26.02.2004
Drawing a class line
This Saturday's conference of the Stop the War Coalition meets in conditions where Blair and Bush, and indeed their 'war on terrorism', are in considerable trouble, writes Ian Donovan
This Saturday’s conference of the Stop the War Coalition meets in conditions where Blair and Bush, and indeed their ‘war on terrorism’, are in considerable trouble.
The failure to find any WMDs in Iraq, the major political convulsions that have afflicted the Blair government because of its lies, the beginnings of similar problems for Bush, as the US ‘Iraqification’ stratagem gets blown to hell by those resisting the occupation - all this is widely recognised as vindication of those millions who fought against the imperialists’ war plans in the run-up to the invasion, and the unprecedented numbers who continued to mobilise and march, even as the invasion went ahead.
The mass movement in Britain, whose highest point was the massive, two-million-strong demonstration on February 15 2003, was of course merely the most dramatic manifestation of what was in fact a global movement. One that demonstrated enormous potential for the future - potential for mass struggles against imperialism and its barbaric depredations around the world, against wars and conquest, against capitalist superexploitation of workers in ‘developing’ countries, from China to Indonesia to Mexico. Against the massive and criminal neglect of the millions suffering from poverty and diseases like Aids, which capitalism has the means to conquer, but chooses not to because it is not profitable. Against the ruination of the environment and the threat that poses for the future of humanity.
Yet the war was not stopped. And even now, with the exposure of these lies, the occupation of Iraq goes on. Despite the clear majority opposed to war, and the millions on the streets, although Bush and Blair were compelled to manoeuvre, in the end we were unable to stop them invading Iraq. Even now, for all their problems with the occupation, they hope to prevail in the face of the anti-war movement and will stop at nothing - as the Hutton affair, among other things, showed yet again. And even if particular politicians and particular ruling parties come unstuck, there are others ready to step into their place. In America, John Kerry is promising to replace Bush with something ‘nicer’. In Britain, the Liberal Democrats, and New Labour’s Robin Cook, posed as opponents of the war - right until the moment it actually started. Such capitalist ‘anti-war’ politicians are contemptible hypocrites - if the war was criminal when it was being planned, it was doubly criminal when it was actually happening. These people were not opposed to invading Iraq in principle, but merely because they feared it would probably backfire.
Many of them have their own skeletons in the cupboard. Who remembers Bill Clinton, and his own bombing of Iraq in December 1998 - ‘Operation Desert Fox’ - again over what were then, as now, fictitious ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Who remembers that Robin Cook was foreign secretary when that slaughter of the Iraqi people happened? Who remembers the support of politicians from all three major parties for this barbaric mini-war, based on the same lies as last year, not to mention the first ‘desert slaughter’ of 1991? Who can trust any of these class enemies to stand up for the victims of imperialist aggression? The answer is obvious.
Mere protest - all good people marching together - is not enough to stop the war machine. For what stands behind government is the interest of predatory capital with its ownership and control of industry and business, as well as domination of the weapons of state power - armies, police, the spooks and much more. For popular discontent to prevail over that is actually quite a tall order - it requires confronting these highly organised social forces with another, even more powerful social force. That can only be the working class, a force that, on an international scale, has more social weight and, if organised, social power than ever before in the whole history of capitalism. To go beyond simple protest we need a political alternative that can begin to organise working people into an independent social and political force in our own right.
Much of the debate at the STWC will touch on the role of politics in the anti-war movement, and how we go about fighting the war and the occupation concretely. There will be debates about whom STWC activists should be supporting in the elections that are coming up in the spring, whether or not to support the new Respect coalition or other parties, or indeed none. Probably correctly, given the fact that good anti-war fighters come from a number of different political standpoints, all of which have their faults, there is no concrete proposal from the leadership of the STWC to give blanket support to any particular political party. However, and this is crucial, there is no class line being drawn against the false friends of the anti-war movement, the likes of Charles Kennedy and Robin Cook, against these bourgeois politicians who would like to exploit the anti-war movement for their own, anti-working class ends. This is a crucial failing.
The steering committee’s draft resolution 17 calls for support for only those candidates or parties that “opposed the war in Iraq, are urging an end to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, and are against British support for George Bush’s programme of endless war, providing only that such candidates or parties share the coalition’s founding values of support for civil liberties and opposition to racism”. This is simply not enough, and could easily embrace the likes of Cook and the Lib Dems.
This is not the only weakness in the steering committee proposals, but it is the most glaring. There are of course many people in the anti-war movement who are new to any sort of radical politics, and whose ideas are in flux and in many ways unformed. However, many leading figures in the STWC are leading members of working class and socialist organisations, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain.
In refusing to draw any kind of class line against the hypocritical, half-hearted opponents of the war, these comrades are failing in their duty to the future political development of the movement. By at least attempting to do so, they could actually strike a real blow not only against Bush and Blair, but against the ‘reluctant war-makers’ and middle class politics within the anti-war movement (in the form of the Greens, for example). It is doubly unfortunate that the SWP has deliberately diluted class politics in Respect, as compared to, for instance, the Socialist Alliance. This can only make working class, socialist forces in the anti-war movement far less distinct, less capable of drawing the healthiest elements further to the left.
There are many other problems with the various resolutions and political strands that make up this conference. An important one is pacifism, as expressed most classically by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This is the same CND that failed to strike any serious blows against imperialism in the two deepest phases of the cold war (1950s and 1980s) - there is little reason to believe it will do any better in today’s ‘war against terrorism’. A strategy of seeking to persuade the capitalists to give up nuclear weapons is utterly illusory - why on earth should they do that? Since when has any ruling class ever given away its ability to wage war against its enemies? We, the working people, will have to take all their weapons away from them by our own overwhelming, revolutionary force.
The Stop the War Coalition led possibly the biggest protest movement in British history, but it is just as full of contradictions as many earlier formations. However, the STWC is not something that can simply be written off as uniformly bourgeois or pacifistic. Mixed in with the bourgeois pacifism - the calls for United Nations intervention, for example - and the opportunism of the left, there are also real glimmers of the kind of working class politics the movement needs.
Of particular note at this conference are the motions from Labour Against the War and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention that of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The LAW resolution clearly calls for “the broadest possible campaign to demand the immediate withdrawal of British and US forces from Iraq”. Furthermore it puts forward a strategy for achieving this by building real working class solidarity: “encourage the development of direct links between the trade unions, women’s groups, student unions, campaigns, social and cultural organisations in Britain with social movements in Iraq … this should involve … major trade unions visiting and helping to rebuild the independent trade union movement in Iraq … practical support to helping rebuild civil society in Iraq by supporting those organisations not aligned to the occupying forces” (resolution 5).
Likewise, the Jewish Socialist Group motion clearly draws a line against the United Nations. It notes that “no outside force can substitute itself for the self-determination of the Iraqi people and that the United Nations is not truly independent of the world’s most powerful nations”. It proposes instead: “Build links with emergent progressive and democratic forces in Iraq and provide solidarity to defend them from attack from the occupation forces, the Iraqi puppet movements and from fundamentalist forces” (resolution 22).
Both of these eminently supportable resolutions make many parallel points to our own shorter motion, which simply calls on the STWC to “campaign in solidarity with the democratic, secular and socialist forces of resistance in Iraq” (resolution 25).
The point is to inject working class politics into the anti-war movement, in order to make a start in taking this tremendously important movement to a higher level. So that in future, when the imperialists threaten a new resurgence of world barbarism, we - the anti-war, progressive forces of the world - can take them by the throat and bring them crashing down, confronting them with our alternative: world socialism, the rule of the working people.