09.06.2004

The politics of 'taking sides'

Mike McNair questions why socialists should 'take sides' in the current conflict in Iraq.

‘Taking sides’ and concrete tasks

My theses were designed to make a clear and unambiguous separation between (1) the tasks of communists in Britain in relation to the US-led occupation of Iraq and (2) issues regarding the political line of Iraqi communist and workers’ organisations. This separation is in my view essential if we are to avoid three fundamental political errors.

            The first error, which is commonplace in Trotskyism, is ‘laying down the line’ in a categorical way in relation to the tactical tasks of communists in other countries on the basis of superficial readings of the foreign pages of the bourgeois press. British and American Trots are particularly prone to do this and, in addition, to define ‘the line’ for the country in question on what they see as the needs and tactics of their own organisation.

            The second, which is specifically the stuff of the Spartacist League, is the propagation of ‘military solidarity with’, ‘military united front with’ and ‘military victory to’ lines. These lines have no concrete practical implications, and, since the comrades do not have military forces on the ground, appear as what they are - absurd self-aggrandisement. Their function is to ‘draw the class line’. They attempt to make every issue into an August 1914 - an outbreak of war which separates communists from class traitors. In doing so they caricature Trotsky’s 1933-34 mistake of treating the Comintern’s failure in Germany as an ‘August 1914’ - the mistake which set the Trotskyists on the path to the endless multiplication of sects.

            The third error, which is related to the second, is ‘taking sides’ in a way that does not pose practical tasks for communists or for the workers’ movement. Communists in Britain have two clear tasks in relation to the occupation of Iraq. Firstly to fight for an end to the occupation - specifically the withdrawal of British troops and an end to other British support for it. Secondly to give support to those militants attempting to build workers’ and communist organisations in Iraq. ‘Taking sides’ lines risk placing conditions on both tasks and, as a result, doing only one, or doing neither effectively. Communists in Iraq have different concrete tasks which flow from the situation in Iraq. Muddling the two results in sectarianism.

            But muddling the two is precisely what Ian’s arguments do. Ian says we must ‘take sides’ with the insurgents. But what concretely does ‘taking sides’ with the insurgents mean? As far as communists’ tasks in Britain are concerned, the answer must surely be: building the biggest possible movement against the occupation of Iraq and for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops. I do not think that Ian proposes that we should attempt to give either political or material (financial) support to either the Mehdi army militia, or the unidentified guerrillas operating around Baghdad and in points north and west. Yet it is clear without ‘taking sides’ that our primary task is to build an anti-occupation movement in Britain.

            Ian’s ‘taking sides’ thus has only one practical consequence: to characterise the Iraqi communists as collaborators with the occupation and thus refuse the task of giving support to Iraqi workers’ organisations. Thus Ian says that I “appear to politically defend forces that are clearly not in favour of such an outcome”: ie, outright defeat for the imperialists. In other words, I insist that it is a task of British communists to build support for Iraqi communist and workers’ organisations in spite of our political differences with the leaderships of these organisations.

Defeating imperialism

The core of Ian’s argument is that we favour an outright military defeat of the imperialists “by any means necessary”. This is in a certain sense true. We equally favour the immediate overthrow of the British and US states (and so on). But our line and tactics are determined not only by our subjective desires, but also by the objective situation (as Lenin said somewhere in Leftwing communism).

            The immediate overthrow of the British and US states is not on the agenda. Equally, a simple outright military defeat of the imperialists in Iraq is absolutely impossible. It is excluded by the military relationship of forces. What is possible is a political-militarydefeat of the imperialists through a convergence of an Iraqi national movement with a mass anti-war movement in the occupying powers, exploiting the contradictions within the imperialist camp to force the imperialists to retreat.

            It has been said that the discussion of Respect in the CPGB shows that comrades should read or re-read Lenin’s Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder. I agree. It seems to me, however, that Ian’s line on Iraq is precisely a peculiar form of ultra-leftism. He selects from the communist programme the single issue of anti-colonialism and defeatism in relation to imperialist military adventures. He then rewrites reality to make it seem that the ‘nationalists’ are on the road to military victory and hence that the only principled course of action is a ‘theory of the offensive’ approach to this single issue: the Iraqi communists must “critically bloc with the insurgency”. The wish has become the father of the analysis, just as in the ideas of the ‘left communists’ of 1918-20. His suggestion that the communists must “critically bloc with the insurgency”, if it had any practical meaning, would have to be a call for (to give an example used by Lenin in Leftwing communism) 5,000 to launch a military assault on 50,000.

Iraq, islamists, jihadis

Ian thinks that the movement around Moqtasa al-Sadr has become a hegemonic national movement animating a mass insurgency against the occupation. I think this is a gross overestimation of the place of this movement in the political and military relationship of forces in Iraq and of the meaning of the April events. This is a pure question of fact. Neither of us has enough information about the situation on the ground to be able to disprove the other’s opinion: the information we can get is heavily filtered through the biases of the pro-war and anti-war elements of the press and the disinformation operations of the contending trends within the US and British militaries and state bureaucracies, alongside the snippets from independent Iraqi sources.

            Behind this difference over the facts, however, are two underlying political differences. The first is that I think it is questionable to condemn the Iraqi communists categorically for errors of principle - as opposed to expressing in a more cautious form disagreement with their policy - on the basis of an assessment formulated on such limited information.

