As some readers will know, for nearly three months now the Weekly Worker has given over a large part of its coverage to high-pitched attacks on the AWL.
For background, and previous polemic, click here
But now, once again, the WW group seems to be wriggling out of a debate with AWL on the underlying political issues.
On 3 August, Sean Matgamna of AWL issued a public challenge to the WW group to debate AWL on the underlying political question, Israel-Palestine.
We followed up with an email on 19 August, and WW seemed to agree to debate.
However - it's still not clear to me exactly how - at some point in the to-ing and fro-ing about arranging the debate, they substituted for it a debate between AWL and... Moshe Machover, a socialist who has written in the Weekly Worker against AWL but (a) has a different position on Israel-Palestine from WW; and (b) has pointedly avoided repeating WW's lying allegation that an article by Sean Matgamna in Solidarity 3/136 "excused an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran" (though Machover's articles have also refrained from rebuking that lie).
Anyway, the debate happened on 12 October, under the title "Israel, Iran, and the left" - a suitably neutral title for a debate where there is some argument about how to frame the issues - and on this website you can read a summary report or hear audio files of all the speeches.
After the 12 October debate, I wrote to the WW office proposing an AWL-WW debate on "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics" on 23 November.
All the correspondence from WW about arranging debates, since August, has been full of mock-macho point-scoring, abuse, and pose-striking. However, underneath all that they did agree to the debate, reserving their position on the date.
Now they have written suggesting 30 November instead (which is fine) - but stating: "There is no possibility that we will accept a debate titled 'Israel, Iran and socialist politics'..."
Their stated position for this refusal is that "This is almost exactly the same title as the CMP-hosted event - i.e., 'Israel, Iran and the left'- and when Matgamna spoke on this on October 12 he failed to mention the question of an Israeli attack on Iran at all!"
A lie. Sean Matgamna took up that question in his second speech at that meeting, focusing in the first speech on the underlying programmatic issue, "two states" in Israel-Palestine. The balance of Moshe Machover's first speech was also on the underlying programmatic issue. In any case, obviously the WW speakers at a debate on "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics" could pose as many questions as they liked about the Solidarity 3/136 article. The title could not in any way inhibit them on that.
So, first the WW agree to a debate. No problem about the title of it - they just want someone with views quite different from theirs to be the "other side" from AWL in the debate! Now, when they can't pull that one again, they won't debate because they object to the title!
We are reminded of the Healyite organisation of the 1960s, the Socialist Labour League, who would not debate the Young Communist League unless the YCL agreed to the title of the debate being "Stalinism or Trotskyism?"
WW insists that the title of the debate be changed to "What if Israel bombs Iran?" Evidently they want to keep the focus as narrowly as possible on their lying allegation about the Solidarity 3/136 article.
Now, the lying allegations have been answered thoroughly in writing, and were answered in the 12 October debate. There is limited value in a further "you advocate nuking Iran"/ "no, we don't, that's a ridiculous lie"/ "you do, so"/ "no, we don't"/ "do"/ "don't"... session.
WW can have no reasonable objection to the broader title. To repeat, the WW speakers at a debate on "Israel, Iran, and socialist politics" could pose as many questions as they liked about the Solidarity 3/136 article. The title could not in any way inhibit them on that.
What their title might do is help the WW group repeat their performance on 12 October. Then, after seven speeches from WW people, we were no wiser than we were before the event about their views on Israel-Palestine and their attitude to Moshe Machover's line on that question.
Only by correspondence with the WW office after the event have we got any light on that. It appears that their majority position is still for "two states", but they have two minorities, one demanding as a precondition of peace that the Israeli Jews be put under the rule of an Arab-majority state covering all 1948 Palestine, and another "something closer to Moshe Machover's position".
We're still waiting for information about the exact nature of the two minority positions. About the single-state one, we have been told only that it has appeared "on discussion lists", unspecified. In what exact way the other minority view is "closer" to Moshe Machover's is still unspecified.
My guess would be that John Bridge and Mark Fischer themselves are toying with the Machover position, and the group will go over to that as soon as John Bridge decides to give the signal. No wonder, then, that they want to put up a smokescreen of scandalising to protect them on the question.
Anyway, we'll see. Will they in fact withdraw from the debate unless we agree to change the title?
Comments
Tragedy, farce...?
