Sean Matgamna concludes a response [1] to “Don’t think twice, it’s alright” [2] by Alan Johnson and Jane Ashworth (Solidarity 3-62).

“No matter what the good intentions of the British parsons, or of sentimental Kautsky, may have been [the result]… is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses … distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present era, directing it towards illusory perspectives.”
V I Lenin, Imperialism

“Distracting… attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems…”, that, it seems to me, is exactly what Alan Johnson is doing in his political prostration before the Americans and their British partner in Iraq. He goes from the hope — which we share — for an outcome in Iraq which will allow the labour movement to survive and develop — to out and out partisanship for Blair and Bush, even to the extent of backing Blair against his critics in the Labour Party!

He “consoles” himself and others with the “illusory perspective” that we can rely on Bush and Blair and their Iraqi collaborators, supervised by the UN, to bring bourgeois-democracy to Iraq. His message? Everything is alright for democracy, the Iraqi labour movement and the fight against clerical fascism in Iraq — Blair and Bush are on the job!

All socialists can do is back them, help to “hold up their hands”, until they succeed (and build the “third camp”, for now, within their camp).

Different attitudes to the Iraqi clerical fascists are separating serious socialists from the kitsch, reactionary “anti-imperialists”. Even so, I find the idea mind-boggling that Iraq or the Iraqi trade unions are of such enormous weight that they reshape and redefine even our attitude to the bourgeoisie and its governments, so that we give Bush and Blair uncritical political support on Iraq — that is, politically self-liquidate into the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Do I misunderstand Alan Johnson? I hope so, but I don't think I do. To my mind the idea that support for the Iraqi trade unions demands of us uncritical support for Bush and Blair in Iraq, could only occur to socialists who have utterly lost their political bearings.

Scarcely less mind-boggling is the idea that — as distinct from unconditionally defending their right to exist — we must give political support to the the IFTU and the Communist Party of Iraq, which leads it. We defend them against the clerical fascists now, and tomorrow we may have to defend them against their present bourgeois-democrat allies and the clericalists and against the US overlord.*

Much of what Alan Johnson writes about Solidarity’s “tone” and about the “differences” he supposes to exist between Martin Thomas and others on one side and this writer on the other, is an objection to the element in Solidarity of sharp criticism of the “democrats” in Iraq — to Solidarity doing anything other than subordinating criticism to “support” for them.

He translates the politics of the IFTU leaders, in Britain, into… the politics of Blair and Bush!

The young people and other newcomers to politics who took part in anti-war marches are instinctively hostile to the powers that rule in Britain and America. They see only the gross inequality in power and firepower between Saddam’s Iraq and the US and Britain, and now between the reactionary resistance and the occupation. They are miseducated by the pseudo-socialists and reactionary “anti-imperialists”, but their reflex siding with the “underdog” is in principle entirely right.

In the broad political sense, these are our people. To educate them away from the foul, neo-Stalinist politics of the SWP is an urgent task for British socialists.

How does Labour Friends of Iraq fit into this picture? To the foul popular front of the SWP and others with the clerical fascists, Saddamists, Sunni supremacists and other reactionaries in Iraq, Alan Johnson counterposes not independent working-class politics, but a different popular front — with Blair, Bush, and the bourgeois-democrats and clerics in the Iraqi interim government! Such politics cannot but discredit the cause of solidarity with the Iraqi trade unions.

“Tomorrow” Alan will again be a Third Camp socialist. Tomorrow belongs to the “Third Camp” working class political independence and socialism, but today belongs to Blair, Bush, the interim Iraqi government and the CP of Iraq!

They do their best to reduce the work of building solidarity with the renascent Iraqi labour movement in the British labour and socialist movement to nothing but a mirror image of the other (SWP and friends) popular front. Just like the SWP, they insist that the choice is between a political popular front with the IFTU, Straw, Blair and Bush, and a popular front with the clerical fascists, Saddamists, Sunnis in arms because their long domination of Iraq cannot survive elections, and so on.

The campaign for solidarity with the Iraqi workers has to be a “propagandist” campaign. Success depends on complex explanations as well as appeals to British trade unionists’ bedrock reflex of solidarity with other labour movements. To make endorsement of Blair and Bush a precondition is, quite apart from what is politically right or wrong, to erect a great political barrier to this work.

The idea that the endorsement of some trade union bureaucrats and Harry Barnes MP can compensate for that is plain political stupidity. Alan, even if your politics were right, your approach to building solidarity is sectarian and subjective.

