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| A supporter of Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr lifts a placard depicting him during a a collective Friday prayer in Sadr City, east of Baghdad on 15 July 2022. Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images. |
Marxism Without its Head or its Heart: A Reply to David North
By Frank Brenner and Alex
Steiner
Chapter Notes for the 2025 edition:
The WSWS as a Left Apologist for
Bourgeois Nationalism in Iraq
·
The WSWS
Record on Iraq: The Perspective of “National Resistance”
·
The
Canonization of Existing Relations
·
The
Heritage no Longer Defended
·
Ignoring
Mistakes and Making Them Worse
·
Turning
a Blind Eye to the Iraqi Working Class
·
Epilogue: Mr. North goes
to Dublin
Chapter
Notes for the 2025 edition:
In
Chapter 1 we explored the problem of objectivism in the history of the
Marxist movement up to the present. We necessarily had to preface our
discussion of objectivism by first disentangling David North’s attempts to obfuscate the theoretical
issues involved. North claimed that we
were not arguing in good faith, that our objections were merely thinly veiled
personal attacks arising out of our “subjective hatred” of our former comrades
and that our real agenda was an attempt to “smuggle” into Marxism concepts that
are alien to Marxism and the workers movement.
Once we brought North’s sophistical and dishonest rhetoric to the light
of day we then proceeded to examine the actual issues in contention between us
and the International Committee.
Objectivism
is a form of mechanical materialism that leads to a fatalistic practice that
denies the critical role of the consciousness of the working class in
determining a political outcome. Instead, it looks for laws that will
inevitably bring the working class to socialism. Little room is left for the
transformative power of a revolutionary leadership. It’s an outlook that has
plagued the Marxist movement since the time of Marx and Engels. We traced the
historical roots of this ideology and the battle waged against it by Lenin and
Trotsky. We noted that it was inevitably
accompanied by an indifference to philosophical questions, consisting of either
a denial or an agnostic position toward the dialectic. We showed how this
indifference to the dialectic was embodied in the approach of the International
Committee toward concrete political questions. Their attitude toward the
dialectic retraced the steps of an earlier tendency in the Trotskyist movement
who broke with Marxism decades ago. The lessons from that struggle were never absorbed.
Finally we documented a case study in how objectivist theory led to an
abstentionist practice when it came to the political crisis in Mexico in 2006.
In Chapter 2 we presented a case study of the other side of objectivism, that it leads not only to an abstentionist practice but also makes the further jump into a form of adaptation to existing leaderships and movements that are hostile to the interests of the working class. These leaderships, in the eyes of those who have fallen into this perspective, embody the agency in an external and alien form that they no longer recognize in the working class. Thus we witnessed the adaptation of the International Committee to the leadership of a faction of Islamist nationalists in Iraq led by Muqtada al-Sadr in the period following the U.S. invasion of that country. Long-standing concepts that guided the theoretical approach of Trotskyism, such as the theory of permanent revolution, were thrown out the window overnight in favor of slogans about a war of “national resistance”. That this step by the International Committee was not merely a momentary aberration fueled by an over-enthusiastic reaction to the embarrassment the Sadr forces in Iraq inflicted on the Bush Administration was demonstrated subsequently in their prostration before other bourgeois nationalist formations. This was expressed most recently in their mostly uncritical attitude toward Hamas following the events of October 7, 2023. By way of contrast, just two years prior to the promotion of Muqtada al-Sadr as the “vox populi” of the Iraqi masses the International Committee, in 2002, was still capable of providing a withering critique of Hamas from a Marxist perspective. (See Terminal Stupidity for a further discussion of this topic).
Muqtada al-Sadr continues to play a prominent role in Iraqi politics today. A political party under his leadership won the most seats in the Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2022. Yet his movement, which has had various incarnations in the past two decades, has never broken out of the straitjacket of Shia communalism. As a report on the World Socialist Web Site noted in 2022, “… [al-Sadr] has no progressive answers to the immense suffering of the Iraqi people.” So what happened to the “vox populi” touted by North 2004? As always with this party, there is no accountability, no learning from mistakes, since an eternal leader like North cannot by definition make mistakes.
In
hindsight much of the later opportunism of the International Committee was
anticipated by us when we wrote in 2007,
By the
same ‘logic’ the WSWS applies to Sadr, there is every reason to hail these
other men as heroes of ‘national resistance’. And why stop there? What about
Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Palestine? After all, being a peddler of
religious poison doesn’t seem to be an obstacle to winning accolades from the
WSWS and these movements have just as much claim as Sadr to being leaders of
“national resistance”. Once you go looking for substitutes for the working
class, there is no end of candidates that you can come up with.
Chapter
2:
The WSWS
as a Left Apologist for Bourgeois Nationalism in Iraq
The Iraq war is one of the defining political issues of our time, and it is no surprise that an upheaval of this magnitude puts all political tendencies to a severe test. As the WSWS itself declared at the end of a critique of Noam Chomsky: “Harsh times have this painful but salutary effect: organizations and individuals are tested. Whatever is false, unresolved or unprincipled inevitably reveals itself.”[1] The events in Mexico, which we just discussed, were such a test and they demonstrated the IC’s abdication of its responsibilities to intervene in the working class. Much the same could be said about the SEP’s failure to hold a meeting in the US for nearly a year to protest the Afghan war. The events in Iraq posed an even greater test, and produced a more striking failure. This time we are dealing not with a sin of omission but one of commission – the abandonment of the permanent revolution and the embrace of bourgeois nationalism in the form of a Shiite cleric and his militia. If we are to understand the International Committee’s political trajectory, then we need to set aside North’s document for a while and examine in detail the WSWS record on Iraq.
Since the US invasion of 2003, the events in Iraq have been bloody and tumultuous, with rapid shifts in the political and military landscape. Of course insofar as it was a question of opposing this criminal war, the responsibilities of the revolutionary movement were relatively straightforward – to do everything possible to mobilize the international working class against US imperialism in order to bring the war to an end. But within Iraq the situation was a good deal less clear. First and foremost was the question of the Iraqi resistance, with its bewildering array of Sunni and Shiite militias. Under these conditions a correct orientation to the working class was critical; otherwise, one could lose one’s bearings and end up lending credibility to some deeply reactionary forces.
The relevance of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution in these circumstances should be apparent to any Marxist. Here is the essential point in Trotsky’s own words:
With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.[2]
Applied to Iraq, this would mean that the working class is the only social force capable of overcoming the welter of religious and ethnic divisions and of leading a progressive and consistent struggle against imperialism. Which should make the political independence of the Iraqi working class the decisive question for revolutionary Marxists.
This does not mean adopting a ‘plague on both your houses’ stance in relation to the military conflict between the various Islamist militias and the US occupation forces. The only position consistent with Marxist internationalism is to be unequivocally for the defeat of the forces of US imperialism. But to be against US imperialism is not to be for the victory of the Islamists. To ignore that distinction is to abandon a proletarian orientation, i.e. to abandon the struggle to build a revolutionary leadership in the Iraqi working class. The Islamists are neither a substitute for nor an ally of the working class; they are instead a toxic blend of religious fundamentalism and bourgeois nationalism. Their military resistance to the occupation is a pressure tactic to strike a better deal with imperialism and to improve their position vis-à-vis their religious and ethnic rivals. And their following among workers and youth is based on stupefying them with religious demagogy for the purpose of using them as political pawns and cannon fodder. Indeed it needs to be said that our opposition to US imperialism is of a piece with our opposition to the Islamists because it is the occupation that breeds the despair and disorientation among the masses that the Islamists exploit. We are for driving the imperialist forces out of Iraq precisely in order to create the best possible conditions for building a secular, socialist movement of the working class that can break the hold of the religious demagogues on the masses.
To be sure, fighting for such a perspective is hardly an easy matter in a country wracked by foreign occupation, internecine warfare and sectarian brutality, to say nothing of the wholesale collapse of social and economic life that has left as much as 70 percent of the population unemployed. But Trotsky called for bringing a socialist program to workers living under the iron heel of fascism in Germany and Italy in the Thirties,[3] and certainly political conditions in Iraq today are no worse than that. Even functioning under severe restraints and with limited resources, it should be possible to reach out to Iraqi workers through coverage of their struggles, critical analysis of the various nationalist and ‘left’ parties, and the development of a program of democratic and socialist demands with the aim of eventually gathering a nucleus of workers and intellectuals to spearhead the fight for socialist revolution in Iraq. It should go without saying that an important part of such work would be the dissemination of material aimed at countering religious backwardness and ethnic prejudice. Obviously, the internet can be a valuable tool in putting such a perspective into practice.
Everything that has been stated so far – above all, the key point that opposition to imperialism does not mean support for the Islamists – would be considered fundamental to revolutionary politics by any literate Trotskyist. Indeed, if we go back to the IEB report on Latin America for a moment, a similar distinction with regard to the bourgeois nationalist regimes in that region is made virtually as a matter of course: “Certainly, a key responsibility of the WSWS is to expose and denounce the threats of US imperialism. This active defense of Latin America against Washington’s aggression, however, does not oblige us to adapt to the illusions in Chavez or any other bourgeois nationalist regime.”[4] One would think that what applies to a bourgeois nationalist like Chavez, who calls himself a “revolutionary” and a “socialist,” would apply many times over to preachers of religious obscurantism. It certainly isn’t the ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric of these forces that matter or even their armed conflicts with imperialism, which can be intense but are always of a temporary and limited nature because of the class character of these movements. What matters is that these forces are a major obstacle to the political independence of the working class and therefore any tendency “to adapt to the illusions” in these forces is a betrayal of the struggle for that political independence.
And yet it was precisely such an adaptation that came to characterize the political line of the WSWS on Iraq. Here we need to go back to April 2004, a time of intense military conflict: as US forces were conducting a brutal siege of the Sunni city of Fallujah, an uprising against the US occupation by the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia broke out in Baghdad and the south of the country. Sadr was the young, and until then relatively obscure, heir of a dynasty of Shiite clerics whose power base was the working class slums of Baghdad. The uprising was a reaction by Sadr to a series of provocations by the US occupation regime, including a threat to arrest him, but as would become clear later, it was also to some extent a calculated move designed to raise Sadr’s political profile.
There is no question that the Sadrist uprising was a striking new feature in the Iraqi political landscape that Marxists needed to analyze and understand. Undoubtedly the job of making such an analysis was considerably complicated by the intensity of the crisis within Iraq, to say nothing of the fact that there was no Trotskyist movement on the ground there. But if our adherence to Marxism is not just an empty phrase, then it should be able to provide us with a correct orientation in the midst of a crisis as well as in more relatively peaceful times; indeed, it is precisely in a crisis that our adherence to Marxism is most essential.
This
doesn’t mean that Marxism makes us infallible: obviously mistakes will be made,
especially under difficult conditions. But an adherence to Marxism does
guarantee a firm orientation to the working class, and so long as we have that
to guide ourselves by, we will always be in a position to correct our errors
and find our way through the maze of conflicting social forces. By contrast,
those whose adherence to Marxism is only superficial throw the orientation to
the working class overboard at the first sign of a crisis. This is to leave
oneself prey to impressionism under conditions where events are unfolding at
breakneck speed, with the predictable result that one soon ends up aligned with
alien class forces. This is just what one would expect from the cabal of middle
class radicals, but what is deeply troubling is that it is also true of the
WSWS record on Iraq, as we are about to see.
The WSWS
Record on Iraq: The Perspective of “National Resistance”
The first WSWS reports on the
Sadrist uprising (April 5 and 6, 2004) were relatively straightforward accounts
of events, with the political message focused on opposing the occupation. On
April 7, 2004, the WSWS editorial board came out with a statement on the
uprising (“Stop the war on the Iraqi people”), which presumably was either
written by North or vetted by him, and already there is a noticeable shift. The
characterization of Sadr is still cautious: “Al-Sadr has adopted a posture of
militant opposition to the US occupation, winning the support of Shiite workers
and youth and the ire of the US authorities,” which seems to suggest that this
“posture” of Sadr’s may be political posturing. But later in the statement
there is no such caution when it comes to describing the Islamist resistance as
a whole:
What is emerging in Iraq is a
war of national resistance that has transcended the religious divides that many
had predicted would erupt into an internecine civil war. The Iraqi resistance
against US occupation is just as legitimate as the struggles waged by the
French resistance against German occupation in the 1940s and the liberation
struggles that swept the colonial countries in the 1960s and 1970s. The claims
of the administration and its apologists that the US is fighting only a small
minority of “extremists” and “terrorists” in Iraq will be rejected by all those
in the US who are capable of independent and critical thought.[5]
Reading this raises an immediate question: whatever happened to the Iraqi working class? It has simply disappeared into the heroic mist of “national resistance.” And the historical precedents cited here are equally free of any class ‘taint’ – the ‘national’ resistance of the French against the Germans in the 40s and the anti-colonial struggles of the 60s and 70s. It would appear that those “who are capable of independent and critical thought” (yet more non-class terminology) don’t seem to be capable of thinking much beyond liberalism: the distinction so crucial to a Marxist perspective – that being against US imperialism does not mean being for the Islamists – is entirely lost sight of here.
