The Left in Disarray: study guides

Here are two alternative study guides.

Questions for discussion/ suggested activities, suitable for one-to-one discussions or very small study groups

Key passages, suitable for larger study groups

You can adapt them, or mix-and-match from them, or choose to cover only some of the questions and activities, or only some of the "key passages".

Questions for discussion/ suggested activities

1. Stalinist roots of disarray

Pages 8 to 73

You could also read /watch

• Like it or not, Stalinism is still a live force, by Martin Thomas —bit.ly/mt-stalinism
• What is Stalinism? youtube.com/watch?v=twzhntmU7AM

Key ideas:

Stalinism

Reactionary anti-capitalism

Party of a new type

Consistent democracy

Suggested activities:

Write a timeline from the beginnings of a permanent mass organised workers' movement to the Russian Revolution to the Stalinist counter-revolution

Questions to consider:

Is Stalinism still an issue to discuss, over 30 years ater the collapse of the USSR?

What is reactionary anti-capitalism?

How could it happen that people identified "left" with whatever Stalin said?

What is the political advantage of telling the truth ("however bitter it may be") over saying what "fits the mood" and may "go down well"?

In what way did the Stalinist left differ from pretty much all strands of the labour-movement left before Stalinism?

Did Stalinism come from the Bolsheviks' form of organisation? Or from the supposed error of attempting revolution rather than bit-by-bit reform?

What was "utopian socialism" (before Marx and Engels)? What did Stalinism have in common with it?

2. Socialism after 1991

Pages 74 to 109

You could also read/ watch:

• Workers' Liberty 3/7: What is the Third Camp? — bit.ly/3rdcamp

• Workers' Liberty 3/8: The other history of American Trotskyism — bit.ly/othertrots

• The Fate of the Russian Revolution vols. 1 and 2

• “The road to Tiananmen Square”, from Workers’ Liberty 12-13, 1989 — bit.ly/road-t

• This short video of Trotsky talking about the Moscow Trials — bit.ly/t-moscow-t

• What's wrong with Hal Draper on the "micro-sect": bit.ly/micro-se

Key ideas:

Bolshevism

Trotskyism

Orthodox and heterodox Trotskyism

Suggested activities:

• Draw a timeline of the development of ideas on what the USSR was. Include branches for different ideas if you think needed.

• Make a list of key terms and define them.

Questions to consider:

1. How was Trotskyism the direct inheritor of the Russian Revolution and the history of the socialist movement until that point?

2. Why the name Trotskyism?

3. How did Trotsky assess the USSR? Did his view of the USSR change? What direction was it going?

4. What was meant by calling the USSR a degenerated workers’ state? What is meant by post-capitalist?

5. Why did Trotsky hold onto the "degenerated workers' state" idea of the USSR?

6. Who were the Trotskyists who held to that description after 1940??

7. Who were the “other Trotskyists”?

8. How did AWL move from Orthodox Trotskyist origins to think we have more to learn from the "other Trotskyists"?

8. Are those debates between different Trotskyists relevant?

3. Our anti-imperialism and others

Read: p.112 to 148

You could also read:

• A new world disorder — Two critiques: “Empire” and “new imperialism” —bit.ly/nwd-war

A Marxist response to capitalist globalisation — bit.ly/m-globalisation

Is Marxism Eurocentric? — bit.ly/M-eurocentric

On the question of free trade by Karl Marx — bit.ly/marx-ft

Anti-capitalism: a Marxist Introduction by Alfredo Saad-Filho

Marx at the Margins by Kevin Anderson

‘Nationalism and patriotism are dead ends for the left’ — bit.ly/np-dead

‘Imperialism yesterday and today’ — bit.ly/imp-y-t

Key ideas:

Globalisation

Imperialism

Sub-imperialisms

Internationalism

Colonialism

Suggested activities:

• Compile a list of definitions of "imperialism" from various sources, including from socialists and from sources such as dictionaries. Discuss what you think of each.

• Make a list of everything you have heard about imperialism (either from the left or in general).

• Divide a sheet of paper in half. On one side, write a list of features of imperialism in, say, 1916. On the other, write a list of features of imperialism in the heyday of neoliberal globalisation, 1991 to 2008. Identify the similarities and differences.

Questions to consider:

1. Page 112 gives a "general" definition of imperialism. What is it?

2. Lenin in 1916 used the term "imperialism" in the sense current then, and argued that it was rooted in basic economic trends then, not in episodic policy choices of different governments. What was the current usage then, and what economic roots did Lenin see?

2. Why is Lenin’s 1916 analysis of imperialism not a good fit for explaining the world today?

3. What does the book mean by "the right of nations to self-determination"?

4. How does the book argue that "anti-imperialism" as a summary slogan was misleading in the era of high Stalinist power? And can be misleading today?

5. What are the "five fundamental attitudes" which shaped Orthodox Trotskyist thinking on imperialism after World War 2 (p.145-6), and what was wrong with them?

6. Why did Trotsky reserve the term "imperialism" for monopoly capitalism? How did he explain the behaviour of the USSR? Do you agree with him on this?

7. What did Trotsky mean by "permanent revolution"? With what different meaning was the term used after the 1940s? (See p.141-8)

4. From the Korean war through to the 1970s and 80s

Read pages 149 to 193

Key ideas:

Colonial revolutiond

War-revolution

Suggested activities:

Make a list of the "case histories" discussed, with one sentence for each on lessons to be drawn

Make a timeline of main dates in the winning of independence by the colonies of the European empires

Questions to consider:

1. The Orthodox Trotskyists talked a lot about "the colonial revolution". On one level that was a common-sense reference to the battles for independence of former European colonies and Marxists' duty to side with those. Why was in Marxists' duty to do that? What additional and confusing ideas did Orthodox Trotskyists put into their talk of "colonial revolution"?

