Dear comrade,
On 7 April, at this year’s National Union of Students conference, Socialist Worker Student Society members, in alliance with the Islamist-dominated Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), organised a walkout in protest at the speech given by the Iraqi socialist, Houzan Mahmoud, who had been invited to conference as a guest speaker.
At the same conference, numerous right-wing speeches by Blairites, Tories and others were met not with walkouts but properly with debate. What must this woman have done to inspire such hostility amongst sections of the student left? Is she one of the Blairite apparatchiks invited to conference by the NUS leadership, perhaps? Or a supporter of the US-backed government in Iraq?
In fact, Houzan is a Marxist — a trade union organiser, socialist, feminist and revolutionary opponent of the Iraqi government. Yet when FOSIS delegates left the hall in protest at her speech, SWSS delegates went with them.
FOSIS objected to the fact that Houzan opposes not only the occupation-sponsored Iraqi government, but also the fascistic Islamist and Ba’thist “resistance” gangs which have harassed and murdered trade unionists, women’s rights activists and socialists in Iraq. FOSIS objected to a woman who has rejected religious superstition in the name of Marxism, condemning the brutality of this so-called resistance.
Houzan is a member of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq. The WCPI sum up their position in this way: “We struggle to separate ourselves from both poles of this conflict [both the imperialist occupation forces and the reactionary, anti-working class resistance] and establish and consolidate a third camp as a humanist, liberationist and progressive alternative which stands up against both poles of reaction and terrorism.”
In that spirit the WCPI have been central to building up some of the new Iraqi unions and an unemployed organisation, the Union of the Unemployed (UUI).
As a result of the WCPI’s brave, principled stand they have become targets of both the US/British forces and the “resistance”. The UUI explains the nature of the resistance: “The ‘resistance’ of the ethnocentric groups isreactionary… ‘Occupation’ and ‘resistance’ are two poles of the same reactionary camp… the real basis for struggle against the USA’s new world order is the workers – and their programme of liberty and equality.”
The UUI understand the reality of the “resistance”. They understand that a “resistance” victory will not lead to national liberation and democracy, but to a terrible inter-ethnic civil war, the probable break-up of Iraq, the enslavement of women, crushing of the emerging labour movement and the secular democratic left.
Is that what the SWP wants in Iraq? And if not, why does the SWP champion the Ba’thists and fundamentalists — the very people who would murder or jail all Marxists and feminists, given any chance to do so? The SWP has forgotten what it is positively for (the labour movement, workers’ revolution, women’s liberation, a vast expansion of democracy) and is fixated only on what it opposes (Blair, the US and Israel). Such negativism has led the SWP to make alliances with reactionary critics of the existing order.
Socialist Worker even goes as far as printing articles by Sheikh Hassan al-Zarqani (see SW issue 1945), foreign affairs spokesman for the viciously bigoted right-wing Iraqi cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.
Have you forgotten the lessons from Iran? During the late 1970s, much of the far left developed illusions in the Iranian Islamist movement led Ayatollah Khomeini. The left accepted the Ayotollah’s warm words about democracy and respect for women, and believed that his denunciation of the Iranian Shah and American imperialism meant they had some common cause with the Iranian religious right. And the result? Khomeini came to power and destroyed the left and the workers’ movement. And Islamist rule has meant the legalised, systematic brutalisation of women.
The SWP leadership have abandoned socialist politics and turned themselves into a “left” face for the right-wing Islamist FOSIS, which is linked to the Muslim Association of Britain, a British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The SWP’s politics have bent to accommodate these reactionaries. At this NUS conference, the SWP even helped to vote down a motion calling for a secular, state-funded education system and the abolition of religious schools – a bizarre action for a supposedly atheist, secularist organisation.
The SWP has helped a right-wing religious/political current, in the form of FOSIS and the MAB, gain increased influence in the structures of the student movement. And we are beginning to see where this might lead. At NUS conference, the deeply conservative leadership of FOSIS used their votes and influence to oppose policy on extending abortion rights (they came close to succeeding) and remove a clause demanding progressive taxation (their NUS national executive candidate Jamal el-Shayyal laughed openly at the left when this clause was removed from the text of a motion).
Perhaps the SWP leaders think they are being “clever” and using the Islamists to get a hearing from youth from a Muslim background. In fact, it is the SWP that is being used: helping the FOSIS right wingers to grow, poisoning the political environment as they do so.