You know what your behaviour reminds me of, Alan? The activities of a group of ex-Trotskyists in the solidarity campaign which we tried to build to support the newly-arisen Polish labour movement, Solidarnosc, at the beginning of the 1980s. Inverted kitsch-Trotskyist sectarians, they treated the work of building solidarity as less important than their own pin-headed campaign against “Leninism”. They tried to make an anti-Bolshevik, retrospective, Polish nationalism a central part of the campaign for solidarity with the new Polish trade unions.

With Alan Johnson, the same obsession with his latest ideological toy, the same obsession with maximising the differences with the existing labour and socialist movement, the same obsession with inverting the SWP, in a way that is politically scandalous and destructive for the work of building solidarity (as Lenin once said: to the mouse there is no animal bigger than the cat!).

The right-wing inverted Healyites are really not a good model to copy, Alan.

In the movement against the Vietnam war, too, Alan Johnson will find political ancestors. There was a segment of the big anti-war movement, led by a quasi-Maoist called Manchandra, whose point of honour it was that the British campaign should say exactly what the Vietnamese government said, want what it wanted, change when it changed, and religiously refrain from saying anything that even implicitly differed from it, or, god forbid, criticised it. For example: the Vietnamese government, properly and from their point of view, wanted negotiations. To hold on to the idea that our job in the West was to insist that the USA should just get out was a betrayal. It was “a lie” that we supported the Vietnamese.

Manchandra’s is not a good example to follow.

The sectarian antics of Labour Friends of Iraq, such things as sheepdogging for Blair at the Labour Party conference, and your idiotic polemics, have made the whole arena of solidarity activity repulsive to people already discouraged by the state of the “left”.

Quoting Martin Thomas’s comment on their activities at the recent Labour Party conference, Johnson characterises it as: “Stupid. Hysterical”.

That follows a passage in which Johnson asserts: “Matgamna pretends the AWL has had a consistent position of clear support for the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. In fact the AWL joined the idiot chorus that attacked the IFTU after Labour Party conference”.

This is on the level of an old Stalinist or Healyite polemic. AWL has supported the Iraqi labour movement. AWL has “clearly” and “consistently” supported the IFTU’s right to exist. We have placed securing the right to exist of an Iraqi labour movement, IFTU and the others, at the top of our list of concerns.

On that level our support has been and is unconditional. It is like our attitude to Solidarnosc in Poland in the 1980s. It had a right to exist, and to have our support against the Polish state, despite its politics, which came to be entirely bourgeois in recoil from the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Of course we have not supported, and will not support, the political line of the IFTU, that is, of the Communist Party of Iraq! We do not think that solidarity with the IFTU implies that we take our political line from them. Where we have agreement with them on political issues, we arrive at it not by following or mimicking them, but as a result of assessments that we ourselves make, from our own political standpoint.

Johnson conflates “support” in the sense in which we do support the IFTU with his own political support for the political line of the IFTU; and he uses that “support” of the IFTU and he lets that lead him — only for now, of course! — to support for Bush and Blair.

Like an overwrought old Stalinist or Healyite, or an SWPer, hard-pressed in an argument, he then claims that since we do not “support” the IFTU politically, we don’t really support it at all, and that when we say we do it is dishonest “pretence”.

More: if we deplore and denounce the Blairite work of Alan Johnson and his friends at the Labour Party conference, the work that comes from their collapse into the politics of the IFTU (that is, the Communist Party of Iraq) — why, then we are joining the “idiot chorus that attacked the IFTU”.

Worse: to criticise the IFTU is to “finger” it — that is, in the normal meaning of “finger”, to denounce, identify, and expose it to the attention of some repressive force. Or at least we share the responsibility for “the disgraceful assault at the European Social Forum” (when IFTU general secretary Subhi al Mashadani was prevented from speaking by loud heckling and attempts to storm the platform).

He rules out and stigmatises political criticism of the IFTU by the ridiculous assertion that any such criticism is a mortal assault on the IFTU’s very existence — that there is no difference in practice between our political criticism, and the attitude of those who condemn the IFTU for refusing to commit hara-kiri on the altar of the “anti-imperialist” clerical fascists — the politics that led to the shouting down of the IFTU representative at the European Social Forum.

To cool down the style of the denunciation a little, and disguise its rampant hysteria, Alan Johnson adds that we “fingered” the IFTU “unwittingly”. No, Alan, there was nothing “unwitting” about what we did.

