Experiences of the left

Kosova and a union conference (1999)

Patrick Murphy

Friday, April 2

Arrive at the National Union of Teachers Conference in Brighton expecting a lively and constructive weekend. Teachers are deeply angry about the Green Paper proposals for performance related pay. Yet it is hard to think about anything but the unfolding crisis in Kosova. The previous week I had been to an involved discussion on the issue. This conflict is not reducible to the well-worn slogans — ‘the main enemy is at home’, ‘stop the war’, etc.

Politics starts immediately with a Socialist Teachers Alliance (STA) meeting. The main issue is, rightly, the Green Paper, but I am approached by some comrades who hope to put the war on Conference agenda. This process requires a petition to suspend standing orders, with 200 signatures. That wins the right to argue on the conference floor for a debate. Two thirds of the delegates must then vote for the suspension. The motion I am shown heavily condemns the war, but my main concern is that it advocates Kosovan rights. It does, but in too low and too subordinate a key.

Later that night

I am preoccupied with the tactics required to fight the Green Paper. I am running between two left meetings (STA and CDFU, Campaign for a Democratic, Fighting Union) arguing the case for insisting that the dispute cannot be ended by the General Secretary and that any agreement be put to a Special Conference. When I get to the second STA meeting, it is obvious that things have moved on considerably on Kosova. The chair announces that the SWP are very keen to push for a discussion and would like this to be a joint effort. They only have one condition: there must be no mention of self-determination for Kosova! A WL comrade moves an amendment, to support independence for Kosova. It is seconded by a Socialist Party comrade and supported by Socialist Outlook.

The leading figure in the STA, Bernard Regan, argues three equally ridiculous propositions: that we must give way to the SWP here, that their tactical judgement might be right; that we might get broader support without reference to Kosovar rights; that independence was different from self-determination: who are we to say what the Kosovars want? He was really saying that the Stalinists on the NEC, and their supporters in Conference, would be less likely to support a motion which championed the Kosovars. The meeting, not very big by that time, voted against including support for Kosovan independence.

Saturday, April 3

Despite the enormity of the bread and butter issues this year, the war debate ripples on. One of our comrades asked the SWP’s most senior NUT person why they had insisted on dropping self-determination for Kosova from the motion. Up until this week, he assured her, it was their position to support Kosovar rights. However, that was now an abstraction: the Kosovars had been driven out; there was no Kosova to speak of and probably never would be. It was chilling in its frankness. It sits very awkwardly with the SWP’s support for the Arab Palestinians’ ‘right’ to all of present day Israel. I suspect the real motive, as ever with the SWP, is organisational rather than political. It cannot have escaped their attention that the anti- war protests, such as they are, consist overwhelmingly of Serb chauvinists and old Stalinists and fellow travellers who think the break-up of Yugoslavia is (a) a terrible thing and (b) all the fault of Germany and western imperialism. Support for the Kosovars doesn’t go down well with this audience and that’s a far more important consideration than the rights of a faraway people of whom the SWPers know nothing.

Meanwhile, the London-based clique at the head of the STA have got themselves all het up about an insult thrown at their beloved leader by WL’s Industrial Organiser, who said to Regan, privately, that his position was ‘chetnik’. The incredible preciousness of this — we are routinely called ‘unionists’, ‘pro-imperialists’, etc. — leads me to conclude that a smokescreen is being created to avoid proper discussion of the substantial issues.

Sunday, April 4

Every so often something happens to reassure you that you have got things right. This morning I am given a leaflet which reminds me why I wanted nothing to do with a broad coalition of all those opposed to this war. The leaflet has a number of bold headlines. The third catches my eye: ‘Stay out of Serbia’s civil war’. Incensed, I go back to the woman. ‘What exactly is Serbia’s civil war?’, I ask. Puzzlement and an answer which amounts to ‘you must have seen the news’. Of course I have, but why does she describe what is going on as a civil war? How would I describe it, she asks? As a war of conquest and genocide by Serb imperialists, I suggest. She searches the leaflet for some reference to Kosovar rights like she would be pleased to find it, and then gives up, declaring that she cannot defend it.

Feeling a bit unsatisfied with her lack of fight, I tackle her colleague, someone I know will defend it, one Hank ‘the tank’ Roberts, NUT Secretary in Brent. Hank believes no state should be needlessly divided up by nationalists: he is against Wales separating from England and, when I press him, against Kurds separating from Turkey or Iraq. A hopeless case. I come away more convinced than ever that no left worth the name would support an anti-war campaign on the same basis as these people, the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).