Your comrades’ actions in Blackpool was not an accident, but a reflection of your organisation’s increasingly opportunistic and undemocratic politics. Because the SWP has so little internal democracy, you may not be aware of everything your leaders are doing in your name.
Did you know that while Socialist Worker condemned the union leaders’ recent decision to call off strike action over cuts in public sector pensions, SWP members on the Public and Commercial Services union executive voted in favour of cancelling the strike?
Or that Respect leader George Galloway, far from being an ex-Labour left-winger, opposes abortion rights, supported the introduction of tuition fees and the abolition of student grants in 1998, and only voted against the Blairite government five times between 1997 and 2001?
Or that the SWP has consistently opposed the call for Respect to advocate that MPs should receive only the average workers’ wage — in order to keep in with Galloway, who thinks that MPs should be paid even more that they are currently!
Comrade, it is time to make a balance sheet. Your organisation, the SWP, is pulling you further and further from independent working class politics and miseducating many young people into the idea that “the enemy of our enemy is our friend”. It’s important that SWP members who disagree with this dash to the right don’t remain silent.
Alan Clarke, Sacha Ismail, Dan Randall, Josh Robinson, Faz Velmi (AWL students)
Comments
A reply
Dear Comrades
Houza Mahmoud was invited by the AWL and only able to speak at the conference due to AWL's scary mastery of NUS' bureaucratic procedure. She wasn't representative of NUS anti-war sentiment or any significant social forces within Iraq. Your letter refers to her as an "Iraqi Socialist" as if she represented both Iraqi's and socialism when in fact she represented neither.
The whole history of social-democracy and Stalinism, if it has taught us anything, has taught most of us in the revolutionary Marxist tradition to be wary of judging peoples politics purely by their outward form and not their content. It is more than enough to mention that whilst Stalin paid lip service to Marxism he simultaneously crushed the international workers movement. Similarly the fact that Mahmoud calls herself a Marxist is irrelevant considering the reactionary position she takes in regards to the national liberation struggle in Iraq.
I assume that when you talk about the "Islamist-dominated FOSIS" who are "poisoning the political environment" and when you talk about the "fascistic Islamist and Ba'thist resistance" you believe you are dealing with the same reactionary forces. If so what justifies this analysis? The growth of FOSIS has been due to the brutality of the war on terror which overwhelmingly targets Muslim people. It isn't surprising that radicalised Muslims expressing their politics through their faith has been an increasing occurrence. Also the fact that they remain conservative on an issue like abortion is irrelevant, neither does it compromise genuine anti-imperialism. Should the Stop the War coalition have had a Marxist tick-box which people had to fulfil before being allowed to demonstrate on the February the 15th demonstration? How do the AWL think a revolutionary party combats reactionary ideas and contradictory consciousness in the working-class? Do the AWL think we should have scuttled around the pickets of the miners strike checking off who could explain "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" before we engaged with that struggle?
Its quite usual for state oppression and imperialism to throw religion in to a progressive role for emancipation (most notably in Central America in the 1980's). So when Islamists are combating a repressive state apparatus and an imperialist American occupation force as in Iraq then its quite different to a situation where Islamists are the reactionary tools of the state. AWL's blanket "religion bad, secularism good" attitude misses the mark. As with Oscar Romero and liberation theology which flourished in opposition to American imperialism in Central America, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the broadly Islamist character of the resistance is fighting against American imperialism and for Iraqi national liberation. The fact that these people express politics through religion is not sufficient evidence to dub someone "reactionary". Any commentary dealing with the resistance must look at the social forces at work and not simply the superficial details like the professed beliefs of "Worker-Communist Party of Iraq", which has more syllables than members.
Your definition of the resistance as "fascistic Islamist and Ba' thist" bares no relation to reality. Firstly I strongly disagree with the use of the term "fascistic", not only does it tar the resistance with a false brush but it dilutes any Marxist understanding of what fascism is. Chris Harman's article "the Prophet and the Proletariat" from ISJ 64 (Autumn 1994) looks at what's wrong with the description of Islamism as fascistic.
