15.10.2008
Hitting a raw nerve
As Sean Matgamna ducked the main issue, some of his comrades behaved like a baying mob. Mark Fischer reports on the AWL's fragile falsehoods
The packed-out October 12 debate between Moshé Machover of the Campaign for a Marxist Party and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Sean Matgamna was raucous, ill-tempered and, on occasion, threatened to spill over into physical confrontation, as AWLers - some booze-fuelled - lost their rag with CPGBers and others.
In truth, their furious reactions and accusations of lying against us confirmed the fact that the Weekly Worker has scored painfully accurate points about Matgamna’s original “discussion article” that prompted this debate. A vile piece of work that excused in advance a ‘pre-emptive’ Israeli military attack on Iran (‘What if Israel bombs Iran?’ Solidarity July 24). As Socialist Workers Party member Lionel Sims observed in last week’s paper, “In my experience, if someone gets instantly very angry, it is often because you have hit a nerve” (Weekly Worker October 9).
Exactly. The meeting - and the manner in which the AWL approached it - dramatically underlined that this paper has correctly identified some basic truths about the trajectory of Matgamna’s pro-imperialist group. However, the various bloggers who have since moaned that the event at times resembled a bar-room brawl are profoundly wrong. Firstly because the subject matter and the history of the dispute dictated that this could never have been a polite exploration of opposing but legitimate views within the left - Matgamna’s scab politics do not represent a legitimate trend within our movement. They must be defeated and driven from it. The fact that our comrades spoke with passion and genuine anger against them is to be expected and is indeed politically necessary.
But we did not ape the baying mob the AWLers became at times. As a guest poster on Liam Mac Uaid’s blog put it, they “proceeded to heckle and shout down all anti-Zionist speakers, including Moshé. Although some CPGB speakers also heckled, they were on the whole better behaved. They also, for the most part, discussed the issue; much of the AWL’s contribution consisted of attacks on the CPGB for refusing to debate them, for lying about them, and for threatening to ‘drive them out of the labour movement’” - liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/a-mass-debate).
Secondly, the meeting was always destined to be fraught, as Matgamna’s organisation has reacted in such a hurt and angry way to our exposure of his treacherous stance and thus its clear intention was to cohere itself against the CPGB. Not to explore the real issues at stake. It was with this aim in mind that the AWL’s Martin Thomas issued two sets of internal briefings to secure the line and content of his comrades’ interventions.
The critical minority in the organisation that has expressed misgivings over Matgamna’s politics scandalously imposed a (voluntary?) gagging order on itself and fell into line behind the anti-CPGB/Moshé Machover front. It was significant, for example, that leading member Bruce Robinson was neither on the list of AWL priority speakers handed to the chair at the beginning of the meeting nor indicated he wanted to speak throughout the evening.
This despite his warnings in the group’s internal discussion bulletin that Matgamna’s method “if applied consistently … could become a slippery slope” towards a method of “choosing the immediate lesser evil that appears open to us”, in effect “[taking] sides on many of the choices posed by bourgeois politics”, without posing a working class alternative in anything other than rhetorical flourishes about the far-off future (see Weekly Worker August 28). Come the evening of the debate, however, Robinson was silent. Probably a tacit recognition by a critical loyalist of just how fragile the unity of his group actually is.
Yet, despite these efforts to present a single face to its opponents, the meeting was a dismal failure for the AWL. It lost the debate hands down. Comrade Machover, despite the disagreements of the CPGB majority with elements of his stance on Israel-Palestine, effectively dissected Matgamna’s crude Zionist narrative - “every single one of these ‘facts’” cited by the AWL leader “have been refuted, including by Zionist historians”, he stated - and went on to prove it. When it came to the debate from the floor, CPGBers and others wiped the floor with the AWL (the whole debate can be viewed on the front page of our website at www.cpgb.org.uk).
Even more painfully for the assembled AWLers was the - barely credible - fact that Matgamna refused to actually address the question of an Israeli attack on Iran at all in his opening. This was despite the fact that the AWL’s own publicity for the event - titled ‘Israel, Iran and the left’ - told us that the meeting would discuss “What would socialists say if Israel bombed Iran?” as its first bullet point! In fact the first five of the eight headlined subject headings in Martin Thomas’s briefing paper concerned Iran (eg, “Iran: does it have a nuclear weapons programme?”; “Oppose Iran having nuclear weapons? Or it’s not an issue?”).
On the night, Matgamna just left his comrades high and dry, focussing his entire talk on the background to the founding of the state of Israel and what the attitude of socialists to Israel should be. As I pointed out in the discussion, this cowardly refusal to even broach what was supposed to be the main subject for debate killed stone dead the crap peddled by the AWL that it is the CPGB that has attempted to duck the question.
