03.10.2001
Workers Power confusion
With US and British forces massed in the region, military action against Afghanistan and the Taliban regime seems imminent.
Before a shot is fired the theoretical frailties of some left groups have been exposed by the positions they have adopted. It is fair to say that the ?anti-imperialism? so far displayed by the left is at its core of a profoundly opportunist character: to paraphrase August Bebel, ?the anti-imperialism of fools?. The position of Workers Power has combined a softness on the terrorism of Osama bin Laden with a pledge to defend the mullahs in Kabul.
WP?s ?international?, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, condemned the attack on the World Trade Center: ?Such actions will not take forward the struggle against US world domination by a single step? (LRCI statement, September 14). However, ?depending on who carried it out, the attack on the Pentagon may indeed be a legitimate target for forces resisting US attack?.
As we can see, there exists an opening in all this to regard the perpetrators as perhaps misguided allies in the battle to defeat imperialism. Even though the Pentagon houses the military headquarters of US imperialism, that does not change the reactionary essence of this attack. It is of course true that at the height of a revolutionary upsurge, when our class had taken up arms at the head of a mass movement, the Pentagon could be a ?legitimate target?. But in such circumstances we are no longer talking about individual terrorism.
When dealing with terrorist acts he could not but have had a certain sympathy for Leon Trotsky, WP?s mentor, allowed no room for the kind of ambiguity displayed by his latter-day followers. He wrote in 1909: ?The killing of an employer, a threat to set fire to a factory or a death threat to its owner, an assassination attempt, with revolver in hand, against a government minister - all these are terrorist acts in the full and authentic sense. However, anyone who has an idea of the true nature of international social democracy [ie, communism] ought to know that it has always opposed this kind of terrorism and does so in the most irreconcilable way? (my emphasis, L Trotsky Why Marxists oppose individual terrorism).
Trotsky is here opposing in an ?irreconcilable way? an attack on individual functionaries of the capitalist state by leftist revolutionaries. Needless to say, on September 11 the vast majority of victims were working class and they died at the hands, not of an Arab version of the Socialist Revolutionaries, but an Arab version of the Black Hundreds - fascistic counterrevolutionaries. Workers Power, like many others on the left, rightly points to the ?despicable double standards of capitalist politicians?. However, Marxists who are equivocal in their attitude to acts of individual terrorism - especially from such a source - are guilty of no less obnoxious double standards.
WP?s attitude towards the likes of bin Laden causes it to reject the necessity of taking an independent working class stand. When it comes to the question of the impending war, it offers workers a distasteful choice between supporting either victory for US/Britain and their coalition partners or the Taliban. The latest issue of the journal of WP?s youth wing asks, ?Whether you wanted the war or not, now there is one anyway, who do you want to win?? (Revolution No47).
The article leaves us in no doubt as to the answer. As does comrade Stuart King, writing on the Socialist Alliance internet discussion list: ?In Workers Power we will support all those fighting the imperialist attack, be it the Taliban and other Afghan militias, the Iraqi army, Hezbollah, etc, because we want the defeat of this imperialist adventure? (my emphasis, September 18). Workers Power does not begin by assessing the contending forces from the standpoint of the world?s working class, but is reduced to choosing the lesser evil.
Mark Hoskisson, backing up his WP comrade two days later, tried to justify this line. He argued that White House policy ?explains why it will be correct to support an oppressed country against the US when the US tries to exact revenge for the attack - such support will weaken the main and principal enemy of the working class and the oppressed worldwide, the imperialist rulers? (ibid September 20).
This is a variation on that old theme, ?My enemy?s enemy is my friend.? How does a ?weakening? of US imperialism at the hands of reactionary forces help the international working class, if as a necessary corollary those reactionary forces would themselves be strengthened? The process of strengthening the working class throughout the world must primarily come from its own self-movement.
Unsurprisingly comrade Hoskisson does not dwell on the internal politics of Afghanistan. The fact that its population can be numbered among the ?oppressed? settles the question. However, what is the concrete nature of this oppression? The responsibility for the suffering of the Afghan people stems in no small measure from imperialism - not least its financing of the mujahdeen and their war against the progressive regime of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan and its backers in the Soviet armed forces. The Taliban themselves owe their rise, at least in part, to US sponsorship. But the main enemy of the workers, the urban poor, women and peasants in Afghanistan is not the USA, but the Taliban. The task of the oppressed in Afghanistan is not to side with the Taliban counterrevolutionaries. On the contrary - what would send a brilliant message to all anti-imperialists throughout the world would be their revolutionary overthrow.