"The petty bourgeois class base has not only been characteristic of fascism, it has also been a feature of Jacobinism, of Third world nationalism, of Maoist Stalinism and Peronism. Petty bourgeois movements only become fascist when they arise at a particular point in the class struggle and play a particular role. This role is not just to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie, but to exploit the bitterness they feel at what an acute crisis in the system has done to them and so turn them into organised thugs for capital to tear worker's organisations apart."
So whilst being a petty bourgeois the fact that they "grow on the soil of a very large social groups that suffer under existing society, and whose feeling of revolt, could be tapped for progressive purposes, providing a lead came from a rising level of workers sturggle." This shows that whilst Islamism is a movement of the petty bourgeoisie (which contains all the contradictions that exist in such a movement) , the broadly Islamist resistance still deserves our support because it is a popular resistance, the vast bulk of whom comes from the ranks of the workers and the poor and who are fighting for genuine national liberation. Also developments like the solidarity between Shia and Sunni in the mainstream of the resistance (despite the occupation forces and minority groups best attempts to stir-up civil war) and the general strike against the occupation in the City of Ramadi show an increasing level of class struggle and working-class leadership in a Iraq that prove the resistance's popular character. Only one question remains about your definition of the resistance as fascistic. If the resistance movement is fascistic then what workers movement is it crushing? You surely aren't suggesting that the resistance is a fascistic mass movement which is attacking the irrelevant WCPI? The WCPI doesn't compete with the size of the German KPD at the time of the rise of Hitler. If the resistance is fascistic then where is the giant struggle between the hammer and anvil of big capital and the organised proletariat. As the current point of the class struggle in Iraq ,at the point of war and subsequent occupation, could not have possibly thrown up a fascist mass movement I suggest you revise that dangerous attack on the national liberation movement.
The way that you treat the resistance is exactly the same as how the bourgeois establishment whip up fear about "terrorists" and "Islamic fundamentalism" just as they did "communists" and the spectre of "communism" during the cold war. According to Anne Alexander and Simon Assaff in their article: "Iraq the rise of the resistance" from ISJ 105:
"Despite the media hype, Tawhid and Jihad [led by Zarqawi] is marginal to the insurgency. Out of 2,700 attacks on the occupying forces in Autumn 2004 only 6 attacks were attributed to Zarqawi's group. Moreover, the handful of radical Islamists who model themselves on Al Qaida represents only the fringe of a much broader Islamist movement."
The resistance has attacked helicopters, tanks and armoured vehicles, oil pipelines, interpreters and regime officials. Attacks have become increasingly daring with a near miss on both right-wing imperialists Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer. The resistance is a political, co-ordinated resistance of national liberation which is targeting American capital and the puppet Iraqi government. On the issue of Ba'thist elements of "regime die-hards" let me quote you Paul Marrie la Gorce writing for Le Monde Diplomatique:
"Saddam Hussein was no doubt a factor that divided rather than united, a handicap rather than an advantage, and it was not in him that the Iraqi resistance could have found popular support without which, as with any clandestine resistance, it was not able to exist. After the capture of Saddam Hussein and the massive arrests that followed, the military resistance was able to integrate the former partisans of the president who wished to continue their fight."
The Iraqi resistance is not some ghoulish army of hardline Ba'thist just waiting to get back at those damned pesky Kurds, but, as one resistance fighter said, ordinary working-class Iraqis: "We are just men, workers, not soldiers" (quoted from a report from Mitchell Prothero UPI correspondent).
I have to agree that "the basis of the struggle against the USA's new world order is the workers" but the person who thinks that resistance to imperialism will immediately translate into workers revolution, soviets and a proletarian state is dealing in the realms of fantasy. When the 1916 Easter rising took place in Ireland Lenin had this to say:
"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty-bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletariat and the semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. — to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution...whoever expects "pure" social revolution will never live to see it."
The bravery of the national liberation front in Vietnam coupled with a domestic anti-war movement, and wide scale revolt in the US army brought the US empire to its knees. The Stop the War Coalition's struggle is the same today, coupled, of course, with the bravery of the Iraqi resistance and the growing revolt in the American and British forces. The attempts by the AWL sect to attack and divide this movement from behind the veil of "Marxism" shows what a tool of imperialism and truly reactionary force it has become. This is the reason why FOSIS and SWSS students rightly walked out of the false and divisive anti-war position you promote. Sectarian attempts to subvert the progress of the Stop the War Coalition should quite rightly be fought off by all antiwar students not just SWSS and FOSIS ones.
