17.01.2002
Who's dumbing down?
Ian Donovan defends the CPGB's consistent democracy over Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine
John Pearson's letter in last week's paper is a prime example of contradiction in politics. He attempts to reconcile two distinct approaches. On the one hand, the consistently democratic and revolutionary, and, on the other, the economistic politics of the Socialist Workers Party, with its indifference to democracy and democratic questions (Weekly Worker January 10). Somewhat strangely, comrade Pearson claims that his criticisms of positions argued by myself and a number of others on the September 11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan are from the 'left' and from the standpoint of some kind of revolutionary purity. He is deluding himself. In reality, his positions reflect a political softness on the opportunist theory and practice of the SWP and an incomplete break with their political conceptions. His objections are not to any alleged "dumbing down" of the politics of the CPGB mainstream on the war, but rather to core elements of these political positions themselves. Comrade Pearson begins by stating that we were "entirely correct" to fight for "implacable opposition to the Taliban and to islamic fundamentalism". He correctly damns "the SWP, Workers Power and sundry Trotskyist groups" as "shamefaced" for their support for the Taliban's supposed 'anti-imperialist' war. He notes that our organisation was excluded from the executive committee of the Stop the War Coalition for its "principled stand" of fighting for this stance of opposition to islamic fundamentalism. Yet the rest of his letter and the overall thrust of his criticisms amounts to blunting the edge of our counterposition to the SWP's opportunism. In effect, comrade Pearson repudiates key elements of the consistently democratic thrust of our programme. This blunting of our politics takes the form of 'advice' on how to allegedly better combat the politics of the SWP, but in reality it makes concessions of principle to those politics. Comrade Pearson complains that our slogan, 'No to imperialism and fundamentalism', was "not fully rounded" and "one-sided", and this allegedly weakened us in dispute with the SWP. This is apparently because islamic fundamentalism, as well as being a form of reactionary anti-capitalism, is also a "conjunctural and partial anti-imperialism". He seems to feel that we should have made a bigger issue of the Taliban's links to imperialism - merely pointing this out is not enough for him. We should have made this question, the Taliban's one-time imperialist sponsorship, one of the key cutting edges of our propaganda. I would certainly defend the medium-ranking prominence we gave in our material to this question. To make it into the main axis of our propaganda would be blunt our criticism of the jihadis, not all of whom by any means have been funded by imperialism. For instance, in Iran, the most important state in the world where 'radical' islamism holds power, no-one could credibly accuse the fundamentalist regime of ever having been pro-western. Very much the opposite in fact. That does not make their programme, vis-à -vis imperialism, one iota less reactionary. Yes, the Taliban were "conjuncturally" in conflict with the imperialist great powers. However, their aims in the conflict with these great powers were reactionary - just as reactionary, in fact, as the aims and objectives as the great powers themselves. Even if they had not had an immediately prior, cosy relationship with the imperialists, their aims would have still been reactionary, as indeed were the aims of the ineluctably 'anti-imperialist' Khomeiniities in years gone by. The truth is that islamic fundamentalist 'anti-capitalism' and 'anti-imperialism' is no more 'progressive' than is Strasserite/Nazi 'anti-capitalism'. It is counterrevolutionary and anti-working-class - it has no 'progressive' side. Comrade Pearson's position completely undermines this important point. As indeed does comrade Pearson's solidarity with the SWP's refusal to use the word 'condemn' with regard to the mass murder of American workers at the World Trade Center. Comrade Pearson, echoing the SWP, lectures us that we should not use the same language as the bourgeoisie with regard to the actions of movements and regimes that are our enemies, but that the bourgeoisie, for its own reasons, also has a deep antipathy to. He opines: "Adopting the language of bourgeois consensus is a serious sign of weakness in a working class organisation. Linguistic unanimity is one of the ways in which the existence of her majesty's Conservative Party, Liberal Party and Labour Party are constantly reaffirmed. We do not want the bourgeoisie, or more importantly the workers, thinking they have a her majesty's Communist Party." Comrade Pearson has no problem, however, in the workers having a 'Communist Party' that has as one of its trademarks the use of evasive language: in other words, a party that lies by omission to the working class. I want a party that tells the truth. And the truth is that the September 11 actions were a monstrous crime against the working class. The kidnapping of hundreds of airline passengers, ordinary working people for the most part, on routine domestic flights. Then their deliberate murder through the use of the aircraft carrying them as giant bombs, to annihilate thousands of other workers (and no doubt a few bosses) at the twin towers, as well as the military HQ at the Pentagon. These actions were atrocities no different in principle from the firebombings of refugee hostels in Germany by neo-Nazis; or the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P Murragh building in Oklahoma City by the ultra-rightist fanatic Timothy McVeigh; or the attack on the Tokyo underground the same year by a religious nut cult armed with Sarin nerve gas. Taken abstractly, the Pentagon could be regarded by some misguided leftist-adventurist group as a legitimate target. But this does not detract from the fact that the very concrete, and not abstract, use of airline passengers as involuntary human bombs against it was an act of Nazi-like barbarism. That is the truth. Not to mention the enormous political damage done to the consciousness of the most powerful working class in the world. An outraged and wounded (and thereby voracious) American nationalist sentiment was formented among the working masses reminiscent of that during McCarthyism - a priceless gift to US imperialism. In every sense, September 11 was a monstrous crime. We are for solidarity with the victims of this reactionary terror in New York, just as we are for solidarity with ordinary Afghans who are victims of Bush/Blair's war. Presumably, for comrade Pearson, the fact that our own government went to war with the September 11 terrorists means that we are disqualified from telling the truth to the working class about their actions. This is a strange and dangerous logic. 