite Against Fascism campaign subscribe to liberal anti-fascism, seeking to defend 'normal' establishment political discourse against fascists, whose ideas are 'beyond the pale'. While the BNP has filled a political space vacated by Labour - claiming to have all the answers to some very real concerns of (white!) working class voters such as jobs and housing - and indeed won 800,000 votes in the European election, UAF just go round telling people not to 'vote Nazi', reminding them that Nazis are 'really, really bad'. In doing this they ignore the reasons why people vote BNP rather than Labour, Lib Dem or Tory - one SWPer he quoted even referred to BNP voters as 'the scum on the estates'.
Bill Jefferies' response was correct insofar as it stressed the need for working-class and minority community self-defence against fascists, and furthermore said that, unlike the SWP, he would not call on the bourgeois state to ban fascists, since any anti-free speech laws would just as easily be used against the far left. It is important that anti-fascism is a working-class cause, not an exercise in liberal moral condemnation of BNP voters. However, I think his argument that we should always refuse to debate fascists was wrong-headed, based as it was on the idea that since fascists are 'really, really bad', we should not give them legitimacy by sharing a platform with them. A couple of others, including James Turley, added that if you debate fascists and sweep the floor with their absurd ideas, they will still have won even if they pick up a couple of contacts by doing the meeting.
This was disingenous - the debate was not really about "should we write to the BNP and ask if they'd do a joint public meeting", but whether it was appropriate to boycott election hustings etc. in which they would also participate. Bill Jefferies said that a couple of years ago a Workers' Power comrade at a student union hustings debated a BNP candidate, but now he thinks she should just have "mobilised the audience against him". Ben Lewis made the obvious retort that a revolutionary standing in an election should seek to mobilise the audience against all of the other bourgeois candidates.
For my part, I said that if you made a principle out of refusing to share a platform with the BNP, then why not boycott the Tories too? Or the Liberal Democrats? Of course, in reality, tearing someone's ideas to shreds at a hustings is not 'legitimising' their politics. I furthermore pointed out that not only do the UAF refuse to debate the BNP, but they also refuse to engage with any of their ideas at all, telling people "don't vote Nazi, vote for anyone else" rather than saying "yes, housing, jobs and public services really are concerns, but black workers are not the problem". Lining up with the bourgeois parties and telling alienated Labour voters who vote BNP that they are just Nazi morons is no good - we should seek to win over their voters. Many of those who turn to the BNP would not do so if the left and workers' movement had more coherence and could ourselves promote a real alternative.
After a debate over whether CS should support the IWW union and an interesting discussion on student politics, and whether it is possible to build mass student campaigns on issues like fees - or indeed on international politics - the focus of the conference turned to imperialism and the Middle East. This was staged as a debate between the chair of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign, the CPGB's Tina Becker and myself (i.e. an AWL member with a "troops out now" position).
I found the politics of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign somewhat bizarre - while the speaker was strongly opposed to the Iranian regime and its various satellite organisations (he mentioned in particular the homophobia of the Mehdi Army), he did not have any particular focus on the working class as an anti-imperialist force, and lauded the home-grown Iraqi resistance groups. While Islamist forces are undoubtedly even more vicious, I was surprised that to this he counterposed secular Arab nationalism, and indeed the Ba'ath Party, claiming that Saddam Hussein remained the "legitimate" president of Iraq under "international law".
This was an unusual position, invoking laws created by the imperialist powers themselves in order to guarantee self-determination.
Indeed, he appeared to think that whatever happens in Iraq is fine, as long as there's no interference from the USA, UK or Iran. But while I opposed the war which provoked Saddam Hussein's downfall, I cannot stomach the idea that Saddam Hussein is "legitimate" - why has he any more right to rule than the dictator he overthrew, or the guy before him, and so on? Tina Becker took the Iraq Solidarity Campaign speaker to task on all of these points.
In my lead off I stressed the idea that no force in the Middle East other than the working class can introduce democracy, and no force other than the working class is, or even could be, anti-imperialist. Imperialism is the logic of modern capitalism, not something which exists in the abstract, and local bourgeoisies cannot be trusted to oppose it. Look at the Tehran theocracy - it spouts anti-imperialist rhetoric and yet supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, supports the occupation of Afghanistan and has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise its economy. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr are not even sufficiently anti-imperialist as to refuse to participate in the occupation government.
Yet the SWP instead exaggerate the "progressive" character of the forces which it sees as anti-imperialist - for example, claiming that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and endorsing the welfare programme and "women's participation" in Hamas. They would rather look to "reform" elements within the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change than encourage the working class to overthrow it. They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba.