We will
have more to say on these remarks later on, but for now we need to see how this
“national resistance” perspective unfolded in the coverage of the WSWS on Iraq.
A day later (April 8, 2004), the editorial board issued yet another statement
on Iraq, “Defend the Iraqi masses.” This in itself was noteworthy: why issue
two editorial board statements on the same issue in the space of two days
unless there was something not quite right about the first statement?[6]
The fact that the April 8 statement was also issued in a PDF format for the
purpose of being downloaded and distributed as a flyer indicates that the
second statement was intended as the more authoritative one. And what is it
that was not quite right about the first statement and that had to be corrected
in the second? Certainly not the “national resistance” perspective: on the
contrary, that would be expanded upon. No, what needed to be ‘corrected’ were
the lingering reservations about the Shiite cleric Sadr.
Gone are any suggestions that
Sadr is posturing. In the “heroic and justified nation-wide uprising against
colonial repression,” Sadr is portrayed uncritically as “the uprising’s main
political spokesman” who is uniting the resistance against the occupation: “In
response to direct calls by Sadr for the unity of all Iraqis, contact has
reportedly been established between his ‘Mehdi Army’ militia and the resistance
organizations in Fallujah and elsewhere.” The praise for Sadr reaches a
crescendo in the editorial board’s comments on an appeal he made to the
American people for support for the uprising. The statement quotes the appeal –
“I call upon the American people to stand beside your brothers, the Iraqi
people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army,
and to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis. Otherwise Iraq will
become another Vietnam for America and the occupiers.” – and then the
editorial board goes on to declare:
Sadr’s call displays a degree of
political sophistication that is completely absent in the American political
establishment. It is a direct appeal to the objective common interest between
the Iraqi masses and American working class—who are both victims of the
policies of the Bush administration and the American corporate elite. Contrary
to the propaganda of the US media, there is no popular support for the
occupation of Iraq among the majority of the American working class (emphasis
added).[7]
These are the statements of a
movement that has lost its Marxist bearings. Since when have Marxists
uncritically repeated appeals for “the unity of all Iraqis”? This was a
shameful capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. Sadr of course had no
pretensions of being anything else except an Iraqi nationalist and Islamist,
and his appeal to the American public that the WSWS editorial board was so
eager to laud was nothing more than a banal specimen of bourgeois nationalism:
he called on “the American people” to support “the Iraqi people” and demanded
that power be transferred to “honest Iraqis,” a breathtakingly vacuous phrase.
And yet this is what the chief publication of the world Trotskyist movement
held up as proof of Sadr’s “political sophistication”! In order to make that
claim credible, the editorial board writers asserted that he was appealing
“to the objective common interest between the Iraqi masses and American
working class.” But this is nonsense: Sadr made no mention of the working
class, either in America or Iraq. And it is noteworthy here that while the WSWS
itself acknowledged the existence of a working class in America, when it came
to Iraq it chose to use the deliberately non-class term, “Iraqi masses,”
presumably in deference to its newly anointed hero of “national resistance.”
If one were to believe the WSWS,
then Sadr deserved the backing of Marxists by virtue of the fact that he was
leading an uprising against the US occupation and had made calls for Iraqi
unity and support from the American people. But if this is true, then why
wouldn’t the same standard apply to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Daniel Ortega
in Nicaragua or Fidel Castro in Cuba? Certainly Castro and Ortega have engaged
in armed conflicts with US imperialism that make Sadr’s uprising (which turned
out to be a relatively brief affair) seem trivial by comparison and Chavez was
briefly deposed in 2002 by a CIA-inspired coup attempt. As for anti-imperialist
rhetoric, all these gentlemen could put Sadr to shame: they ‘talk the talk’ and
not just about national unity (though they are of course all big on that) but
also about revolution, socialism and the working class. Appeals for solidarity
from the “American people”? Castro’s rhetoric on this score alone could
probably fill volumes, and these sorts of appeals are equally a staple of
Chavez’s rhetoric, to say nothing of his PR campaign to hand out heating oil to
residents of poor working class neighborhoods in New York and Boston. By the
same ‘logic’ the WSWS applies to Sadr, there is every reason to hail these
other men as heroes of ‘national resistance’. And why stop there? What about
Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Palestine? After all, being a peddler of
religious poison doesn’t seem to be an obstacle to winning accolades from the
WSWS and these movements have just as much claim as Sadr to being leaders of
“national resistance”. Once you go looking for substitutes for the working
class, there is no end of candidates that you can come up with. But it is
revisionists, not Marxists, who are in the business of looking for such
substitutes and of becoming cheerleaders for bourgeois nationalism.
It seems incredible that in the
21st century one still has to repeat the elementary truth that the
perspective of “national resistance” is absolutely incompatible with the
perspective of Marxism. Indeed, only weeks before the Sadrist uprising began,
the WSWS ran a nine-part series on Iraq which made precisely this point: “The
history of the past half-century entirely confirms – if only in the negative –
the theory of permanent revolution. At no point during the post-war period were
any of the nationalist movements of the Middle East capable of consistently
carrying out the basic democratic and national aims they proclaimed for
themselves.” Those aims were “always subordinated to and ultimately foundered
upon the narrow interests of the ruling classes of the various countries … The
fear and hostility of the bourgeoisie toward the working class meant that
genuine democratic mechanisms could not be tolerated.”[8]
How can one possibly square
these remarks with the editorial board statements of April 7 and 8? Either Sadr
was some astonishing exception to “the past half-century” of experience – and
there is absolutely nothing in the editorial board statements that justified
such a claim – or else the editorial board threw aside the fundamentals of a
Marxist perspective. This succumbing to impressions and disregard for
theory is, to state the obvious, the hallmark of pragmatism. A good example of
this ‘throwing aside’ of Marxist fundamentals was the claim by the editorial
board that Sadr’s uprising marked the emergence of “a war of national
resistance that has transcended the religious divides” in Iraq. But for a
Marxist, there are far more important “divides” than religious ones – i.e.
those between social classes. Had they too been “transcended”? To answer yes
was to abandon Marxism completely; to answer no was to expose the perspective
of “national resistance” as a fraud for the purpose of hoodwinking the Iraqi
workers. The editorial board – bent on cheering on Sadr –got around the problem
by never raising it.
(It is worth noting here that
the WSWS was hardly alone in its embrace of Sadr: the Shiite cleric developed
an enthusiastic following within many left-liberal circles in the west at this
time. A typical example is Naomi Klein, columnist for The Nation and a
leading figure in the anti-globalization movement. She was in Baghdad in April
2004 and sent back reports brimming with the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm of
‘radical tourists’, the sort who used to go to Cuba in the Sixties, Nicaragua
in the Seventies or Venezuela more recently. One report began: “I heard the
sound of freedom in Baghdad’s Firdos Square,” the sound being that of a
demonstration by the Sadrists. The cleric himself is described as “a kind of
cross between Ayatollah Khomeini and Che Guevara,” which presumably Klein meant
as a compliment. She also tossed out the observation that if Sadr were in
power, “His Iraq might look a lot like Iran,” but this didn’t seem to cause her
much consternation.[9]
She had “heard the sound of freedom,” much like liberal intellectuals in the
Thirties who came back from their guided tours of Stalinist Russia and claimed
to have ‘seen the future’. But this crass impressionism was, in no
fundamental sense, different from the analysis being offered by the WSWS of the
Sadrist uprising. And in fairness to Klein, she raised aspects of Sadr’s
program that the WSWS was conspicuously silent about: his Islamist goals a la
Khomeini and also his call for the US occupation to be replaced by UN forces, a
demand which Klein strongly supported.[10]
Of course Klein could afford to be honest because she didn’t have to pretend
that her gushing over Sadr had anything to do with Marxism.)
Opposing the perspective of
“national resistance” doesn’t mean being oblivious to the ‘divide and rule’
strategy that American imperialism was (and of course still is) employing in
Iraq, fomenting religious and ethnic tensions that have finally spun out into a
horrific cycle of mutual mass murder. Marxists fight to expose this strategy
and inoculate the masses against the poison of religious and ethnic prejudice.
But we do this precisely by not caving in to bourgeois nationalism and
its demagogic appeals for the “unity of all Iraqis.” To be sure, there are
divisions among the Islamists on this issue: the main Shiite parties are for
Shia hegemony while the jihadists and supporters of al-Qaeda are for Sunni
hegemony, whereas the Sadrists among the Shiites and the Baathists in the Sunni
camp have a more national perspective.[11]
But it isn’t the job of Marxists to line up behind any of these factions or to
hail any amalgam between them: adding nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism
doesn’t make the ‘blend’ any more progressive from the standpoint of the
working class. All these factions, whatever their religious and political
differences, share the perspective of exploiting the working class. And
Sadr’s attempt to forge an alliance with factions in the Sunni camp changed
nothing about the class character of these forces. That is why it is
inexcusable for Marxists to rely on a bourgeois nationalist Shiite cleric to
overcome the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of imperialism: to do so is to boost the
credibility of bourgeois nationalism in the eyes of the masses. Marxists fight
for a different kind of ‘unity’ – the unity of the oppressed against their
oppressors.
And Marxists have traditionally
drawn different lessons from history than those proclaimed by the WSWS
editorial board. The anti-colonial struggles of the 60s and 70s – fought
precisely on the basis of a “national resistance” perspective – were ultimately
traps for the oppressed masses, achieving little more than the exchange of a
homegrown exploiter for a colonial one. And much the same goes for the French
resistance against Nazi occupation. Trotskyists have never partaken – until
now, at least – in the liberal and Stalinist mythologizing of this history. The
Trotskyist movement was for an independent proletarian and socialist opposition
to the Nazis, turning the resistance to fascism into an onslaught on French
capitalism. The Stalinists, who dominated the French Resistance, imposed their
Popular Front politics, i.e. their version of “national resistance,” to make
sure that once the Nazis were gone, the French bourgeoisie would be back in the
saddle. In other words, the historical precedents cited by the WSWS attest to
the dangers of caving in to a “national resistance” perspective and to
the urgent need for a genuinely Marxist perspective that fights for the independent
mobilization of the Iraqi working class in the struggle against
imperialism.
Sadr as
Iraq’s vox populi
If we continue to follow the
WSWS coverage on Iraq, we can see that the “national resistance” perspective
was no anomaly. On April 12, 2004, the WSWS posted greetings by North to an SEP
meeting in Australia that focused on the Sadrist uprising. In a couple of
paragraphs in this text, the tensions between Marxist orthodoxy and the new
perspective are apparent. While hailing the uprising, North declares that
“admiration for the courage of the Iraqi people in the face of overwhelming
odds does not blind us to the fact that the basic problems of political
leadership in the working class—upon which the defeat of imperialism
depends—remain unsolved.” This is entirely right but it is also directly at
odds with the “national resistance” line espoused in the editorial board
statements only days earlier. Rather than critically assessing those
statements, however, North proceeds in the next paragraph to demonstrate that
the IC leadership is indeed “blind” to “the basic problems of political
leadership in the working class.” Alluding to the editorial board statements,
North writes:
We have taken serious note of
the appeal issued by al-Sadr to the people of the United States. This appeal
must reflect a new awareness among the Iraqi masses that American imperialism
is not a monolithic force, and that the United States is torn by internal
social divisions. It also expresses a realization that the Iraqi people must
seek support beyond the borders of their own country. This development in
consciousness was already anticipated in the mass international anti-war
demonstrations of February 2003, and provides fresh substantiation of the
emergence of new and more favorable conditions for the building of the World
Party of Socialist Revolution.[12]
Here North develops the theme of
Sadr’s supposed “political sophistication”: the cleric’s banal bit of
anti-imperialist rhetoric is elevated to nothing less than a leap of political
consciousness, “a new awareness among the Iraqi masses.” And as in the editorial
board statement, North is only able to make this claim credible by dressing up
Sadr’s paltry phrases, which are now presented as amounting to a recognition of
the class nature of American society and even the need for international
solidarity of the working class. It almost seems as if Sadr seems here to be
well on his way to becoming a Marxist!
But what is noteworthy about
these remarks is what they reveal about the method behind this adulation for
Sadr. North writes that the cleric’s appeal “must reflect” a new awareness in
the masses: in other words, this notion of there having been some leap in
political consciousness is speculation, impressionism. What is missing here is
a class analysis, which is to say the essence of Marxism. As soon as we
bring that into the picture, Sadr’s rhetoric and even his uprising come sharply
into focus as the maneuvering (i.e. posturing) of a bourgeois nationalist.
