31.01.2002

Solidarity with LPP

On January 25 over 60 people attended a public meeting, addressed by comrade Farooq Tariq, leading figure of the Labour Party Pakistan. Comrade Tariq was in Europe on a mini-tour organised mainly by comrades of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and its British section, the International Socialist Group. The audience was comprised of members of a number of left groups, including the Socialist Workers Party, CPGB, Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Workers Power, the Socialist Party, Workers Fight and the Spartacist League, as well as a number of independents. After introductory remarks from the chair and an ISG speaker, Greg Tucker, Farooq Tariq gave a wide-ranging presentation highlighting the political positions and practical work of his organisation. The LPP is the largest group on the left in Pakistan by a considerable margin - it has over 2,600 active militants - and the comrade's speech underlined how this organisation has managed to achieve this admittedly modest weight in conditions of some difficulty. Comrade Farooq started by pointing out that the LPP had no relationship whatsoever with the British Labour Party. The British Labour Party praises Musharaf, yet Musharaf is himself in part a product of fundamentalism. The British Labour Party supports privatisation and neo-liberalism, which has created the impoverishment of the masses that fundamentalism feeds off. He also pointed out that there are over one million troops dug in on either side of the India-Pakistan border - the danger of war is acute. The LPP has organised delegations to visit the border villages in Pakistan - and reports that the overwhelming majority of the population in Pakistan, including in the border areas, is opposed to war with India. This popular sentiment has been keenly felt by Musharaf, which is in part why he has moved to ban some islamic fundamentalist groups, despite the fact that these groups were originally promoted by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's feared intelligence agency. For comrade Farooq, Musharaf was forced to do this by mass pressure. But at the same time, Musharaf is incapable of tearing up the roots of fundamentalism. Like for instance, the 35,000 religious schools that exist in Pakistan. Nor has he touched the blasphemy laws. Nor the laws that make a woman legally only worth half a man. For comrade Farooq, as well as being a reaction to mass pressure, the limited measures Musharaf has taken are superficial ones, in part to please the United States and India in the context of the 'war on terrorism'. For the LPP, the bourgeoisie in Pakistan can only play a reactionary role - as personified by not only Musharaf, but in the past the Bhuttos and Nawaz Sharif. Only the working class can modernise the country. The LPP therefore believes in the theory of permanent revolution. The comrade then moved on to the thorny question of Kashmir, pointing out that in the world context in the aftermath of September 11, much of the room for negotiations has disappeared. The Kashmir question has immediately posed the threat of war, for instance over the December 13 attack on the Indian parliament by islamists whose activities are apparently linked to the fighting in Kashmir. The LPP is for the right of self-determination of Kashmir. They are in favour of a plebiscite over the question of its fate, to be organised not by the UN, but rather on the basis of committees of the Kashmiri masses themselves. However, comrade Farooq pointed out that the activities of islamic fundamentalists in Kashmir are aimed at changing the nature of the Kashmir question - in a reactionary direction. Musharaf was initially in favour of a jihad in Kashmir, but post-September 11 has been forced to change direction. For the LPP, in the words of comrade Farooq, "fundamentalists are the new form of fascists" - there is nothing progressive about them: rather they are consistently reactionary. The comrade criticised western socialists who paint the fundamentalists as being progressive, and pointed out that the LPP has learned the lesson of Iran, where Khomeini's fundamentalist regime, after being brought to power with the support of much of the left, turned on and butchered them. Equally suicidally, some of the Pakistani left supported fundamentalist forces against the regime of ZA Bhutto in the 1970s, on the spurious ground that the undoubtedly corrupt and venal Pakistan People's Party bourgeois regime was 'fascist'. In Afghanistan, some leftists supported the islamist mujahedin against the PDPA regime of Najibullah. In contrast to these idiocies, the LPP rejects all alliances with any section of the fundamentalists - even if some of them do make a show of opposition to privatisation ( purely in order to preserve some support among workers.) As regards the outcome in Afghanistan, in Farooq's opinion most of the cadre of the Taliban are safe, having made their own deals with the Karzai regime and the United States. This has left a bad taste among islamists in Pakistan, discrediting the Taliban somewhat. Bin Laden and the top echelons of the Taliban have fled, and they are probably finished as a political force. However, it is likely that new fundamentalist forces will emerge in the changed situation. The comrade rounded off his presentation by listing some of the exemplary and courageous initiatives the LPP has taken during the recent war period and the continuing threat of war with India. For instance, the LPP organised its first anti-war demonstration on September 27, before the US/British bombardment of Afghanistan started. The demonstration consisted mainly of 500 working class women. This was followed on October 15 by another demonstration of over 1,000, again with around 400 women, explicitly on the basis of slogans such as 'Neither imperialism nor the Taliban'. On November 6 there was another, 6,000-strong, demo in Rawalpindi, this time called by an LPP-initiated bloc called the Coalition for Peace and Justice. Some elements involved in this bloc, particularly those connected to various 'humanitarian' NGOs, wanted to concentrate the fire of the demonstration exclusively against the fundamentalists, and thereby exempt from criticism the imperialists and the Musharaf regime. However, the LPP insisted on making opposition to US imperialism a prominent slogan of the demonstration. On December 17, the comrade reported, the LPP initiated a peace demonstration at the India/Pakistan border - at which people on both sides actually protested against the war threat from Musharaf and Vajpayee. The comrades also initiated a 'peace night' celebration in Lahore for new year's night. Usually, he explained, the fundamentalists are able to break up such celebrations of the new year, but this time that was not possible. In fact the police, who might have been expected to participate in the repression of such an event, refused to do so, and some even wished the revellers a happy new year - such was the anti-war sentiment that the