Workers' Liberty

Here are some notes on the situation in Iraq and the prospects for the working class, and on the growth of Islamism in Iraq. They aren't 'finished' thoughts, so any comments will be welcome.

Notes on perspectives for Iraq

There is widespread opposition to the presence of US/UK troops in Iraq, the prospect of US bases, etc. But is this likely to evolve into a 'war of national liberation' in the immediate future? It seems highly improbable that it will. First, the US will attempt to co-opt opposition forces currently hostile to it, and appear already to be finding room to negotiate with SCIRI, the best organised force inclined to be hostile. Second, more importantly, society is only beginning to emerge from forty years of repression. As 'order' begins to be restored under US hegemony - which it is likely to be, even if only on a temporary and unstable basis - many of those currently seeking to mobilise against occupation will seek some sort of modus vivendi with the US, if only for the time being.
'Order' to some degree will be restored. Even if the US' aim is old-fashioned colonial rule, and even if this generates widespread opposition, such opposition is unlikely to entail mass, militant - still less armed - resistance in the immediate future. We are looking at a period of US-dominated 'order', probably under an interim government consisting of US-friendly Iraqi forces.
In other words we are likely to see a period in which relatively stable bourgeois government is restored in Iraq, ie in one way or another a government under US hegemony. (The US would obviously prefer a government consisting of Iraqis as soon as possible). It will be authoritarian, or certainly not properly democratic; but it will be, probably, substantially more open, more bourgeois-democratic, than what preceded it.

A working class movement is unlikely to be built through full-on confrontation with the occupying forces, leading a 'war of national liberation'. It will be built through painstaking, patient work, as independent union movements have been built in Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, etc.
Realistic perspectives for the development of a workers' movement are counterposed to insurrectionary fantasies about wars of national liberation. I've made the comparison between the situation now in Iraq and the debate between the WP and SWP regarding Europe from 1943ish on. (In fact, re-reading it, the WP stuff in the book is posed in quite sectarian fashion - no revolutionary party, no revolutionary situation - which isn't quite what I mean). It seems to me that the priority must be the basic steps towards the building of workplace organisation, presumably trade unions, etc. It will take time to develop such organisation.
Fundamentally, all talk of workers' revolution, in the absence of a working class movement, is meaningless posing. If there is a 'revolutionary situation' in the immediate future in Iraq, it is unlikely to lead to progressive, democratic results, because there is no working class movement to act as a positive, democratic pole of attraction.
In the event of revolutionary struggles in Iraq, we would advocate working class leadership, etc. We wouldn't oppose 'revolution' on the grounds that the working class wasn't ready for it; and a workers' movement will partly be formed through the working class' engagement with the broader struggle.
But we don't base our perspectives on an insurrectionary scenario. We recognise that the building of a workers' movement is, in reality, a much longer-term project.
The immediate prospects for the building of workers' organisations must be reasonably good. Issues such as the non-payment of wages pose the need for workers to self-organise. Some of the political forces on the ground, notably those in or educated by the CP presumably have the perspective of building unions, even if only as front organisations parallel to women's federations etc and other aspects of the 'popular movement'.
Iraqi socialists should oppose US domination, US military bases, etc. But this does not require them to call for revolutionary uprising, now, against US/UK forces. Even if the US presence could be defined as straightforwardly colonial, it would not imply such an immediate perspective. (Socialists could be opposed to colonial rule in the past without demanding immediate revolution against the colonial rulers; and they could, in principle, put demands on the colonial state. I think apartheid South Africa might hold parallels, too).
A programme of democratic and working class demands is called for which will develop the organisations and struggles of the working class as an independent force. These include democratic demands which could and should be fought for immediately, ie are not conditional on the withdrawal of foreign occupying forces, or on the overthrow of whatever government (including free trade unions, the right to assembly, freedom of the press, etc - and all such demands which can be fought for now, and won by struggle against the existing authorities).
The best conditions for the development of an independent workers' movement would be stable bourgeois democracy. We don't advocate this programmatically, but we are sensitive to its importance. And it makes the articulation and struggle for democratic demands (both in Iraq, and by way of solidarity) particularly important. The struggle for democratic reforms, in other words, is extremely important. We don't counterpose immediate democratic demands to 'revolution'. Any space for working class organisation to develop, even under US overlordship, is valuable and should be seized upon.