Alan Johnson must have come across the saying: don’t speak of the rope in the house of the hanged. Before he used words like “stupid” and “hysteria”, he would have done well to recall it.

The stuff I have just analysed is a piece of vintage hysterical reasoning, all too familiar on the pseudo-left. Criticise our group, criticise me, and you commit a crime against the working class and against socialism!

The Iraqi CP and the IFTU are “right” to take the approach they do? They are right to oppose the clerical fascists and right to favour bourgeois democracy in Iraq. That has to be said in their defence against the “reactionary anti-imperialists”, the British allies of the clerical fascists, Ba’thists and Sunni supremacists. But are they “right” from the point of revolutionary working class politics in Iraq? They are not right.

They are ex-Stalinist reformists. The approach they take, the extent and degree of their support and involvement in interim government, is no necessary part of being for bourgeois democracy as against its enemies in Iraq; nor is our support for them — as above — endorsement of what they do.

The approach of the CPI and IFTU is determined not only by the situation in Iraq and the relation of forces there, but also by their politics. Their politics is an active, shaping, factor in the Iraqi situation and helps determine its possibilities — the situation that we, from far away, have to accept as “given”. If they had a different approach, the Bolshevik approach which I outlined in the first part of this article, there would be other possibilities in Iraq.

We defend them against the clerical fascists and their “anti-imperialist” British allies — we do not endorse them politically. We condemn their “Menshevik” politics, without letting that interfere with our duty to support them against the clerical fascists and their British cheerleaders.

Even if we were to aspire to nothing more than bourgeois democracy in Iraq we would criticise and condemn them. Why? Meek self-subordination by the Iraqi labour movement to the Iraqi interim government, and to the USA — that is not the way to “strengthen” bourgeois democratic prospects in Iraq! Were the Iraqi labour movement led by Marxists, it would stand in critical political opposition to the bourgeoisie and the US/British authorities (no, that would not necessarily mean demands that they “get out now”, still less making that their central concern).

The approach of the CPI and of the IFTU is likely to weaken the prospects for democracy in Iraq, not least because it leaves disaffected Iraqi workers to the clerical fascist demagogues. (Just as the politics of the German social democrats in the early 1930s, as German capitalism began to fall apart, left the disaffected to the Hitlerites and Stalinist demagogues.)

In the mid-1930s a lot of individuals and some organisations in and around the Trotskyist movement uncritically backed the quasi-Trotskyist POUM party in the Spanish civil war. But the POUM pursued a weak and vacillating policy, which led to its own destruction and contributed to the defeat of the Spanish revolution. Trotsky noted how the impulse of “solidarity” with the POUM, understood as endorsing its politics and its actions, politically derailed much of the anti-Stalinist, subjective revolutionary left in Europe. Alan Johnson’s and Jane Ashworth’s political conclusion from supporting the IFTU parallels that experience.**

By way of redefinition — the UN, not the USA! — and the employment of sociological jargon, he finds himself writing not about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, but about the UN backed process!

This is pitiable evasion by redefinition. Psychologically it is very revealing.

He demands that we “recognise the validity of the UN process”. What does that mean? De facto “recognition. By “recognise” Alan Johnson seems to mean accept, acquiesce, subordinate, support and limit the working class to “the UN backed process”.

That is still in the future. For now, he understands support to mean the Iraqi labour movement having an “input” into constitution-making, as a loyal and subordinate part of a broad “democratic” coalition.

Alan Johnson’s understanding of what “recognising the validity” of the “political process” means, rules out independent working class politics.

Alan Johnson’s line implies recognising in advance the “validity” of whatever the “political process” produces and of the working class limiting itself to what is acceptable to the other participants.

This is a policy of political collapse into the camp of the bourgeoisie! And it is recognisably “Menshevik”. Alan Johnson is a victim, like the Mensheviks in 1917, of his own “idiotarian” schematism, which subordinates struggle for working class political and organisational independence and socialism, and, immediately, for the best democratic system that can be won, to a priori “recognition” of a necessary historical stage in which the bloc of those who support “the UN backed” transitional process are recognised as the “legitimate” and necessary protagonist. The working class movement must embed itself in the bloc of the US-vetted, “democratic” bourgeoisie, clericalists, etc, and subordinate itself to “the process”, whose outcome is as yet unknown.

