By Ruben Lomas
Just as one element of the left (the SWP and its milieu) has committed political suicide by abandoning independent working-class politics in favour of uncritical support for Islamist forces in the Middle East, so another element has made the exact opposite mistake by throwing their support behind bourgeois democracy and capitalism in its war against political Islam.
Socialists like Eric Lee and others (many cohered around the Euston Manifesto group) who the AWL debated in London on 27 July see Israel’s war in Lebanon as a straightforward self-defensive action taken by a bourgeois republic facing an “existential threat” from fascist forces.
On his website, Lee says “let us imagine that Israel wins — meaning that the captured soldiers are returned and the rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon end. The result will not only be good for Israel, but good for the Palestinians and Lebanese as well. The Islamo-fascists will be weakened. Democratic and secular forces will be strengthened. Socialists should cheer this on.”
This capitulation before the brutal, expansionist and sub-imperialist Israeli ruling-class is as much of a suicidal error as the SWP's sacrificing of class politics on the altar of “anti-imperialism”. Both suicides share the same essential character; they retreat from carrying out the long, hard and difficult task of developing the workers' movement internationally as a hegemonic social and political force, independent from and opposed to all capitalists, imperialists and reactionaries big and small. In a world in which our class has suffered many defeats, both the SWP (which undoubtedly contains many sincere revolutionaries) and people like Eric Lee (people who are also sincere in their commitment to basic socialist principles) give up on our class and search for saviours – the “anti-imperialist resistance” of Hamas, Hizbollah and the Iraqi sectarians or the bourgeois democratic forces of Bush, Blair and Olmert – to deliver desired outcomes, or at least “progressive” or less-bad consequences.
They are suicides born of desperation and despair. To counter such despair, socialists should look neither to the representatives of the hyper-imperialist ruling-classes and their friends in the Middle East nor to the murderously reactionary medievalists in organisations like Hamas and Hizbollah. We must look to the peace movements of Israel/Palestine and the labour movements of Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. While the outcome delivered by the victory of one or another side in a war like this may be more or less “progressive”, it is not our job as socialists to “cheer on” either side; our job is to build the third camp.
“The fetishism of two camps must give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat – the camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.”
Leon Trotsky
Comments
No...
This is all an illusion of having something to say. It's the pretence of having an answer.
I am in favour of some sort of intervention in Darfur, in principle, by the 'outside world'. In principle, I would have been in favour of some kind of intervention other than the one which actually happened in Rwanda. But you don't seem to ask (yourself) the meaningful question about why there is/was no intervention or why the French intervention in Rwanda made things worse.
And obviously, what kind of intervention is a big question. A military intervention in Darfur which led to a disaster would not be a good thing. And most likely, it would; or it won't happen because the ruling classes of the world, strangely enough, don't determine their foreign policies because of suggestions from us.
What you are proposing is not a 'reform'. It is asking an agency to act in a way it simply will not. I think the analogy with struggles for rights or democracy or what have you within capitalism (gay liberation, NHS, or whatever you want to mention) is way, way off beam. Frankly it seems to me simply a surreal parallel.
I also think, which is what I was trying to say before, that this *focus* - which seems to be your argument, that this should be a *focus* (many people seem to be saying it's the key thing in the Euston Manifesto) - is just weird. I don't know how many atrocities have been committed around the world since I got involved in politics. Until recently, nobody on the left even *thought* about suggesting that the answer was armed intervention.
As I say, agitating for intervention *sounds like* an answer to these terrible things, but it isn't. In very, very specific circumstances, it might be rational, right. But not as a generalised 'answer'. Military intervention to stop Russian slaughter in Chechnya was not viable; intervention against North Korea is not... Darfur, maybe, all right. Certainly, denounce them for their failure; and if they do something, don't organise demos against it. But you are suggesting - aren't you - something much more.
Calling for 'duty of care' intervention sounds realistic, 'doing something' and so on. But if you actually want to 'do something', volunteer for a charity or something. I'm serious, incidentally, I'm not trying to make a cheap point. I often thing about my utter powerlessness in the face of atrocity, and how if I really wanted to do something there's plenty of things I could do. But as socialists, if that's what we're still talking about here, we feel powerless *because we are*. Yes, rebuilding a socialist movement is hard. Actually, getting international capital to behave like a benign force which cares about the suffering of the world's poor is a FUCK of a lot harder.
Darfur etc
I don't know exactly what kind of intervention would be right in Darfur.
I think you know it's not newness I object to, so I won't bother to reply to that bit.