2. What attitude did Trotskyists take in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948? How did Orthodox Trotskyist attitudes to Israel evolve after that?

3. "For the Orthodox Trotskyists, Algeria established the absolute supremact of the idea that the most militant and combative anti-colonial force was the one that deserved backing" (p.155). How did it establish that? What is inadequate about the idea?

4. What were the shortcomings in our politics on the Vietnam war?

5. What lessons from Russia's war in Afghanistan?

6. What lessons from the Kosova war in 1999?

7. What lesson from the arguments over Brexit?

8. What lessons from the arguments about the Provisional IRA "long war" in Northern Ireland?

5. (a) Iraq (b) "absolute anti-Zionism" today

Read: pages 195 to 244

Key ideas:

"Supervisors of the historical process" p.204

Zionism

Suggested activities:

Write a timeline of the development of political debates in the Jewish communities in Europe from the Russian pogroms of 1881 (the major turning point from the hesitant evolution towards equal rights from Jews from the French revolution) to now

Questions for discussion:

1. What is the common thread in:
• opposing the British ruling class in World War 2 even though by the later stages of the war anyway their victory could be seen as most probably bringing improvement as compared with Nazi-occupied Europe?
• opposing the US troops in Iraq even when, in 2005-7 especially, their main opponents were the forerunners of Daesh, ultra-reactionary sectarians?
• refusing to support Kerensky in 1917 even while fighting the Kornilov coup which aimed to overthrow the Kerensky governments
• refusing to vote for the Republican government's war budget even while siding with the Republic in the Spanish Civil War
• refusing to vote for Bismarck's measures even while recognising the unification of Germany and its proto-welfare-state as steps forward
• opposing the US/ UN war in Korea even while seeing Stalinist North Korea as worse than bourgeois Korea (then more or less a military dictatorship, and not bourgeois-democratic until 1987)?

2. Why do we sometimes use the term "Third Camp" to describe our politics?

3. Why do some leftists have an inclination to favour the Russian and Chinese states today?

4. Why "two states" in Israel-Palestine rather than "smash Israel"? Why not BDS?

6. More or less contemporary polemics

Read: pages 245 to 334

You could also read: Two nations, two states

AWL pamphlet on Left Antisemitism

Key ideas:

Permanent revolution

Islamism

Suggested activities:

Write definitions of "permanent revolution" (as Trotsky understood it) and "Islamism"

1. Recall what Trotsky meant by "permanent revolution"? What did those who used the term as a programme for Ireland in the 1970s and after mean by that?

2. What was wrong with the SWP getting the Muslim Association of Britain (British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) credited as co-organiser of the big protests in 2002-3 against the US-led invasion of Iraq?

3. Why did we not use the slogan "Troops Out Now" in Iraq in 2003-2008?

4. How does the belief that Israel has no right to exist lead to left antisemitism?

6. More or less contemporary polemics

Read: pages 335-405

Background information:
Tony Cliff was the founder and longtime leader of the group which is today the SWP. He died in 2000.
Ernest Mandel was the main writer, for decades until his death in 1995, for the "mainstream" Orthodox Trotskyists, who were never very big in Britain (today they are ACR), but after 1968 had sizeable and influential organisations in France and other countries.
Tony Benn was a leading figure on the British Labour left from the second half of 1979 through to his death in 2014. He had been a Labour MP and sometime Cabinet Minister, mostly in the centre or on the right of the Labour Party, since 1950.
Gerry Healy led the biggest avowedly-Trotskyist group in Britain from the early 1950s through until it degenerated into something not-even-left from 1976 and then collapsed in 1985.
Ted Grant was the leading writer for the tendency from which today's Socialist Party, RCP, and Socialist Alternative come, from the 1940s through to his death in 2006.
The Euston Manifesto was a 2006 declaration purporting to establish a new "progressive-democratic" pole in politics. Its signatories included some ex-members of ours. Nothing much came of it, but it had wide publicity at the time.

Suggested activities:

Map the history of the RSL - Militant - Socialist Party/ Socialist Appeal strand in politics.

Questions to consider:

1. What did Cliff mean by "tactics contradict principles"? What is wrong here?

2. What do you make of the analogy between Mandel and Kautsky? (Karl Kautsky, one of the main writers of the German Social Democratic Party [SPD] for decades; on the left of the SPD from the 1880s to 1910, took a sort-of-pacifist position in World War 1; supported the SPD's policy of coalitions with bourgeois parties after 1919).

3. Benn aspired after 1979 to recreate the Labour left. What were the problems about how he went about it?

4. How could Healy's group degenerate the way it did?

5. What was wrong with the Euston Manifesto?

Being an educator

Being an educator is not a one-way process. You will learn as well as teach, so do not worry that you don’t have all the answers. It is ok if you don’t know the answer to someone’s question; our website and our comrades are a valuable resource that can be used to answer questions.

It is important to read and make your own notes on the reading before you educate someone else on it. You may come up with other questions or activities yourself when reading, it is ok to amend the questions used in this course.

Ideas for activities

Included in each session are ideas for activities to do with individuals or as groups. These are meant as suggestions, and can be ignored or adapted. Generally it is good to try to use a diverse range of activities to aid teaching.