Instead of embracing him, we should have been cautioning the working class not
to be taken in by him.
But North’s impressionism isn’t
some inadvertent error; it is rather the inevitable outcome of his objectivism,
i.e. of the systematic downplaying of the significance of the subjective
factor in revolutionary politics. And these remarks illustrate that objectivism
yet again. Where did this “new awareness” of the Iraqi masses come from?
Presumably from objective conditions. In fact their impact has been so
extraordinary that they have transformed Sadr himself: the fact that North uses
the cleric’s pronouncements as a window into mass consciousness in effect makes
Sadr out to be the vox populi of Iraq, the ‘voice of the people’. To be
sure, spontaneous consciousness can undergo considerable changes, but since
Lenin’s time Marxists have understood that it cannot on its own get
beyond the barrier of bourgeois consciousness. But this cardinal truth – with
all its implications for revolutionary practice – is what objectivism is
constantly ‘forgetting’.
As these remarks show, for North
spontaneous consciousness is capable of some remarkable things – an
understanding of the class nature of American society and the need for
international working class solidarity. That is a good deal beyond what Lenin
thought were the limits of spontaneous consciousness, i.e. trade unionism. Nor
is this just an Iraqi phenomenon: as North goes on to say, a similar
“development in consciousness” was already evident in the mass anti-war
demonstrations a year earlier. The picture North paints here turns the
traditional standpoint of Marxism on its head: it is not the party’s
intervention in the class struggle that raises the political consciousness of
the masses but it is rather objective conditions which raise spontaneous consciousness
to the point of creating “new and more favorable conditions” for building the
party. One need only add here that three years later, it is sadly evident that
North was as far off the mark about this “new awareness” as he was about Sadr.
Both the Iraqi uprising and the global anti-war demonstrations were crippled
precisely by a lack of political consciousness – which is why they were
easily coopted, with Sadr using his working-class base as a bargaining chip to
become a power-broker in a bourgeois government (and an active participant in
the internecine butchery between Shiites and Sunnis that developed soon after),
while the anti-war movement was soon furnishing foot soldiers for John Kerry’s
pro-war presidential campaign.
Indeed, impressionism tends to
have a particularly short shelf-life in the midst of a major crisis. Three days
after North’s pronouncement, the first hint creeps into WSWS coverage that
there might be problems with Sadr as the Iraqi vox populi. The article,
“US military prepares assault on Najaf and Fallujah” (April 15, 2004), notes
that the main Shiite parties are putting pressure on Sadr to call off his
uprising and that Sadr “is bowing to the pressure.” He ordered “his militiamen
to hand back police stations and strategic buildings in Najaf to Iraqi police,”
pledged loyalty to the Shiite religious leadership and “also declared his
willingness to disband his militia and submit to being tried for murder in the
future, under a ‘legitimate and democratic government’ established after the
end of the US occupation.” While the article exposes the opportunist motives of
the main Shia parties (the Dawa party and SCIRI) in putting pressure on Sadr,
it maintains a discrete silence about Sadr’s readiness to bow to that pressure.[13]
The
Canonization of Existing Relations
In any case, one would think
that this development would call for some reevaluation of the “national
resistance” line on Iraq, but there is no indication of that having happened.
Six weeks later, in an exchange with a reader about Ralph Nader, WSWS staff
writer Patrick Martin defended the resistance in glowing terms:
The Iraqi insurgents—the armed
resistance fighters in Falluja, Najaf and other cities—are a genuine expression
of popular anti-American and anti-colonial sentiment. They cannot be
counterposed to the “mainstream” because they represent the mainstream. I would
not press an analogy between the current situation in Iraq and the American
Revolution except in this: I have no doubt that somewhere in the British
Colonial Office in 1776 there was a strategist writing about the need to
separate the “insurgents” at Concord and Lexington from the “mainstream
Americans” who were loyal to their king. Such distinctions are characteristic
of every colonial and counterrevolutionary war in history. The method is known
as “divide and conquer.”[14]
What is striking here is that in
attacking the middle class liberal Nader, the Marxist Martin adopts the
language of liberalism: his categories – insurgents, resistance fighters,
mainstream, anti-American and anti-colonial sentiment – are all devoid of
any class content. Where Nader sees a negative, Martin sees a positive, but
the frame of reference is the same for both, and there is no place for the
Iraqi working class anywhere in that frame. Once you are freed of the nagging
problem of class, then all kinds of glorious parallels suggest themselves, as
we saw earlier with the French resistance etc. Martin now enlists the shades of
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and one can almost see the fife and
drum marching through the dusty streets of Najaf and Fallujah. But alas the
shade of Leon Trotsky, author of the theory of permanent revolution, is nowhere
to be seen in this heroic scenario.
A more sophisticated defense of
the “national resistance” perspective comes up in a series by WSWS editorial
board member Peter Schwarz on “The politics of opportunism: the ‘radical left’
in France,” specifically in part 6, which deals with the Lutte Ouvriere (LO)
organization. Schwarz says a good many correct things about LO, and it is worth
quoting one point in particular before we get to what he has to say on Iraq.
Schwarz is scathing about LO’s ‘workerism’, which entails being ‘close’ to the
working class but never criticizing the unions or “raising an issue or standing
on a principle that was not already in the air and more or less accepted by
most workers.” To illustrate this, Schwarz quotes LO leader Arlette Laguiller:
“We always put forward proposals that we think are in line with the
relationship of forces and with what the working class is prepared to do in a
given country.” Then Schwarz comments:
This formula amounts to the
canonization of existing relations. An organization that restricts itself to
those demands already accepted by the majority of workers is not revolutionary,
but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, conservative. LO does not
believe that a courageous, forward-looking perspective can ever find a response
in the working class and thus change the objective situation. It invariably
justifies its own inactivity and passivity with the alleged immaturity of the
masses.[15]
This is entirely right. But only
a few pages later, when Schwarz comes to the question of Iraq, he adopts the
very approach he has just attacked Laguiller for.
To put Schwarz’s remarks on Iraq
into context, it needs to be kept in mind that the Naomi Klein-style adulation
of Sadr that we noted earlier was quite typical in the middle class left. The
British SWP/IS are good examples of this: they are uncritical defenders of the
Islamist resistance, not just the Sadrists, and even the spiraling of sectarian
violence from 2005 on has done nothing to alter that position. In defending
this stance, party leader Chris Harman freely acknowledges that this means
backing reactionary forces like the jihadists, but dismisses such concerns by
declaring that “support for a movement for liberation should not depend on
those who lead it at a particular point in time.” This is, to put it mildly, a
prescription for opportunism since liberation movements in the 20th
century have been betrayed time and again by their leaders. Genuine support for
such movements would require a principled struggle to expose their misleaders
and counter their bourgeois perspective with the standpoint of the permanent
revolution, but this is the exact opposite of Harman’s notion of ‘support’.
(Harman adds a further rationalization for his opportunist policy: “the Iraqi
resistance indirectly aids all those who would be next in line if the US were
not bogged down in Iraq. This includes forces such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and
also those in Venezuela and Bolivia who are beginning to struggle to turn the
dream of ‘socialism in the 21st century’ into a reality.”[16]
This is the ‘global perspective’ that animates middle class radicalism, and it
clearly has nothing to do with proletarian revolution. But Harman is certainly
right about one thing – with that sort of perspective, it does indeed make
eminent sense to support the Iraqi Islamists.)
The LO, by contrast, came out
strongly against the Islamists. This isn’t that surprising since the middle
class radical milieu is hardly homogenous. While the Pabloites and IS orient
themselves to the so-called ‘anti-capitalist left’ (i.e. the anti-globalization
and anti-war movements, identity politics and environmentalism), the LO orients
itself more towards syndicalist workers and left-talking union bureaucrats. For
that reason, the LO is more concerned about maintaining the rhetoric of Marxist
orthodoxy, which is crucial to its image of being more ‘working class’ and
‘revolutionary’ than its chief rival on the French ‘extreme left’, the Pabloite
Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR). The politics of a group like LO
consists in more or less neatly compartmentalizing its rhetorical adherence to
Marxist principle from its ‘canonizing of existing relations’. The trouble with
Schwarz’s criticism of LO’s stand on Iraq, however, is that it is aimed at the
former rather than at the latter. In other words, it is aimed at LO’s defense,
at least in its rhetoric, of the permanent revolution.[17]
Like the other WSWS writers,
Schwarz sets up a simple dichotomy between imperialism and the resistance,
referred to as “the resistance of the Iraqi population” and the “growing
popular resistance,” terms that exclude any reference to Islamism and are
devoid of class content. Given such a dichotomy, it automatically follows that
to attack the Islamists, as LO does, is to line up with imperialism:
While growing popular resistance
has thrown the governments in Washington and London into a deep crisis, LO has
denounced one of its symbols, the Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, as the “worst
enemy” of the Iraqi people. The policy of imperialism, LO wrote, was “to drive
the masses into the arms of a reactionary Imam like al Sadr, i.e., their worst
enemy.” This same theme runs through all of LO’s statements on this issue. The
occupying powers and the resistance against it are equally condemned. The main
accusation LO raises against the occupiers is invariably that they strengthen
Islamic fundamentalism. One article states: “Whether or not the Western
occupation is continued, the Iraqi masses risk being caught between two
fronts—between the armed gangs of imperialism and its fundamentalist
opponents.”
Reading this three years on, one
is struck by the prescience, not of Schwarz and the WSWS, but of the
perspective of permanent revolution, even when defended by a revisionist outfit
like LO. The bitter truth is that the Iraqi masses have indeed ended up being
“caught between two fronts – between the armed gangs of imperialism and its
fundamentalist opponents.” And all those on the left – including the WSWS – who
played the role of cheerleaders for the Islamists bear a measure of political
responsibility for that.
To stack the deck in his favor,
Schwarz presents the LO’s position as being to ‘equally condemn’ imperialism
and the Islamists. Indeed, a few paragraphs later he is claiming that for the
LO, “it makes no difference” if the occupation continues and that their stand
“comes very close” to demanding “the replacement of the present occupying
forces by UN troops.” One doesn’t have to hold a brief for the LO to see this
as a crude distortion of their position. In fact they have been consistent in
opposing the US occupation, and the only way Schwarz can make his case seem
credible is by pulling quotes out of context. (Incidentally, while Schwarz
claims, wrongly, that the LO was implicitly for UN troops replacing the US
occupation force, he conveniently neglects the fact that Sadr had explicitly
taken just such a position.)
Thus Schwarz tries to make much
of the phrase “whether or not the Western occupation is continued,” but he
ignores the next sentence in the original article: “And that [i.e. to be caught
between the armed gangs of imperialism and its fundamentalist opponents] is all
that this rotten imperialist system is capable of offering the masses of a
country like Iraq.”[18]
Similarly, in the quote that called Sadr “the worst enemy” of the Iraqi masses,
Schwarz leaves out the beginning of the sentence: “In the absence of a radical
perspective that truly represents the interests of the lower classes, the
policy of imperialism is perhaps in the process of driving the masses into the
arms of a reactionary Imam like al Sadr, i.e., their worst enemy.”[19]
Read in context, these
statements are not some backhanded defense of imperialism in the guise of
giving ‘equal’ treatment to the imperialists and the Islamists, as Schwarz
contends. Rather they are consistent with the principle of the political
independence of the working class, i.e. a “perspective that truly represents
the interests of the lower classes.” It has always been the apologists for
bourgeois nationalism, notably the Stalinists and the Pabloites, who have
condemned such a perspective as unrealistic or as amounting to support for
imperialism. Now the WSWS partakes in the same sort of vilification of the
perspective of permanent revolution.[20]
But it is Schwarz’s statements
defending the WSWS “national resistance” perspective that are most revealing.
He writes:
The Iraqi people have reacted to
the criminal imperialist war by putting up heroic resistance to the occupation.
In doing so, they have employed the ideological and political means at their
disposal. Given the decades long despotic rule of the nationalist Baath regime
and the treacherous role of the Iraqi Communist Party in supporting it, the
domination of the most radical wing of the Shiite clerics comes as no surprise.
LO’s reaction to this development is not that of revolutionaries, but of
frightened liberals. Revolutionaries support the Iraqi resistance, they call
for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the imperialist occupiers,
they mobilize the international—including the American—working class for this
aim, and in this way undermine the influence of the Islamists, whose position
is, of necessity, inconsistent and half-hearted.
