Afghanistan, Islam and the Revolutionary Left
By Peter Taaffe on behalf of the CWI.
The following is a lengthy article written in February 2002. We are publishing it now because the issues it analyses, of war, Islam and the approach of Marxists,
are relevant to the new world situation of increased imperialist intervention
in the neo-colonial world and the continued threat of a US invasion of Iraq.
July
2002
1)
War
is an acid test for the programme, perspectives, strategy and tactics of all
political formations, particularly those that stand on the left. Everything which
is positive, which in action shows a way forward for the working class, is
revealed. Conversely, everything that is rotten, which is false, is also laid
bare. So it was in the Gulf war, in the conflict in Kosova/Kosovo and now also
in the war in Afghanistan.
2)
The
Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida have suffered a severe military and
political defeat. The scale of their defeat is heightened by the fact that
there was virtually no resistance on the ground to the imperialists and the
Northern Alliance. We have analysed this elsewhere (see the CWI’s previous
statements) and wish here to compare the positions taken by the CWI and its
sections with those of other organisations, particularly those who claim to
stand on the revolutionary left. This approach, the method of contrasts, was
deployed by Leon Trotsky, particularly in the 1930s, as a means of educating
the revolutionary cadre. Most of the revolutionary left erred, and sometimes
quite grossly, during the war. Some were opportunist; mostly however they were
ultra-left and sometimes managed to combine both opportunism and ultra-leftism.
Misuse
of Trotsky’s writings
3)
The
theoretical underpinning for the positions of some of these organisations
during this war is, according to them, ironically, comments made by Trotsky on
wars and armed conflicts in the 1930s in particular. A Marxist approach for
them is to merely repeat by rote Trotsky’s phrases. His fragmentary and
undeveloped comments, particularly in relation to Brazil, Ethiopia and the war
between Japan and China in the 1930s are used to justify their arguments. They
use the letter of Trotsky’s writings without understanding its spirit or his
method. Above all, they completely ignore the historical context in which these
remarks were made.
4)
Trotsky,
perhaps anticipating the future misuse of his writings, comments appropriately
in relation to the Chinese-Japanese war in the 1930s: “Genuine internationalism
does not consist of repeating stereotyped phrases on every occasion but
thinking over the specific conditions and problems”, particularly those thrown
up by wars and revolutions, it could be added. The most important law of the
dialectic is that truth is concrete. A rounded out analysis involves
understanding the specific conditions, above all the historical background
against which a war takes place, and the objective factors involved, which for
us includes the consciousness of the working class, both in the industrialised
and the neo-colonial world.
5)
The
world has undergone colossal changes since Trotsky wrote. The reality which
confronts us is entirely different today. Therefore, it would be completely
mechanical to simply apply remarks made in the 1930s to the current situation.
World relationships and particularly the relationship between the ‘advanced’
imperialist countries and the neo-colonial areas of the world have undergone
immense changes. In the past, imperialism exercised direct, military domination
of many – but not all – areas of what is now the neo-colonial world. This has
been largely replaced by indirect economic control. Undoubtedly, the effects of
this are, in general, no less oppressive for the masses. Nevertheless,
independence for the former ‘colonies’, the development of new states and with
this a national consciousness, as well as the relative strengthening of these
regions vis-à-vis imperialism – at least of the larger states – has
considerably changed the position.
6)
Marxists
have to implacably oppose the continued imperialist domination and the obscene
use of overwhelming military might to maintain their power against the masses
in the neo-colonial world, as in the case of Afghanistan. But the profound
changes which have taken place mean that it is ludicrous today to compare, for
instance, the regime of the ‘emperor’ of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, in 1935 with
the phenomenon today of bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida and the Taliban. The colossal
development of the means of worldwide communications – TV, radio, newspapers,
Internet, etc. – is one of the most obvious differences between now and then.
In consequence, there is a heightened awareness of what is happening
internationally.
7)
The
masses in the 1930s would have understood little of the precise detail of the
Haile Selassie regime. Moreover, Ethiopia was under attack by the fascist
regime of Benito Mussolini at the time Trotsky was writing. Given the
democratic illusions of the working class of Europe or the US in particular,
together with the recent bloody example of what fascism would mean for them in
the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, it was natural that the
sympathies of the masses in the 1930s would be with Ethiopia against fascist
Italy. The British and most of the European bourgeoisie together with the US,
for their own imperialist strategic interests, also played on this sympathy for
Ethiopia. It is nonsense to imply, however, as the sectarian organisations do
by quoting these remarks of Trotsky, that the mass of the populations in most
industrialised countries could take the same attitude today towards bin Laden
and the Taliban.
Consciousness
8)
This
does not mean to say that we have to revise the past positions of Marxism,
particularly elaborated by Lenin and Trotsky. We clearly differentiate between
the advanced imperialist countries and those in the colonial or the
neo-colonial world. In general we still support the peoples in the neo-colonial
world in the struggle against imperialist domination, particularly when this
takes on the form, as it did in Afghanistan, of military intervention. In this
case we were clearly on the side of the Afghani people and in the imperialist
countries we opposed the war. Support for the Afghani people and their
resistance against the armed incursions of imperialism is not the same as
support for the Taliban, even if this support is ‘critical’, as some left
organisations have posed it.