"Have you forgotten Iran?" You cry desperately. Well I haven't but it appears you have. It appears that you think every time the left and Islamist forces hold hands it produces a "fascistic" reactionary regime. The idea that the left was some naive junior partner in the Iranian revolution, as if we accidentally collaborated in the rise of Khomeni and the creation of an Islamic state is just idiotic. The left supported the Iranian revolution of 1979 because of the mass demonstrations against the Shah prompted by the economic crisis, we supported the mass strikes across Iranian industry and we supported the revolutionary collapse of the army (fomented by left-wing guerilla groups). This was the nature of the revolution and the fact that Khomeni later smothered the Shoras (factory workers councils) and Komitehs (local committees) is irrelevant. I don't suggest that the situations are exactly comparable but did we give up the principle of revolution and workers self-emancipation after the smothering of the German, Italian, and Russian revolution by the forces of international reaction? To say that the left naively supported Khomeni's ultimately reactionary agenda is similar to saying that supporting the Russian revolution is naively supporting Stalin's ultimately reactionary agenda.
Your assumption that FOSIS and anything vaguely Islamic is inherently right-wing is a simplistic generalisation and your assertion that SWSS "helped to vote down a motion calling for secular, state-funded education and the abolition of religious schools" is highly misleading. Had the motion not included reactionary rubbish (which we tried to remove from the motion) I, and other SWSS delegates, would have certainly voted for it. The presence of a call to destroy faith schools was clearly counterproductive and part of the AWL, UJS and Labour Students consistent attacks on FOSIS, and, not a genuine left motion. Socialists should support a secular education but should support personal religious freedom and therefore are opposed to enforced secularism (as with enforced collectivisation) as it runs counter to the idea of self-emancipation. At a time of widespread persecution of Muslim people it is sectarian idiocy to launch an attack on Muslim (and other) faith schools. This motion came hand in hand with the appalling spectacle of an AWL member personally and falsely attacking the FOSIS candidate as a 'fundamentalist' and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Labour Students and UJS members joined the AWL in an unholy Islamaphobic alliance all giving a standing ovation to this relentless vitriolic tirade.
Your claim that the SWP lacks internal democracy has to be proved, so do your claims of "opportunistic and undemocratic politics". As an active participant in internal party democracy I would ask you to be specific as assertions like this on their own are completely vacuous.
Your claims about Galloway fall short too. What is Galloway's position on education and universal Grants now? What about Respects position on a women's right to chose? What about Galloway's role outside parliament? And what about his activity outside of the highly selective 4-year period you have chosen to dwell upon (which doesn't even include the key issue of the war!)? Your omissions are glaring. Also whilst I personally think that a representative wage has been an essential point of socialist politics dating to the Paris commune, I also think its misleading to say that Galloway "thinks that MPs should be paid more than they are currently!" without mentioning that Galloway doesn't use his money for immense personal consumption but for highly sustained, even tireless, political campaigning. For example his £150,000 victory against the Telegraph didn't go towards a lifetimes supply of Cuba's finest cigars, but, in fact to a Respect battle-bus. I'm not saying that Galloway doesn't maintain a relatively decent standard of living, but he does contribute selflessly and relentlessly to principled left politics and to judge him on the largely incorrect or irrelevant matters you raised is pointless.
This reply is meant in the spirit of debate and I would like to turn your invitation around and ask you to question why you are members of such a curious sect as the AWL. By the way, by means of a simple contrast between our two organisations briefly admire our two respective websites and tell me how man times the SWP is mentioned by Workers Liberty and, in comparison, how many times www.SWP.org.uk mentions Workers Liberty in return. I couldn't find a single mention of AWL. Just a superficial point but it does speak volumes about the differing weight of the two organisations and their contrasting influence in the working-class movement.
Dan Berry (SWP student)
Reply to Dan B
Hi Dan,
Unusually for an SWPer posting on this site, your comment is relatively thoughtful (though wrong on every point) and deserves a reply. I'm about to head off to Glastonbury, but when I return I'll devote a couple of hours to replying.
Comradely,
Sacha Ismail
Dear Dan You write:
Dear Dan
You write:
“Houza[n] Mahmoud was invited by the AWL and only able to speak at the conference due to AWL's scary mastery of NUS' bureaucratic procedure. She wasn't representative of NUS anti-war sentiment or any significant social forces within Iraq. Your letter refers to her as an "Iraqi Socialist" as if she represented both Iraqi's and socialism when in fact she represented neither.
