27.08.2008
Making themselves look ridiculous
Recent resignations from the AWL have underlined the crisis of the organisation - but also the political weakness of its minority opposition, writes Mark Fischer
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has presented an extremely sorry spectacle since its leader, Sean Matgamna, went public with a “discussion article” that excused any future attack on Iran by Israel.1 Many members have retreated into an excruciating form of denial, where the caveats that the patriarch slipped into the original piece - to the effect that he does not explicitly “advocate an Israeli attack on Iran, endorse it or take political responsibility for it” - have been seized on as desperate means to deflect the harsh criticisms by the Weekly Worker and others. Frankly, this is pathetic.
To reiterate the simple facts - for those AWLers who refuse to face the uncomfortable truth - the Matgamna logic runs as follows. There is “good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity”. This, he affirms, is inevitable, given the “lunatics” of the “clerical fascist regime” in Tehran and their genocidal intentions towards Israel. So, he asks, “in the name of what alternative would we condemn Israel?”
Solidarity editor Cathy Nugent claims that the “poor loons who control the Weekly Worker” started up a “chorus of spluttering abuse”. Where we wrote that Matgamna “excused” an attack on Iran (necessarily, up to and including the use of bunker-buster nuclear weapons), Nugent has actually discerned that “you are meant to read: ‘justified’, ‘advocated’”.2
True, Matgamna has not - yet - advocated such an attack: but what possible meaning can be read into the series of statements above, other than excusing - ie, apologising for, defending, explaining away, making justifications for - an Israeli attack?
Apart from David Broder - who has now resigned, along with fellow minority member, Chris Ford - the general response to this outrage has been the sort of mealy-mouthed obfuscation that Nugent has gone in for and a refusal to draw a sharp line against this naked embrace of social-imperialism. By forming a defensive phalanx around Matgamna, core members Martin Thomas, Mark Osborn, Paul Hampton and Cathy Nugent have demonstrated that the correct characterisation for this organisation as a whole is social-imperialist. Without an organised, politically coherent revolt from AWLers, the danger is that those individuals who disagree with or want to distance themselves from Matgamna will either fall into a conforming silence or simply drop out of the AWL in shame and disgust without a political fight.
Nevertheless, there is seething discontent. Key people like Sacha Ismail, Bruce Robinson and Daniel Randall have all roundly criticised Matgamna. So it would be stupid to rule out the possibility of the AWL ditching its patriarch. After all Gerry Healy and Ted Grant both went that way. Indeed in the contributions to the latest AWL discussion bulletin,3 we see the battle lines being drawn between Matgamna-loyalists and Matgamna-opponents.
Pre-emptive
As we pointed out the last edition of this paper, the Matgamna “discussion article” was not intended to prompt a rational debate on the left on the prospects of an Israeli attack on Iran. It was a calculated provocation - not against what he calls the “kitsch left” in general, but specifically against the growth of a roughly equivalent political trend in his own organisation.
As a pre-emptive strike against ‘kitsch creep’ in the AWL - the tendency for AWL youth in particular to lean in the direction of ‘mainstream’ opinion on the revolutionary left - Matgamna sought, by excusing Israeli military aggression against Iran, to draw out far more explicitly the implications of his self-proclaimed Zionism. Logical, but deeply reactionary.
The organisation’s May conference worried him deeply. Some 40% voted for a soft ‘troops out’ amendment on Iraq, invoking sneers from the likes of Mark Osborn about the AWL’s “Maoist youth” (reported by David Broder in their discussion bulletin).4 Worse, the conference passed a totally inadequate - but, for Matgamna, deeply flawed - resolution on Iran. This stated: “… a conflict between Iran and Israel would constitute war between two sub-imperialisms …” It goes on to commit the organisation to “oppose military action (whether invasion or air strikes, bombing raids, etc) or economic sanctions against Iran”.5
Matgamna’s intervention was a high-risk attempt - for the moment successful - to rewin his disorientated organisation. This has involved corralling the majority into attacking the CPGB and the Weekly Worker. In fact, this has become a sort of loyalty test in the AWL.
This sectarian mindset is neatly revealed by Matgamna-loyalist Tom Unterrainer’s bulletin contribution. He advocates “a turn designed to address contacts and activists beyond the existing left milieu”. This necessitates the AWL going “on the offensive against those organisations, publications and individuals that distort, corrupt and poison socialist ideas”.
He goes on: “I do not propose going along to smash up anyone’s meetings, I do not propose mimicking the Sparts - a campaign of dogmatic harassment - but I do advocate a campaign whereby we sharply raise the political temperature … We should continue to challenge [the left] to debates, we should intervene in their meetings … and plan contact work with those in their orbit.”
