17.06.1999

Teach-ins or gaggings?

‘From teach-ins to troops out’ is the title of an interesting article by Martin Smith in Socialist Worker (June 5). Comrade Smith discusses the growth of the mass movement against the Vietnam war and cites approvingly the role played by the ‘teach-ins’ which were initiated in US colleges during 1965. These were open discussions and debates, without time limit, which involved both supporters and opponents of the war. “Through protest and debate, we can forge a new anti-war movement. We have to start building that now,” the Socialist Worker piece concludes.

The article is interesting because the practice of the Socialist Workers Party with respect to the Balkans war has everywhere been diametrically opposed to the methods described by Smith. This phenomenon has been brought into sharpest focus in areas like Manchester, where distance from the House of Commons committee rooms and left Labour MPs such as Tony Benn and Alice Mahon has placed the SWP as the leadership of the anti-war campaigns.

The Weekly Worker (April 22) reported the inaugural rally of Manchester Against War in the Balkans. This was addressed by speakers from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour left and the SWP, but no contributions from the audience were permitted. No discussion took place. At this rally, and at the subsequent regional anti-war demonstration in Manchester, the platform rhetoric was restricted to opposition to Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia. The just struggle of the Kosovars for independence was not mentioned. At the MAWITB committee meetings, demands from internationalist socialists that Kosovars be allowed to speak from the campaign’s platforms were brushed aside by the SWP/CND majority. So much for the example of the teach-ins.

At the close of the April 24 Manchester demonstration, the suppression of the issue of the democratic rights of the Kosovars was highlighted in a manner which was almost surreal. After the ‘usual suspects’ had spoken, a Kurdish speaker was called to the rostrum. He delivered a passionate speech on the oppression of his people by the Turkish state, and he described the Kurds’ bitter struggle for nationhood. The unarticulated thread between these speakers was the message that Nato was not bombing its member state, Turkey, which has sustained a murderous war against the Kurds. Of course, it was quite proper that a Kurdish militant should be invited onto the platform of an anti-imperialist demonstration, but not as a fig-leaf for the exclusion of a Kosovar.

SWP sensitivities were again challenged at a public meeting on May 27 entitled, appositely, ‘Censorship and the Balkans war’. Twice during the week preceding this meeting, the CPGB had requested the facility to speak at the event, emphasising its action in mounting a working class challenge to bomber Blair in the European elections. No reply was received and last-hour requests for an answer, prior to the commencement of the meeting, met only with a succession of ‘I know nothing’ pleas from the organisers. Bearing in mind the subject of the meeting, and the fact that the star-billed speaker, Tam Dalyell MP, had not showed up, it was unsurprising that this event should have closed with half an hour of contributions from the floor. And, indeed, it was equally unsurprising that none of the raised hands seen by the SWP chair brought forth a speech supporting the Kosovar struggle.

The rottenness at the heart of the SWP’s politics spewed forth at its own forum, ‘The new imperialism: Nato after the war’, held in Manchester on June 12. This event had been publicised in leaflets distributed on the coaches to the national anti-war demonstration in London on June 5. The leaflet had, as usual, radiated the SWP’s time-honoured “All welcome” embrace. Once again, actions belie the words.

Amongst the throng of left paper sellers outside the meeting hall, was a lone comrade from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who was distributing an ‘Open letter to the SWP’. The contents of the letter can accurately be described as an antithesis of the SWP’s politics on the earlier phase of the Balkans crisis. It opened with a quotation from Trotsky in 1913 that is highly pertinent and worth repeating:

“An individual, a group, a party or a class that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking its nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above, massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and to become worm-eaten while it is still alive. On the other hand, a party or a class that rises up against every abominable action wherever it has occurred, as vigorously and unhesitatingly as a living organism reacts to protect its eyes when they are threatened with external injury - such a party or class is sound at heart” (On the Balkan wars).

The letter correctly lambastes the SWP for “talking down … Milosevic’s genocidal war against the Kosovars”. It suggests that the SWP “wants” to blame Nato for this “crime against humanity” and, justifiably, charges that “a socialist who blames Nato for the ethnic cleansing becomes a moron in the face of the facts”. Most telling of all is the reference to Alex Callinicos’s piece in Socialist Worker, in which he argues against Kosovar independence: “Arming the KLA and backing Kosovan independence would make the situation worse … An Albanian nationalist army, hardened by war and enjoying mass support in refugee camps, could threaten the integrity of half a dozen states throughout the region.” All communists would be bound to endorse the condemnatory observation that “Callinicos has balanced the rights of the oppressed to fight against the ‘integrity’ of the capitalist states in the region, and come down on the side of capitalist integrity”. The SWP’s failings and inconsistencies on self-determination, the national question, and the duties of revolutionary socialists towards the oppressed, are all devastatingly exposed.