Some ideas: making lists, drawing concept maps, drawing flow charts, giving definitions to key words, drawing comparative tables, using statistics or diagrams, role plays, writing and making speeches, writing articles.

Ideas to aid reading

Not everyone studying this course will be used to reading longer pieces of political or historical reading, but it is a skill that is important to develop. Most of the sessions have a variety of reading and further reading; you may want to adapt the reading to the individual or group, or spread some readings out over a few sessions. There are also a variety of videos, audiobooks, and recordings of Workers’ Liberty events you may find useful workersliberty.org/audio, and youtube.com/c/WorkersLibertyUK. Audios of many “classics”can be found on for example librivox.org, and other videos of varied quality can be found at reddit.com/r/socialistvideos/ and elsewhere.

However there are also tips for reading that could be helpful:

• Read on paper (or an e-reader), and without phones or other possible distractions nearby.
• Read in shorter bursts to help concentration, as needed. And regularly, for example,schedule 20 minutes of reading books every day.

• Highlighting and making notes as you read. This is easier to do on a print copy rather than screen-reading

• Making lists of key words

• Writing a list of questions you want to find answers to before you read (and filling in answers as you go)

• Making a list of what you already know before you start reading (this is called activating)

• Summarising text as you go (after a paragraph, page, section or chapter)

• Visualising concepts — drawing concept maps, diagrams, flow charts etc

Key passages

The "key passages" notes below are designed to be used in a study group. The way to use them: with each passage, go round the group, and everyone in turn says what they make of the passage. If they have read the text at all, they will be able to say something (even if it is little more than a summary in slightly different words), or raise a question: they won't be left silent or embarrassed. And there is a good chance that each person in turn has something to add or some new question to raise. Then the comrade leading the group can sum up, giving more background, expanding on points made, answering questions, etc.

1. Stalinist roots
Read: Introduction and first part of "Stalinism has not been buried yet", pages 8 to 73.
Background or further reading: Russian Revolution book, chapter 10. Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed.

Quotes to discuss:

"Philby stuttered... 'Whatever Stalin does - that is the left!'... It is a statement that sums up an entire epoch in the history of the world and of the left" - p.20

"In the summaries of the proper revolutionary communist approach which Trotsky wrote in the 1930s, the demand to be truthful... is always central. The fact that such a 'demand' had to be made and that it was made only by a tiny pariah minority... was one measure of how far the 'Marxist' movement had fallen..." - p.38

The Stalinist program was "reactionary anti-capitalism: an 'alternative' development to capitalism that was in a thousand ways, and not least in terms of liberty and democracy, a regression to pre-capitalist society" - p.41

"The term, 'party of a new type', was attributed to Lenin... or to Gramsci... In fact it was a Stalinist term for a new protagonist, a bureaucratic machine which replaced the working class" - p.46

"'Socialism' developed a political split personality, a comprehensive dualism in which what was condemned, resisted, and fought in one part of world, could be simply ignored, or proclaimed good and praiseworthy, in the other" - p.73

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2. The Bolshevik rearguard
Read: Second part of "Stalinism has not been buried yet", pages 74 to 109.
Background or further reading: The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume 1, especially the Introduction.

Quotes to discuss:

"When things began to go wrong [in isolated revolutionary Russia after 1917] the Bolsheviks stood their ground. The workers' risings were defeated in the West. Invasions, civil war, and economic destruction wrecked the soviets. The Bolshevik party itself divided. One section took a path on which it ended up leading the bureaucratic counter-revolution. The surviving central leaders, in the first place Trotsky, fought the counter-revolution..." - p.84

"From 1937... Trotsky became increasingly hostile and negative about the 'USSR', which at the end of his life he defined as only potentially progressive... Trotsky did not properly name Stalinist imperialism 'imperialism', but he described it in fact, and counterposed to it a working-class programmatic alternative" - p.85

"Even at their most inadequate, the Orthodox Trotskyists were for a revolution against Stalinism... [but] Their assessment of the USSR, inherited from Trotsky but erected by themselves into a self-blinding dogma, trapped the Orthodox Trotskyists into letting themselves be reduced, too often, to the role of mere satellites of the Stalinist bloc" - p.96-7

"For two decades and more, [the Heterodox Trotskyists] produced a powerful literature that has for that period no equal, nor any near relative or rival. Ultimately, from the end of the 1950s, their tendency too fell apart"- p.100

"Scientific understanding of capitalism... and... politics... does not arise 'spontaneously'. It has to be brought into the struggle by those who have laboured for years or decades in advance to educate themselves and absorb the lessons of past struggles" - p.102

"We do not repudiate the tradition of Lenin and those who made the great working-class revolution in Russia in 1917. On the contrary, we believe we defend that tradition as it really was" - p.109

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3. Imperialism and anti-imperialism
Read: pages 112 to 148
Background or further reading: Lenin, Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism. "Marxism and imperialism", at http://www.workersliberty.org/empire

Quotes to discuss:

"'Imperialism' in the generic... sense... is the drive by stronger states to enlarge their rulers' power and revenues at the expense of weaker states and peoples by threatening or deploying... coercion... Opposition to imperialism is the sine qua non for consistent democrats and socialists" - p.112

"The imperialism analysed by Vladimir Lenin in 1916 was different from other imperialisms in history... In its economic structures and the typical behaviour of its subdivisions, international capitalism is no longer what it was in Lenin's day" - p.113

In the left today "the governing idea has come to be that... 'imperialism' is advanced capitalism; advanced capitalism is imperialism, whatever it does, or does no longer... this [attitude] is best called 'reactionary anti-imperialism'" - p.114