Trotsky had a great way of
describing what Schwarz is advocating here: he called it “bowing before the
accomplished fact.” The masses, Schwarz informs us, “have employed the
ideological and political means at their disposal.” But for a Marxist the
decisive question is what to do about this fact – does one bow before it and
accommodate oneself to the domination of the masses by the Islamists, or does
one resist it? Marxist politics begins from the objective needs of the working
class (as North endlessly reminds us), and surely here we have a case where
those needs are in the starkest contradiction to “the ideological and political
means” at the disposal of the Iraqi masses. Yet precisely here the objectivist
opts not for resistance but for adaptation! (In this respect, Schwarz’s
argument is identical to that of the SWP’s Chris Harman: “support for a
movement for liberation should not depend on those who lead it at a particular
point in time” – or more accurately, at any and every “particular point
in time.”)
Like a clever salesman, however,
Schwarz tries to dress up his shoddy product in the brightest “revolutionary”
colors. You see, it is only “frightened liberals” who are against the Islamists
dominating the Iraqi masses, as opposed to the presumably ‘fearless’
revolutionaries who capitulate to this domination. And if that topsy-turvy
logic isn’t convincing, Schwarz has another argument up his sleeve: supporting
Sadr and company is really just a way “to undermine the influence of the
Islamists.” This is truly an Orwellian formulation – you undermine the
Islamists by supporting them!
Indeed it comes as something of
a shock to read the phrase – “undermine the influence of the Islamists” – in
the WSWS. Where else has there been even the suggestion that this is what
revolutionaries should do? Up to now Sadr was routinely presented in the WSWS
as the heroic leader of a movement in the tradition of the French resistance
against the Nazis, to say nothing of the parallels to the American Revolution,
and on top of that he was praised for his “political sophistication” in terms
that made him out to be the voice of the Iraqi people. And Schwarz adds his own
bit to this nauseating cheerleading for the Shiite cleric, referring to him as
a “symbol” of the resistance. Is this how revolutionaries act “to undermine the
influence of the Islamists”? One is tempted to say: with ‘enemies’ like that,
who needs friends?
But even if one were to take
Schwarz at his word about wanting to “undermine” the Islamists, his policy is
still the opposite of what a revolutionary policy should be. Schwarz here
advocates precisely “the canonization of existing relations” that he rightly
attacked the LO for earlier. For him the grip of the Islamists over the masses
is a ‘given’, and it would seem that there is nothing revolutionaries can do
about it – that is, apart from supporting the Islamists and thereby helping to
strengthen their grip! Recall what Schwarz said earlier: “LO does not believe
that a courageous, forward-looking perspective can ever find a response in the
working class and thus change the objective situation. It invariably justifies
its own inactivity and passivity with the alleged immaturity of the masses.”
This fully applies to the WSWS policy on Iraq. There is never any mention of
the Iraqi working class, let alone any sense that “a courageous,
forward-looking perspective” – i.e. the permanent revolution – could ever find
a response among the masses.
Even Schwarz’s paradigm for how
the Islamists are going to be undermined is indicative of this standpoint of
“inactivity and passivity.” The Islamists will be caught out by their own
actions, i.e. by being “inconsistent and half-hearted” in fighting imperialism,
while the ‘fearless’ revolutionaries will contribute nothing to the
enlightenment of the masses except for their continued support of the
Islamists. It obviously never occurred to Schwarz that once the Islamists lose
their credibility, so do their cheerleaders. Why would the masses place any
confidence in a party that has done nothing to fight for the political
independence of the working class and has instead boosted illusions in
bourgeois nationalists who have ultimately betrayed them?
But such questions are
meaningless to an objectivist. And this is the crux of the matter: this
shameful abandonment of the permanent revolution in Iraq is above all
symptomatic of the deadening effect of objectivism. What it demonstrates is
that objectivism is not about acknowledging objective facts but about prostrating
oneself before them. Which is why objectivism is a travesty of Marxism, no
matter how much it mimics Marxist rhetoric.
The
Heritage no Longer Defended
To fully appreciate the
significance of this cave-in to Iraqi bourgeois nationalism by the WSWS, we
need to place it in the context of the history of Trotskyism. And one cannot do
better in this regard than to quote from a document co-authored by North himself:
How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism 1973-1985. This
was the 1986 balance sheet on the degeneration and collapse of the British WRP,
and it stands alongside Cannon’s Open Letter of 1953 and the SLL’s Opportunism
and Empiricism as essential statements that mark watershed moments in the
history of Trotskyism.[21]
The second of this document’s three parts is entitled “The Permanent Revolution
Betrayed”, and it is almost an understatement to say that its relevance to the
present discussion leaps off the page.
In charting the metamorphosis of
the WRP leadership into crass apologists for bourgeois nationalist regimes,
especially in the Middle East, North and his co-authors go back to the 1962-63
split in the International Committee, where again capitulation to bourgeois
nationalism played a crucial role, this time in the form of the American SWP’s
embrace of Castroism. North quotes at length from a report by Cliff Slaughter
in the aftermath of the SWP split, and these quotes amount to a damning
indictment: the Slaughter of 1963 demonstrates the principles that Slaughter
(and Healy and Banda) betrayed from the mid-70s on. But the irony is that these
quotes now also serve as an indictment of North’s policy on Iraq. Let us hear
what Slaughter had to say in 1963:
In the backward countries,
fighting to resolve the crisis of leadership means fighting for the
construction of proletarian parties, with the aim of proletarian
dictatorship. It is especially necessary to stress the proletarian character of
the leadership in countries with a large petty-bourgeoisie or peasantry. On
this question, the revisionists take the opposite road to Lenin and Trotsky,
justifying their capitulation to petty-bourgeois, nationalist leaderships by
speculation about a new type of peasantry. In recent years, the Pabloites have
declared that the character of the new states in Africa will be determined by
the social character and decisions of the elite which occupies state
power, rather than by the class struggle as we have understood it.[22]
Nothing could be clearer: the
crux of Marxist policy in countries like Iraq is “the construction of proletarian
parties” and “it is especially necessary to stress the proletarian character of
the leadership” in such countries. Equally clear is that this is completely
irreconcilable with the WSWS’s embrace of Sadr and the perspective of “national
resistance.”
Cannon and Hansen rationalized
their capitulation to bourgeois nationalism by claiming that Castro, Guevara et
al. were “natural Marxists,” but Slaughter exposed this for the objectivist
distortion of Marxism that it was:
In all this it is indicated that
without conscious theory men will respond to ‘objective forces’ and arrive at
the path of Marxism. This is a clear abandonment of the Transitional Programme,
with its stress on the decisive question of resolving the subjective
problems of the world revolution.[23]
While the WSWS never went so far
as to anoint Sadr a “natural Marxist,” there is a distinct echo of this in its
praise for the “political sophistication” of the Shiite cleric. Similarly, the
WSWS conjures up a “new awareness” out of objective forces, and though this may
not bring the masses quite to “the path of Marxism,” it certainly does take
them beyond the limits of spontaneous consciousness. In other words, though the
IC of today hasn’t gone as far down this road as Cannon and Hansen (or Healy,
Banda and Slaughter), the objectivist tendency of the WSWS’s political line is
unmistakable. Finally, it is a little startling to see “resolving the subjective
problems of the world revolution” characterized as the “decisive question” in
the Transitional Program, given that North has turned any mention of the
subjective or subjectivity virtually into a heresy. When was the last time an
article or lecture was devoted to the topic of “The Subjective Problems of the
World Revolution”?
Needless to say, the issue for
Slaughter (and Trotsky) was not the mechanical counterposing of subjective to
objective, as North continually presents the matter, but rather their
dialectical interrelationship, which objectivism entirely ignores. Indeed, in
the next paragraph of his report, Slaughter elaborates on precisely this point:
It is in this sense that the
fight for dialectics is the fight to build the world party in every
country. Neither can succeed without the other. Dialectical materialism will
only be understood and developed in the struggle to build the party against all
enemies. The party can be built only if there is a conscious fight for
dialectical materialism against the ideas of other classes. It is on
revolutionary theory that the ability of the party to win the political
independence of the working class is based.[24]
The stark contrast between the
standpoint expressed in these remarks – “the fight for dialectics is the
fight to build the world party” – and what the IC is today hardly needs
comment. But what is noteworthy here is the prescience of these statements,
written over 40 years ago. Slaughter contended that you could only sustain the
fight for “the political independence of the working class” on the basis of
“revolutionary theory,” i.e. the “conscious fight for dialectical
materialism.” And what is the WSWS record on Iraq if not a negative
confirmation of that? For two decades the IC leadership has done no work on
dialectical philosophy and now this abnegation of its theoretical
responsibilities has brought about a shameful cave-in to bourgeois nationalism.
As one reads through the middle
part of How the WRP Party Betrayed Trotskyism one is above all struck by
how debased the WRP leadership’s capitulation to bourgeois nationalism became.
One of the most shameful episodes involved the Baathist regime in Iraq, with
the WRP press endorsing the regime’s execution of members of the Iraqi
Communist Party (ICP) in the winter of 1978-79, a monstrous position
unprecedented in the history of Trotskyism. Given that awful precedent, one
would think that if ever there were a country where the International Committee
would be inured to the blandishments of bourgeois nationalism, Iraq would be
it.
The document speaks of the
“obscene adulation” that the WRP showered on Saddam Hussein, who came to power
in the summer of 1979, and it gives an example of Hussein’s “phony” rhetoric
which the WRP broadcast uncritically: Hussein promises that he “shall fight
oppression everywhere, support right everywhere, support the poor everywhere
[and] fight exploitation everywhere.”[25]
But reading this in light of the present discussion, it is evident that
Hussein’s rhetoric shows as much (or rather as little) “political
sophistication” as the statement of Sadr’s hailed by the WSWS editorial board,
and no doubt somewhere in the yellowing files of the Newsline one can
find an ‘analysis’ that proves that Hussein’s rhetoric is “a direct appeal to
the objective common interest between the Iraqi masses and American [or make
that British] working class.” To be sure, the admiration for Sadr in the WSWS
is in a minor key compared to the WRP’s craven kowtowing to Hussein, but it is
nevertheless the same tune.
Another parallel between the
politics of the IC today and the politics it denounced in 1986 comes up in
relation to the WRP’s line on Zimbabwe. WRP leader Michael Banda in particular
is attacked for turning armed struggle into a “political abstraction [that]
served as a bridge for justifying the program of the Popular Front in the
underdeveloped countries.” North focuses on a passage from a WRP resolution
that offered support for the nationalist leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo
“in so far as [they] continue the armed struggle against [the apartheid regime
of Ian] Smith and reject a constitutional compromise.” North denounces this
formulation as a “complete violation of Marxist principles”, going on to
declare: “Rather than stating clearly that the Zimbabwean bourgeoisie is
incapable of securing genuine national independence and that it will prosecute
the armed struggle only within the limits of its class interests, the document
hitched the fate of the working class to the policies of the bourgeoisie.”[26]
All one needs to do is change Zimbabwean bourgeoisie to Iraqi Islamists, and
this becomes a damning criticism of the WSWS line on Iraq.
Moreover, one can well imagine
Banda trying to justify his opportunism with the same line of argument used by
Schwarz: we support the Zimbabwean nationalists/Iraqi Islamists only in so far
as they resist imperialism, and in this way we “undermine” their influence
because their resistance is “of necessity, inconsistent and half-hearted.” In
1986, North (and his co-author Schwarz) saw this argument for what it was – a
“hoax” that amounted to “a denial of the responsibility of the Trotskyist
movement to fight for the political organization of the working class
independently of the native bourgeoisie and prior to the latter’s inevitable
betrayal of the anti-imperialist struggle.”[27]
It is a measure of how much the IC leadership has abandoned its own history
that it now perpetrates the same sort of hoax in relation to Iraq.
Ignoring
Mistakes and Making Them Worse
As we have already seen, the
WSWS persisted with its support for Sadr even though there were warning signs
about his eventual betrayal only days after the WSWS embraced him. Typical of
the WSWS coverage is a June 1, 2004 news story reporting on a truce between
Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia and the US occupation forces in Najaf. The truce is
painted in glowing terms as a major victory for Sadr, who is quoted without
comment as declaring: “I will not obey the occupation. Never.” A tone of
unabashed enthusiasm for Sadr and for Iraqi nationalism pervades the report. We
are told, “Sadr has used the main Kufa mosque to deliver regular sermons and
speeches calling on Iraqis from all religious and ethnic groups to unite
together to fight against the US occupation. He has also issued appeals to the
American people to support the Iraqi struggle.” In the next paragraph we hear:
“The last eight weeks have boosted the standing and authority of Sadr among the
Iraqi masses. A recent poll carried out by the Iraq Centre for Research and
Strategic Studies found he registered 68 percent support, up from just a few
percent before April.” This is reported without even a hint that this level of
support for a bourgeois nationalist Shiite cleric might not be such a wonderful
thing.