For Revolution the war will be an ?attack by the world?s richest countries against a weakened and desperately poor people? (my emphasis). Notice how the rather important factor of the Afghan state is left out. When, however, in its statement the LCRI pronounces its ?support for any people or state that comes under attack?, the two categories become indistinguishable - both are defended.
It is true that both Afghanistan and the Afghan people are ?weakened and desperately poor?, and like all other ?third world? countries suffer from a grossly unequal economic relationship - such as it is - with the advanced capitalist countries. But that does not make Taliban resistance against US attack some kind of liberation struggle (as both Mullah Mohammed Omar and Workers Power would logically have us believe).
Interestingly Lenin, in reproaching Rosa Luxemburg for viewing demands for national self-determination as being ?utopian?, pointed to a fundamental mistake that she made: ?For the question of the political self-determination of nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society ? [she had] substituted the question of their economic independence? (VI Lenin, ?The right of nations to self-determination? Selected works Vol 1, p604). The Workers Power comrades, and those on the left like them, substitute political oppression for economic oppression.
Workers Power may protest at this point that as Marxists we support Afghanistan?s right to self-determination. We do, but the content of self-determination is, according to Lenin, ?the political separation of these nations [in which there is a national movement - JM] from alien national bodies and the formation of an independent nation-state? (ibid pp602-3). Leave aside the fact that Afghanistan is not a nation, but a multi-national state. The mujahdeen are in effect no different to the Northern Alliance and Mohammad Zahiur Shah today. One client of imperialism - turned feral - is to be replaced by another. Pro-gressives in Afghanistan must seek their own road which both opposes US and imperialist plans and seeks to smash the Taliban - till last month sponsored by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Any actions against US forces that coincide would be purely episodic and in essence accidental.
Workers Power on the other hand ends up apologising for the Taliban regime. It advises the Afghan people to unite with these reactionary cutthroats. It supports a regime that is so barbaric that it is doubtful whether the bourgeois press will have to manufacture ?myths? to damn the Taliban in the eyes of workers in the west: the truth is damming enough.
Of course the WP comrades try to wriggle out of the political consequences of their position. Stuart King argues on the SA Press Group that their backing for the Taliban ?does not mean ? we are somehow political supporters of these reactionary regimes? (my emphasis). In essence, they argue for a ?military bloc? with the Taliban. This separation of the military from the political is truly absurd from a Marxist standpoint. War is the continuation of politics by other, violent, means. For Marxists wars are, as Lenin argued, ?inseparable from the political system that engenders them? (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p400). Furthermore, Lenin continues: ?The policy which a given state, a given class within a state, pursued for a long time before the war is inevitably continued by the same class during the war, the form of action alone being changed.?
Ignore Lenin for a minute and suppose that military aims were separate from political considerations. How then can Workers Power (correctly) characterise the military actions of the US and its allies as imperialist and reactionary? If the separation exists for Afghanistan then it must logically apply to both sides. If you separate the military from the political in the case of the US?s actions, ignoring the nature of US imperialism, then you might well end up arguing, alongside the entire gamut of bourgeois opinion, that such actions ought to be considered as a quite legitimate retaliation for September 11.
Perversely WP argues that a Taliban victory may ?give the Afghan people the strength and confidence they need to overthrow the Taliban? (Revolution No47). But defeat. not victory, breeds revolution. By that same WP logic, revolutionaries in Britain should call for a victory to Blair (and the defeat of the Taliban); maybe after all it will give the British workers? ?confidence?.
Obviously Workers Power sat out last year?s events in Serbia. After his defeat at the hands of imperialism, Milosevic was toppled. Over and over again, history has shown that repressive regimes are strengthened by victory in war. But what is obvious to even the dullest of stars in the bourgeoisie?s constellation has not just escaped Workers Power - it has been turned by them on its head.
James Mallory