Later that night

The SWP insist that they should have the speeches moving and seconding the suspension (and the motion if it is discussed), reneging on a prior agreement with the STA. The STA cave in. We, WL, decide to produce a special bulletin on the issue for the next day as (a) the international debate is held then and (b) we have a fringe meeting on the subject. The normal arrangement at this conference has been that we provide paper and, as long as it doesn’t upset their schedule, the STA print our bulletins. This time they, or at least one individual, refuse to print the bulletin because it criticises them. The really depressing thing is that no-one seems to find this sort of thing shocking any more.

Monday, April 5

The attempt to suspend standing orders fails to get a two thirds majority. Would it have been more likely with support for the Kosovars? I think so. There is no way of knowing and, in any case, that isn’t the point. Immediately after encouraging the conference not to allow time to discuss it, the leadership take up 15 minutes of debating time with a statement on Kosova by the Deputy General Secretary, Steve Sinnot — bland, empty, delivered in a tone appropriate to a report on the union’s budget.

Later that evening

At the SWP fringe meeting on Kosova, Alex Callinicos adds to the sense of unreality by questioning whether it really is reasonable to describe what is happening to the Kosovar Albanians as ‘massacres’, ‘mass murder’ or ‘genocide’ or whether these are just the lies of western imperialism. Hearing this I remember the earlier argument, that there is no Kosova left, as everyone has been driven out. What exactly has forced these people to such a desperate state that they would leave home in their thousands?

Is a left which sees this genocide and yet fails to place the rights of the Kosovars at the centre of their concerns a left worth having? This weekend I have looked, not for the first time, at many of my fellow socialists and thought: if this was all there was on the left I would want no part of it. It is not only a matter of the left we have, but of the left we can and will rebuild!

Workers’ Liberty 55, April 1999

Lynne Moffat

I attended a picket on Saturday 27 April outside the Israeli embassy in High Street Kensington. My previous experience of pickets there had been primarily of ones organised by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, but supported by other organisations who also take a two state position on the Middle East conflict. I was somewhat shocked by some of the things I saw and heard on this picket.
I arrived to see about 50 or 60 people, mainly from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the SWP, although there was also a Workers’ Power stall at the back.

I was the only person there selling literature arguing for a two state position. I therefore expected some of the comments I received such as “I don’t know how you can sell that ‘ and accusations of being racist. However I was surprised by the strength of anti-Jewish feeling: loud chants of “5,6,7,8, we want no Israeli state” and mutterings of “death to the Jews”.

There was a man next to me (he had nothing to show he was from any organisation) who was selling “intifada scarfs”. I had been there about half an hour when a woman from the SWP asked me if I would like to buy a scarf. I said simply, “no thank you”. I began looking around and saw that the majority of the women on the picket had their heads covered. I thought little of this as I expected there to be a lot of British and Palestinian muslim women on the picket. However, many other women who did not appear to be muslim and who appeared to be members of the SWP also had their heads covered, with the “intifada scarf”.

The SWP woman I had spoken to earlier then said to me, ‘Don’t you think you should at least cover your head as a mark of respect, this is a mainly Muslim protest?”. I was too shocked to give much of an intelligent reply, and it was only a little while later that I left.

I do not want to make sweeping generalisations about the protesters present. I saw female Workers’ Power members who didn’t have their heads covered and have no idea if anything was ever said to them. Not every woman there had their head covered, and I cannot say that it was a uniform decision for those that did.
I can say that I spoke to a number of Palestinian women who listened and debated with me even if they didn’t agree. I wasn’t called “racist” by any of them, or asked why I didn’t have a intifada scarf or my head covered. They seemed to want my solidarity. It was only this that made me feel in any way comfortable at the picket.

One last point: I found it very ironic that at the same picket people can shout “no Israeli state” and ask people to sign a petition against Le Pen as a fascist, in part for his anti-semitic views.

Solidarity 6, 30 April 2002

The response to 7/7 from the Respect/SWP axis has been smug, thoughtless, and irresponsible.

On the morning of the slaughter in London, the SWP put out a statement signed by Socialist Worker editor Chris Bambery and SWP national secretary Martin Smith. Denounce the bombings and condemn the bombers? No way!

The statement sorrowfully chided the bombers for targeting London. “London... is a global centre of opposition to the war and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq... A majority of those killed and wounded will have opposed the war in Iraq; some will have joined the huge marches for peace”.