We have to take account of the realities of Iraq, including the politics of the Iraqi CP, in our assessments and calculations. We have to, and we do. But Alan Johnson thinks it is his duty to accept, agree with, promote, advocate, defend and limit himself to the politics of the Iraqi CP/IFTU!

His quarrel with us is that we will not do that. That we think real Iraqi socialists should not subordinate themselves or the perspective for which they fight to the “UN backed” “process”, but use every crisis, difficulty, delay, to agitate with, organise and educate the Iraqi working class and promote such things as workers’ control of the economy.

Whether the working class movement is a docile part or supporter of the government or is a militant politically independent force can have a decisive influence on the shape of the bourgeois democratic “revolution” being forced through by the US.

The first job of socialists is to maximise the independent political weight and strength of the working class, and develop its consciousness and its organisations. This means precisely building working class political and independent organisations. It is only when we know the results of such efforts that we would know concretely how we would relate to the UN (the US and British) “process”.

The politics of the Iraqi working class organisations help to limit what is practically possible in Iraq now. It is the lack of such a Bolshevik approach by the Iraqi CP that forces us, from afar, to conclude that bourgeois democracy is the best practical possibility.

Alan, your politics here are a toy-town version of the politics of the right wing Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution!

But is Alan Johnson convinced that his “position” is, for a serious socialist, tenable? It is revealing that in his exposition, the US and all the uncertainties its centrality poses, is magicked away and replaced by the UN. He thus sidesteps the problem and difficulties.

One of the oddest things is the way he stresses the UN nature of the political process in Iraq, the way he substitutes “UN” for “US”. Even for himself he needs to “soften” the reality and centrality of the US in Iraq. He needs to gloss-up the reality and redefine it in prettier words.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the USA is now engaged in spreading its own pluto-democratic version of bourgeois democracy, that the invasion of Iraq is one consequence of that, and that there will be others.

In this “benign scenario,” bourgeois democracy is spreading across the world. A foreign-originated, essentially US, bourgeois democratic revolution is being imposed from outside. The US bourgeoisie, or one of its factions, is the historical protagonist, using the strength of the US hyper-power state as its instrument.

The mechanics of it are, of necessity, unclear. Would the example of Iraq and economic and diplomatic pressure be enough, or would it involve US-British invasion of Syria and Iran?

Would we be obliged to support such wars, as the corollary of supporting the US and Britain in Iraq now? If not, why not? Surely from his present vantage-point, Alan Johnson must think he was wrong not to have supported the US-British war on Iraq in 2003?

Certainly, success in Iraq will strengthen those in and around the Bush administration who want to take such a course.

Now, the idea that the bourgeoisie and capitalism are the great revolutionary force in history, the ground breaker for the working class movement and the socialist revolution, is of course, not foreign to Marxists, but basic to our entire world outlook.

But what would follow from it, politically, for those engaged in organising the working class and working to prepare the socialist revolution?

That we merely follow the bourgeoisie and urge the working class to do the same, until the “proper” role of the bourgeoisie in history has been entirely exhausted? Politically, that was never the right policy, not even in France 200 years ago!

The great “bourgeois” French revolution was not made by the bourgeoisie but by the lower petit-bourgeoisie and the so-called sans culottes, the lowest class bar the lumpen proletariat in the towns and the nearest equivalent of the modern proletariat.

It is one of the formative experiences of Marxist politics that in the 1848 revolution in central Europe — in the first place, in Germany — the bourgeoisie proved unable to carry through “its own” revolution, in part for fear of the proletariat. Afterwards, over decades, parts of the bourgeoisie’s social programme were introduced under Chancellor Bismarck by those who had defeated the bourgeoisie.

The most important serious liberals in pre-1917 Russia took the general model of “reform from above” as their own desired “bourgeois revolution” for fear of both the workers and the peasantry.

What all this meant for the political history of “bourgeois democracy” was, of course, that within the bourgeois democratic framework what we think of as “democratic” or “mature” bourgeois democracy had to be won, defended, and yet again won back and defended again, by the working class and its allies.

Talking about it all as simply the bourgeois period of history says nothing that isn’t misleading about “bourgeois democracy”.

At any turning point in this long history anyone who stuck to what the bourgeoisie wanted would have been a vehement enemy of most of the things we prize in “bourgeois democracy”.

Way, way back those who sided with “the people” had to fight the idea that “real” historical and social progress was the possession of the bourgeoisie and therefore that intelligent well-wishers of their kind should side with and aid the bourgeoisie.