Unsurprisingly, this has produced further disquiet in the ranks of the AWL, with members - in the words of one on an internal e-list - left “perplexed” by Matgamna’s “odd” decision to “completely [leave] out the whole Iran issue” from his talk on October 12. Sacha Ismail forlornly admits on the same list: “I don’t know either why Sean didn’t mention Iran in his opening speech. No doubt he’ll explain and then we can discuss.”
Then you can discuss it? Would you not expect AWLers to be in uproar about this now? Should they not demand an immediate explanation and apology for this evasion of the main subject matter of the debate? This issue has caused the AWL agonies since July, when the original “discussion article” appeared in Solidarity, yet the man who has been the author of their discomfort simply ducks the issue.
In fact, it is absolutely clear why Matgamna tried desperately to avoid being put on the spot, being made to explicitly state his genuine views on the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran. Interrogated in this way by the audience, it is obvious he would be forced to make explicit what was simply implied in that scandalous article - that he would not oppose an Israeli attack on Iran, but would oppose condemnation of the action and would oppose any mass demonstrations sparked by Israel’s attack. No wonder he preferred to say nothing at all …
It is long overdue that AWLers stop acting like children. Working class politicians operate by drawing out the logical consequences of political statements and actions, not closing their eyes to uncomfortable facts, sticking their fingers in their ears and going ‘la-la-la’ till it goes away. But the AWL’s method is to fudge questions of principle, and blur clear lines of political demarcation.
Thus, following the October 12 debate, I was told by several AWLers that the CPGB had simply - perhaps wilfully - misunderstood Matgamna’s original article and its controversial question, “In the name of what alternative would we condemn Israel?” (if it launched a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on Iran). I was confidently informed that what he meant by this was that AWL condemnation and opposition to such an action of Israel was a given, but Matgamna was making a point that the “kitsch left” (everyone apart from the AWL) would be condemning Israel as a national entity (ie, its very right to exist) as a function of our supposed ‘anti-semitism’.
This is desperate stuff and childlike in its gullibility. It also begs the question as to why it has not only been the Weekly Worker and the rest of the left that has been ‘confused’. Why has the leadership of the AWL itself been split over this question? Why on the August 30 AWL national committee meeting did Patrick Murphy emphasise that “the word ‘oppose’ is crucial”. He went on: “Sean’s original article says an Israeli attack would be a bad thing, but does not oppose it. It asks in the name of what should we condemn it, but dismisses all the reasons for which we might condemn it … what’s the complication about just saying that we oppose an Israeli attack, we condemn it, etc?”
At the same meeting, a Sacha Ismail amendment to a motion from the executive committee to remove the phrase, “We are against such an action”, from the text and replace it with the (marginally) tougher “we are against - that is, we oppose - an attack” was - incredibly - defeated by five votes to eight (see Weekly Worker October 2). Are we therefore to presume that Sacha Ismail, Lynne Moffat, Patrick Murphy, Bruce Robinson and Janine Booth - the NC members who supported the change - are as ‘confused’ as the rest of us? (Farcically, I was told by one irate AWLer after the debate that everyone in the AWL had been happy and onboard … before the CPGB began “shit-stirring”).
The fact that rank and file AWLers repeated this bilge to me confirms a point made during the October 12 meeting. Given the febrile atmosphere of a sect under attack - internally and externally - a test of members’ loyalty becomes the ability to give at least a good impression of believing in palpable nonsense such as this.
What this foul culture requires, of course, is not simply the willingness of the membership to be lied to, but also the practice of constructing what Matgamna referred to in another context as “a tremendous edifice of lies”. Examples include the idea that the CPGB and Hands Off the People of Iran support a “mullahs’ bomb”, that - as expressed by the boorish Paul Hampton - we are just “third period Stalinists”, and that our organisation has been running scared of debating the AWL on this question. This nonsense was effectively batted aside by a leaflet we put together for the debate (see www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/740/Awl%20lies.htm), as well as in numerous articles in this paper - yet we still encountered AWLers on the night (including the thoroughly grumpy Matgamna himself) who repeated the lie.
When a sect peddles such fragile falsehoods, it can only ensure its survival by interacting with others on the left in a semi-hysterical manner that precludes any rational exchanges of ideas. At times on October 12, AWLers continually shouted down their opponents - with Paul Hampton more often than not leading the pack. This behaviour was undoubtedly facilitated by the organisation’s culture of drinking at political events. By contrast, before the event we reiterated our standing practice that comrades must not drink before or during political meetings.
There were one or two confrontations at the end of the meeting with some very drunk, very hurt AWLers, but nothing to worry us. It should, however, worry AWLers themselves. A culture which regards it as acceptable for some members to booze through a meeting, attempt to howl down political opponents and even finish the evening off with physical confrontations should not go unchallenged. If it becomes the norm today, then tomorrow it will be dissident AWLers themselves who will be targets for this sort of loutishness.