On the contrary, a little later
the article is enthusing that,
It may, however, be too late for
deals and manoeuvres by the occupation forces to prevent Sadr’s movement
emerging as the central political voice of Iraq’s majority Shiite population. A
supporter of Sadr, Sheik Ahmed Shibani, told the Los Angeles Times:
“Iraqis now feel there is only one enemy against them—the Americans. It has
caused the rise of one Shiite leadership.”[28]
This quote from a Sadrist Sheik
was the perfect expression of the perspective of “national resistance” and –
what should be evident to any Marxist – of its utterly fraudulent character.
The “rise of one Shiite leadership” was not a step forward for the Iraqi
working class but a dangerous trap in its way. The WSWS, however, was blind to
such concerns, as it basked in Sadr’s nationalist glow. And the breathless
speculation about it being “too late for deals and manoeuvres” to prevent
Sadr’s ascendancy was simply inane, since his ascendancy guaranteed that there
would be other “deals and manoeuvres” in defense of his bourgeois class
interests. This article was a crass piece of propaganda for bourgeois
nationalism. It is worth noting that on the same day this article was posted,
the WSWS also ran Patrick Martin’s commentary that compared the Sadrist
uprising to the battles of the American Revolution. Put these pieces together
and you get a picture of shameless pandering to bourgeois nationalism, very
much in the WRP mold.
Nothing much changed in the WSWS
position on Sadr for a year and a half, even though his uprisings were quickly
wrapped up and he began to wield power inside the interim government set up by
the occupation regime. As late as August 2005, the WSWS was still reporting
favorably on Sadr, boosting his credentials and those of other nationalists for
opposing the Iraqi draft constitution that was up for a vote in a national
referendum in December. (For example, there is the article, “Shiite factions
clash as opposition mounts to the draft Iraqi constitution” from Aug. 26, 2005,
which reports favorably on Sadr’s pronouncements against the constitution and
quotes another Shiite cleric from Baghdad, who characterizes the fight over the
constitution this way: “Followers of the occupation and the government of the
occupation want the constitution, and Iraqi nationalists including Shia and
Sunni do not want it.”[29]
Needless to say, this quote is run without comment, much less criticism. On
Apr. 11, 2005, an article on demonstrations organized by the Sadrists against
the US occupation reported on some of the Sadrist banners - “Yes for Islam, yes
for Iraq. No to occupation, no to terrorism” – and the demonstrators’ chants –
“No, no to the Americans. Yes, yes to Islam.” The only comment from the WSWS
was: “A number of the Iraqi police on duty raised their fists in a sign of
solidarity.”[30]
This solidarity between the police and the Sadrists would eventually play a key
role in the formation of Shiite death squads.)
It was only in October 2005 that
the WSWS political line on Sadr finally changed. Suddenly the website’s writers
discovered that Sadr was a bourgeois nationalist and that he couldn’t be
trusted. What brought about this reversal was Sadr’s refusal to call for a no
vote in the constitutional referendum, opting instead for an abstentionist
position. There was nothing surprising about this to anyone who had examined
Sadr’s politics from the standpoint of his class position. He was continuing to
do what he had always done, which is to “posture” as a militant to maintain his
working class base in Baghdad while maneuvering to get a bigger share of power
for his wing of the Shia bourgeois elite. His mini-uprisings were as much a
maneuver in this respect as his abstentionist position on the referendum or his
later role as kingmaker in the Iraqi parliament. But for those like the WSWS,
who had abandoned an orientation to the Iraqi working class, Sadr’s later
maneuvers created serious problems since it became increasingly untenable to go
on portraying him as the hero of “national resistance.” After all, romanticized
images of the French underground get a little tarnished when the hero is
behaving like a Vichy collaborator.
The change of line is first
evident in an October 13, 2005 article, “Moqtada al-Sadr refuses to call for a
no vote on Iraqi constitution”.[31]
Sadr’s abstentionist position is described as “a direct service to both the
Bush administration and the wing of the Shiite establishment that has openly
collaborated with the US occupation of Iraq since the 2003 invasion.” Beyond
the immediate news about Sadr’s abstentionism, the article is an attempt to
settle accounts with him politically and for this purpose it brings in some
historical material on the origin of the Sadrist movement and the politics of
the different Shia parties in Iraq. This part of the article begins by stating,
“The gradual coming together of the Sadrists with the other Shiite
fundamentalist parties is not accidental.” This is true, but to anyone relying
solely on the WSWS for their information, this would have come as a complete surprise.
The writer, James Cogan, goes on
to note the deeply reactionary history that all these tendencies share,
including Sadr’s: their primary focus has been “to combat the influence of
socialist and pan-Arab nationalist ideas among Iraqi Shiites, which undermined
their allegiance to the clergy,” and Sadr’s uncle “authored works denouncing
Marxism and advocating the establishment of a Shiite-dominated Islamic state in
Iraq.” Their hostility to Marxism and the working class didn’t stop at words:
“In 1963, Da’awa supported the massacre of thousands of members of the
Stalinist Communist Party by the military and Baath Party death squads.”
Charting the divisions and maneuvering within the Shiite camp both in relation
to Saddam’s regime and the US occupation, Cogan concludes:
The
Sadrists exemplify, however, the incapacity of any layer of the bourgeoisie or
petty-bourgeoisie in Iraq, even the seemingly most radical, to conduct any
consistent struggle against imperialism. Their opposition to both the Baath
regime and the US occupation reflected the social interests of a stratum of the
Shiite elite that was marginalised. Having secured a place within the framework
of the occupation, Sadr and the upper echelons of his movement are increasingly
antagonistic toward the opposition of their working class supporters to the
nightmarish conditions the US invasion has produced.
This is all certainly true, but it is also
in one important respect politically dishonest. It fails to address an obvious
question: why did it take the WSWS 18 months to acknowledge that Sadr was
a bourgeois nationalist who would betray the Iraqi workers? The history
of the Sadrists was no less reactionary in April 2004 than in October 2005. And
to supporters of the theory of Permanent Revolution (to say nothing of the
writers of How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism), it should have been evident
right from the start that the Sadrists were incapable of conducting “any
consistent struggle against imperialism” and that their opposition to the
occupation “reflected the social interests of a stratum of the Shiite elite
that was marginalized.” It is utter nonsense to suppose that all this
‘suddenly’ became clear only when Sadr opted for an abstentionist line on the
referendum. What was needed here was a settling of accounts not just with Sadr
but also with the WSWS’s own capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. This isn’t
just a quibble over the need for a mea culpa. What is at stake here is
the political miseducation of party members and of the working class,
and a Marxist leadership would set the highest priority on correcting such an
error and probing its underlying causes.
But
no such accounting ever took place. The fact that this article, which announced
an important shift in the party’s political line, was presented as a routine
news report by a staff writer, is noteworthy in itself. Why no editorial board
statement? Why not have a leading figure like North or Schwarz weigh in on such
a major issue? This already suggests a dubious motive behind this sudden bout
of honesty about Sadr – i.e. that what was really going on here was an exercise
in damage control. This suspicion is heightened by the following
statement: “Sadr’s position on the referendum is a clear retreat from appeals
in the aftermath of the US invasion for the unity of all Iraqis against the
occupation. After calling for national armed resistance to the US forces on two
occasions in 2004, the Sadrist leadership is adopting a similar policy to that
pursued by Da’awa and SCIRI—exploiting the occupation to leverage greater
privilege for a layer of the Shiite elite.”
What
is this if not a continuing defense of the perspective of “national
resistance”? If only Sadr had gone on calling for “the unity of all Iraqis
against the occupation,” then presumably everything would have been all right. In
other words, Sadr’s problem wasn’t that he was a bourgeois nationalist but
rather that he wasn’t nationalist enough! The fact that this article took
for granted that “the unity of all Iraqis against the occupation” is something
that Marxists endorse is indicative of the disorientation brought about by the
WSWS line on Iraq. Even after finally acknowledging the class interests that
Sadr represents, the WSWS was still refusing to orient itself towards the Iraqi
working class and to fight for the perspective of the permanent revolution.
Instead, what these remarks indicated was that the adaptation to bourgeois
nationalism would continue.
But
this would now have to be an adaptation to ‘Sadrism without Sadr’, so to speak.
The 18 months in which the WSWS boosted Sadr were now a bad memory, best
forgotten about. In the world of pragmatic politics this is known as ‘moving
on’, and if we follow WSWS coverage of Iraq, it is evident that this is indeed
what happened. In the report on Iraq to the International Editorial Board
meeting in January 2006, there is no mention of the WSWS record of supporting
Sadr. The few references to the Shiite cleric are merely factual statements
about his uprisings having been contained. When it finally comes to the WSWS’s
own perspective, the report (given by Cogan) adopts an orthodox tone:
And we
must be clear: the aim of those heading the armed resistance in Iraq is not
liberation. Its leaders are predominantly representatives of the Sunni Arab
elite who are seeking to use the guerilla war to pressure Washington to make a
deal with them. In exchange for official positions and prestige in a US puppet
state, they would be more than prepared to collaborate with the American
military against their Iraqi rivals and, above all, against the Iraqi people.
The interests of the Iraqi working class—of all ethnic and religious
backgrounds—are being subordinated to various bourgeois cliques that have
demonstrated, throughout the twentieth century, their venality and their
incapacity to conduct any genuine struggle against imperialism.[32]
Immediately
one notices here the singling out of the “Sunni Arab elite” – what about the
Shiite elite? Are they any less reactionary, any less interested in a deal with
imperialism? And one might well wonder whether this obvious omission isn’t
symptomatic of a political guilty conscience. We are told that “we must be
clear” that “the aim of those heading the armed resistance in Iraq is not
liberation,” but the WSWS record on this question has been anything but clear.
And the final statement – about the subordination of the interests of the
working class to bourgeois cliques whose venality and treachery have been
plainly evident throughout the last century – is a damning indictment of the
WSWS itself for turning its back on these lessons. But of course there isn’t a
hint of that anywhere in this report: the fact that the WSWS had been operating
as a left cover for one of these bourgeois cliques during a crucial period in
the struggle against the US occupation is swept under the rug. Read in this
light, what this statement really says is: “We must be clear” … that we are
‘moving on’.
If we fast forward to 2007, the
year began with the ghastly images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging. The WSWS
rightly denounced the execution as a “sectarian lynching” (Jan. 3, 2007),[33]
but what is significant for the present discussion is that the lynch mob in
question came from none other than Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The article also
notes that, “For nearly a year, Sunni Muslims, Christians, secular Iraqis and
others targeted by Shiite death squads have been hunted down, tortured and
murdered.” In a later report (Mar. 10, 2007), this reference to Shiite death
squads is amplified: “The focus of the Mahdi Army over the past year has
been a vicious civil war against Sunni Muslim opponents of the US occupation
and Shiite rule. The militia is alleged to be directing many of the Shiite
death squads that are carrying out sectarian killing and evictions against the
Sunni population of the city.”[34]
Obviously these are horrific facts, but in relation to the WSWS record on Iraq,
they are the bitter harvest of an opportunist policy: the “national resistance”
heroes of 2004/5 have become the lynch mobs and death squads of 2006/7.
But there is no evidence from
recent WSWS coverage that any lessons have been learned. The adaptation to
bourgeois nationalism continues,[35]
albeit now with a line that is critical of Sadr. But in the absence of an
orientation to the political independence of the working class, even this
criticism of Sadr only deepens the confusion. In a report on Iraq to an SEP
membership meeting in Australia in January of this year, Cogan declares:
The surge of troops [planned by
Bush Administration] is aimed at provoking a confrontation and conducting a
pre-emptive strike against Shiite militias that could rise up again against US
forces. While the Sadrist leadership is desperately seeking to keep their
supporters in check, they are discrediting themselves in the process and
will not be able to restrain an explosive anti-imperialist response
indefinitely, especially in the event of a war with Iran (emphasis added).[36]
Here we have ‘Sadrism without
Sadr’: the masses will break free from the restraints of the Islamists in “an
explosive anti-imperialist response.” It is obvious that this anticipated
explosion will have nothing to do with the intervention of the revolutionary
party, which means that it will have nothing to do with a development of
political consciousness in the Iraqi working class. On the contrary, the
scenario is an objectivist daydream: it will be objective conditions,
specifically a war with Iran, that will break the stranglehold of the Islamists
over the masses.
(It is certainly true that a US
war with Iran would have cataclysmic consequences in the region, but it isn’t
clear that those consequences would automatically benefit the working class in
Iraq. It is quite possible that the anger of the masses could be channeled as
much into sectarian violence – i.e. against Sunnis – as into opposition to
imperialism, particularly in the event of an intervention by the Saudi, Syrian
or Turkish regimes. The point is that war with Iran is not a deus ex machina
that can overcome the difficult problems of the fight for political
consciousness in the working class. Those who have given up on that fight often
seek salvation in catastrophes, the most notorious example being the line of
German Stalinism in the early 30s – First Hitler, then us.)