What follows for us now? It is not a bourgeois social system but the possibility of a bourgeois-democratic regime that is involved in adventures like the invasion of Iraq. Even granted that the Neo-Cons in control of the US government want to establish a bourgeois democracy regime, they may not even do that. And it is anyway not, or not necessarily, their central goal.

A US-friendly, economically compliant regime is primarily what the US wants. Given that, they may stop well short of even a serviceable bourgeois democracy in order to “stabilise” Iraq.

Iraq illustrates the fact that there is a limit to which outside military force can create a bourgeois democratic system from outside.

The US is not trying to reduce Iraq to an old-style colony (as, for example, Russia was in Afghanistan and, say, Italy in feudal Ethiopia in the mid-1930s). But there is certainly a large dimension of imperialism in the US policy in Iraq.

If the USA were to pursue a comprehensive world wide “democratic foreign” policy, it would at one and the same time be pursuing, in that way, the goal of a world imperium for the US hyper power. It is a serious possibility that the upshot of the US-Iraq war will be a long-term — and a possibly expanding — US “colonial” presence in the Middle East. We don’t know, yet. Possibly the US government doesn’t know.

A situation may develop in which the policy of the Lenin-Trotsky Communist International, in the era of colonial imperialism, would guide us. We would back a genuine national liberation movement, even one led by reactionaries (of course, without politically endorsing the reactionaries).

None of this implies the policy of the “reactionary anti-imperialists”. It does not imply that when the US/Britain are attempting to set up an Iraqi bourgeois democratic system and pledge to withdraw eventually (though that may mean after quite a few years) we back Islamic clerical fascists, Ba’thists and Sunni supremacists, shouting “Troops Out Now”.

It does imply that, even while we hope for an outcome in Iraq in which the labour movement can develop, we look with cold eyes on the US (and Britain) in Iraq.

Our primary obligation is, it seems to me, to tell the truth — first to ourselves — about what is happening and what may happen. It means that we don’t join in the suicidal “anti-imperialist” negativism that lines up so much of the “left” on the side, first, of the weaker imperialist power — Iraq — in the war and now on the side of clerical fascism and against those in Iraq attempting to create bourgeois democratic structures.

I repeat: it means we tell the truth to ourselves and others. The whole truth, including the truth about the “democratic imperialists”.

Nothing but the truth: we should not indulge in soft-headed, “pixillated” fantasies that the US bourgeoisie is a pure — or relatively pure — force for “democracy”.

Only in that way can we fight for working class political independence in Iraq. And in Britain and America too.

Finally, take an example from the history of the suppression of black slavery. Even though the activities of the British navy to stop the slave trade (after 1808) was an aspect of Britain’s drive for, and exercise of, dominion over the world’s seas, it was none the less right, good, progressive that it should be done.

Someone who was hostile to British domination of the seas — rightly so, from our point of view — and therefore denounced British ships stopping the slave ships of other, sovereign nations on the high seas and freeing the slaves, would have been a malignant fuck-wit.

But someone supporting the British drive to suppress the slave trade would have been a different sort of a fool to ignore the facts that slavery continued in the British colonies until 1834. That the British ruling class exploited large parts of the world — India, Ireland the West Indies, etc. Suppression of the slave trade meant the growth of “slave-breeding farms” in the USA to supply the slaves to grow the cotton on which the British cotton industry depended, etc. Or who would feel that it would be a betrayal to fight against the slave trade to mention such things…?

Whatever policy the American and British or other bourgeois forces pursue, even if they are or may be “progressive”, or doing something — in their own way — that we want to see done, we advocate working class political and organisational independence from them and what they do. We tell the labour movement that it should place neither trust nor reliance in any bourgeois force.

Any “progressive” role played by the USA, Britain, the EU, or whatever, will be shaped and warped by what they are, by their imperialism of colonial conquest or of trade and power.

We tell ourselves and others the truth about what is, or might be, the positive results from what they sometimes do.

We take no political responsibility for them, their typical methods, or for their goals.

We reject the idea that working class policy can be worked out as a mere negative imprint of bourgeois policy.

We scorn the cheap delusion that if we shout “good on you!”, “we’re with you!”, we can affect, shape or control what, in their own interest and for their own goals, they do.

We recognise that the cost of that cheap delusion-of-influence is a loss of political clarity, definition and identity for the erstwhile revolutionary socialists.

As Trotsky put it, we are “the party of intransigent opposition”. We relate to the bourgeoisie in all circumstances with mortal working class hostility.