Attacks by the Iraqi resistance have been made on member’s of the IFTU on the railway line between Basra and Nasiriyyah. Reports of the attack on the No Sweat website prompted this exchange. Abridged.
What exactly were the trains carrying, that the resistance would want to attack them? Are workers to be immune from resistance, even when they are complicit in atrocities by supplying or working for US forces? What about the train drivers who carried prisoners to Auschwitz — are they above attack, as well?
IFTU is the scab union who got targeted at the ESF for supporting the imperialist occupation. They are linked to the Iraqi Communist Party which has representatives in the pro-occupation interim government. Calling for the Iraqi “government” (puppet regime) and its US imperialist paymasters to “protect” workers from the resistance amounts to siding with the forces of imperialism in their attempts to impose US rule in Iraq. IFTU are acting as stooges of imperialism and should not be supported. Instead, activists should support independent trade union initiatives, while also supporting the right of Iraqis to resist imperialism.
If you don’t like the resistance — end the occupation!
Andy
There is no meaningful comparison between the occupation of Iraq and the systematic destruction of the Jewish people, your “train drivers at Auschwitz” analogy collapses straight away.
Put yourself in the position of an Iraqi worker: your house has been bombed to shit, you’re living with family or in the tumble-down wreck of your former house. You’re out of a job because your factory was blown up in an air raid. You have no way of making money and you and your family can’t eat.
There are some job opportunities for cleaners at some Coalition Forces facility; do you refuse to take the job because the Islamists might denounce you as a “collaborator”?
Socialists and trade unionists in Iraq may try and convince such workers to leave those jobs, and use trade union or community based support networks to support them until they can find a different job. You apparently seem to be in favour of killing them instead.
There’s a chasm between the “collaboration” of, for example, some ex-Ba’athist apparatchiks who take jobs in the Governing Council, or the Stalinist ICP who’ve done the same, and the “collaboration” of workers who take jobs cleaning Coalition facilities or whatever because they need to put food on the table. If you don’t see any difference between the two then your politics are bankrupt and have nothing to do with class.
Pete
If someone shells a military base, chances are they aren’t trying to kill the workers, they’re trying to kill the soldiers.
Choosing to work on a military base is not the same as when American forces attack civilian areas, it means taking a job which puts you in the line of fire. And yeah, there’s understandable reasons why people would take such a job, just as there’s understandable reasons why an impoverished unemployed worker would take a job as a scab. Does that mean we should support scabs, or condemn attacks on scabs in all circumstances?
While some workers respond to occupation by working for the occupiers to make ends meet, others try to make ends meet, and to hit back at the occupiers, by engaging in resistance activities.
These train drivers are presumably carrying supplies for the US military. Train drivers in the past have refused to carry military supplies and they’ve even gone on strike. Even without taking sides politically, a half-decent trade union of drivers would make a point about refusing to carry cargoes which would make drivers targets in a warzone.
The Auschwitz point is not a direct comparison but an analytical point — reductio ad absurdum — if train drivers are always “workers” and therefore worthy of “protection” from anyone who might attack them, then this protection would also apply in the case of Auschwitz.
I’m taking “class” beyond its narrow meaning and urging workers not to act as pawns of the bosses and instead to take control of their own lives and workplaces. Although some factions of the Iraqi resistance are certainly reactionary, it is also clear that the occupation of Iraq is a great evil which needs to be overcome, and also, that the reactionary fractions of the resistance will only be strengthened by the continuation of the occupation.
Andy
On some level, given the control of Iraqi society by the occupation forces, any job is collaborative on some level. So what’s the answer, Andy? No-one in Iraq should work? No — obviously that’s nonsense. You can’t just opt out of capitalism, not here, not in Iraq.
The forces carrying out these attacks are Islamist not a democratic national liberation movement of any kind of simply one of sectarian religious conflict posturing as “anti-imperialists.” I don’t support their “resistance” at all.
Today, the “resistance” you’re cheering on might be blowing up trains carrying weaponry and it might kill a few Iraqi workers by accident. But tomorrow the same people might be attacking women in the street for refusing to wear the veil, or it might be shopping revolutionaries to the Coalition police. Both these things have already happened, which I think proves whose class interests the “resistance” represents.
Pete