And typically this is a daydream
spun out of impressionism. The evidence Cogan offers to back it up is a New
York Times article, specifically a quote inside it from “a Sadr City
shopkeeper, who observed with contempt that the Sadrist leaders were not
resisting the US incursions into the area because they were worried about their
‘Italian shoes.’” Based on the evidence of this shopkeeper, Cogan concludes
that “ordinary Shiites already believe the Sadrists are more concerned
with holding on to the privileges they have gained from the occupation than
with honouring their populist pledges to prevent Iraq being turned into an
American colony” (emphasis added).
Thus the complaint of a
shopkeeper becomes the window into the consciousness of “ordinary Shiites”!
What has this got to do with Marxism? This is the stalest of bourgeois
journalistic clichés – the ‘man in the street’. It tells us nothing about the
state of consciousness of the working class. One might add that it used to be a
commonplace in the Trotskyist movement that there is no such thing as
“anti-imperialism” outside of the struggle for socialism. It was always
Stalinists, revisionists and of course nationalists who embraced the term and
turned it into a magical hybrid, immune from the ‘partisan’ politics of class
warfare, but Trotskyists fought to expose that as a fraud. The debasement of
language here testifies to the debasement of Marxism, i.e. to the
disorientation bred by the WSWS line on Iraq.
Of course the rift between the
Sadrists and their working class base is an important development, but the way
to exploit that rift is not to call for a more consistently ‘anti-imperialist’
version of Sadrism, one where the Sadrists “honour their populist pledges” to
fight the US occupation to the satisfaction of shopkeepers. What is needed is a
complete break with bourgeois nationalism and the advancement of a socialist
perspective by the working class as the only viable way out of the morass that
the US invasion has plunged Iraq into. Without that, the fracturing of the
Sadrist movement will not automatically produce a progressive development
within the masses. The anger and frustration with the Sadrist leadership could
easily be diverted into more sectarian violence. Indeed, only a couple of weeks
after giving his report, Cogan penned another article which suggests that this
is indeed what is happening: “Hundreds of militiamen are believed to have
already broken away from the Mahdi Army and are blamed for both attacks on US
forces and much of the sectarian violence that is wracking Baghdad.”[37]
One might add that under these
conditions, spinning daydreams about an “explosive anti-imperialist response”
borders on adventurism: it would provoke a bloodbath for the Sadrist workers to
enter into an armed confrontation with the US forces, either without any
leadership or led by dissident elements within the Sadrist movement, and such
an outcome would only strengthen the grip of the Islamists, to say nothing of
imperialism. Iraqi workers don’t need more ‘explosions’ and more armed
conflict – they need more political clarity! And they can only get that
from the Marxist movement, provided that Marxists haven’t themselves abandoned
their principles.
Turning
a Blind Eye to the Iraqi Working Class
Perhaps the most damning aspect
of WSWS coverage on Iraq is what it hasn’t covered – the Iraqi working class.
Judging from the WSWS, the only workers in Iraq are all in Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
About workers in the Sunni or Kurdish areas, we hear next to nothing. And might
there not be some workers who aren’t completely overwhelmed by the various
religious and ethnic divisions and who actually define themselves in class
terms? You wouldn’t know such workers existed by reading the WSWS.
In fact there is a labor
movement in Iraq that has engaged in a remarkable number of struggles, given
the conditions under which it is operating. One of the most militant unions in
the country is the General Union of Oil Employees (GUOE) in Basra. Commonly
known as the Basra Oil Union, it organized oil workers in the Southern Oil
Company shortly after the invasion, and defied the occupation authorities by
staging a three day strike in August 2003 to win workers a living wage and to
force the removal of the American company KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s
company Halliburton, from oil installations in the region. The union has staged
other walkouts since then calling for the removal of Baathists from management.
Its most recent strike action, in August 2006, involved 700 workers in Basra
and Nasiriyah demanding overtime pay and for salaries to be paid on time. In
October 2005, it set up the Federation of Oil Unions of Iraq, which now
represents 23,000 workers, uniting the work force of all the major oil production
companies in the southern region of the country. It opposes the US occupation,
supports resistance to it but also condemns sectarian terrorism. Recently it
has been involved in protesting the proposed new oil law that would effectively
hand over control of Iraqi oil to US and multinational oil companies.
For obvious reasons the oil
industry plays a pivotal role in the class struggle in Iraq, but it is by no
means the only sector where workers have been organizing. Metalworkers and
hotel workers in Baghdad and rail workers have been involved in pay disputes,
with the rail workers winning equal pay for men and women. Electrical
utilities, particularly in Basra, have been hotbeds of union activity. Teachers
have organized nationally and been involved in strike action. As well,
according to one report: “In April [2005], the port workers union, supported by
the oil workers and others, blockaded the port of Zubair, and forced out the
Danish shipping giant Maersk, which took over the terminals at the start of the
occupation. In mid-2004, the U.S. multinational Stevedoring Services of America
was also forced out of the port of Um Qasr.”[38]
Put these facts together and you
have a picture of an upsurge in workers’ struggles, again all the more
remarkable given that this was taking place in the context of a foreign
military occupation and after decades of ruthless repression by Saddam’s regime.
And the actions against US and European corporate vultures like KBR and Maersk
amounted to a working class offensive against the occupation. Here were the
beginnings of a way forward, the beginnings of the working class striving to
provide its own way out of the morass of occupation and sectarian divisions. Of
course these could only be beginnings, given the limitations of spontaneous
consciousness and the role of the labor bureaucracy (which we will get to
shortly), but this is where the intervention of the Marxist movement becomes
indispensable, through the analysis of these struggles that only it can
provide.
Instead, blinded by its
“national resistance” perspective, the WSWS paid no attention to this upsurge
of the Iraqi working class. So far as one can tell from a perusal of the WSWS
archives, there was not a single report posted on any of these struggles. It is
hard to understate what this says about the political disorientation of the IC.
The self-serving rhetoric of a Shiite cleric is touted by the WSWS, and slogans
boosting Islam and even the complaints of a shopkeeper are deemed worthy of
attention as indications of mass consciousness – but the struggles of
Iraqi workers are completely blacked out!
This upsurge of labor struggles
also sheds important light on the evolution of Iraqi politics. Most of these
struggles took place in the first two years of the occupation, i.e. 2003-2005,
but 2005 is also when sectarian violence began to dominate the political
landscape in Iraq. This strongly suggests that not only were the US
imperialists trying to pit Sunni against Shiite, but it was also in the class
interests of both the US occupiers and the Sunni and Shiite elites to
use sectarian violence to head off a potential threat from the working class.
Thus it is probably not coincidental that 2005 saw a sharp rise in anti-union
violence, with three union officials assassinated in the first two months of
the year, along with the kidnapping of two other union leaders and the
uncovering of a plot to kidnap and murder union leaders in Basra. The Basra oil
workers leader, Hassan Juma’a, stated that he expected to be attacked himself
and accused remnants of the Mukhabharat, Saddam’s secret police, of being
responsible for the killings. “They seem to be able to operate freely,” he
noted, obviously implying that that they did so with the cooperation of the US
occupation authorities.[39]
Again, none of this was ever reported in the WSWS.[40]
Just as the struggles of the
Iraqi workers have been ignored, so too the history of the working class has
been given scant attention. That history is bound up with the Iraqi Communist
Party, which in the middle of the 20th century was the largest
Communist Party in the Arab world. Some of that history was discussed in a
series the WSWS carried in March 2004 which we cited earlier (“The diplomacy of
imperialism: Iraq and US foreign policy”, especially parts one and two, Mar.
12-13, 2004),[41]
but since then the only references the WSWS ever makes to the ICP are in
passing, claiming that it is a discredited force and that most workers have
shifted their allegiance to Sadr and his Mahdi Army. While it is true that
areas like the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad that were once ICP strongholds have
gone over to the Sadrists, the ICP still retains a considerable base of
support, primarily through its influence in the Iraqi Federation of Trade
Unions (IFTU), which by 2005 was claiming 200,000 members. But even if this
weren’t the case and the ICP had no substantial support, a thorough
understanding of the pernicious role of Iraqi Stalinism would be essential for
a Trotskyist movement ever to emerge in Iraq. Indeed, coming to grips with the
history of Iraqi Stalinism would be far more important in terms of finding a
road to the Shia workers now backing Sadr than poring over Sadr’s own
self-serving pronouncements.[42]
The outstanding feature of that
history is prostration to bourgeois nationalism, which one could trace from the
1930s on. (This isn’t the place for such a discussion, but one thing that
should be said is that the ICP, like most of the other Communist parties in the
Middle East, was blighted from birth by the degeneration of the Communist
International under Stalin. But this makes it all the more important to bring
the history of Trotskyism to bear in the Iraqi context, above all the record of
struggle for the permanent revolution – the very thing the WSWS has abandoned.)
During the Saddam years, the Stalinists offered their support to the regime,
only to be subjected to brutal repression. After the US invasion, the ICP held
ministerial posts in the interim regime set up under the occupation and
supported the January 2005 national elections, which is to say that they
extended class collaboration into collaboration with the occupation (which of
course didn’t prevent them from being subjected to attacks and arrests by the
occupation forces).
A key objective of the IFTU has
been to establish itself as the officially sanctioned union federation in the
country, which amounts to getting the ‘franchise’ as the government’s
designated corporatist partner. To this end, it merged in September 2005 with
the remnants of the Baathist union federations (allies, in other words, of the
very forces that were probably behind the assassination of some the Stalinist
union leaders only months earlier, to say nothing of the wholesale repression
the party suffered under Saddam) to form the General Federation of Iraqi
Workers (GFWI). This conforms to an established pattern of the Stalinists
groveling before nationalist and/or imperialist forces, only to be kicked in
the teeth for their efforts. The Stalinists have also sought to establish
themselves as a secular opposition to religious sectarianism and to the
balkanization of Iraq (promoted by the main Shiite parties), and this is likely
what accounts for whatever political credibility they have left. Their perspective,
however, is thoroughly nationalist and counter-revolutionary, their proclaimed
goal being “a unified democratic Iraq,” i.e. a bourgeois democracy, which in
the context of Iraqi history is nothing more than a reactionary pipedream.
Nothing establishes the
counter-revolutionary role of Iraqi Stalinism more clearly than their
collaboration with the occupation. To this day, the ICP refuses to call for an
immediate withdrawal of US forces,[43]
justifying this gross betrayal by playing on the legitimate fears that many
workers have of the sectarian militias (but conveniently downplaying how the
occupation has fostered sectarian violence). But the Stalinists aren’t alone in
this respect: the occupation has exposed the political bankruptcy of every wing
of the labor bureaucracy, including its more supposedly radical factions.
Notable in this regard is a Maoist tendency, the Worker-Communist Party, that
has set up its own Federation of Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq (FWCUI),
which has been active in organizing unemployed workers and presents itself as a
militant alternative to the main union federation. Though the FWCUI has taken a
much stronger stand against the occupation, calling for the US troops to leave
at once, it wants those troops replaced by UN forces, a stand which exposes the
anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Maoists as a sham.[44]
(Again, it should be noted that in this respect, the Maoists are no worse than
the Sadrists, who have also repeatedly called for UN ‘peacekeepers’ to replace
the US occupation forces.)
Then there is the Basra oil
worker’s union, the GUOE. It has also taken a strong stand against the
occupation, but it has adopted a regionalist perspective, which became evident
in a one-day strike of 15,000 workers that the union called in July 2005 to demand
that more oil revenue remain in the Basra region.[45]
This action was explicitly in support of demands put forward by the local Basra
governor, who in turn was expressing the standpoint of the leading Shiite
factions that want to balkanize the country and set up an oil-rich Shiite
enclave in the southern region. This regionalist perspective is as much of a
dead-end for the working class as bourgeois nationalism, turning workers into
pawns of the various competing bourgeois factions.[46]
The onset of globalization has
exposed the political bankruptcy of traditional labor organizations everywhere,
and it is evident that the Iraqi labor movement is no exception in this regard.
If there is anything distinctive in Iraq, it is the fact that for decades any
manifestation of working class opposition was brutally suppressed by the
Baathists, so that when that regime collapsed because of the US invasion, all
the pent-up pressure was released in a surge of labor activism. Nor should it
come as a surprise that the form this activism took was trade unionism or that
Iraqi workers (to borrow a phrase from the WSWS) “employed the ideological and
political means at their disposal,” in this case unions and the traditional
parties of the left.
But it should have been of great
significance to the Marxist movement that the crisis created by the US
occupation brought about an explicitly class response by important
sections of Iraqi workers that was distinct from the bourgeois nationalist and
Islamist demagogy of the Sadrists. That response was both a confirmation of the
theory of permanent revolution and an opportunity for Marxists to make a
potentially powerful intervention. None of the factions within the labor
bureaucracy are capable of fighting for the political independence of the
working class; all of them have lined up with one or another camp of the
bourgeoisie, and even with the US occupation in the case of the Stalinists. A
consistent fight for that political independence, i.e. for a socialist solution
to the crisis in Iraq, would cut through the tangle of nationalist, Islamist
and ethnic claptrap, and thus become a pole of attraction for workers,
intellectuals and youth opposed both to the brutality of the US occupation and
the gangsterism of the militias.