The whole history of social-democracy and Stalinism, if it has taught us anything, has taught most of us in the revolutionary Marxist tradition to be wary of judging peoples politics purely by their outward form and not their content. It is more than enough to mention that whilst Stalin paid lip service to Marxism he simultaneously crushed the international workers movement. Similarly the fact that Mahmoud calls herself a Marxist is irrelevant considering the reactionary position she takes in regards to the national liberation struggle in Iraq.”
But here you are simply asserting your side of the point at dispute. Houzan Mahmoud, and the Worker-Communist Party, may or may not be Marxists, but they are serious militants who have organized workers and women in very difficult conditions in Iraq. If such people question your dogma that the so-called resistance are a national liberation movement, that ought to give you reason to pause for thought.
In any case the issue at NUS conference is not whether the SWP might have endorsed Houzan as a speaker, but why you would walk out of the conference in protest. That you consider her view of the so-called resistance ‘reactionary’, and warranting a walk-out, is precisely what makes us think you have lost the plot. It is the same story with the workers’ movement as a whole in Iraq: there is an actual life and death struggle between secular, working class forces – including the WCPI who have been threatened with murder, and sometimes murdered, by Islamists – and forces, Islamist and otherwise, who want to crush them. There is a basic ‘class line’ from a socialist point of view. The SWP used to know which side of that line it was on.
You write:
“I assume that when you talk about the "Islamist-dominated FOSIS" who are "poisoning the political environment" and when you talk about the "fascistic Islamist and Ba'thist resistance" you believe you are dealing with the same reactionary forces. If so what justifies this analysis?:”
They are separate things, but both problematic. On Iraq, see above. But yes we do think the growth of political Islam among Muslims in Britain is problematic, and not something to be welcomed from a socialist point of view.
Your write:
“The growth of FOSIS has been due to the brutality of the war on terror which overwhelmingly targets Muslim people. It isn't surprising that radicalised Muslims expressing their politics through their faith has been an increasing occurrence.”
But this is a deeply patronizing notion – that inevitably, people from a particular community will respond in this way. The growth of Islamism, in Britain or elsewhere, is not simply a knee-jerk response to external pressure. Political forces have mobilized, and built their organizations. One of our charges against the SWP is that they have helped such forces, for instance the MAB. This is not some elemental what-else-can-you-expect-from-Muslims gut response to the war on terror: it is a political operation by a sophisticated, experienced, and reactionary movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. The SWP has helped them grow.
Nor is the self-identification as ‘Muslim’ as automatic and inevitable as you seem to think. Twenty years ago immigrant communities tended to mobilize politically around the idea of being ‘black’. That this has declined and been replaced by a more sectional and religious identity – and to some extent it obviously has – is the product of history, of politics, not simply of an elemental knee-jerk reaction by ‘Muslims’.
You write:
“Also the fact that they remain conservative on an issue like abortion is irrelevant, neither does it compromise genuine anti-imperialism. Should the Stop the War coalition have had a Marxist tick-box which people had to fulfil before being allowed to demonstrate on the February the 15th demonstration?”
No. But reactionary ideas are surely not ‘irrelevant’.
You write:
“How do the AWL think a revolutionary party combats reactionary ideas and contradictory consciousness in the working-class? Do the AWL think we should have scuttled around the pickets of the miners strike checking off who could explain "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" before we engaged with that struggle?”
The AWL did rather more work, rather sooner than the SWP, around the miners’ strike, in fact: you saw it as an ‘expression of the downturn’, and the miners’ support groups as ‘left-wing Oxfam’. But nobody is suggesting that the only way to confront reactionary ideas is to scream abuse, or that no struggle is possible until everyone has understood Marxism, or whatever it is you are trying to suggest.
But the revolutionary party certainly does have to combat reactionary ideas. The mark of the problem with the SWP is that you are constantly trying to argue that the Islamists, in Britain and elsewhere, are not reactionary, or that it’s all a matter of this or that isolated issue (gay rights, etc). It isn’t: the programme for an Islamic state, or for more clerical control in Muslim communities, which is what a lot of it comes down to, is reactionary.