I understand the first exchange in this debate was a tragedy, the second was indeed a farce, but now we're on the fifth round... I don't know what to say. I can see why the CPGB doesn't shut up about it, because they've got nothing else to do, but I thought the AWL was supposed to be a bit more serious. You publish some very interesting things on this site, but really: this is completely absurd. No one cares. It's reached the point of an absurd left spectacle; it has clarified nothing about anything politically. It doesn't even matter whose fault this is (though in my opinion, neither side is entirely innocent). The point is that it has obviously reached the point of being completely counterproductive. What do you think's going to happen? That they'll back down? That they'll be 'exposed' before the assembled left, whilst you'll be vindicated? Please. Beneath the rhetoric and spin in both your papers, it's barely possible to discern a point of principle. There was as much, or more, in your recent paper about this farrago as about the economic crisis. Three pages! Do something else for all our sakes!
"No-one cares"?
At our Workers' Liberty trade union school on Saturday 25th, one trade unionist recalled a conversation with a workmate in a Royal Mail sorting office. The AWLer had been talking about some international issue - Sierra Leone, as far as he could remember. His workmate responded: "I don't know how you can bear to know all these things".
I guess that is one of the critical differences between socialists and people who avoid politics: that we can bear to know. "Am I bovvered?" Yes, we are bothered about such things.
The issues here: does Israel have a right to exist, or is getting the Israeli Jews under the rule of an Arab state a precondition for peace? Should we back Iran's "right" to develop nuclear weapons, or oppose them as a real threat? Is "clerical-fascist" a reasonable description of the Iranian regime, or not? Should our attitude to Iran be entirely focused on "defence" of it (against a presumed US drive to "wipe out Iran" or "bomb it back into the Stone Age", as WW and quite a few others would have it), or should we see the Iranian state as a regional imperialism?...
"No-one cares" about all this? We do. Actually, most left-minded people do, in one way or another. The "no-one cares" cry is usually used within the left to deflect argument on the issues and insist (usually with great emotional fervour, demagogically drawing strength from denunciations of the terrible plight of the Palestinians) that everyone complies with the view that Israel must be destroyed (or "overthrown", or "dismantled", or whatever) and that there should be nothing said about Iran other than to oppose US or Israeli threats against it.
Or does Tom mean that the question of whether the WW will debate us is something "no-one cares" about? That would be more reasonable, but then the stuff about "three pages!" in the last issue of Solidarity is a misrepresentation. The "three pages" are about the substantive issues.
It would be more reasonable not to care whether the WW debates us, except that standards of straight dealing on the left, between groups who hold opposing views (and there always will be such opposing views, until and unless the left is completely dead) - those standards are important.
And I fear that, just as the "am I bovvered?" pose on the substantive issue is a backhanded way of endorsing a particular view (destroy Israel, say nothing much about Iran except to "defend" it), so also here "am I bovvered?" is a backhanded way of saying that "no-one should care" about, i.e. no-one should object to, the WW telling blatant lies, and then wriggling out of debate.
Martin Thomas
No, they don't.
Or does Tom mean that the question of whether the WW will debate us is something "no-one cares" about?
That, yes: and the associated ephemera such as: what you think about particular CPGB personalities; what you think about the chair of the meeting; whether or not certain people are "chickenshits" (a particularly embarassing low); who offered who what meeting when, and why; whose supporters observed the conventions of debate less well; offering cod-psychological error theories; etc. But even the ostensibly political content of the "debate" is not, in fact, political. Neither side has any interest in listening to the other. It's a dialogue of the deaf. If you seriously want to claim that anything has been clarified by this "debate" over the past few weeks, you are of course welcome to do so, though I dont think it's plausible. Ridiculously, the two sides are now arguing about a different question from the original, even though nothing was clarified about that first question at all. Seamlessly, "debate" has shifted onto another topic, which the people involved felt more like having a set piece argument about. (Of course, there're connections between the two topics, but they're clearly different.) The confrontation is now self-perpetuating, the politics are entirely secondary, and that shines through in every article.
I don't think I'm being backhanded, by the way. I'm quite out and out saying: no one should care. Including you. Object to it, that's fine, hold whatever opinion you will of it. Just give it its proper, miniscule place.
Who cares?
Well, yes, in the general scheme of things I don't care much about whether the WW is willing to debate us.
Quite a lot has been clarified on the original question by the debate between Sean Matgamna and Moshe Machover, but I don't expect new light from an exchange with the WW.
But, since the WW really does make this question of who'll debate whom and suchlike so central, it's worth replying.
Tom, if you don't care about it, fine. Just read the substantive debate and forget about the who'll-debate-whom bit.
Martin Thomas