"The Marxist analysts of Lenin's time were agreed in dating the start of modern-capitalist, monopoly-capitalists and finance-capitalist, imperialism at roughly 1900" - p.116

After 1945 "the independence of the West European states was quickly restored... In 1948 the USA created the Marshall Plan... It was called a variant of imperialism by the anti-Stalinist left. In overall terms... it was - all qualifications granted - benign... The Russians looted and raped, slave-hunted, and held its European satellites in an iron grip... The Orthodox Trotskyists... managed the tremendous feat of not seeing Russia as imperialist" - p.134, 131

"Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the Orthodox Trotskyists saw the revolts in the colonies and semi-colonies as a segment of an unfolding 'world revolution'... Thus anti-imperialism, meaning conflict with the capitalist big powers, was per se also anti-capitalist, or sure to become so as the struggle 'developed and deepened'" - p.144

"Some of the attitudes, methods, mindsets [of that era] have survived into the post-Stalinist era in the idea that advanced capitalism, defined as 'imperialism', is unconditionally reactionary, so reactionary that almost any force that opposes it... thereby becomes 'good'..." - p.140

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4. From the Korean War to the Iraq war, 1950 to 2011
Read: pages 149 to 193
Background or further reading: Workers' Liberty 2/3, The new world disorder

Quotes to discuss:

"For a month after the outbreak of the [Korean] war on 25 June [1953]... the most important of the Orthodox Trotskyist organisations hovered on the brink of a 'third camp' position, refusing to back either side... After a month... they came down solidly on the side of North Korea... redefined and rechristened Korean Stalinism... as 'the colonial revolution'..." - p.149-50

In the 1948 Israeli-Arab war "with the possible exception of a handful of people in South Africa, no Orthodox Trotskyist... backed the Arabs... [They] denounced the May 1948 invasion and demanded 'full national rights for the Jewish community'." - p.152

"For the Orthodox Trotskyists, Algeria established the absolute supremacy of the idea that the most militant and combative anti-colonial force was the one that deserved backing" - p.155

"The Orthodox Trotskyist were right to oppose the Americans in Indochina and to support self-determination for the people there... the American alternative was worse than victory for Stalinism... but... there was much of political indifferentism about Stalinism: 'don't confuse my anti-imperialism with your complexities'..." - p.156-8

"In 1967 and after the Trotskyists did not declare for the destruction of Israel... [But many] easily evolved to favouring the conquest of an unreasonable Israel in order to win the 'secular democratic state'... After the Israeli victory in 1967, Israel formed close ties to the USA (for the first time), and the whole question became part of the general opposition to world 'imperialism'..." - p.160-1

Iran 1979 "was a revolution - it rose against an unpopular regime and replaced it - but a profoundly reactionary and socially regressive revolution" - p.165

"One consequence of the [Russian] invasion [of Afghanistan] and the second Cold War which it triggered was that many leftists were driven by the logic of their position on Russia and other Stalinist states to rally to Russia. Since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Russia had been in bad odour on the left... but now that changed for many Trotskyists and others" - p.168

Many leftists backed Argentina in the 1982 Falklands war, "with the self-aggrandising Argentine regional imperialism cast in the role of the anti-imperialist which it was nowhere near being, in the Falklands or anywhere else. It was pure unalloyed fantasy" - p.170

Support for Serbia in the 1999 Kosova war "was not comic-opera nonsense, as supporting 'anti-imperialist' Argentina had been, but full all-out partisanship for a regional imperialism attempting genocide in Serbia's colony, Kosova" - p.171

"Opposition to the EU is an aspect of the addled left's 'anti-imperialism'. The initial 'left-wing' opposition came from the Communist Party, concerned to stop 'imperialism' strengthening itself against the non-imperialist Russia... The Orthodox Trotskyists eventually fell into mimicry of them" - p.173

In Northern Ireland "the Protestant Unionists were classified not as a national minority but tagged politically, as just a politically reactionary grouping" - p.192

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5. Consistent democracy and absolute anti-Zionism
Read: pages 231-244 and 306-317
Background or further reading: Two Nations, Two States.

Quotes to discuss:

"There is Israeli colonial imperialism in the Palestinian-majority territories. To go from that to [the idea that] Israel becomes the super-imperialism. Imperialism must be wiped out, and Israel is the epitome of imperialism... This attitude is possible only to people who no longer see imperialism as primarily a system of state actions, but rather as an 'essence' which they track to its worldly lair..." - p.243

"Confronting the old antisemitism which identified capitalism with Jews and Jews with capitalism, the German Marxist August Bebel famously said that it was 'the socialism of fools'. Wipe-out-Israel 'anti-imperialism' is the anti-imperialism of the fools..." - p.244

"We defend the Palestinians and champion an independent Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The difference here between left-wing antisemites and honest critics of Israel... is... [that] the left-wing antisemites do not only criticise Israel. They condemn it outright and deny its right to exist..." - p.307

"Socialists should of course be in favour of agreements between Israel and the Palestinians for compensation and for letting individual Palestinians into Israel. Support for a collective right of return is only another form of the demand to conquer and destroy Israel, if it will not surrender" - p.313

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6. Third Camp politics today (i.e. the polemics on various issues)
Read: pages 246 to 334 (excluding 306-317, already read)
Background or further reading: Workers' Liberty 5, Provos, Protestants, and permanent revolution, http://www.workersliberty.org/taxonomy/term/1195