9)
Moreover,
to call baldly and crudely for the ‘defeat of US imperialism’ and its coalition
allies as an agitational slogan is wrong. When Lenin used the term
“revolutionary defeatism”, as Trotsky subsequently explained, it was in order
to clearly delineate revolutionary Marxism from opportunism following the
betrayal of the German social democracy and their opportunist international
co-thinkers at the beginning of the First World War. It was primarily a policy
for the cadres to draw a clear line of separation between the revolutionaries
and the opportunists. It was not a policy that could have won the masses to the
banner of Bolshevism or to the revolution. It was the programme of the
Bolsheviks and everything that flowed from this, including the taking of power
by the working class in alliance with the peasantry, which guaranteed the
success of the Russian Revolution.
10) Many ultra-left organisations
are organically incapable of understanding the approach of Lenin, Trotsky and
the Bolsheviks. They take what have been essentially formulations used within
the Marxist movement to sum up, delineate and clearly differentiate one idea or
conception from another as an expression of what should be stated publicly.
Consequently they have been unable to pass from a circle mentality and
intervene successfully in mass movements. Even worse, they have miseducated a
layer of young people and occasionally workers, who otherwise could play an
important role in strengthening and building Marxism.
11) How we relate to the
consciousness, which can be different in the industrialised world compared to
the neo-colonial world, whilst still maintaining a principled Marxist position,
is the key to finding a road to the working class and the youth. This is not an
easy task; a correct position can only be arrived at through analysis and
discussion, sometimes of the most painstaking kind. Such an approach is,
however, foreign to many organisations of the revolutionary left. For them it
is merely a question of presenting a ‘programme’, usually sucked out of their
thumb or drawn out of the writings of Trotsky or Lenin from a different period,
and mechanically applied to the situation irrespective of the ebbs and flows in
the mood or understanding of the masses.
12) This was not the approach of
Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. The mood of the
masses was a vital issue which was crucial in determining tactics at different
turning points in the nine months between the February and October Revolutions.
For instance, in July Lenin opposed the seizure of power by the Petrograd
working class who were ready to take this step because it was premature, given
that consciousness lagged behind throughout the rest of Russia and particularly
amongst the peasant masses who formed the bulk of the Tsarist armies at that
stage. A serious attempt to seize power would have risked the crushing of the
Petrograd working class, and therefore the vanguard of the revolution, with the
possible complete derailment of the revolution. In the event, the decision of
the Bolsheviks to go along with the demonstration, but stopping short of an
insurrection, lessened the repression which inevitably followed the July
events. Similar care in gauging the mood of the working class in the three
months before the October Revolution was a key, hotly disputed issue within the
ranks of the Bolshevik party.
13) We have always taken the
consciousness of the working class, which is not a static thing, into account
in formulating demands and an approach towards issues such as war. This is not
an easy task and even in a healthy Marxist organisation can provoke controversy
and differences.
The
Gulf war and
September 11
14) In the Gulf War some took the
position in the first, initial phase of the war that it would be necessary to
give ‘critical support’ to Saddam Hussein in the intervention in Kuwait. We
were in this war on the side of the peoples of the Middle East, Iraqis, Kurds
and others against the armed and subsequently brutal intervention of US
imperialism in the region. However, in the industrialised countries, where the
consciousness was different to that which existed in the Arab world, for
instance, then our support did not take the form of support for the Saddam
regime and its armed intervention in Kuwait. We implacably opposed the US,
Britain and their allies going to war against Iraq. We demanded the end of the
war, the withdrawal of US, British and other troops and put forward the slogan
of let the Iraqi people, the Kurds and even Kuwaitis decide their own fate.
15) When our public representatives
were challenged on TV or radio along the lines of ‘Are you in favour of the
withdrawal or forcing out of Iraqi troops who have intervened in Kuwait against
the wishes of the people of that state,’ we could not reply in a bald unskilful
fashion. Our answer, in general, was to say, ‘Yes, but not by US or British
bayonets but through a successful uprising of the workers and peasants of Iraq
against Saddam, which could effect such a withdrawal and allow the peoples of
the region to decide their fate democratically’. This was the only way that we
could approach such an issue in the industrialised capitalist countries, given
the repulsive, undemocratic and viciously dictatorial features of the Saddam
regime, not least of which was the brutal suppression of the Kurdish people in
the north and the Shias in the south. We could not take any responsibility
during the Gulf War for Saddam Hussein, his regime or actions. We sought to
separate this from our open support of the Iraqi and other peoples of the area
in the resistance which they put up to imperialism’s ‘war for oil’ in the
region.
16) At the same time, the difference
in the outlook towards the Gulf conflict meant that revolutionary Marxists in
the neo-colonial world would have somewhat different tasks, would have to pose
things differently from the way this was done in the advanced industrial
countries. There was a common position of all members and sections of the CWI
in whatever sphere of the world they operated in expressing opposition and
fighting against the imperialist attacks on Iraq. In the neo-colonial world,
while there was distaste for the dictatorial features of the Saddam regime,
nevertheless the hostility to imperialism meant that there was greater sympathy
for Iraq on the principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
17) This was enormously heightened
in the Arab world where Saddam’s actions were also seen as a blow not only
against imperialism but its local allies in the form of Israeli ruling class.