'Our' government went to war with Hitler once. Is comrade Pearson saying that during this period, to tell the truth about Hitler's regime, to accuse it of engaging in mass murder and racist genocide on an epic scale, would have been to transform us into "her majesty's Communist Party"? Then there is the question of Stalinism during the Cold War. Should we have soft-peddled, or hidden, the truth about the murderous actions of Stalinism from the working class, have refused to call Stalin a bloody tyrant and oppressor, again on an epic scale, because the bourgeoisie were, for their own reasons, saying the same thing? Trotsky rightly dismissed such arguments - in the interests of telling the truth to the working class - and did not hesitate to brand Stalin's regime as in some ways even worse than Hitler's, openly, before the working class (see the Transitional programme 1938). In reality, comrade Pearson's argument about use of language is one typical of the SWP milieu - do not offend the prejudices of one's target audience, whoever they may be. This is liberal political correctness, not communism. The comrade then compounds his error by his criticism that we did not include a demand against 'Zionism' in our material on the war (despite the fact that neither Israel nor the Palestinians were combatants in the war we were protesting about!). He claims that this omission undermined us with the SWP, who were allegedly able to present us as not being on the side of the oppressed. He goes on to defend the SWP's slogan, 'For a democratic and secular Palestine', as an example of consistent democracy, against our comrades, who allegedly are betraying our demand, 'For democracy and secularism everywhere', by asserting that Israeli jews actually have national rights. Comrade Pearson disingenuously asserts that the SWP's slogan implies "linguistic, cultural and social equality" and therefore is a "communist slogan" and an expression of consistent democracy. He then, equally disingenuously, asks the question as to why I allegedly think that "jews and Arabs cannot live together in the same country as equals". While the comrade lists "linguistic, cultural and social equality" as the benefits of this allegedly consistent expression of democracy, the word 'national' is significantly missing from his list of putative equalities. This is no accidental omission. Comrade Pearson does not envisage that his allegedly "democratic and secular Palestine" would be democratic enough to acknowledge that Israeli jews have any national rights whatsoever. Presumably then, to take this a little further, if those damn stubborn Israeli jews were foolish enough in this wonderful democratic and secular utopia to continue to assert that they were in fact a nation, and thereby to claim the right that all nations should have, the right to self-determination, this striving would have to be suppressed by force. Such consistent democracy! In reality, by its very name alone, the slogan of a 'democratic and secular Palestine' projects an Arab-dominated state, in which jews with a religious, but no national, identity, would be tolerated on the grounds of secularism - ie, neutrality of the state on the question of religion - just as christian Palestinians are tolerated by the secular regime of Yasser Arafat (who is, in fact, a christian Palestinian Arab himself). In other words, it assumes that the Israeli jews would be absorbed into the Palestinian Arab nation itself. In fact, more than that, it presupposes that the Israeli jews are really, 'at heart', Palestinians anyway. After all, this is the only way that our compulsory assimilationists apply an analogous logic to the demand to the forcible unification of the British-Irish into the Irish republic. The assertion that British-Irish protestants are 'really' just Irish at heart is something that can sometimes gain a little spurious credibility by historical obfuscation and sleight of hand, but the assumption that Israeli jews are 'really' part of the same nation as Palestinian Arabs and can therefore be absorbed into a common Arab national state beggars belief. Trying vainly to pull a similar trick, comrade Pearson accuses me of softness on 'jewish nationalism', and thereby ascribes to me the straw man of a hoary and obviously false Zionist myth - that the jews themselves are a nation. In reality 'the jews' internationally have no state, and currently no intention of seeking a state, any more than 'the muslims' or 'the christians' or 'the buddhists' have - the majority of practitioners of the jewish religion live outside Israel. But the truth is that, irrespective of Zionist myth, a national state has been consolidated off the east Mediterranean coast, of a specific national grouping, derived from, but not identical with, the jewish religion and a section of the jewish people, with an invented set of national myths and a resurrected 'national' language, Hebrew. That entity, not 'the jews', is a nation and, despite the fact that at present it acts as a monstrous oppressor, any programme that denies the national existence and therefore any national rights of that entity is utterly counterposed to democracy. The denial of reality and 'ideological' myopia involved in such an assumption is reminiscent of the assertion by Turkish nationalists, from Atatürk's day on, that the Kurds were really 'mountain Turks', or the Titoite attempt to assimilate non-Slavs such as Albanians into 'Yugoslavia', an explicitly South Slavic proto-national project. Just as in the Balkans what is needed is not 'Yugoslavia', but 'Balkania' - a genuinely democratic federation of all the Balkan nations with full national rights for all peoples - so in the Middle East what is required is not a "democratic secular Palestine", but rather a democratic, secular, federation of the peoples of the Middle East, in which all peoples, including Israeli jews, would exercise full and equal national rights, including the right to secede. In other words, a broad, voluntary federation, as a transition to voluntary unification of the peoples. Only the working class, led by a reborn communist movement, can fight for the consistent democratic politics that can bring such a thing about, and it can only truly be consolidated under an international socialist order.
Worker