Just as tellingly, of the AWL’s politics, however is that which is omitted from this polemical broadside. This of course is the crucial point that the necessary attitude of revolutionary socialists and communists towards all of the above questions has nothing whatsoever to do with altruism. And I have little doubt that Leon Trotsky will have gone on to emphasise this in the quoted work. It is, of course, everything to do with the championing by the working class of the struggles of the oppressed, and of the project of human liberation, as the means by which the working class seizes political power and makes the international socialist revolution.

The laddered stocking that resembles the AWL’s politics is revealed by its approach to the question of the revolutionary attitude to imperialism and its armed wing, Nato. Not for the AWL is our main enemy at home: “The main feature of this war is the Serb war against the Kosovars,” it asserts. The AWL will not join anti-war demonstrations that include Serbian nationalists, it announces. References to Nato’s air war are brief in the extreme. The internationalist demand, ‘Nato out of the Balkans’, is conspicuous by its absence.

The AWL’s approach to the ‘Stop the bombing’ demand has ladders within ladders: “We agree with you that Nato bombing of civilians in the Balkans must be opposed,” they concede (emphasis added). But this concession is soon qualified:

“Nato’s military policy is mainly to smash up the Serbian economy, bombing bridges, factories and power installations … A Serb official has claimed that Nato’s bombing has killed over 300 people.”

The question that remains unanswered is, does the AWL, having declined to demand that Nato gets out of the Balkans, “want” Nato to stay there only to undertake ground operations? Or does it indeed have no problem with the ‘clinical’ bombing of economic targets, together with the collateral damage caused by ‘errors’. I see a distinct softness here, towards the world oppressor.

It was hardly surprising that the ‘Open letter’ attracted a rapid response. The SWP’s stewards emerged from the hall to order the AWL comrade off the premises. (Ah - the role of the accidental in politics - all of the paper sellers were only stationed in the lobby because of a near-monsoon lashing down on their usual spot on the building’s steps.) When the comrade replied that he was about to move into the hall to attend the meeting in any case, he was firmly told that he would not be allowed into the meeting. The explanation given for this disgraceful banning was that this was an “anti-war meeting and the AWL is not against the imperialist war”. A CPGB comrade intervened to call for a retraction of this ban on the expression of sincerely held views within the workers’ movement. He received the response that the AWL had placed itself “outside the workers’ movement by refusing to oppose the Nato war”.

There was a delicious irony in all of this. At what had been - insofar as it could be in view of time limits on speeches - a truly ‘open forum’ on the Balkans war - ie, that held under the auspices of the North West Socialist Alliance, in Manchester on May 15 - an AWL comrade had forcefully expressed the view that comrades of the Socialist Labour Party “have no place in this meeting”. This had been in response to the forthright espousal of the politics of Yugoslav defencism that had come from the SLP’s representatives.

But back to June 12 - it did not end there. Down the corridor shuffled the imposing political figure of comrade John Nicholson, convenor of the Greater Manchester Socialist Alliance; chair of Manchester Against War in the Balkans; and a billed speaker at the ‘forum’. When asked to intervene on behalf of the debarred GMSA affiliate, Nicholson muttered, “I’ll see Sean” (the SWP full-timer). He entered the hall. He spoke to Sean. He walked on, to his seat on the platform. He did not return to report the outcome of his representations. The ban remained operative.

Important lessons are to be drawn from this sorry saga. There is only one trend which has put itself outside of the workers’ movement, and that is the social-chauvinists; the cheerleaders for bomber Blair and imperialism; those who are the sworn enemies of independent working class politics. Even so, within appropriate forums, we still need to engage with these class traitors. This is because they retain mass influence within a class that currently exists only sociologically. It is dangerous and wrong to speak of trends within the class which stand for workers power and socialism as being outside of the workers’ movement.

The seeds of the new are contained within the old. The Communist Party will not spring immaculate from the head of Zeus, or anyone else. Its core will come out of the revolutionary left which presently exists. It will emerge out of the dialectic - from debate; from united fronts; from polemic; from struggle. It certainly will not come from exclusions.

Derek Hunter