08.10.2008
Defending sect cohesion
Mark Fischer points to the 'family resemblance' between the AWL and those it calls the "kitsch left"
One of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s supposed selling points is its relative openness compared to much of the rest of the ostensibly revolutionary left - a feature it promotes energetically.
For instance, prominent on the organisation’s website is a contribution titled ‘Left unity? Yes, but why is the “left” divided now?’ (see www.workersliberty.org). The fact that the word ‘left’ appears in scare quotes in the first place gives us a small clue as to the AWL’s real take on the task of left unity - after all, this is a group that publicly refers to the rest of us as “kitsch left”, “anti-semitic” and, in the case of the CPGB, “loons”. However, if you did not actually know the real practice of this sect in the workers’ movement, the document makes some telling points.
Amongst other well aimed criticisms, it talks of the pervasive anti-democratic culture of the left, the drive to political insularity that characterises so many groups, since “contact with a more open, democratic and rational ways of organising would dissolve the pretensions of the leaders of such groups, and dissipate the holy aura surrounding them, their ideas and their organisation”.
This leads the groups to “cultivate and foment extreme hostility and hatred for [open and rational criticism] when it comes from outside.” This in turn creates an odd world, where working class partisans of various persuasions maintain “a malevolent silence towards each other except for an occasional snarl”.
There may well be a more than a few furrowed brows amongst regular readers of the Weekly Worker by now. After all, we have reported quite a bit of AWL ‘malevolent snarling’ directed towards us over the recent period. Since this paper has taken the lead in the attack on Sean Matgamna’s disgraceful “discussion piece” excusing in advance an Israeli attack on Iran, AWLers have generally responded in irrational ways.
Of course, the degree of puffed up outrage they have manifested is generally in inverse proportion to their actual confidence about their leadership’s political stance - the more troubled they feel, the more surly and unpleasant they are with the messenger bringing them the bad news. Comrades should recall the violent reaction CPGBers faced when we exposed the SWP’s “clause four moment” - Lindsey German’s comments from a platform at Marxism 2003 to the effect that women’s and gay rights were not “shibboleths”.
As we pointed out at the time, “the SWP’s violent hysteria flows from a profound political weakness. If the organisation was actually confident about its politics and the alliance with the mosques, why react in such a brittle way to criticisms? The SWP leadership is aware that in terms of Marxist principle and the history of our movement, it is skating on very thin ice. That is why it is trying to paint any criticism, any dissent as an act of ‘racism’, something that must be met with physical attacks and censorship” (Weekly Worker July 17 2003).
The AWL’s hysteria has taken similar forms. As we reported last week, there is deep unease in the ranks of this organisation. Currently, the leadership is attempting to channel this into irrationally aggressive opposition to its critics on the left - primarily its chief tormentor, the Weekly Worker.
It is also very much on display in the leadership’s attempt to whip up anger against David Broder and Chris Ford, two comrades who resigned from the AWL (primarily over the organisation’s pro-imperialism, but also citing the sect’s lack of operative democracy) to form the grandly named International Communist Group, organised around the Commune website (thecommune.wordpress.com).
Last week, I contrasted the quite tender solicitude shown to ex-AWLers who leave to the right with the aggressive attitude to critics on the left. This has gone to the absurd level of the August 30 AWL national committee passing a resolution defining the ICG as “a very hostile group, and specifically one where hostility to the AWL is one of their main missions rather than incidental” (minutes of NC).
Frankly, this is so palpably untrue that plenty of AWLers themselves are raising qualms. Specifically, their criticisms were prompted by a comment in a Martin Thomas email of August 31, where he proudly reported that Tom Rigby - the right-leaning ex-AWLer mentioned above - “agreed that he would not post in future to David B’s and Chris F’s website”.
Very quickly, David Kirk came back on this to correctly note that there is nothing on the Commune site that is “expressly sectarian or expressly anti-AWL”. So what is the problem with contributing posts “expressing the [AWL’s] politics and ideas … We should not act in a sectarian way towards them.” On September 1, Ed Maltby also confessed himself “unclear”. Moreover, he expressed disquiet with “the implication of Martin’s email”. After all, he asks, what’s the problem with “carrying on loyal and honest discussion with members of the ICG” - why has Thomas even implied that this in itself this would be “politically suspect”?
Gemma Short in a posting of the same day was also “confused”. This was despite the fact that she regarded the NC as being “right to characterise [the ICG] as a hostile group and treat them as such”. That is one thing, but “shouldn’t we and don’t we actively encourage comrades to post to other groups’ websites when we see the argument needs to be had?” Despite the supposed ‘hostility’ of the Commune group, “how this logic extends to not engaging in debate I don’t see”.