Quotes to discuss:

"Despite the intentions of most of the demonstrators, [protests against Israel's attacks on Gaza] have not been peace demonstrations, but pro-war, war-mongering, demonstrations - for Hamas's war, and for a general Arab and Islamic war on Israel" - p.247

"For the duration of the Provo war, 'permanent revolution' served to rationalise socialist accommodation to the Provisional IRA: up to the Good Friday Agreement, there were always 'Trotskyists'... to argue that, any day now, the Provo war would start to 'develop' into the Irish workers' revolution" - p.254

"While fighting racism and discrimination against Muslims and Muslim communities, we [must] find a way to combine that defence of vulnerable people with opposition to them where they are champions of intolerance, bigotry, and petrified, age-old sanctified ignorance, in short, of political, cultural, and civic reaction" - p.273

"There is... in this business... gross chauvinist stereotyping, and not on the part of those who side with the secular 'Muslims' and against Islam. 'Asian Muslims' are... backward, bigoted, unteachable Muslims, who can only be approached on their own terms and by way of cynical would-be manipulative patronisation. That is the implication of the SWP approach. And it is not remotely true. Large numbers of people from Islamic backgrounds have in serious part emancipated themselves from Islam..." - p.289

"Those who howled down al Mashadani [an Iraqi trade-union leader, at the European Social Forum in 2004]... say they are anti-imperialists, and their objection to al Mashadani is that the trade union movement which he represented.... does not call for the immediate withdrawal of US and British troops from Iraq... they believe that the supreme revolutionary virtue is not, as Solidarity maintains, commitment to the working class and to the creation, growth, and education of a labour movement, but 'anti-imperialism'..." - p.279-80

"AWL was against the USA's war in Iraq... solidarised with the new Iraqi labour movement wherever it clashed with the occupiers... maintained a stance of hostility to the troops... But we refused, between 2003 and the 2008 US agreement to withdraw (completed in 2011) to raise a 'demand', Troops Out Now, whose likely, calculable, practical consequences... victory of the reactionary Iraqi 'resistance'... we did not want" - p.294-5

"The main enemy is the enemy now, not the enemy of yesterday; the evil to focus on is the evil around you, not the evil of the past or the far away... But it isn't possible to fight the evils of today by indiscriminately equating them all kinds of horrors of the past, by blurring the distinction between the effects of market capitalism... and totalitarian mass murder" - p.327-8

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7. Who shaped the British left?
Read: pages 336 to 392
Background or further reading: The formation of the SWP, www.workersliberty.org/workers-liberty-338-formation-swp

Quotes to discuss:

"Cliff worked according to his belief that for practical politics 'tactics contradict principle'. His genius was for political manoeuvring and 'positioning'... His last three decades were spent in the elaboration of techniques for building a 'revolutionary party' by way of pushing politics into the background so as to maximise the stability and possibilities of growth..." - p.345

"Kautsky devised ideological schemes to depict the time-serving activities of a bureaucratised labour movement as an effective drive for working-class liberation; Mandel produced similar rationalisations for totalitarian Stalinist machines, convinced that they embodied the spirit of history, and that it was his job to interpret and rationalise it" - p.360

"Playing the demagogue to the existing left and its causes and assumption, Benn won tremendous popularity among people eager for a prominent and capable tribune who, moreover, knew how to play the media's game" - p.366

"Gerry Healy came to dominate British Trotskyism from the late 40s... because in the 1940s and 50s the world posed big political and theoretical problems to the old-style Trotskyists, and most of the political leaders of the movement collapsed in demoralisation, confusion, or perplexity. The Healys... came to the fore because they cared about the ideas only as crude working tools that did, or did not, help build the organisation. They could propose what to do on the basis of short-term calculations, without any political or intellectual qualms" - p.344

"For Grant, the rulers of what he chose to call 'Bonapartist workers' states' had a positive economic and social role to play in the underdeveloped world for an entire historical period... Grant, Taaffe, Woods and their comrades also had a full quiver of rationalisations for accommodating to the bureaucratic leadership of the existing labour movement" - p.389

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8. How not to fight the kitsch left ("liberal interventionists", Euston Manifesto)
Read: pages 194-213 and 393-405

Quotes to discuss:

"Grant, for the sake of argument, that the US neo-conservatives had with the invasion of Iraq launched a drive to install bourgeois-democratic regimes in the Middle East, intending to do there something like what the invaders of June 1944 did in Europe - and that we could estimate that they would probably succeed... [then] nothing in the socialist criticism of capitalism would thereby be cancelled out... Indeed... the more plain... would become the crying need for the socialist alternative" - p.198-9

"The forces of the Third Camp of socialism and liberty are here, and it is our sworn duty to help organise them into an independent movement. The only way we know how to do this: tell the truth about capitalism and Stalinism; help make those we can reach conscious of the problem of society today and how to solve it, and increase the clarity of those who are already partly conscious of it..." - p.212

The Euston Manifesto "are the 'Pabloites' of post-Stalinist bourgeois arrogance and expansion" - p.403.

Comments?
We welcome replies, corrections and debate pieces. Contact us

Comments

Matgamna's Lies

'The Euston Manifesto "are the 'Pabloites' of post-Stalinist bourgeois arrogance and expansion" - p.403.

1. Jane and I opposed the war - actively. I was a leader of South Lakeland Stop the War.

2. I worked with Abdullah Muhsin of the IFTU in the aftermath to help build the new Iraqi free trade unions. The TUC published the pamphlet I wrote - 'Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Trade Unions'. Buy it here: https://www.tuc.org.uk/online-shop/products/hadi-never-died-hadi-saleh-and-iraqi-trade-unions. We were brought to the US by the AFL-CIO to make the case for the new unions. We spoke to global union federations, CLPs and union branches.