What on earth were the bombers thinking about, killing their friends? Think what this statement says implicitly about the slaughter in New York in 2001, or last year in Madrid.

London should be spared because of the anti-war movement there. But there was no anti-war movement in New York in 2001. And think of all the places across the globe where there is no sizeable opposition to the occupation of Iraq! Think of the places in Iraq where the people welcomed the US and British troops!
Why pick on London, friends? Peaceful, anti-war, Ken-Livingstone-led London!
Bambery and Smith fell over themselves in their eagerness to rationalise and explain the motives of the bombers. The bombers issued no manifesto: so Bambery and Smith drafted one for them.

The indiscriminate slaughter in London, said Bambery and Smith, was “a consequence of its [Britain’s] support for war and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq”.

In fact, the men who butchered Londoners on their way to work were part of a wide and many-stranded international political-Islamist movement which wreaks daily havoc and slaughter in Iraq. Their attitude to people who are not like themselves — whether Muslim, Christian, or, like most Londoners in their eyes, infidels — was that they deserve death.

Of course, British involvement in Iraq puts London and other British cities higher on al Qaeda’s target list than they might otherwise be. But to present these religious maniacs as people motivated by rational, secular aims — people who would behave differently if Britain left Iraq — is to undertake the role of a public relations agency for them.

Al Qaeda’s goal is not this or that secular measure. It is a world of Islamic dictatorship. In principle they are prepared to go on committing atrocities until they get the perfect “Islamic state”.

Iraq and Afghanistan are for them mere details. Immediate British withdrawal from Iraq, as a response to the London bombing, might lessen London’s prominence as a potential target, but it would vastly strengthen the belief of those who organised the slaughter in London that they can triumph. It would increase the likelihood that al Qaeda and its allies could conquer at least part of Iraq, and subject its peoples to their merciless savagery.

Socialists who give their voices to “rationalising” for these bombers, and to advocating an open-ended policy of appeasing them — beginning with the immediate abandonment of Iraq to people like them — are no longer, properly speaking, an “anti-war” movement. They are a pro-political-Islamist-terrorist, and for Iraq a pro-Sunni-supremacist, movement!

After 9/11 some leading SWPers boasted about the fact that the SWP had not condemned the attack on the World Trade Centre. Now the SWP is less gung-ho. After all, the dead are closer to home.

But the change is only in the pleading that London, as a special “centre of peace”, should be spared. The SWP still spouts the line that Bush and Blair are “really” or “solely” to blame!

The people “ultimately” responsible for the bombings are those who carried them out, and those who encouraged and promoted their attack.

Those who in retrospect rationalise for them incur some small vicarious share of responsibility.

Of course, the Iraq war created a climate in which political Islam is prospering. But to blame what the political-Islamists do “ultimately” or exclusively on “Iraq” is a bit like saying that we should have responded to Nazi atrocities by blaming not the Nazis but the Treaty of Versailles pushed through by Britain and France after World War One.

That treaty created a Germany in economic and political chaos for 14 years, and created a fertile breeding ground for Nazism. But it was the Nazis who committed the Nazi atrocities.So too with political Islam. It should be condemned and opposed, here, in Iraq, everywhere.

One SWP statement says that the bombings have nothing to do with religion. Nonsense! They have everything to do with religion — with the bombers’ crazed, murderous religion, with a version of religion that takes religion’s built-in valuing of an imaginary god and an imaginary infinite after-life above actual human life to the conclusion that infidels’ lives (and those of Muslims who share trains and buses with them) are worthless.

Religion led the bombers to die believing that they would get a privileged place in heaven. How else can you explain them? One of them had human sensitivity enough to help teach young kids. Another of them was a loving parent. How else, if not because they see the world through a haze of religion-induced delusions, could such young men board trains and a bus, surrounded by hundreds of people, knowing that they would soon kill huge numbers of them?

What inspired the bombings was a madness of a sort — the madness of irrational religious belief to which all human life, including their own, was subordinated. But the movement they adhered to is a political movement — a fascistic movement that uses religious sectarianism and fanaticism much as Nazism used fanatical racial and national “sectarianism”.

Not all that movement supports such atrocities as London. Some political-Islamists condemned the London bombing without any of the SWP’s equivocation. But political Islam, is by its nature, a political movement that subordinates human life to religious constructions.