But it is impossible to fight
for a revolutionary line in the working class if one has become a mouthpiece
for nationalist claptrap. The WSWS paid no attention to the struggles of the
Iraqi workers because it became a proponent of so-called “national resistance.”
But to ignore the working class means to abandon any effort to build a
revolutionary party. And so there has never been a single article on the
WSWS devoted to the call for the building of a Trotskyist party in Iraq or the
spelling out of what such a party would stand for. Nothing expresses
the WSWS’s abandonment of the permanent revolution more clearly than this.
Capitulating to bourgeois nationalism is a black hole that blots out both the
working class and Marxism.
Epilogue:
Mr. North goes to Dublin
There are well-known precedents
for what happens to Trotskyist parties who support bourgeois nationalism: this
is often the first step to a wholesale accommodation to middle class public
opinion. This was the case with the American SWP in the 60s (via its backing
for Castroism in Cuba) and the WRP in the 70s and 80s (via its craven embrace
of bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East). And the reason for this
is readily apparent: the abandonment of a proletarian orientation in a colonial
or semi-colonial country becomes the first step in abandoning such an
orientation altogether. In this regard, having a look at a speech delivered by
North in Dublin can serve as an epilogue to the examination of the WSWS record
on Iraq that we have offered here, because this speech is a small but telling
indication of the political trajectory the IC is on.[47]
Let us set the scene. We are at
the Philosophical Society of Trinity College and it is mid-October 2004. North
is participating in an annual debate the society sponsors on American foreign
policy, and this year’s topic is “This House Believes that America is Still the
World’s Peacekeeper.” Besides North, there are three other speakers opposing
the proposition – an Irish senator, the foreign editor of the Independent
newspaper in Britain, and Chris Marsden of the British SEP. What makes this
interesting is that it is a relatively infrequent occasion on which North is
addressing a non-party audience and is sharing a platform with what one can
safely assume are social democrats and/or liberals. In other words, this is one
of those occasions where we get to see the ‘public face’ of the party outside
its own milieu.
Now, it should be readily
apparent in such circumstances that a key responsibility of a Marxist,
especially someone as experienced as North, is to do what he can to distinguish
the standpoint of revolutionary socialism from that of liberalism. This doesn’t
mean that one has to be heavy-handed about it, stridently spouting slogans in
the manner of sects like Spartacist. Nonetheless, the job for a Marxist in such
a debate and before such an audience is not only to score points against the
pro-imperialist side but also to make evident that liberals and socialists
aren’t all ‘on the same side’ either. And it would seem that there was no
external reason why this shouldn’t have been possible: there is no indication
in the WSWS report that the debaters were under any restrictions as to content,
and time clearly wasn’t an issue since the text of North’s remarks runs to
nearly 2000 words.
And yet the remarkable thing
about North’s speech is that it is completely stripped of anything that is
identifiably Marxist. There is not a single mention of Marx or Marxism, of
Trotsky, of socialism or of revolution. The only political authority who gets a
positive mention is Lincoln, which is hardly designed to distinguish a
socialist from a liberal. Perhaps most significantly, there is no mention of
the SEP, of the International Committee or the WSWS. This omission is
particularly noteworthy because this debate was taking place three weeks before
the 2004 US elections, in which the SEP was running a presidential candidate.
Surely that fact – i.e. that a socialist candidate was running on an anti-war
platform – had direct relevance to a debate about the role of US foreign
policy. But bringing that up would have necessarily underscored the differences
between revolutionary socialists and liberals, who were backing the pro-war
candidacy of John Kerry. And clearly North was going out of his way in this speech
not to do that.[48]
The bulk of North’s remarks
concern international law as it applies to the Bush administration’s doctrine
of pre-emptive war. North charts the history of war guilt as a criminal
offense, focusing on the precedent of the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis after
the Second World War. He digs into this history with evident relish, and one
cannot help noticing a contrast between the tone of this speech – freed, as it
were, from the ‘burden’ of having to defend Marxism – and the more ponderous
style and inflated language that often afflicts North’s orthodox
pronouncements. It is as if one were listening to a passionately liberal legal
historian.
The domain of such a historian
is not the class struggle but the struggle for ‘justice’. And this results in
some formulations that are striking departures from Marxism. For example, there
is this paragraph:
In the nineteenth century, von
Clausewitz’s dictum that war was, in essence, politics conducted by other means
guided the diplomacy and military policies of the great powers. But in the
aftermath of World War I, the transformation of Europe into a slaughterhouse
could not be described as simply another form of politics. The concept of war
guilt emerged: that governments could be held responsible and accountable for
waging aggressive war. The resort to war in pursuit of strategic geo-political
and economic objectives—that is, for reasons other than self-defense defined in
the strictest sense of the term—began to be seen in international law as a
crime that could not be justified on the basis of traditional and conventional
“reasons of state.”
One would think from reading
this that von Clausewitz’s dictum was passé. Nothing could be further from the
truth, particularly in light of the Iraq war, which is manifestly a case of
“politics by other means”. North ‘forgets’ to mention that it wasn’t only the
great powers who guided themselves by this dictum but also the great Marxists.
And it is rubbish – or rather liberalism – to claim that somehow the quantity
of casualties canceled out this essential quality of war, that because millions
had died in the First World War, this meant that war “could not be described as
simply another form of politics” any longer. This was never Lenin’s view or
Trotsky’s: everything they understood about imperialist war was rooted in the
Clausewitz dictum. And that is why they repeatedly denounced the whole
apparatus of international law and governance that emerged after the war as a
sham designed to hoodwink the working class, because you could never separate
war from politics, and the notion that one could rid the world of war under
capitalism was a reactionary pipedream.
North will no doubt claim that
he was simply presenting the issue from the point of view of international
legal opinion, but as a Marxist he also had an obligation to explain to his
listeners to what extent these opinions had any political validity.
North never does this, there isn’t a single qualification that he makes to
these opinions. On the contrary, he clearly speaks as a supporter of these
international legal arrangements. Thus he describes the 1928 Kellogg-Briand
treaty for the renunciation of war as a “major step toward the criminalization
of aggressive war,” whose only fault was that it didn’t make violations a
punishable offense. You would never know from this that Trotsky heaped scorn on
this treaty time and again and lambasted Stalin for signing the Soviet Union on
to it.
“The Kellogg Pact,” Trotsky
wrote in 1930, “is an imperialist noose for the weaker states. And the Soviet
government adhered to the pact as an instrument of peace. This, in reality, is
a sowing of illusions, an inadmissible smearing over of contradictions, an
outright deception of the workers in the spirit of social democracy.”[49]
Two years later he described the Kellogg Pact as “a complete fraud whose
purpose is to ‘justify’ only such wars as correspond to American interests.”[50]
There is nothing that has happened since Trotsky’s day that calls for a
revision of these views of bourgeois international justice; on the contrary,
they are as right on the money now as they were seven decades ago. What North
is doing in this speech is precisely what Trotsky attacked as “an inadmissible
smearing over of contradictions,” i.e. of class contradictions, and the
purpose for doing that is to kowtow to liberalism.
(Of course North is perfectly
well aware of Trotsky’s opinions of bourgeois international ‘justice’. And when
not addressing liberals, the WSWS often rightly denounces institutions like the
International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, whose prosecution of Yugoslavia’s
Slobodan Milosevic was a blatant case of ‘victors’ justice’. But that makes
North’s performance in Dublin all the more telling: he donned the wig of
bourgeois legalism to hide his Marxist ‘horns’.)
For a liberal the crimes of
imperialism are the fault of ‘evil’ people doing bad things, and this
moralistic fiction is embedded in the body of bourgeois international law. What
this does is to obscure the systemic nature of war, i.e. that capitalism
breeds war and that war is inescapable under capitalism. It puts the focus
instead on individual leaders, and the fight against war becomes a matter of
bringing those leaders to justice. It should go without saying that those who
perpetrate imperialist war are criminals and deserve to be punished, but to
imagine that war crimes trials will do anything to prevent future wars is
nothing more than the “sowing of illusions.” From today’s vantage point what is
most noteworthy about the Nuremberg Trials that North sets so much store by is
how dramatic a failure they have been in doing anything to prevent war.
But in this speech North chooses
to buy into this liberal fiction. He lays great stress on the fact that the
criminal actions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al., are a rupture
with legal precedent.
The promulgation of the doctrine
of pre-emptive war in September 2002 and its implementation in March 2003 with
the launching of an aggressive war against Iraq represents nothing less than
the unequivocal repudiation by the United States of the legal principles that
were enforced against the Nazi ringleaders at Nuremberg and, therefore, the
criminalization, in the full and most profound legal sense of the word, of
American foreign policy.
Here the kowtowing to liberalism
in the form of harping on bourgeois legal standards leads to an egregious
distortion of history, one which makes it seem as if the “criminalization” of
American foreign policy began with Bush. No doubt Henry Kissinger would be
pleased to learn that the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos or the butchering
of the Chilean working class do not constitute war crimes “in the full and most
profound legal sense.” The truth is that America was engaging in aggressive war
in Korea only a few short years after it signed on to the Nuremberg protocols
and it has never stopped, the most obvious case being Vietnam, along with
covert wars and wars-by-proxy too numerous to mention. Once again this
underscores the fraudulent nature of bourgeois international law, whose primary
purpose, as Trotsky said, is “to ‘justify’ only such wars as correspond to
American interests.” And every American president of the last century, and
particularly every one since the end of the Second World War, has engaged in
such wars and is, before the bar of proletarian justice, a war criminal.
The Bush administration was only repudiating in words what had been repudiated
in deeds countless times before. The truth is that for an American president to
be a war criminal is the political norm under capitalism, irrespective
of the lip service that is (or isn’t) paid to bourgeois standards of justice.
Of course the more openly
aggressive stance expressed in the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war is
significant, but in a social and political sense, not a legalistic one.
Globalization, the steep decline in American economic power and the fact that
there is no longer another superpower to keep American imperialism in check –
all of this has fueled a new upsurge of American militarism. These underlying
conditions are what a Marxist analysis of American foreign policy would have
focused on, and the point of such an analysis would have been to make the case
that the fight against war is now, more than ever, inseparable from the fight
for socialism.
North envisions a day “when
legal proceedings on the Iraq war are finally held,” but he gives no indication
that the struggles of the working class will have anything to do with bringing
that day about. As we noted earlier, he doesn’t even mention the election
campaign his party was then engaged in, a campaign waged against the war
criminals he was denouncing. And he finishes with an appeal to “humanity”, the
perfect liberal abstraction, declaring that “humanity must not tolerate the
reversion to imperialist barbarism of which the invasion of Iraq by the United
States is a terrible omen.” As to how “humanity” is to go about doing
this, North maintains a discrete silence.
North’s Dublin speech was given
six months after the WSWS began cheerleading the “national resistance” in Iraq,
and both express the same political malaise, the same “inadmissible smearing
over of contradictions.” In Iraq this took the form of caving in to bourgeois
nationalism; in Dublin it took the form of kowtowing to liberalism. To be a
revolutionary socialist has always meant having to swim against the stream,
having to rub people the wrong way,
having to be the one jarring voice in the chorus of middle class
‘reasonableness’. There was nothing jarring or ‘unreasonable’ in North’s
speech, there was nothing that would challenge or upset the liberal views of an
audience of students and academics. This was a speech of someone not only eager
to be understood but also eager to be accepted. But that acceptance comes at a
cost of blunting one’s revolutionary edge.
 |
| Mr. North at the lectern in Dublin |
Members and supporters of the
International Committee need to think long and hard about what the WSWS record
on Iraq means. This cannot be written off as a minor lapse in judgment. Let us
recall the quote from the WSWS we cited at the start of this section: “Harsh
times have this painful but salutary effect: organizations and individuals are
tested. Whatever is false, unresolved or unprincipled inevitably reveals
itself.” What the test of Iraq has revealed about the WSWS is that its
commitment to the permanent revolution – i.e. to the fight for the political
independence of the working class – could not withstand a major political
crisis. Obviously this commitment wasn’t abandoned intentionally: the WSWS
editorial board didn’t take a vote to renounce the permanent revolution in
Iraq. But good intentions aren’t the point here, since everyone knows where
they can lead. What the WSWS record on Iraq has brought out are much deeper
problems, which make themselves felt, as it were, below the level of intentions.