I did however address the complexities of the kind of solidarity we need with workers in the Middle East. I expressed my disagreement with the majority position of the AWL which, while explicitly focused on the "third camp" of the working class, can collapse into acquiescence to imperialism when the workers appear too weak to act on their own. The AWL's refusal to call for troops out now, and indeed its support for Fatah against Hamas, are both predicated on the idea that the workers will be crushed without their imperialist guardians - yet how is the "third camp" ever to grow as an independent force if in the "here and now" (i.e. all the time) it does not cut itself sharply against both imperialism and Islamist reaction?
Our support for the working class in the Middle East must be linked to our tactics at home. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and realise that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable so doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Actions like those of the train crew in Scotland who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can do itself.
I then briefly turned to the question of engaging with left groups in the Middle East, and said that as well as teaching ourselves about workers', women's, LGBT and student struggles in the region (which the SWP deny the existence of), we should critically engage with the ideas of our comrades there. Giving money to organisations in the Middle Eastern left is useful - particularly given their pressing need for self-defence - but we must also learn from the comrades and argue with their positions.
In the discussion that followed I broadly agreed with much of what was said by CS comrades, although I feel that they are too willing to defend those who raise the slogan "troops out now" from an abstract perspective with no reference to class. My whole point was that we should take a strict class standpoint against imperialism and Islamism, and discussion about which of the two heads of reaction is worse than the other or whether "the main enemy is at home" does not give us much tactical direction.
Equally, I have no doubt that neither the "bring the troops home" line of Barack Obama nor the Stalinist-Islamist use of "troops out now" by Galloway and his ilk is better than the position of Sean Matgamna. Nevertheless, my criticisms here should be qualified by a positive attitude towards Communist Students' and the CPGB's Hands Off the People of Iran campaign, although I do think they should make more of an effort to foster these ideas in the labour movement rather than just in the anti-war and student milieux.
The first significant discussion was on how we should fight against the British National Party, a debate which has recently had significant coverage in the Weekly Worker. While Ben Lewis, who led off the session, believes that we should be flexible in our tactics as regards the BNP, and although not necessarily seeking to organise meetings with the far right we should sometimes be prepared to debate them, others such as the Permanent Revolution group think that any debate legitimises the ideas of 'fascists' (there was a subordinate debate as to whether the BNP are actually fascists).
Ben talked about the way in which the SWP and the Unite Against Fascism campaign subscribe to liberal anti-fascism, seeking to defend 'normal' establishment political discourse against fascists, whose ideas are 'beyond the pale'. While the BNP has filled a political space vacated by Labour - claiming to have all the answers to some very real concerns of (white!) working class voters such as jobs and housing - and indeed won 800,000 votes in the European election, UAF just go round telling people not to 'vote Nazi', reminding them that Nazis are 'really, really bad'. In doing this they ignore the reasons why people vote BNP rather than Labour, Lib Dem or Tory - one SWPer he quoted even referred to BNP voters as 'the scum on the estates'.
Bill Jefferies' response was correct insofar as it stressed the need for working-class and minority community self-defence against fascists, and furthermore said that, unlike the SWP, he would not call on the bourgeois state to ban fascists, since any anti-free speech laws would just as easily be used against the far left. It is important that anti-fascism is a working-class cause, not an exercise in liberal moral condemnation of BNP voters. However, I think his argument that we should always refuse to debate fascists was wrong-headed, based as it was on the idea that since fascists are 'really, really bad', we should not give them legitimacy by sharing a platform with them. A couple of others, including James Turley, added that if you debate fascists and sweep the floor with their absurd ideas, they will still have won even if they pick up a couple of contacts by doing the meeting.
This was disingenous - the debate was not really about "should we write to the BNP and ask if they'd do a joint public meeting", but whether it was appropriate to boycott election hustings etc. in which they would also participate. Bill Jefferies said that a couple of years ago a Workers' Power comrade at a student union hustings debated a BNP candidate, but now he thinks she should just have "mobilised the audience against him". Ben Lewis made the obvious retort that a revolutionary standing in an election should seek to mobilise the audience against all of the other bourgeois candidates.
For my part, I said that if you made a principle out of refusing to share a platform with the BNP, then why not boycott the Tories too? Or the Liberal Democrats? Of course, in reality, tearing someone's ideas to shreds at a hustings is not 'legitimising' their politics. I furthermore pointed out that not only do the UAF refuse to debate the BNP, but they also refuse to engage with any of their ideas at all, telling people "don't vote Nazi, vote for anyone else" rather than saying "yes, housing, jobs and public services really are concerns, but black workers are not the problem". Lining up with the bourgeois parties and telling alienated Labour voters who vote BNP that they are just Nazi morons is no good - we should seek to win over their voters. Many of those who turn to the BNP would not do so if the left and workers' movement had more coherence and could ourselves promote a real alternative.
After a debate over whether CS should support the IWW union and an interesting discussion on student politics, and whether it is possible to build mass student campaigns on issues like fees - or indeed on international politics - the focus of the conference turned to imperialism and the Middle East. This was staged as a debate between the chair of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign, the CPGB's Tina Becker and myself (i.e. an AWL member with a "troops out now" position).