3. Sean combined two incompatible non-positions 1. a refusal to call for the withdrawal of the troops because, so he said, they were needed in Iraq to keep the monsters of the Baath and the Islamists off the backs of the working class while the class revived their organisations, and tried to open a road to democracy 2. a refusal to support those same troops in any way. 'Not a penny, not a man' for the troops was his slogan. So he wanted the troops to be there, to stay and fight and die, but he would not support one bullet being sent to them. So, 'No Troops Out but No Troops In Either!' was the 'position'. It made absolutely no sense. As if the troops doing the job Matgamna wanted them to do could fight off the monsters without money or soldiers. The Third Camp had no forces on the ground, so having said A I was willing to say B.

4. Matgamna, aware that his position and mine were the same - bar his contradictory and self-cancelling nonsense about 'Not a penny, Not a man' - and aware that the AWL were under pressure from the idiot far left about their refusal to shout 'Troops Out Now!' - has been trying to use me and Jane as a chopping block with the members ever since, periodically telling lies about our record, and writing Marxoid stupidities like the one above.

5. We wrote this in 2004.

A reply to Sean Matgamna’s “Reactionary Anti-Imperialism”

Sean Matgamna’s article (“Reactionary Anti-Imperialism” [Solidarity 3/60]) was a useful brick to throw at reactionary anti-imperialists but was dishonest on three counts.

First, Matgamna pretends the AWL has had a consistent position of clear support for the IFTU. In fact, the AWL joined the idiot chorus that attacked the IFTU after Labour Party conference. Martin Thomas wrote: “The actual effect of the Labour Friends of Iraq/Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions intervention at the Labour Party conference was to give Blair a free hand to carry on backing Bush. Whatever sophistry may be used to evade this fact, it was de facto support to Bush’s policy — brutal, arrogant, militaristic, privatise-at-all-costs, “spot of trouble? Slaughter a few hundred more civilians and that’ll show them!” — which, far from being a democratic alternative to the rise of Islamist reaction, has fuelled that rise”.

Stupid. Hysterical. An unwitting part — and one balanced by better things Thomas has written — of the fingering of the IFTU that contributed to the disgraceful assault at the ESF. So much for Matgamna’s assertion that they support the IFTU. The unpleasant truth is that Thomas not Matgamna represents the mainstream of the AWL on the issue of Iraq. Matgamna is often silent while this political nonsense sets the AWL’s tone.

Read these web comments from AWLers:

AWL member: “We recognise the IFTU leaders for what they are — right-wing Stalinist bureaucrats prepared to collaborate with an imperialist occupation”.

AWL member: “It would be stupid of socialists and workers, either in Iraq or here, to use the existence of a potentially more brutal force around Al Sadr to excuse the brutality of that occupation. But that as far as I can see was what the IFTU representatives, that you [Alan Johnson] are close to, did at the Party conference”.

Mick Duncan, the organiser of the No Sweat group did not even mention the attack on the IFTU at the ESF, in his ESF conference report for the No Sweat list.

Solidarity editorialised “We disagree with the IFTU’s rallying to Allawi and the Interim Government as a ‘lesser evil’ than Sadr”.

AWL member: “I think the IFTU strategy is wrong because I don’t think unions should have plans for ‘working along with’ ruling classes anywhere”.

AWL member: “The Allawi administration is not just an ordinary ruling class the same as any other. It is, additionally, the puppet of an occupying foreign power. That makes the IFTU’s strategy worse”.

AWL member: “The IFTU representatives’ actions at Labour Party conference are a ‘level of collaboration’ with the government party of an occupying power that goes well beyond what is necessary to secure the space for unions to develop in Iraq — I don’t think that the US/UK occupation can or intends to create a democratic society in Iraq.”

In our opinion the best hope for democracy and the trade unions in Iraq is the UN-backed political transition process. It is codified in UN resolution 1546, overseen by the UN and the Interim government, backed by the Kurds, Sistani, the IFTU, and everyone in Iraq bar the “resistance”. Matgamna knows this. The IFTU knows this. Everyone in the world bar the idiotarian far left knows this.

The AWL’s error is to counterpose the need for independent working class organisations to the UN process as if recognising the validity of the political process necessarily denies such independence. One AWLer, and no neophyte at that, when pushed in a web-debate, confuses the democratic with the socialist programme and demanded workers’ control of the economy as the alternative to the UN process!

The (difficult) task of the Iraqi democrats is to bring democratic pro-worker politics into the UN-backed political process and timetable. And the job of the western left is to support them because they are right to take this approach. It is not good enough to (just) to mimic both the old Militant Tendency, shouting “socialism!” and the old IS, shouting “build workplace organisation!”. The AWL used to know the limits of both abstract propaganda for socialism and narrow syndicalism. But, today, this is what the AWL offer on Iraq. Matgamna won’t draw a clear political programme for Iraq from his critique of “reactionary anti-imperialism”.

Second, Matgamna side-steps any honest accounting about the troops. He pretends the AWL has had a consistent position on the troops. In fact the AWL has been all over the place.

The AWL has argued that the call for troops out now should be “condemned” and argued that US troops only bring “helicopter gunships and cluster bombs”.