These are the problems that Trotsky warned about in In Defense of Marxism,
above all the dangers posed by pragmatic methods of political work. The IC
leadership has ignored those lessons for two decades and the consequences of
that neglect are now before us. It is these problems of Marxist philosophy that
we will examine in the following section.
[1]
David Walsh, “Professor Chomsky Comes in from the cold,” Apr. 5, 2004 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/chom-a05.shtml
The critique was occasioned by Chomsky’s support for John Kerry in 2004
election.
[2]
L. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, p. 276. On line: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1931-tpv/index.htm
[3]
See for example “The Program of Transitional Demands in Fascist Countries” in The
Transitional Program http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1938-tp/index.htm
[4]
“Report on Latin American perspectives”, WSWS, Mar. 18, 2006: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/van1-m18.shtml
[5]
“Stop the war on the Iraqi people”, WSWS, Apr. 7, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/iraq-a07.shtml
[6]
There was still another editorial board statement a day later (i.e. Apr. 9,
2004), but this focused on the role of the Democrats in relation to the Iraq
war.
[7]
“Defend the Iraqi masses”, WSWS, Apr. 8, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/iraq-a08.shtml
[8]
“The diplomacy of imperialism: Iraq and US foreign policy,” Part Two,
WSWS, Mar. 13, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/iraq-m13.shtml
[9]
“Freedom Fires,” Apr. 5, 2004. The column, originally in The Nation, is
now posted on Klein’s website, https://naomiklein.org/freedom-fires/
[10]
“Mutiny in Iraq”, Apr. 28, 2004. Again, originally in The Nation, now
posted here: https://naomiklein.org/mutiny-iraq/
[11]
The combination of Iraqi nationalism and Islamism is chiefly what characterizes
Sadr’s politics and what distinguishes him from the other Shiite parties,
notably the various wings of the Dawa party as well as the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). These differences reflect divisions
within the Shiite clergy, whose top ranks are made up mostly of Iranian-born
clerics including the Shia ‘pope’ of Iraq, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani. Sadr and his family represent a
wing of the clergy with a more Iraqi nationalist orientation. (See a profile on
Sadr, “America’s Unlikely Savior” by Nir Rosen, originally on Salon.com [Feb.
3, 2006]) https://www.salon.com/2006/02/03/muqtada/
[12]
Greetings from David North to Australian SEP: “A devastating blow
to the myth of American invincibility”, WSWS, Apr. 12, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/dn-a12.shtml
[14]
“An exchange on Nader, Kerry and the US war in Iraq”, WSWS, June 1, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/nadr-j01.shtml
[15]
Peter Schwarz, “The politics of opportunism: the ‘radical left’ in France”,
Part Six, WSWS, May 26, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/pab6-m26.shtml
[16]
Chris Harman, “Why Opposing Imperialism Means Supporting Resistance,” Socialist
Review, Dec. 2006, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/why-opposing-imperialism-means-supporting-resistance/
[17]
To bolster his case,
Schwarz contends that the LO’s opposition to the Islamists in Iraq was of a
piece with its support for the French law banning Muslim girls from wearing
headscarves in public schools, but his argument isn’t convincing. He claims
that both positions are part of a trend by the LO to make “advances” towards
the bourgeois state. While that is evident in relation to the headscarf law,
where the LO was blatantly adapting to bourgeois public opinion, on Iraq the
French state was actually opposed to the invasion (for its own imperialist
reasons, needless to say) and anti-Americanism was (and still is) hugely
popular in France, especially on the left. Thus if there was any mileage to be
gained in terms of courting public opinion in France, it was from opposing the
US occupation, not the Islamist resistance. Where Schwarz sees consistency
between the two policies, there is instead the compartmentalization typical of
revisionist outfits between gross opportunism in relation to the headscarf law and
formal adherence to Marxist principle in relation to the Iraqi Islamists.
[18] “Irak- La montee de l’integrisme,
sous-produit d’une sale guerre” Lutte Ouvriere, 2 April 2004, https://www.lutte-ouvriere.org/portail/journal/2004-04-01-irak-la-montee-de-lintegrisme-sous-produit-dune-sale-guerre_8396.html
[19] “Irak: l’occupation alimente l’escalade
integriste” Lutte Ouvriere, 9 April 2004, https://www.lutte-ouvriere.org/portail/journal/2004-04-08-irak-loccupation-alimente-lescalade-integriste_8435.html
[20]
Frankly one finds more insight into Sadr’s politics in the LO press than
anywhere in the WSWS. Here is an excerpt from an article posted by the LO
tendency in Britain, Workers’ Fight, in July/August 2004:
Indeed, given that Sadr City was among the neighbourhoods which
organised help for besieged Sunnis in Falluja, it may well be the case that, on
the basis of the credit he has earned, al Sadr now seeks to emerge as a symbol
of radical nationalism, with the aim of uniting all Iraqi Muslims behind his
banner. This would be consistent with his announcement that he intends to form
a political party and will support [then interim premier] Allawi's government
as long as its aim is to end foreign occupation of, and interference with the
country. Of
course, this changes nothing to the deeply reactionary nature of al Sadr's
politics. But it means that the west's power game of playing Sunni against Shia
may end up in failure. One of the consequences of the western occupation of
Iraq may well be to allow Islamic fundamentalists like al-Sadr to grab the flag
of Iraqi nationalism, thereby providing them with a social base they had never
enjoyed before. If so, the US leaders will have no partners to bargain with
other than the radical Islamic factions - exactly what they wanted to avoid. (Class
Struggle #56, “Iraq – ‘Democratic Process’ or civil war?” http://www.union-communiste.org/?EN-archp-show-2004-6-553-3087-x.html )
The
image of Sadr as maneuvering “to grab the flag of Iraqi nationalism” in order
to expand his power base is exactly right, and stands in stark contrast to the
vapid rhetoric of the WSWS. Also, the analysis of imperialism is more
perceptive: far from being master manipulators, their ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics
will finally blow up in their face even as they plunge Iraq into the nightmare
of sectarian civil war. The point here
isn’t that the LO was possessed of any special brilliance; quite the contrary,
their theoretical level is abysmally low. It is rather that insight into the
political role of Sadr as a bourgeois nationalist-cum-fundamentalist was
readily apparent to anyone maintaining even a formal adherence to the
perspective of permanent revolution. The only reason the WSWS did not see this
is because it was being willfully blind.
[21]
The fact that this document has never been posted on the WSWS says something
about the attitude of the IC towards its own history, consistent with the
disregard for theory we discussed earlier.
[22]
How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism 1973-1985 in Fourth
International, v. 13, n. 1, Summer 1986, p. 45. Available online at https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/00.html
Slaughter’s report (“Report on the International
Situation made to the International Conference of Trotskyists by C. Slaughter,
September 1963”) is reprinted in Trotskyism
Versus Revisionism, v. 4, pp. 186-221. This passage is on p. 188.
[23]
Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, v. 4, p. 193. Also How the WRP
Betrayed Trotskyism, ibid.
[24]
Ibid.
[25]
How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, p. 57.
[26]
Ibid, p. 48.
[27]
Ibid.
[28]
“US makes tactical retreat before Iraqi uprising”, WSWS, June 1, 2004: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/sadr-j01.shtml
[30]
“Baghdad protest demands an end to US occupation of Iraq”, WSWS, Apr. 11, 2005:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/iraq-a11.shtml
[32] “WSWS International Editorial Board Meeting –
The consequences of the US-led war against Iraq”, Mar. 3, 2006: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/jcre-m03.shtml
[33]
“Saddam Hussein execution: A sectarian lynching”, WSWS, Jan. 3, 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/sadh-j03.shtml
[34]
“US military begins operations in Baghdad’s Sadr City”, WSWS, Mar. 10, 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/sadr-m10.shtml
[35]
An example of how the
WSWS continues to function as an apologist for bourgeois nationalism is the
following potted history of Iraq:
It is true, of
course, that the division within Islam between Sunni and Shiite goes back more
than 1,000 years. But this division, however deep-rooted, never became the
basis for mass sectarian violence under the Ottoman Empire, British colonial
rule or Iraq’s 70 years of semi-independence. Sunnis and Shiites lived together
in the same neighborhoods in Baghdad and other parts of the country and
frequently intermarried. It was only under the impact of ever-increasing US
pressure—war, followed by 12 years of economic blockade, followed by invasion
and occupation—that Iraqi society disintegrated along the fault lines of
religion, ethnic group and tribe. (“Blaming the Iraqis: A new cover-up for
American militarism”, Feb. 10, 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/iraq-f10.shtml.)
The context here is
an attack on conservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer of The Washington
Post who try to foist the blame for the sectarian violence on the Iraqis
themselves rather than on the American occupation. But the WSWS writer Patrick
Martin, (whose comparison of the Iraqi resistance to the American Revolution we
cited earlier), ends up sounding more like a liberal apologist for bourgeois
nationalism than a revolutionary Marxist. The truth is that Saddam’s regime was
notorious for brutal persecution of both the Kurds and the Shiites. By some
estimates, 200,000 Kurds were butchered by the Baathists during the 1980s and
as many as 300,000 Shiites were murdered, first in a massive exercise in ethnic
cleansing in the late 1980s and then in a bloody retribution for a failed
Shiite uprising after the Gulf War in 1991. If this does not constitute “mass
sectarian violence,” then the term has no meaning. A Marxist response to
reactionaries like Krauthammer would have exposed the crimes of US imperialism without
whitewashing the crimes of Iraqi bourgeois nationalism. Indeed, in respect to
sectarian violence, the crucial point that needed to be made was that Bush is
very much following in Saddam’s footsteps. It also needed to be said that if
the US policy of divide-and-rule has succeeded, it is because of the willing
involvement of both the Sunni and Shiite bourgeois elites in resorting to
sectarian violence to further their own class interests.
[36]
“The implications in Iraq of Bush’s military ‘surge’”, WSWS, Feb. 15, 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/iraq-f15.shtml
[37]
“Huge bomb blast in Baghdad inflames sectarian tensions,” WSWS, Feb. 6, 2007: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/bomb-f06.shtml
[38]
David Bacon, “Between Soldiers and Bombs”, Aug. 2, 2005, Foreign Policy in
Focus. https://fpif.org/between_soldiers_and_bombs/
[39]
Ibid.
[40]
It is still an open question as to who was responsible for killing the union
officials. All three were from the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU),
including its international secretary, Hadi Saleh. The IFTU is associated with
the Iraqi Communist Party, which at the time held two ministerial posts in the
interim regime of Ayad Allawi and was backing the Jan. 30, 2005 national
elections, which the Sunni resistance in particular was strongly opposed to. It
is quite possible that these killings were, at least in part, an attack on
perceived collaborators with the occupation, though the singling out of trade
union officials suggests that these ‘hits’ were also intended to intimidate the
labor movement. Marxists had an obligation first of all to condemn these
killings and also to explain their implications, including an examination of
the politics of Iraqi Stalinism. The WSWS did neither.
[41]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/iraq-m12.shtml
and http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/iraq-m13.shtml
[42]
The essential text here is the thousand-page plus The Old Social Classes and
the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978) by the Palestinian-American
historian Hanna Batatu, which contains a detailed history of the ICP up to the
time of Saddam’s takeover.
[43]
“Q&A about Iraq –Iraqi Communist Party viewpoint”, an interview with an ICP
central committee member, People’s Weekly World, posted Nov. 30, 2006, https://peoplesworld.org/article/q-and-a-about-iraq-iraqi-communist-party-viewpoint/
[44]
“Between Soldiers and Bombs,” see n. 42.
[45]
“Iraqi Oil Workers Hold 24-Hour Strike – Oil Exports Shut Down”, a statement by
the Basra Oil Workers, July 22, 2005, https://www.indymedia.ie/article/70934?author_name=s&save_prefs=true
[46]
Much the same seems to be the case in the Kurdish region in the north, where
the official labor movement is even more strongly aligned with ethnic
nationalism. The Kurdish elites, like their Shiite counterparts, are pushing
for a ‘federalism’ that is a thinly veiled balkanization of the country. While
the Shiite bourgeois elites want a free hand to exploit the oil in the Basra
area, the Kurdish elites want exclusive access to the oil in the Kirkuk region.
[47]
“WSWS Chairman David North denounces Iraq war at Dublin debate”, WSWS, Oct. 15,
2004, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/deba-o15.shtml
[48]
It is curious that though Chris Marsden is listed as one of the debaters, we
never learn what he had to say. It would be interesting to know whether his
remarks were as sanitized of any references to Marxism as North’s. But even if
they weren’t, it was North’s speech, not Marsden’s, that the WSWS editors chose
to highlight in their coverage of this debate.
[49]
Leon Trotsky, “World Unemployment and the Soviet Five Year Plan,” Aug. 21,
1930, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1930, p. 360.
[50]
Leon Trotsky, “Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam,” July 25, 1932
in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932, p. 154.