You write:
‘Its quite usual for state oppression and imperialism to throw religion in to a progressive role for emancipation (most notably in Central America in the 1980's).”
But radical priests etc in Latin America have played a very different role to Islamism! They have been on the side of the left, seeing themselves as part of it. The Islamists, from Iran onwards, are deeply hostile to the left. In the instance where they came to power in the face of a mass workers’ movement – Iran – they crushed the workers. Where there are workers’ movements and Islamists are growing, working class militants see them as much the same as fascists – Indonesia. This is true also in Iraq.
You write:
“So when Islamists are combating a repressive state apparatus and an imperialist American occupation force as in Iraq then its quite different to a situation where Islamists are the reactionary tools of the state. AWL's blanket "religion bad, secularism good" attitude misses the mark. As with Oscar Romero and liberation theology which flourished in opposition to American imperialism in Central America, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the broadly Islamist character of the resistance is fighting against American imperialism and for Iraqi national liberation. The fact that these people express politics through religion is not sufficient evidence to dub someone "reactionary".”
But opposition to America isn’t enough to dub them ‘progressive’. This entire discussion proceeds as if the Iranian revolution never happened. The Khomeinite movement was very ‘anti-imperialist’; it used that as a cover to attack and destroy the left and the workers’ movement. As a rule of thumb, I would have thought socialists surely do think ‘religion bad, secularism good’ . But of course it’s more complex– think of James Connolly, who was a Catholic. But the issue here is the character of a political movement, or movements.
You write:
“Any commentary dealing with the resistance must look at the social forces at work and not simply the superficial details like the professed beliefs of "Worker-Communist Party of Iraq", which has more syllables than members.”
This is philistine pseudo-Marxism. Social forces are not simply sociological data. That the base of the Mahdi Army is poor doesn’t make it a working class movement.
You write:
“Your definition of the resistance as "fascistic Islamist and Ba' thist" bares no relation to reality.”
It is the opinion, for example, of the strongly anti-war US academic and commentator Juan Cole (www./juancole.com)
And go on:
“Firstly I strongly disagree with the use of the term "fascistic", not only does it tar the resistance with a false brush but it dilutes any Marxist understanding of what fascism is. Chris Harman's article "the Prophet and the Proletariat" from ISJ 64 (Autumn 1994) looks at what's wrong with the description of Islamism as fascistic.
"The petty bourgeois class base has not only been characteristic of fascism, it has also been a feature of Jacobinism, of Third world nationalism, of Maoist Stalinism and Peronism. Petty bourgeois movements only become fascist when they arise at a particular point in the class struggle and play a particular role. This role is not just to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie, but to exploit the bitterness they feel at what an acute crisis in the system has done to them and so turn them into organised thugs for capital to tear worker's organisations apart." “
I am not bothered about the term ‘fascistic’. The point is that these are movements with a mass base which is violently hostile to the organized working class and the left and will crush – physically liquidate – the working class and the left if it comes to power. (Some are worse than others; but the more verbally ‘anti-imperialist’ they are, the more reactionary). Call it what you like. It is our enemy. And this is not hypothetical. They came to power in Iran. In the Algerian civil war, Islamists murdered or drove into exile leftists, feminists, and so on.
(You complain, further down, that Iran is not a good example, and that it is false to assume everything will turn out like Iran. Nobody is suggesting it will be exactly like Iran; but lessons of history are surely lessons. Aren’t they?)
You write:
“ So whilst being a petty bourgeois the fact that they "grow on the soil of a very large social groups that suffer under existing society, and whose feeling of revolt, could be tapped for progressive purposes, providing a lead came from a rising level of workers sturggle." This shows that whilst Islamism is a movement of the petty bourgeoisie (which contains all the contradictions that exist in such a movement) , the broadly Islamist resistance still deserves our support because it is a popular resistance, the vast bulk of whom comes from the ranks of the workers and the poor and who are fighting for genuine national liberation. Also developments like the solidarity between Shia and Sunni in the mainstream of the resistance (despite the occupation forces and minority groups best attempts to stir-up civil war) and the general strike against the occupation in the City of Ramadi show an increasing level of class struggle and working-class leadership in a Iraq that prove the resistance's popular character.”
