20.12.2007

Abandoning class politics

The tensions in the Alliance for Workers' Liberty over the occupation of Iraq have disappeared from public view. Yet the opposition has found a new hook to express its discontent. Ken Crisp reports

Since June the Alliance for Workers' Liberty's newspaper Solidarity has not carried a single article questioning that organisation's refusal to demand an end to the occupation of Iraq. Despite the significance of this position, Solidarity gives its readers no indication that there exists in the AWL a substantial minority tendency which has opposed this essentially pro-imperialist line. The minority's most vocal representatives, Daniel Randall and David Broder, appear to have fallen silent.

But the tensions in the AWL over the question of Iraq have again begun to surface, with two short bursts of polemic in Solidarity's sporadic letters page exposing a parallel debate over Palestine. While in previous years AWL comrades have displayed embarrassment at Sean Matgamna's boisterous self-definition as "Zionist", or the claims of his number two, Martin Thomas, to be "a little bit Zionist" (see Weekly Worker October 30 2003), this time the row is over the organisation's alignment to Fatah, which the AWL has supported enthusiastically since the PLO endorsed a variant of the 'two states' solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The dispute around Palestine was first referred to in the editorial of the June 28 Solidarity, which observed in the wake of the Hamas-Fatah civil war: "The issue is the right to resist tyranny: the right to fight it, subvert it, defeat it, crush it. The secular, or more secular, or semi-secular, forces have every right to try to resist, defeat and crush clerical fascism." The editorial argued that "socialists and consistent democrats" had no choice but to take sides with Fatah.

In the following issue David Broder baulked at the idea of support for the US-backed Fatah formation: "Surely our means of fighting clerical fascism is not to invoke the so-called international community or line up with the 'least worst' bourgeois forces at hand, but instead to rebuild a working class alternative" (Solidarity July 19). AWL functionary Mark Osborn responded with a call for Palestinian workers to "help Fatah fight Hamas" (August 9).

Using an argument strongly reminiscent of the AWL majority's apologia for the occupation of Iraq, comrade Osborn commented that "Under Fatah there is some freedom for a third camp to develop; under Hamas there is none. David doesn't like the choice, Fatah or Hamas. I don't like it much myself. But during the fighting in Gaza that's what it came down to."

So the AWL's enthusiasm for an independent working class 'third camp' is predicated on the ability of the imperialist 'first camp' to hold the 'second camp' of political islam at bay in the region. They look to US 'globocop' intervention to protect the working class from islamism, crudely mirroring the Socialist Workers Party's opportunist support for the reactionary immediate rivals of American imperialism (Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, etc).

Martin Thomas even goes as far as to suggest that "if it were possible to imagine some 'surgical' operation that would stop Iran's hideous regime acquiring nuclear weapons, and take out the foul Ahmadinejad, it would be good" (October 11), although back on Earth the real effect of US sabre-rattling is to rally many Iranians behind the ultra-conservative Tehran regime. No wonder the AWL has refused to engage with the Hands Off the People of Iran campaign, which is unconditionally opposed to war and sanctions as well as the Iranian government. The AWL did not even send a reporter to the Hopi conference.

The article which sparked the second flurry of letters in Solidarity over Palestine - Daniel Randall's essay on the different elements of the Palestinian labour movement - was superficially separate from the earlier row. His correct conclusions were that, "although the Israel-Palestine conflict is undeniably a complex one, there is one simple aspect for socialists: that is the basic reality that only the working classes of both nations can bring about fundamental and democratic social change"; and: "if working class and democratic forces in Palestine and Israel are currently weak, marginalised or politically misled, then that is no argument for abandoning our faith in them as the agents of change and naively pinning our hopes on some other force. It is only an argument for doing whatever we can to help those democratic, working class forces become stronger"(October 11). This implicitly attacked comrade Osborn's assertion that "smallish trade union initiatives, etc" should pin their hopes on the corrupt, EU-USA-approved and - most centrally - bourgeois Fatah party.

Unfortunately comrade Randall is far from explicit on this score, and nowhere relates the AWL's support for Fatah to its attitude towards the occupation of Iraq. Failing to note the AWL's ignorance of the relationship between democratic demands and working class politics, comrade Randall leaves himself open to the criticisms levelled by Martin Thomas (writing under the pseudonym 'Rhodri Evans'), who excuses the AWL's lack of interest in Palestinian workers' organisations on the grounds that they do not seek a 'two states' solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (October 25).