warmongers will have to defeat. The LPP also in 2000 initiated the Afghan Workers Solidarity Campaign, which has provided a platform for Afghan socialists in the workers' movement in Pakistan and organised congresses in solidarity with refugees and with Afghan workers and leftists, despite threats from fundamentalists and the ISI. The discussion that followed the main presentation was a mixed bag. It highlighted many of the weaknesses of the British left when dealing with the social reality of underdeveloped countries, particularly the phenomenon of 'radical' islamic fundamentalism. First to speak was a Committee for a Workers' International comrade from Kashmir, who rightly pointed out that Kashmir has been the subject of barbaric oppression from India, that Kashmiris have been treated like dogs, Kashmiri women have been raped, etc. However, perhaps understandably given the circumstances, he displayed some softness on islamic fundamentalism, stating that in his view that term simply implied someone who believed in the fundamentals of islam, the religion of Pakistan. This view is somewhat at variance with the often healthier attitude to political islam that tends to prevail within the CWI tradition, from which the LPP originally came. While undoubtedly this is a product of the feeling of powerlessness in the extreme current situation in Kashmir, what is odd is that, instead of arguing against such misconceived views, some of the left in Britain seems to vicariously echo them. This tendency was evidenced by comrade Stuart King of Workers Power, who vehemently asserted that the duty of the left in Britain was to support any forces fighting against the imperialists, irrespective of their political programme. Somewhat contradictorily, he at the same time denied that Workers Power in any way supported the Taliban. What he was doing was peddling the contemporary 'left' Trotskyist notion that there can be an absolute separation between military and political support. This strange formulation enables one to support the actions of forces the left has nothing whatsoever in common with in terms of aims, and yet rationalise a denial of all responsibility when the forces one is supporting implement their programme, which in the case of islamists invariably involves a massacre of the left. Comrade King advocated that the LPP should organise joint campaigns with the islamists against privatisation, and he condemned the LPP for positively noting that some of the measures Musharaf has recently taken against fundamentalism are a product of mass pressure from below, from the secular working class population, and thereby seeming to endorse them. While Marxists should never give bourgeois regimes any licence to attack the democratic rights of even extreme reactionaries, it was clear that comrade King's outrage was that these 'anti-imperialist' forces who in his view the LPP should be allying with were being attacked. From this angle comrade King's defence of the 'democratic rights' of holy-warrior cut-throats is actually considerably worse than the problematic LPP position he was polemicising against. However, Eibhlin McDonald, speaking for the Spartacist League, which has the same formal position as Workers Power on the 'duty' of socialists to 'defend' Afghanistan and the Taliban, did not make an issue of this at all. The Spartacists were originally distinguished at the time of the 1979 Iranian 'revolution' with an extremely far-sighted position that warned correctly of the consequence of the left's tailing of Khomeiniite islamic 'radicalism' - ie, literal suicide. Of course, this was briefly mentioned in her contribution. But the SL preferred to breast-beat inaccuracies about how it is allegedly the only group who refused to vote for Tony Blair in 1997. It was not interested in seeking to engage with socialists from the muslim world who have drawn correct conclusions about islamic reaction. An AWL comrade, speaking immediately after comrade King, pointed out that his claim not to support the Taliban, and yet at the same time to support any forces fighting the US irrespective of their politics, was a complete contradiction. And indeed Mark Fischer of the CPGB expanded on this, reminding comrades that the war waged by any force, including and especially a reactionary force such as the Taliban, is an expression of its politics. As Clausewitz pointed out, war is the continuation of politics by other means. A notable contribution came from Dave Landau, a member of the Jewish Socialist Group and the Socialist Alliance, who pointed to the parallel between the arguments for allying with islamists against privatisation in Pakistan and allying with a fascist march in Britain. Both could easily try to seize on the same kind of issue. One other floor speaker raised the question of the role of islamists in Bangladesh, and in particular that they had allegedly fought against Pakistani oppression of the people of the former East Pakistan. Comrade Roger Silverman, formerly a left oppositionist within the CWI, noted that what we are now seeing is an imperialist offensive against the anti-globalisation movement, in a context where, for the first time in 150 years, the bourgeoisie does not have to reckon with the working class as a political force. Comrade Farooq summed up by vehemently denying that islamists had anything to do with Bangladesh's struggle for freedom in the early 1970s. On the contrary, they had fought against it. Jamaat-e-Islami had fought with the Pakistani army in Bangladesh. The claim of the islamists to be 'anti-imperialist' is quite recent. He reaffirmed that they were not fighting against privatisation, but were simply trying to gather working class support - they were in reality committed to private ownership of everything. One could argue that this reasoning is a little mechanical. The real point is that extreme reactionaries sometimes promote forms of partial state ownership (eg, Mussolini's 'corporate state'). But the content of these goals is reactionary and cannot be supported by the working class in any way. He pointed to the "great effect" of the anti-globalisation movement in Pakistan. This contrasted with dominant bourgeois politics, which from Musharaf to Benazir Bhutto is completely subservient to the demands of the IMF. The comrade concluded by talking a little about the LPP's work with the landless peasantry. Refuting the implication from some quarters that the LPP's hostility to fundamentalism meant contempt for ordinary people who have religious belief, he pointed out that a considerable number of LPP militants are practising muslims. Thus party activities have to sometimes take this into account, making special arrangements for prayers, etc. Despite its shortcomings, the LPP has played a highly political, positive role in seeking to mobilise progressive working class opposition to imperialism and reaction in Pakistan. This sentiment was obviously widely shared in the meeting when a collection was taken to help the LPP's work - over £300 was raised. Ian Donovan