But surely it is obvious that the core of the ‘resistance’ in the sense we are describing it is Sunni, motivated at least in part by sectional, Sunni fears of being dominated by Shi’a and Kurds. According to very many sources who are opposed to the occupation, the core of the Sunni resistance is Ba’thists, with a heavy addition of Islamists from outside Iraq. There are widespread reports of growing tensions between Sunnis and Shi’a. The boycott of the elections earlier this year was overwhelmingly Sunni, while Shi’a voted – in the main for the largest party, which is dominated by sort-of moderate Shi’a Islamists.
This is not a description of a national liberation movement. Even if it was, there is something from a socialist point of view which is more important, the workers’ movement, reborn after forty years of repression.
I am going to leave the rest of your answer for now, partly for time, partly because I think the main points have been covered. But I will respond to one last points.
YOU write:
“This reply is meant in the spirit of debate and I would like to turn your invitation around and ask you to question why you are members of such a curious sect as the AWL. By the way, by means of a simple contrast between our two organisations briefly admire our two respective websites and tell me how man times the SWP is mentioned by Workers Liberty and, in comparison, how many times www.SWP.org.uk mentions Workers Liberty in return. I couldn't find a single mention of AWL. Just a superficial point but it does speak volumes about the differing weight of the two organisations and their contrasting influence in the working-class movement.”
The SWP was small once, too, and I think you should be careful of running too far with this ‘size is everything’ argument. Plenty of parties are bigger than yours. For our size, the AWL has considerable weight in some sections of the labour movement. And the SWP doesn’t mention us – because it refuses to seriously debate with the rest of the left, as if it is beneath their dignity. This, incidentally, is a measure of the SWP’s lack of democracy. But on that point: I was told by someone in the SWP that you don’t elect all you National Committee (or Central Committee, or whatever you call it), which I admit shocked me. Is it true?
Clive Bradley
SWP consistency and debate
Hi Dan,
Just a couple of quick points because I think Clive's reply has covered much of the ground, and I'm interested to hear what you think of his answers, but I was confused by the SWP at UNISON conference last week, when your comrades joined in the standing ovation given by the conference to representatives of the IFTU and the Kurdish General Federation of Trades Unions, who spoke as guests of the UNISON leadership.
Our comrades in the AWL consider the IFTU to be a genuine working-class union federation, democratic and legitimately organising workers in Iraq under the occupation. Not the only one, obviously, as we have also organised support for Houzan Mahmood's federation, and for the independent Southern Oil Company Union. However, we believe the IFTU is genuine and democratic, and therefore deserves solidarity from UK trade unionists.
The SWP, however, says that democracy is not possible in Iraq under the occupation, and that the IFTU played a treacherous role at last year's Labour Party conference, when representatives there spoke to union delegations, one of the reasons cited later by those delegations for backing off from a confrontation with Blair about the timetable for troop withdrawal. George Galloway has called the ITU "quislings" and "collaborators", comments which the SWP has done nothing to disassociate itself from, either within Respect or within the StWC.
Yet your comrades didn't follow the students' example of walking out. The joined in a standing ovation!
How does this make sense. I can think of only four explanations, but none of them are very positive. The first is that one of you - either your UNISON comrades or your student comrades - were wrong. If so, I think they should say so. The second explanation is that somehow Iraqi stalinists (for the IFTU are, essentially, Stalinist-led) are less of a problem for you in the SWP than Iraqi Trotskyists, so that you can applaud 'quisling' Stalinists, whilst walking out on a Trotskyist. The third possibility is that your UNISON comrades were opportunist - wanting to walk out in protest but knowing that the other delegates in the hall would be disgusted by such behaviour they chose to cover their real views and joined in the ovation. The fourth possibility is that the decision to walk out at NUS conference was a different kind of opportunism, in which the 'notoriety' you would gain from the stunt in internal NUS politics became the reason for doing it - point-scoring over the AWL, if you like, rather than a genuine protest at Houzan Mahmood.
Either way, I cannot see a principled consistency between the actions of your comrades at those two conferences, and I would very much like to hear the views of an SWP member about that.
Which brings me to my second comment. You wrote at the end of your message about comparing the two websites of our respective organisations. I went to the SWP's website to ask a question of the comrades about the UNISON conference ovation for the IFTU, but I couldn't find a discussion forum, or debate section, or anything like it. Am I just being short-sighted, or is this another difference between our two organisations?