Fetishised above and beyond any analysis of imperialism or class, 'two states' becomes the only determinant, and so Fatah is worthy of the AWL's support. This even though Fatah, like some Hamas leaders, has adopted the 'two states' demand on purely pragmatic grounds (in the hope of taking power in whatever territory it can lay its hands on) rather than out of some sort of cast-iron democratic principle. But since the AWL abstracts self-determination for the Palestinians and Iraqis from class politics and its much-vaunted "everyday trade union activism", the AWL can back even bourgeois anti-islamist forces who use a variant on the right slogan.

For the AWL leadership the working class is just too weak to be worthy of any consideration. Responding to a further letter of indignation from comrade Broder, 'Rhodri Evans' ridiculed comrades of his who have too much faith in the Palestinian labour movement, arguing that, given the weakness of working class forces, the only realistic position for the British left is to align itself with the better bourgeois alternative on offer: "There are small independent workers' committees in Gaza which, understandably, disavow links with either side in the civil war. We support those workers' committees against both Hamas and Fatah; but, in circumstances where there is absolutely no chance of those committees triumphing against both Hamas and Fatah, is that all we have to say? The 'third camp' does not mean saying that all cows are black in the night of politics short of working class triumph - 'They're all bad! Workers, workers, workers!' (December 6).

However, if there is one lesson to be taken from the British left's ignominious history of support for 'progressive' third world regimes, it is the bankruptcy of dependency on bourgeois parties as substitutes for the working class. No sector of capital can be relied on to defend democratic rights for the working class - it must defend them for itself. If workers are too weak to do this in the immediate, the key question for communists is precisely how working class forces can gain influence.

Comrade Broder reveals the AWL's shortcomings here: "The recent Workers' Liberty supplement entitled 'How do we best help the Palestinians?' rightly opposed any academic boycott of Israel and argued for 'two states', but failed to pose the question of positive solidarity with Palestinian workers - thus repeating one of the main mistakes of the 'boycotters'. While the arguments made on the national question were convincing, its pages did not in fact give us any clues as to how we can 'best help the Palestinians', or deal with the question of agency. How might the organised working class grow as a real force in the region, and how can we practically help them?" (www.workersliberty.org/node/9623).

But, again, the simmering debate over the imperialist occupation of Iraq goes almost without mention in David's piece, which includes only this casual reference: "Neither Israel's racist Histradut union nor Iraqi trade unions who - horror of horrors - call for the withdrawal of US-UK troops, are subject to equivalent disapproval [as compared to the Workers' Advice Centre] in Solidarity." This kind of half-joking side comment is no substitute for real polemic. Taking the AWL leadership to task is a very serious duty indeed - dissenting voices in the organisation must realise that what their leaders are doing is giving apologias for the plans of American and British imperialism in the Middle East, while abandoning any effective focus on the labour movement.

The AWL's substantively pro-imperialist stance does, of course, have a 'third camp' gloss. Its leaders claim that the withdrawal of coalition troops would mean the destruction of the labour movement, so then conclude that the continuing occupation represents the 'lesser evil' scenario. Sacha Ismail writes: "Of course, the occupation does not exist to protect the labour movement in any sense. But it is nonetheless true that, as against the 'resistance' and the gangsters, its rule and that of its sponsored government provide some very limited space for the labour movement to exist. Can you deny that the Iraqi left and labour movement basically exist in occupied territory, not territory controlled by the 'resistance'? (Solidarity December 8 2006).

The AWL leadership does not for a second stop to think of the role imperialist troops play in engendering sectarian tensions and buttressing the 'resistance', the Americans' own death squads and islamist gangsters, nor the Iraqi left's and workers' organisations' own call for occupying troops to leave Iraq. Nor can the AWL imagine the huge effect a successful campaign by the international labour movement to force the troops to leave would have on the balance of class forces within Iraq itself, purely because of who had forced them out. Like the SWP, for the AWL 'Troops out now' can only mean lending support to the islamist 'resistance', since it perceives the right to self-determination as deracinated and not to be understood as a class issue.

Unfortunately, dissenting thinkers in the AWL appear yet to draw any sharp conclusions about their leadership's practice. In an email exchange with CPGB national organiser Mark Fischer, comrade Broder claimed that "the debate in the AWL is one of tactics...there is no pro-imperialist side, hence there is no dispute 'in principle'" (Weekly Worker June 14); and when the AWL leadership refused him permission to speak at the Communist University 2007, he crudely defended his organisation with an article attempting to play down the seriousness of the debate: "The majority is not pro-imperialist or pro-occupation, and does not have a 'scab line', but makes a purely tactical error" (Solidarity August 9).

This will not do, comrades. Abandoning independent working class politics, playing down democratic rights and sidetracking communist agitation in favour of backing half-baked bourgeois democrats is indeed a question of principle. For therein lies the distinction between a fight for working class self-emancipation and the politics of toadying to imperialism's 'bourgeoisie with a human face'.