In fact, the leadership clique around Matgamna has already started to implement this proposal. This explains why we were approached on August 21 by Martin Thomas: are we “willing to debate the issues?” he asks. Our record shows we are more than willing. At the same time, a number of our comrades have been individually contacted by Thomas as he goes fishing for the squeamish in our ranks. (This from an organisation that complained last year that we had approached comrade Broder as a minority representative to speak at Communist University 2007 - Paul Hampton defined this as “shit stirring”, I recall. In contrast, we have no complaints: the AWL can speak to any of our members - this was precisely why we invited them to debate Israel-Iran at this year’s CU in the first place. That they ducked that debate is up to them - but what a mendacious, two-faced cult they are!).
So, rather than provoke a “rational discussion” with the rest of the left,6 Matgamna and his leadership allies are acting to increase the isolation of their own group, to compact its ranks internally by provoking more external pressure from organisations outraged at its leading figure’s pre-emptive justification of an Israeli attack on Iran.
The dissenting voices that have been raised against this nonsense are mostly characterised by their timidity and unwillingness at the moment to call for Matgamna to be removed from the leadership. Nonetheless, we have veteran AWLer Bruce Robinson referring to the “ambiguities in the third camp tradition” as the “root of the problem”.7 He bemoans the “incoherence and evasiveness in our politics”, personified in Matgamna himself. At the last national committee of the organisation, Robinson recalls, the AWL leader “revealingly” noted that “we do not live in an age of revolutions”, thus “all we can do at the moment is make propaganda for our ideas and fight the rest of the left”.
He points to “Sean’s rather contradictory combination”. The reality of the world means “we have to take sides on many of the choices posed by bourgeois politics”, yet at the same time “take no responsibility for them and remain the party of irreconcilable opposition”. In Robinson’s opinion, the contentious “discussion article” illustrates that Matgamna “seems increasingly to operate in these two separate political spheres with little connection between them”.
The danger for Robinson is that, “if applied consistently, this could become a slippery slope” towards a method of “choosing the immediate lesser evil that appears open to us”. Shachtman’s shameful collapse is then cited, although - with an aversion to drawing sharp lines that has been typical of most of the AWL minority - he reassures his readers that there are “many built-in safeguards” against this in the group, despite the “danger” he sees “in the sort of method Sean uses”.8 This about a man who has excused in advance an Israeli attack on Iran, the opening of a new phase of imperialist barbarism in the Middle East!
Endorsement
This tendency to fudge differences, to be loath to launch factional war against rightism in the revolutionary movement is hardly the preserve of the AWL minority, of course. Just look at the way members of the Socialist Workers Party have meekly followed their leadership out of the Respect debacle with no fight, no rebellion, effectively offering an endorsement of the disastrous course of that leadership. That, or meekly leave the organisation, mostly as individuals.
This stands in sharp contrast to the practice of Lenin, who would - as he made clear in a different context - launch a factional “struggle of extermination” against ideas he regarded are harmful.9 We have written before on the need for this angular method, quoting Jules Martov - the future leader of the Mensheviks - on the culture of the famous paper Iskra that he and others edited alongside Lenin: it “strove to make sure that ‘all that is ridiculous’ appears in ‘a ridiculous form’” and to “expose ‘the very embryo of a reactionary idea hidden behind a revolutionary phrase’”.10
The defeats of recent decades have produced a loss of collective memory on the left. The result is softness, lack of seriousness and an apolitical philistinism. Even comrade Broder - who really should know better - refers to the “Punch and Judy” exchange between Matgamna and the CPGB, thus attempting to trivialise the absolutely vital issues at stake in much the same way as leading AWL writers.11 The Weekly Worker is proud to uphold the hard, clear-edged and aggressively honest tradition of Iskra.
In contrast the AWL resorts to silly lies, hysteria and almost crazy behaviour. For instance, the AWL again provided CPGB comrades with some entertainment on the opening day of this year’s Communist University. Last year we were faced with a dismal little picket line led by the clownish lout, Paul Hampton (literally clucking like a chicken at some points, readers will recall). This was in response to our supposed cowardly refusal to debate Matgamna on the occupation of Iraq. All nonsense, of course. In fact, the AWL was grandstanding to deflect attention from the fact that it had barred David Broder from addressing our school.12
This year’s stunt was on an even lower level, but still just a wacky. A forlorn Mark Osborn stood alone in the drizzle handing out a leaflet (‘No to the mullahs’ bomb’) while a selection of AWL literature gently moisturised on a concrete step. We tried to persuade him to enter the building, to have a stall for his material, to dry out and participate in the school’s opening debate on Iran and the danger of war.