It is a powerful movement, different strands of which rule in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. It is strong in Egypt. It killed thousands in Algeria in the 1990s. Today it is a daily threat to the people of Iraq.

To claim that condemning political Islam is “siding with Bush and Blair”, or “Islamophobic”, or both, can only push thinking people, in reaction, towards Blair — and a few of them towards political Islam.

Five years ago political-Islamist organisers complained that they could make no headway among Muslim youth in Britain. Now, after four years of excuses and apologies given to it by the left, different strands of political Islam have become very influential here. They are influential enough to make the London bombers believe that their suicide might attract more to their ideology; that it might shake some “soft” political-Islamists into seeing “martyrdom” as a better way to the shared aim of an Islamic state.

We need to ask why. And not hide behind simply “blaming Bush and Blair”.
The “left” should reflect on its failures, and accept that part of the blame for the rise of political Islam lies with itself.

To argue, as the SWP did in its statement argue, that the bombings were just an automatic, inevitable response to Bush and Blair is patronising drivel. The bombers had choices. They chose to commit mass murder.

Socialists and democrats oppose conventional wars for human-centred reasons. Those wars are led by political establishments in the US/UK for whom democracy and the right to life are secondary to business interests. The armed forces are led by people who have a culture of callous disregard for human life and liberties. We have Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah as examples of that.
Let us for the sake of argument assume that opposition to the occupation of Iraq was the trigger for those who perpetrated the slaughter in London. But if they started with reasons similar to ours for opposing war, they lost that plot somewhere. They became obedient to an ideology that has interest neither in general human life and liberty nor in democracy. How else could they commit those bombings?

If once they were primarily motivated by human-centred opposition to war and racism, how did they lose it? Did the mainstream anti-war left fail?
Suppose some of the bombers went on the anti-war marches. They would have seen the slogans on placards, read the leaflets. They would have tried to work out why the war was happening, and how to respond.

They ended up with al Qaeda. They must have concluded that the war was caused by a fixed hostility of “the West” to “Islam”, and that the answer was for “Islam” (as represented by themselves) to strike back against “the west”.

It is not hard to see how they might have been pushed that way, or at least not stopped from moving that way, by aspects of the anti-war movement. The Islamic prayers. The joint sponsorship by the Muslim Association of Britain, British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The banners demanding “Palestine, from the river to the sea” (that is, including Israel) for Arabs or Muslims. The SWPers shouting that Bush and Sharon were the “real” terrorists — any terrorism by Al Qaeda or Saddam being “unreal”.

If the bombers had been on the marches, then the anti-war left would have failed them and the people who died at their hands. Failed to warn them that political Islam is a horror throughout the Middle East and north Africa even worse than US/UK imperialism. Failed to explain to them that the wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq were not wars “against Islam” but wars determined by capitalist greed. Wars that should have been opposed by championing democracy and working-class internationalism, and by opposing religious sectarianism here, in Iraq, everywhere.

The SWP denounced those who argued against political Islam. They accused us of being “Islamophobes”, despite the fact that most of those who have died at the hands of political-Islamists have been Muslims.

Over the last two and a half years, the political-Islamist militias in Iraq have been cheered and celebrated by dominant elements of the anti-war left as a heroic “resistance”.
Even while the SWP timidly distances itself from the London bombers, it continues to support the Islamist “resistance” in Iraq.

Murdered kids in Baghdad or Musayyib do not get the same sympathy as London commuters. Scratch a “leftist”, and you find, behind their shameful (though calculating) patronising of the political-Islamists, a species of British chauvinism!

Solidarity 77, 21 July 2005

Cathy Nugent

The last issue of Action for Solidarity went to press two days after the aircraft attack on the US. At the time we believed the British left had condemned the attacks. That was not quite right.
All of the British left have described the events as horrific, of course but most have not made an unequivocal condemnation. Rather they have condemned the “tactics” of the attackers(Socialist Party) or said they condemn the attack “because the actions will not take forward the struggle against US domination by a single step...” (Workers Power).

The Socialist Workers Party did not want to use the actual word “condemn” in the (very acceptable) statement of the Socialist Alliance.

Condemnation of the tactics has been a means by which the left has distanced itself from outright criticism of what was likely to have been, from the start, the work of an Islamic fundamentalist group. They wanted to see and describe the attack as an act of “anti-imperialism”.