In Solidarity (52) the editor argued that socialists must treat the Iraq War like earlier socialists treated World War One and say “Not a penny for the system”. In the jargon this is a “revolutionary defeatist” position. Yet Matgamna argued (Solidarity 50 and 53) that the stance taken by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Britain during World War Two - critical support for the allies against Nazism while continuing to work for socialism — was the better guide for socialists today. In the jargon this is a “revolutionary defencist” position. The first position should logically have led to a call for the withdrawal of the coalition troops, but it hasn’t. The second position should have led to a position of “critical support” to the coalition’s project (while continuing the fight for socialism) but it hasn’t. At the very least the AWL should have faced the fact that it had two positions. It didn’t. The silence on Matgamna’s article about the ILP and World War Two has been astonishing.

In the resultant confusion AWL members have been left picketing British Army barracks to protest troops going to Iraq while selling a newspaper that argues (Matgamna, in Solidarity No. 50) “right now the proclaimed programme of the US-UK in Iraq and their Iraqi clients and allies — the setting up of a viable democratic Iraqi government, and ultimate US withdrawal — is relatively progressive, and that of their armed opponents is reactionary by any measure you choose to use... For all these reasons we condemn slogans like ‘troops out now’ as inappropriate to the situation in Iraq”. So the AWL pickets a barracks demanding no troops are sent to Iraq while selling a newspaper that “condemns” calls for troop withdrawal. No troops out, and no troops in. What about those troops in transit? Keep going? Turn back?

The truth is there are two AWLs.

One AWL has argued that precipitate withdrawal of troops would open the gates to a “vast regression” of Iraqi society and the death of the labour movement while a Solidarity supporters voted at Labour Party conference for, yes, the precipitate withdrawal of troops.

One AWL joins protests against multinationals “touting for business” in Iraq (note, protests that do not just call for labour rights but actually demand capitalists stay out, or get out, of Iraq) while the other AWL, seemingly oblivious, argues the coalition project is “relatively progressive” because, for one reason amongst many it opens the doors to trade unionism — and you cannot have trade unions without industry or jobs!

Matgamna supports troops staying where they are to stop the Saddamist-fundamentalist “resistance” winning. Pete Radcliff [on the website] dodges this question by this argument: “We don’t support a ‘fixed date for withdrawal’, or even an early date for withdrawal because, for one reason, that implies that before that date we support the troops. We don’t support the troops at any time.”

Take careful note of this. One AWL does not support the troops “at any time” while another AWL “condemns” calls for their withdrawal.

In fact, the AWL opposes “one penny” being spent on the very soldiers whose withdrawal from Iraq they would “condemn”.

When a Solidarity supporter at Labour Party conference voted for an early date for withdrawal she denounced the IFTU for failing to support her, using this argument: “The fig leaf used by the Blairites to cover their naked ‘save Tony’ strategy was the support of some Iraqi trade unions for the Allawi government. In order to persuade the Big Four union delegations that they should oppose the critical motion, representatives of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions attended delegation meetings to argue against early withdrawal of troops, and to put the case that the decision on this should be down to Iraq’s elected Government rather than Labour Party conference”. In other words the Solidarity supporter was outraged that the IFTU advanced Matgamna’s own argument, the argument carried in an editorial of the newspaper she supports.

The ambivalence is driving some mad. Martin Thomas opts for lies and fatuous abuse of LFIQ and all its works for advancing the very arguments set out by Matgamna. Presumably he fears that some AWLers who back Matgamna will want to get involved. “A ‘solidarity’ campaign which crawls so far and so fast up Blair’s arse will not deliver much solidarity”, belched Thomas, shortly after attacking the IFTU as “de facto backers of Bush and slaughter.” (Solidarity 3/60)

AWL coverage of Party Conference privileged your desire to blood Blair’s nose above the living reality of Iraq. That is a form of chauvinism you would never have allowed over Ireland. You could have taken on the reactionary anti-imperialists over Party Conference but you chose instead to stay and keep them warm: perhaps you dare be isolated with anyone, but us.

We would have watched all this from the sidelines had it not been for Matgamna’s attack on the very people (us) who have developed the political position he now agrees with. He attacks myself and Jane Ashworth (who have joined with others to set up Labour Friends of Iraq) as “pixillated right wing political suicides” who have “self-prostrated before the US and UK ruling classes”). The extravagant violence of the language is good knock about stuff written not only to amuse the members and licence them to try to cut up rough, but has another purpose. It is a protective shield.

The awkward fact for Matgamna is that everything politically important he says in October 2004 I or Jane Ashworth — the “pixillated right wing political suicides” who have “self-prostrated before the US and UK ruling classes” — have been saying, often in heated debate with his own members, since March 2004.

Compare the following quotes:

Johnson (March 2004): “We now have a Pro-Tyrant left and democratic socialists should draw a line and oppose it and build something else rather than march with it. It is indeed time to move on. Such a rational and democratic left can only be built in through practical solidarity with the progressive forces in Iraq. Much of the existing left — incoherent anti-imperialists rather then democratic socialists, unable to condemn the most foul terrorist outrages without excusing them in the same breath — is finished for that kind of progressive politics. It is time to move on”.

Matgamna (October 2004): “The left is defined, grouped and regrouped, and redefined again and again, by responses to major events — for example, to the October Revolution of 1917. The left is now undergoing another redefinition, around its responses to the series of wars that began with the Kosova war of 1999 and continued through to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those who stand for working-class socialist politics are lining up on one side, and on the other are those who are for a nameless, classless, almost depoliticised and entirely negative ‘anti-imperialism’.