            (I should say here that I include among the Iraqi communists, contrary to Ian’s assumption, not only the Worker-communist Party (WCPI), but also the ‘official’ Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and its splinter, the ICP-Central Command. I think comrades should read materials from their websites as part of the process of informing themselves on the present discussion (WCPI - http://www.wpiraq.org/english/; ICP - http://www.iraqcp.org/framse1; and ICP-CC [indirectly] - http://www.idao.org/).

            The second difference is that I assess that the political positions of the Sadr movement actually preclude the possibility of their forming the sort of national leadership which could inflict a political-military defeat on the imperialists. The explanation of this view is in my original theses: that is, that the political ideas of islamism and, in particular, jihadism are disabling in the context of the current situation in Iraq.

            Ian’s response is that jihadism equals al Qa’eda and that I am making a false equation between the “openly organised, publicly accessible” and shi’ite, Mehdi army militia, on the one hand, and the secret, terrorist (wahabi) sunni al Qa’eda, on the other. That is not what I said. I take an islamist tendency to be one which considers the sharia (whether in the interpretation of one of the sunni schools, or that of the shia jurists) to be a sufficient guide to political ordering and political action. Such tendencies are as various as catholic and protestant political tendencies, but - like christian religious political groups - they have some fundamental common ideas. I would say that a jihadi tendency is one which takes literally, as an immediate guide to action, the religious duty of muslims to wage war on unbelievers. Such tendencies include Hamas and Hezbollah just as much as al Qa’eda, and the theoretical differences between shia and sunni jurisprudence on the issue are, in the present context, completely secondary (because they concern aggressive, rather than defensive, war).

            The argument of my theses on this issue is that islamism as such is politically disabling to the project of creating a unified national movement against the occupiers, both because it immediately poses the question of which variant of sharia is to be enforced - thus tending towards petty statelets or warlordism - and because its justice-based economic ideas would block any practical reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. Secondly, I argue that jihadi tendencies are specifically disabled from “knowing how to retreat” and how to exploit the contradictions within the enemy camp (Leftwing communism again). This is apparent in Hamas; Hezbollah have been saved from the consequences not by their own political ideas, but by the coercive intervention of the Syrian state in Lebanon in the 1980s.

            Ian’s response simply fails to treat islamist and jihadi tendencies on their own terms or to engage with their religio-political ideas as political ideas. Instead, the nearest approach to a political characterisation of them he offers is as merely an ideological form of nationalism. It should be utterly obvious from the Iranian and Afghan experiences, as well as the politics of islamism and jihadism in other muslim countries, that this is a grossly inadequate analysis. Ian’s patronising refusal to engage with the islamists’ politics reflects the fact that he is blinded by the moralistic politics of ‘taking sides’.

‘Anti-imperialism’

The point of Marxism is not to take ‘morally correct’ positions or to ‘be on the right side’. We can do this without Marxism. The point of Marxism is to use objective analysis about economic and political dynamics to propose feasible ways forward for the working class and the oppressed.

            In this context, moralistic ‘anti-imperialism’ is actually a trap for the working class and oppressed. It is perfectly true that, as Ian says, US imperialism is today’s principal exporter of torture, tyranny, oppression and economic ruin, and that it is capital’s globo-cop. But it does not follow that any defeat for the immediate policy of US imperialism is also a victory for the workers and the oppressed.

            In part this reflects the fact that small bosses and exploiters can be as exploitative and oppressive as big ones and sometimes more so. Equally, if I am mugged by some local teenager, it is not much consolation to be told that the mafiosi are much bigger criminals. The Iranian islamic revolution was undoubtedly a defeat for the policy of US imperialism. It was also and equally undoubtedly a defeat for the Iranian workers and oppressed, and, in fact, worsened the class relation of forces on a world scale.

            In part it reflects the fact that moralistic and ‘taking sides’ anti-imperialism is the gut-reaction remnant of a failed global strategy. At the Comintern Congress of the Peoples of the East and the Second Congress of the Comintern, a possible strategy of defeating the imperialists through the colonial revolution was articulated. The Maoists developed on this basis the global strategy of ‘surrounding the cities’. The strategic line of ‘official communism’ in the Brezhnev period similarly imagined a global development of the ‘anti-imperialist front’ with the ‘socialist bastions’ at its core. 1989 and all that - and the present pro-capitalist evolution of the Chinese and Vietnamese ‘communist’ leaderships - tell us categorically that this global strategy is a dead-end. Imperialism will be strategically defeated through the common efforts of the proletariat globally - or not at all. It will not be defeated through the ‘advance of the colonial revolution’: all such advances, without a breakthrough of the class movement in the imperialist centres, will be recuperated or have the life squeezed out of them by blockades and war.

            The historical disaster of this strategy of anti-imperialism does not mean that we should turn it on its head and see imperialism as playing a progressive, ‘democratic’ role - the line, in however dilute a form, of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. This line is absurd not merely in theory, but also on the basis of all the ‘democratic’ and ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the imperialists in the last 20 years.

            There are, however, two concrete implications. The first is that we cannot simply put a plus sign against the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’. It is a political dead end and can be worse. The second is that we have to cherish and support all efforts to create an organised workers’ movement, even where we have major political disagreements with the comrades in question. However weak these efforts are politically, it is the self-organisation of the working class as a class which is the only road to a future for humanity.

China

Ian and I clearly have radically different positions on the class character of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s (and, following from that, on the character of the 1948 revolution in China). In my opinion the CCP remained a party ultimately based on the proletariat, albeit of a Stalinist, and to this extent petty-proprietor, political character. The result is that my use of 1930s China as an example of communist policy and Ian’s critique of it are at complete cross purposes.

            To address this difference would be a whole different discussion, and I mention it here only to make clear that the difference exists.