Islamism in Iraq

How likely is it that Iraq will echo the experience of the Iranian revolution, bringing to power a Shi'ite Islamic regime which crushes the left, the workers' movement, and all secular opposition?
There are obvious parallels - the mosque as the space in which organisation can take place; in Iraq's case, the mosque as the one institution independent of the Ba'thist state which has survived forty years of totalitarianism; the 'availability' of Muslim (and especially Shi'a) identity for masses excluded from political processes for their whole lives, in most cases, in the absence of almost any alternative. Islam articulates all sorts of quasi- or overtly-political agendas in ready-made language.
There are stark differences with Iran which are immediately obvious. In Iran there was a powerful working class, and a large, organised left (beyond the Communist Party) - much of it armed - which had prepared for the revolution in advance. The working class' role in 1978-79 was anticipated by struggles under the Shah throughout the 1970s. None of these conditions exist in Iraq. In themselves, of course, from our point of view these are 'negative' differences. (You might calculate that the absence of a challenge from the left will make the Iraqi Islamists less repressive - but a) we want there to be a challenge from the left; and b) the most repressive and crazy Islamist regime of all, the Taliban, had no challenge from the left).
But there are other differences.
Gilles Kepel, in his excellent book 'Jihad', argues that in reality Islamism has been on decline since the early 1990s: September 11 itself was an expression of the desperation and isolation of the most militant Islamists, not their strength. The collapse of the Taliban will have further weakened them. (Afghanistan was the high-point of salafi-jihadist Islamism, driving out the godless communists; that the Taliban was so easily beaten, and there is now a government sponsored by the Great Satan is a debacle).
Fundamentally this is because the modern Islamist movements had been built on an alliance between the 'devout middle class' (bazaaris, etc) and dispossessed youth. As the latter moved further into actions of extreme violence - the Algerian civil war, terrorism in Egypt, sections of them became educated in the madrassas of the Afghan jihad (in Pakistan, etc), many of them returning home after the fall of Najibullah, but with a worldview which was fantastically divorced from normal life -this alliance fell apart. The middle class were horrified by the actions of the militants. Islamists failed to impose their agenda on the war in Bosnia; the Islamist party (Refah) which formed the Turkish government gradually secularised in practice (and the Islamist party currently in power there is avowedly moderate, pro-democracy, and pro-Europe). In Iran, the clerical government is highly discredited, viewed as venal and oppressive, and so on.
Iraq in 2003 is not Iran in 1979, for many reasons. Twenty four years on, with - fundamentally - a catalogue of failures to their credit, will Islamists be able to turn Iraq into the new jihad? Khomeini articulated a specific radical-Islamist programme for the mass movement mobilised against the Shah - though in fact somewhat modified for public consumption until after power had been consolidated. But Islamism was on the rise; it was, in effect, a new phenomenon.
The Shi'a movement in Iraq is currently divided. The best-organised, the Iranian-backed SCIRI, is constrained by Tehran's desire to get friendlier with the US. Iran was the US's ally over Afghanistan; and although they are earmarked as part of the axis of evil, the general tendency of Iranian politics (whatever the rearguard action of the arch-reactionaries) is to improve relations with the west in general. They have strong economic and political motives for this course.
SCIRI's initial opposition to (and boycott of) US-sponsored meetings of oppositionists has already mellowed. The other strong mosque-led group, under Ayatollah Sistani, is more moderate, and both anti-Iranian and doctrinally opposed to the Khomeiniite programme of clerical rule, anyway.
Of course you can imagine a mass movement propelled from below, from the dispossessed poor of the Shi'a slums, with no ideology available to them other than Islamism which outstrips the current leaderships, or forces them to adopt a more radical stance, transforming the current movements into a full-scale jihad. There are no doubt Afghan veterans, etc, waiting to get in on any such act. The more repressive the US occupying forces are towards them, the more they will fuel this development. But is an all-out Islamic revolution which drives the US from Iraq all that easy to imagine? As the economy gets back on its feet - and the huge contracts awarded to US companies to rebuild Iraq start to take effect - as oil starts to flow, as some semblance of government authority is established, which the Shi'a leaders will probably aim to be part of, while for sure widespread Shi'a protest will continue, and the situation will remain unstable and volatile, it seems improbable that we will see an equivalent of Afghanistan, or even Algeria. The forces which boosted the jihad in Afghanistan have directly contrary interests in this case (ie the US and the Saudis - Pakistan, presumably, has no direct interests at all); and the potential joker in the pack, Iran, is for the moment at least, less of a wild card than its image suggests.
There are significant forces in Iraq with an immediate reason to oppose the rise of Shi'a militancy. 40% of the population are either Arab Sunnis, or Kurds - who for the moment at least show no signs of wanting independence. The Kurds are armed, self-confident, want to be part of the new dispensation and will not take kindly to any sectarian effort to exclude them. Arab Sunnis constitute about 20% of the total population, a very significant minority, used to being favoured by the state.
This is in sharp contrast to Iran. Many of those who had an objective interest in opposing the rise of Khomeini, in particular the secular Left, failed to do so. The middle class which was linked to the Shah was of course the revolution's target to a significant extent. The movements of national minorities, such as the Kurds, were not even remotely as organised and effective a force as the peshmergas are now in Iraq. Khomeiniism cast itself as the umbrella for all popular movement; Shi'ite sectarianism in Iraq will be perceived as such.
But there is, in any case, no real history of sectarian conflict. Even though there is some correlation between 'Sunni' and 'wealthier' and 'Shi'a' and 'poor', there is no history of sectarian bloodletting (compared to communal conflict along ethnic lines in the north, for example); Iran failed to mobilise Iraqi Shi'as on its side during the war; even now, Shi'a demands do not appear to be articulated in anti-Sunni terms. The US and whatever government it sponsors would be insane not to be as inclusive as possible towards the Shi'as. In other words, it does not seem the Shi'as have either the aim or the stomach for a conflict with the Sunnis in central Iraq. Appeals to them as co-religionists might have some force; but an Islamism which seeks to unite Sunnis and Shi'as would be a) unusual; b) by definition more moderate (for miltant Islamists, Muslims who don't agree with their particular sect - not just whether they are Sunni or Shi'a, but even down to more obscure doctrinal questions - are heretics and apostates who should be put to death).
The alternative scenario, in which bloody sectarian conflicts arise between Shi'as and Sunnis (mainly in Baghdad and its environs), though obviously not a pretty one and not one to hope for, nevertheless equally militates against a Shi'a seizure of power.
Is there the possibility of the declaration of an Islamic state only in the south, with the secession of southern Iraq? It seems unlikely at present. Rather, the objective circumstances would seem to compel some sort of accommodation between the different communities and the occupying forces.
Of course, the emergence of a working class movement would radically alter these conditions.