“Why would I want to come in to your shit event?” he snarled. Well, for the same reason he thought it worthwhile dragging himself out of bed first thing on a wet Saturday, one would have thought. To engage with the CU participants, to argue, to fight to change minds. The leaflet laughably challenged us in its closing lines “to debate us on this question, at a time and place and with a chair acceptable to both sides”.13 Anywhere, any time … apart from here and now!
Risible
The Osborn intervention is not just risible. It shows that the AWL core leadership - most importantly, Matgamna himself - had no honest intention of discussing this issue, despite their posturing.
The last thing they want is rational debate with the left - witness the content of the leaflet the intrepid Osborn was distributing. It is inconceivable that anyone on the left will take it seriously. It asserts:
- First, that Hands Off the People of Iran is nothing more than a CPGB “front organisation”. This bilge has been effectively rebutted on their respective blogs by Hopi executive committee members Tami Peterson and Vicky Thompson.
- Second - and utterly incredibly - that Hopi advocates a “mullahs’ bomb”! “By talking about the ‘Iranian people’, Hopi and the [CPGB] disguise their political capitulation to the clerical fascist regime. Would they care to explicitly justify their position in favour of an Iranian nuclear bomb?”
- Even more bizarrely, this nasty little flyer goes on to suggest our “weaselling support” for a “mullahs’ bomb” is “also blatant and shameless”. In reality, Hopi states this: “Opposition to Israeli, British and American nuclear weapons. For a Middle East free of nuclear weapons as a step towards worldwide nuclear disarmament.”14
This, according to the leaflet, is simply “a statement about Israel’s bomb; it is a smart ass way of deflecting the burning, immediate question of the acquirement of nuclear weapons by the Iranian regime onto a general project for a nuclear-free Middle East” (as if the prospect of Iran threatening Israel with a nuclear strike is a matter of “immediate” politics - as opposed to a military strike by Israel against Iran). Apparently, what we really mean “is all too clear if you think about it” - the CPGB and Hopi are “defending the clerical fascist regime which they equate with the ‘Iranian people’”.
This desperately incoherent stuff is easily batted aside by simply looking up the Hopi website, viewing the videos from the founding conference or just reading the report of that event in our paper.15 It belies the sickly hypocritical editorial in the latest issue of the AWL’s newspaper, Solidarity, for “the restoration of the habit of rational discussion and honest examination of political positions and experiences” on the left.16
Some on the left and in the workers’ movement oppose the politics of Hopi - eg, last year John Rees and Andrew Murray ensured that Hopi’s affiliation to the Stop the War Coalition was rejected. But you will find no-one this side of sane who suggests the campaign supports the Iranian regime and advocates its acquisition of nuclear weapons.
More nonsense of this ilk can be expected, as the AWL continues to degenerate. We can understand the reaction of David Broder and Chris Ford in walking out of the organisation, a place whose whole atmosphere comrade Broder characterises as “poisoned”.
Nevertheless they have made a mistake. However unpleasant the regime, the struggle to fully elaborate and generalise the issues involved should have been made.
This would have required hard, factional organisation and clear politics. Besides laying bare the undemocratic practices of the AWL and vigorously opposing its social-imperialism and pro-Zionism, it was obviously necessary to get to the heart of the matter. First and foremost that would have meant taking a clear stand on the reactionary nature of imperialism, rejecting the AWL’s version of ‘ultra-imperialism’. Other programmatic questions immediately follow: the decline of capitalism, the role of the labour bureaucracy, the nature of Labourism, the illusions of economism, the importance of republican democracy and the kind of party the working class needs in order to win state power.
Done openly, all this would have helped to educate the wider workers’ movement, not merely the ranks of the AWL. Inevitably there would have been bureaucratic attempts by the Matgamnaites to close down debate, to intimidate and to expel. But valuable lessons would have been learnt and the cycle of slow demoralisation and irresponsible resignations broken.
Another opportunity has been lost, comrades.
Notes
1. ‘What if Israel bombs Iran?’ Solidarity July 24.
2. Solidarity August 21.
3. No281, August 26.
4. Ibid p21.
5. www.workersliberty.org/print/9964
6. Solidarity August 21.
7. Discussion bulletin No281, August 26, p41.
8. Ibid p42.
9. Quoted in M Liebman Leninism under Lenin p59.
10. Quoted in ibid p29.
11. Guest posting at shirazsocialist.wordpress.com, August 23.
12. See Weekly Worker August 30 2007.
13. For the full text, see www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/08/09/no-%E2%80%9Cmullahs-bomb%E2%80%9D
14. See www.hopoi.org/main.html for full statement.
15. See www.hopoi.org/conference/videos.html for Moshé Machover speaking on this subject. See Weekly Worker December 13 2007 for a report of the conference discussion specifically on this subject.
16. Solidarity August 21.