I found the politics of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign somewhat bizarre - while the speaker was strongly opposed to the Iranian regime and its various satellite organisations (he mentioned in particular the homophobia of the Mehdi Army), he did not have any particular focus on the working class as an anti-imperialist force, and lauded the home-grown Iraqi resistance groups. While Islamist forces are undoubtedly even more vicious, I was surprised that to this he counterposed secular Arab nationalism, and indeed the Ba'ath Party, claiming that Saddam Hussein remained the "legitimate" president of Iraq under "international law".
This was an unusual position, invoking laws created by the imperialist powers themselves in order to guarantee self-determination.
Indeed, he appeared to think that whatever happens in Iraq is fine, as long as there's no interference from the USA, UK or Iran. But while I opposed the war which provoked Saddam Hussein's downfall, I cannot stomach the idea that Saddam Hussein is "legitimate" - why has he any more right to rule than the dictator he overthrew, or the guy before him, and so on? Tina Becker took the Iraq Solidarity Campaign speaker to task on all of these points.
In my lead off I stressed the idea that no force in the Middle East other than the working class can introduce democracy, and no force other than the working class is, or even could be, anti-imperialist. Imperialism is the logic of modern capitalism, not something which exists in the abstract, and local bourgeoisies cannot be trusted to oppose it. Look at the Tehran theocracy - it spouts anti-imperialist rhetoric and yet supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, supports the occupation of Afghanistan and has willingly introduced all sorts of IMF plans to liberalise its economy. Similarly, parties in Iraq like Dawa, SCIRI and even the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr are not even sufficiently anti-imperialist as to refuse to participate in the occupation government.
Yet the SWP instead exaggerate the "progressive" character of the forces which it sees as anti-imperialist - for example, claiming that Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East, and endorsing the welfare programme and "women's participation" in Hamas. They would rather look to "reform" elements within the Iranian bourgeoisie to effect change than encourage the working class to overthrow it. They seem to want to see this decade as the 1960s in slow motion, with Hamas substituting for the Vietcong and the Iranian government for Cuba.
I did however address the complexities of the kind of solidarity we need with workers in the Middle East. I expressed my disagreement with the majority position of the AWL which, while explicitly focused on the "third camp" of the working class, can collapse into acquiescence to imperialism when the workers appear too weak to act on their own. The AWL's refusal to call for troops out now, and indeed its support for Fatah against Hamas, are both predicated on the idea that the workers will be crushed without their imperialist guardians - yet how is the "third camp" ever to grow as an independent force if in the "here and now" (i.e. all the time) it does not cut itself sharply against both imperialism and Islamist reaction?
Our support for the working class in the Middle East must be linked to our tactics at home. Workers' action to undermine our armed forces and strikes against the war are vital in showing the power of the working class to stand on its own two feet as a force which can intervene in the "war on terror" conflict. "Troops out now" is not a magic wand to make the troops disappear, but a slogan for the working class to organise around, to try and realise that demand itself. I support the slogan not because it is unrealisable so doesn't matter what the consequences would be if it played out, but precisely because if it is workers in the US and UK or workers in Iraq whose efforts force the troops out, then the balance of forces will turn in favour of the workers' movement.
Actions like those of the train crew in Scotland who refused to move weapons are inextricably linked to the strikes of oil workers in Basra, and must be both encouraged and advertised. Rather than writing articles about geopolitical developments which we cannot influence with analyses cropped from the comment pages of the Guardian, our primary task is to talk about what the workers' movement can do itself.
I then briefly turned to the question of engaging with left groups in the Middle East, and said that as well as teaching ourselves about workers', women's, LGBT and student struggles in the region (which the SWP deny the existence of), we should critically engage with the ideas of our comrades there. Giving money to organisations in the Middle Eastern left is useful - particularly given their pressing need for self-defence - but we must also learn from the comrades and argue with their positions.
In the discussion that followed I broadly agreed with much of what was said by CS comrades, although I feel that they are too willing to defend those who raise the slogan "troops out now" from an abstract perspective with no reference to class. My whole point was that we should take a strict class standpoint against imperialism and Islamism, and discussion about which of the two heads of reaction is worse than the other or whether "the main enemy is at home" does not give us much tactical direction.
Equally, I have no doubt that neither the "bring the troops home" line of Barack Obama nor the Stalinist-Islamist use of "troops out now" by Galloway and his ilk is better than the position of Sean Matgamna. Nevertheless, my criticisms here should be qualified by a positive attitude towards Communist Students' and the CPGB's Hands Off the People of Iran campaign, although I do think they should make more of an effort to foster these ideas in the labour movement rather than just in the anti-war and student milieux.
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