Johnson (March 2004): “Political third campers want to build a third camp in real political time and in the concrete circumstances we find in Iraq. That means using the breathing space offered by the coalition occupation, for now, to build up the progressive political forces that would constitute a ‘third camp’. In short, we have to understand what the progressive forces inside Iraq have already understood, that while a progressive Iraqi political force might emerge by intelligent political struggle under and against the umbrella of a managed transition to sovereignty and democracy, such a force would be, literally, executed under conditions of civil war or Baathist dictatorship.”

Matgamna (October 2004): “For socialism to become possible, the Iraqi working class and labour movement will have to have time and space to educate and clarify themselves politically. Even the terrible situation there now is more conducive to that than the victory of clerical-fascist ‘anti-imperialism’.”

Johnson (March 2004): “Do I trust the coalition? No, of course not. The task of the third camp is to fight in and against the coalition umbrella for a secular democratic Iraq. Note: ‘fight’! Note: ‘and against’! Shachtman in 1951 was for fighting. You seem to think I am for sitting back and trusting the coalition will deliver democracy. No! But I am for fighting for democracy in the breathing space provided by the coalition — and immediately that means recognising that political space exists and that ‘troops out now’ would close it — by building the size, independence, power, finances, and networks of the progressive democratic opposition. I want a future when that opposition can cast off not only the Baath and al-Qaida but also the control exerted by the coalition. But politics is always a strategic activity, always conducted in real political time. First this, so we can move on to that. If ‘third camp socialism’ is to move on it must decide to live in ‘real political time’... That does not mean giving up on our goals. But it might mean we move towards our goals and not someone else’s. And that would be a start.”

Matgamna (October 2004): “The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions believes that the establishment of some sort of bourgeois-democratic system — even with the continued presence of US and British troops, which they oppose — is a better way forward for the Iraqi people. In that they are entirely correct.”

Johnson (March 2004): “The political third camper accept that being for the ‘third camp’ means doing the difficult and messy work of building an alliance of democratic and progressive political forces out of a situation of extreme weakness. This dictates we attend urgently to what we might call ‘real political time’ and develop our political programme in its light. This kind of third camper wants to be a political lever not an abstract propagandist. We are working for the construction and eventual victory of the third camp not the coalition. But if we decide to live in ‘real political time’ not ‘third camp time’ we have do that work in a particular way, connecting up the brute facts about the present role of the coalition, the present strength of our forces, and our own future goals. That present is the only terrain on which we fight to carve a better future, as opposed to merely making abstract propaganda for one.”

Matgamna (October 2004): “Socialism would be better. But if the working class is not yet able to win socialism, then the IFTU is right that the establishment and consolidation of the sort of bourgeois-democratic rights that now exist de facto, despite the bloody chaos in Iraq, and without which the trade unions cannot survive — that that is the best possible option for the Iraqi working class.

The real difference between us and Matgamna was captured by an AWL member months ago. “At least Alan Johnson takes his position to its logical conclusion and offers critical support to the occupation in its attempts to put down the Islamists and Ba’thists and oversee a transition to something vaguely resembling national sovereignty. At least Alan admits that he does, advocating leaving the task of opposing the Ba’thist-Islamist-civil war threat to the imperialists, claiming that the workers have ‘no choice’ but to do this”.

In other words, the real difference is that we have been willing to draw practical political conclusions and fight for them. There is no chance of a workers’ militia fighting back the insurgents and once that truth lays waste to flat-pack politics there are consequences to be faced: now, just as in World War Two.

The road to the self-determination of the Iraqi people passes through the democratic process being overseen by the UN and the coalition. The role of the left is to build up our forces to fight within that process. Back in March Alan Johnson cited this passage written by Max Shachtman in 1951 (when he was still a left-wing socialist leading the Independent Socialist League):

“We are opposed to such defeats of the bourgeoisie whose consequences are, and cannot but be, a disaster and an inferno of exploitation for the working class. We do not exist to see that revenge is taken upon the bourgeoisie for its social crimes, but to see that the working class emancipates itself from all class rule... We do not for a moment suspend the class struggle, even in wartime. But, not being Stalinists and not being cretins, we do not prosecute it in such a way as to produce a defeat of the government by Stalinism. We are for the working class defeating the bourgeoisie in the class war and that is all we work for. We do not work for it in such a way as assures the defeat of the bourgeoisie by a reaction that would crush the proletariat itself”.

Today, Matgamna is saying something almost identical. “We are above all else for the development of the labour movement and the political development of the working class. We are for the freedoms without which that will not happen — without which the labour movements and the working class cannot develop politically towards socialism and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Everything else is subordinate to that. There is nothing — except the socialism that the working class must win — higher for us than that. ‘Anti-imperialism’ that is indifferent or hostile to the working class and the labour movement is a contradiction in terms”.

Matgamna must make up his mind. His organisation must make up its mind.

You can think troops should come out as part of a political settlement as Sean does, or you can be for their precipitate withdrawal, as the AWL member at Labour Party conference was, voting with the reactionary anti-imperialists to give Blair a bloody nose.

You can think the IFTU “correct” as Sean does, or “de facto backers of Bush and slaughter” as Thomas does.

You can think the best guide to our thinking on Iraq is the ILP during World War Two as Sean does (“revolutionary defencism”) or think that Lenin’s analysis of World War One the better guide as the Solidarity editor did (“revolutionary defeatism”).

But you can’t think all of these things at once. Not in logic nor in political reality.

Sean, your first thought is the right one. Don’t think twice, its alright.