It's not a question of a 'tight read-off' from capital to policy. It's a question of the fundamental nature of this system, and the class which rules it. If we aren't in agreement about the nature of the beast, this is a different argument. But otherwise you suggest we are, basically. Either things follow from an understanding of this fundamental nature, or they don't.
I'm not against, under all circumstances, advocating specific actions by the capitalist states (I think these have to be very specific, though, rather than hoping-for-the-best endorsement of wholescale military action - like Iraq, for instance). What I object to in your approach is the suggestion that this should is the catch-all answer to our (socialists') current impotence, the *focus*, the making-it-the-issue (on which, for instance, you apparently want to intervene here). In fact it is all a very big deal for you (and follows from what you think you've found as the fundamental flaw in Trotskyism, World War Two). I think to concentrate on it is disorienting at best, nuts at worst.
If there was some kind of effective intervention in Darfur, I think the last thing I would campaign for is that it be some kind of 'norm'. The conditions for its success would be entirely unique. The last thing we should be doing is giving Western (or whoever) states a blank cheque to 'intervene' all over the place.
Solidarnosc
Ali is referring to the fact that when I was a kid I argued it was inconceivable that a working class movement could have a programme for capitalism. This was silly. Among the people who disabused me of it were leaders of the AWL.
I am not arguing that it is inconceivable that imperialist/capitalist states can do good things. They did, for instance, save the Kosovars from slaughter. There are a number of other recent instances I don't know much about but - Sierra Leone, etc.
The circumstances in which they act in this way are specific, though. A generalised 'duty to protect' is unlikely to work - ie to actually provide a mechanism by which atrocity can be prevented. It is more like demanding capitalism provide generalised equality, an end to poverty worldwide, or whatever. It is not a reform.
To focus on it, as if it is an actual answer to the problems of the world and our own irrelevance and impotence, is - I was going to say disoriented, but actually I think it's just weird. It reads like a very odd 'fad'. There's something about it which is - in its approach, not its politics - reminiscent of the IMG.
Tin-openers
It's the job of socialists to create the movement to provide the "tin-opener." The Eustonites have said, essentially, "sorry, ain't no tin-opener coming, use whatever you can to open the tin, even if it ends up poisoning the beans in the process."
And a bit about Eric Lee. In the 1970s he was on the right wing of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (USA). This was a wing that was basically Israeli/Jewish-chauvinist. I was under the impression that his politics had changed over the last 30 years. Apparently, they haven't changed enough.
Worth reading: http://www.labournet.net/other/0607/moshe1.html
Frameworks
I agree with the gist of this post, but I'd like to clarify one thing - because it relates to another discussion I've been having on this site, about bourgeois democracy.
Surely what's wrong with the Eric Lee/Euston approach is not that they are wrong to think bourgeois democracy is preferable to fascism, but that it is false to see what's happening in Lebanon, or Iraq, as a struggle between bourgeois democracy and fascism. In both cases, what is taking place is immensely more complex.
If you conceptualise Iraq, for instance, as 'democracy' against 'fascism', you end up with a weird picture (the US/British occupying forces, allied with pro-Iranian Islamists, on the side of 'democracy'...). That's not to say there aren't democrats and fascist-type forces.
Similarly, Israel is - broadly speaking - a bourgeois democracy, and there are fascistic aspects to HIzbollah. But 'democracy' against 'fascism' is a false framework for understanding the conflict.
We - I mean socialists - do, though, prefer democracy, that is even bourgeois democracy - to fascism! We therefore 'back' it in a more limited sense.
Popular fronts...
... didn't end in World War Two. There is a pretty miserable tradition of subordinating working class interests to those of other classes in plenty of occasions since. What is new is the idea that the most valuable allies for progress, democracy, etc, are the most powerful ruling classes in history.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about World War Two: for instance, on one reading - as the AWL has suggested - the so-called 'proletarian military policy' was closer to 'revolutionary defencism' than 'defeatism'. There are important debates about, eg, Darfur (and that in fact for many of the 'pro-intervention' left this discussion is subsumed into one about Iraq doesn't help it).
But scoffing at the idea of, and problem with, cross-class strategic alliances ('popular fronts') is an utterly philistine way of approaching those discussions.
Duty...
But these powers do not, as a rule, intervene to protect life. They intervene when they have an interest to do so. That's because of what they are.
Where they do intervene - Kosova - or should they intervene in Darfur, we shouldn't stand in their way.
But that's different from proposing as some kind of priority an entirely utopian project to get ruling classes to behave as if they are something else.
It seems to me the whole idea that this is where the left's priorities should lie arises from the defeat of the labour movement and of socialist ideas. The real task is to revive a socialist movement.