These politics are to put it crudely, the politics of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. The SWP for instance, because they oppose US imperialism, describe this act against the US as “the bitter fruits of policies pursued by the US state” (Socialist Worker). To describe the attack on the US as an anti-imperialist act one has to take the “anti-imperialism” of Islamic fundamentalism as good coin — a terrible distortion of the truth and one which can only lead the left into backing or bolstering our bitter class enemies.

The fundamentalists use anti-imperialist rhetoric as part of their political armoury. In Islamist states such as Iran campaigns against “western threats” are used to ward off such western phenomena as free trade unions, women’s rights, rights for national minorities and so on. The fact that Iran has rejected the overtures of the west from [then foreign secretary] Jack Straw does not make their “anti-imperialism” any more progressive. The Islamist “anti-imperialism” is code for the most reactionary politics.

Obviously the thinking of the Islamists is nourished by hostility to US policies and is a reaction to the big-power influence of the US. But these political movements are much more the product of factors peculiar to the countries in which they develop. Essentially Islamism arises from the contradictions of modern capitalist development in societies with many archaic structures. Their program is to reverse capitalist development.

Socialists have no truck with that program. We oppose capital within its development. That is, we fight for the rights and the interests of the working class which is born out of, and develops a class consciousness inside capitalist society. Socialists who want to take a stand that is consistently in line with the interests of the working class have to spell out why we are against the Islamic fundamentalists, even while we oppose a war that will not stop that fundamentalism and will kill, maim, and disrupt the lives of many, many people.
We are against all religious fundamentalism, in fact, and vehemently opposed to the victimisation of Muslims. Still, we must be precise and upfront about why we oppose Islamic fundamentalism.

Workers Power have been most obviously identified with the anti-imperialism of the fundamentalists. They say the US is the “number one terrorist” and as long as it exists there will be “desperate militants” who want to fight back. The Islamists are not “militants” in any sense that we would not want to heavily qualify to the point of contradiction. They are not “good guys”, they are a profoundly reactionary, anti-working-class political force.

Action for Solidarity 48, 28 September 2001

Janine Booth

I am alarmed by an article in Socialist Worker about Hamas and its victory in the Palestinian Authority elections. Explaining the background to the election victory, and interviewing Musheer al-Masri, the Hamas MP for the northern Gaza Strip, what is remarkable about the article is that it is entirely uncritical of Hamas. Going by this article, you’d think that Hamas was a laudable national liberation movement, which does good community work and runs local councils ‘efficiently’.

When it mentions their determination to “drive the occupation from our lands”, it does not clarify that by “our lands”, Hamas means the whole of Israel, not just the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And it takes as good coin Hamas’ claim that “Our only goal is to defend our people and drive the occupation from our lands.” Hang on, it also has a goal of establishing an Islamic state.

Socialist Worker quotes Musheer al-Masri that before getting involved in the resistance, Hamas was “primarily concerned with improving the health and welfare of our people.” It does not explain how intimidating women into wearing the veil – Hamas’ first campaign – amounts to “health and welfare”. When I visited the Occupied Territories in 1991, I spent time in a classroom where the girls had to sit at the back and could barely see the blackboard – the explanation given was that Hamas had ordained that it be so. Nor does it clarify that “our people” does not include Palestinian lesbian, gay or bisexual people, who Hamas seeks to attack rather than defend.

Of course, the Israeli government shoulders a lot of the blame for the election of Hamas. Its vicious repression of the Palestinians has driven them into the arms of the Islamist Hamas. And the Israeli right will be celebrating the election result, believing that it will rally Israelis to the idea that you can not make peace with the Palestinians and should therefore carry on repressing them. But that does not change the fact that Hamas is a deeply reactionary movement, that socialists should criticise, not support or paint up. The election of Hamas is very bad news for the Palestinians, as well as for the prospects of a just settlement.

Socialist Worker used to grasp the principle that socialists should stand for working-class interests against whichever regime or movement seeks to repress them, even if those movements hated each other. My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend. Or, as Socialist Worker’s strapline used to read ‘Neither Washington Nor Moscow but international socialism’.

OK, so the ‘Moscow’ bit might be out of date, but how about bringing into the 21st century as ‘Neither Washington Nor Mosque’?! (That’s not having a go at everyone who goes to mosque, by the way, any more than it is having a go at everyone who lives in Washington. But socialists reject the government in Washington, and we reject government by the mosque.)
We need to step up solidarity with the Palestinians, but not with Hamas.

www.workersliberty.org, 3 July 2006