All of which seems to be, more or less, reasonable. However, Camila Bassi replied on behalf of the Matgamna loyalists. She suggested that “unlike other left groupings (such as the SP, Scottish SP and SWP), the DB/CF entity [the ICG] is not simply hostile to us but has a project to poison the AWL and kill it off”. If this (transparently false) proposition is accepted, it follows that “paying attention to this entity like it’s a sincere effort to galvanise working class forces for progressive good, albeit with confused political ideas, misses the point of its existence … I would place the tiny duo of DB/CF in my camp of political scumbags (I’m not being flippant here), along with Socialist Action and the CPGB … posting to their website fuels their existence in a way that can only suit them”.
Bassi recognises that there are those in the AWL who “disagree” - but she targets them with a question - “what ultimate purpose” would the AWL serve in “paying attention to this duo?” They are different to other left groups - apart from us “loons”, I assume - because the likes of the SWP et al “aren’t specifically out to smash us”: they “carry out some good political activity (although with politically erroneous ideas) and have a layer of contacts around them” (posting, September 1).
What we can detect here is a whiff of the same sort of sectarian template as the SWP, if you think about it. At Marxism, in the pages of Socialist Worker or its other journals, the SWP is happy to debate with political trends to the right of its formal political stance; those to its left - with coherent and worked out programmatic differences within the parameters of Marxism - are ignored, ostracised and largely written out of history.
The AWL is not the SWP, of course. Thus, despite its preferred options, it has to engage with the likes of the CPGB and even the ICG. The mode of this interaction, however, is not intended to honestly deal with the arguments - it is exclusively designed to cohere the sect. Once a firewall of irrational hostility is established, behind it almost any lie can be disseminated and believed in a sect (expediently ‘believed’, perhaps).
So we have had in the recent past the feeble nonsense that Hands Off the People of Iran (and one of its leading members, Moshé Machover) stand for the right of the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons - a “mullahs’ bomb”, in fact. And now the rank and file of the AWL are being fed the bullshit that this new ICG group is seriously committed to a core “project to poison the AWL and kill it off”, as the sectarian fantasist Camila Bassi puts it.
In fact, as I have previously observed and as confirmed by reports of the ICG’s first (semi-) public meeting on September 1, it is not explicitly hostile enough, instead presenting itself as yet another immaculately born sect.
The AWL decided to send “a team” to this event “to make sure we intervene in the meeting in an organised way” (Sacha Ismail, internal email, September 1). It was as though the meeting had been titled ‘Why we left the AWL and why others should follow our lead’ - ie, an attempt to define the new ICG against the original host organisation. In fact, the meeting was on the theme of “the upsurge 1968-74, with guest speakers Sheila Cohen, author of Ramparts of resistance, and George Shaw, a former Vauxhall car worker and former member of Solidarity” (thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/09/01).
Now, in terms of the culture we seek to disseminate in the workers’ movement, this is absurd. We believe the left should take its differences seriously and make time and the effort to dissect them publicly. However, the fact that the ICG decided to organise its first meeting in this way hardly indicates a group “where hostility to the AWL is one of their main missions rather than incidental” (my emphasis).
Undaunted, the AWL members turned up at the event and - reportedly - made themselves appear slightly ‘Sparty’ in their attempts to get the meeting to discuss what they had come to talk about, not its advertised subject. Chris Ford - one of the “scumbags” who resigned from the AWL, of course - bemoaned the fact that those present had to listen to speeches about the AWL dispute, when they had pitched up to discuss “the class struggle in the 1970s instead of the usual trading abuse and point-scoring about internecine squabbles in left groups - topics that most workers don’t give a shit about” (mailing to the Commune, September 2).
Other postings after the meeting on the same site give a taste of just how self-obsessed the AWL’s intervention was on the night:
- “In the end three AWLers did speak and all insisted on asking questions about the departure of the meeting’s organisers [from the AWL] that were not related to the topic of the meeting” - Mike, September 3.
- “… the AWL people were allowed to speak. Martin [Thomas] made a speech from the floor, which he made facing sideways, addressing his own members. When he went over the time limit, chairperson Broder asked him to stop speaking, which produced some hue and cry from the AWL section of the audience. It seems to me that, while the AWL seem to have come along to discuss the recent split/defections, the audience were there to watch the film and hear the speakers (none of whom are party to the dispute with AWL) and effectively insisted on their right to do so” - Londonhobgoblin, September 4.
- “Actually, thinking about it for 30 seconds, their behaviour indicates the fear David Broder et al’s departure appears to have instilled in [the AWL]. Sad and a tragedy that they should have degenerated so” - George S, September 4.
There are clearly many in the AWL who, having taken their organisation’s protestations of honest debate and engagement with the left as good coin, feel intensely uncomfortable when these sorts of stunts and provocations are organised. They need to wise up. In order to make such AWL claims a reality, they first have a rebellion to organise.