Moreover, the justification by Saddam for the take-over of Kuwait – a legacy of
the artificial Balkanisation of the Arabian Peninsula by imperialism – found a
certain echo. This undoubtedly tended to push the disquiet felt towards the
dictatorial Arab regimes into the background in mass consciousness. There was,
in a sense, ‘critical support’ for Saddam because he appeared to be striking a
blow against imperialism. For instance, rockets were fired from Iraqi territory
which struck Israel. This was a reversal of what normally happened in the
Middle East up to then, with Israel devastating Palestinian areas and Arab
targets with their superior military hardware.
18) The slant of propaganda, the
agitational demands that would be raised in this situation would be different
to the way that Marxists would approach it in the advanced industrial
countries. Even in the neo-colonial world however, including in the Middle
East, it would have been wrong to give unqualified support to Saddam, who was
seen by sections of the Arab masses as a ‘progressive dictator’, in this
conflict. It would have been even worse to do this in the case of bin Laden and
the Taliban, who could not be described as even ‘capitalist’. If anything, they
were tribal or feudal in their outlook, programme and fantastical schemas for
the world. Despite this, a somewhat different attitude did exist towards the
attack on the twin towers in the neo-colonial world compared to Europe, Japan
and the USA. Even in some industrialised countries like Greece, which in a
sense because of its past and its location straddles the industrialised
countries and the neo-colonial world, the attitude towards 11 September was
different.
Attitude
to US working class
19) Regret at the loss of innocent
lives went together with a feeling that the arrogant US ruling class ‘brought
this on themselves’. Marxists understand the reasons for this, the oppression
and super-exploitation of the masses in the neo-colonial world, but we do not
condone this attitude. We need to re-emphasise the fact that it was not the US
capitalists who were, in the main, the victims of 11 September. In the main, it
was ordinary US workers and middle-class people who perished. Our comrades in
the neo-colonial world also have to counter the attitude that does exist
amongst sections of the workers and peasants in Africa, Asia and Latin America,
that the US population is one reactionary mass, that the working class does not
exist or even if it does is complicit in the crimes of US imperialism
worldwide. The terroristic acts of 11 September have provided the pretext for
US imperialism to rampage through Afghanistan, to prepare for a possible
invasion of Iraq, and to reassert its wounded power and prestige with the
support, at least at the beginning, of the majority of the US population.
20) However, Marxists in this war do
not have one programme in one country or sphere of the world and a different
one elsewhere. In Britain, Europe, the US or in Afghanistan we are opposed to
the war. In Afghanistan, it is necessary, of course, to resist the military
attacks of the imperialists. The workers and peasants’ resistance would be
separate and apart from the Taliban and even against it. The approach, the
slant of the propaganda may differ, according to the different consciousness
which exists in different countries.
21) After the attack on the Twin
Towers, imperialism stoked up the fear of the US population for bin Laden and
al-Qa’ida. They felt that these organisations threatened their existence.
Moreover, this idea was reinforced in the interview that was given by bin Laden
to a Pakistani journalist, reprinted in the Western press during the war, in
which he ascribes to the whole of the US population the crimes of the US ruling
class. “As ever [bin Laden] denied, and did not deny, involvement in the 11
September hijackings, saying that all Americans were responsible for the
‘massacring’ of Muslims in ‘Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq’ and that
Muslims have the ‘right to attack… in reprisal’. ‘The American people should
remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president,
their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses
them to massacre Palestinians. The American Congress endorses all government
measures and this proves that the entire America [sic] is responsible.’” [The
Observer, 11 November 2001]
22) Bin Laden and al-Qa’ida were
pictured by Bush and Co. as a mortal threat to the very existence of the US.
However, mere propaganda by the bourgeoisie is not enough to shape public
opinion. The actions and statements of bin Laden and al-Qa’ida reinforced in
the minds of the US population that they did indeed pose such a threat.
Consequently, there was a profound patriotic wave during the war. But in its
aftermath, as we predicted, there has been a growing questioning that US
foreign policy and the actions of the US government, and by implication the US
capitalists, created the conditions which led to the catastrophe of 11
September. Undoubtedly, this critical mood will grow but in no sense is there
sympathy or support for al-Qa’ida or bin Ladism. They are perceived as a
terrible and frightening result of US policy in the neo-colonial world.
23) And yet, the small, ultra-left
groups would seek to convince us that during this war Marxists should advocate
‘critical support’, including common military action, with al-Qa’ida and the
Taliban, in confronting US imperialism. They may say that this is a policy to
be applied in the neo-colonial world but this idea is advocated in their
journals which are sold primarily, in the case of some, in the advanced
industrialised countries. Moreover, it is also wrong from a Marxist point of
view to advocate this in the neo-colonial world as well. This is a programme
not for the masses, not to reach workers and convince them of the ideas of
Marxism, but to drive them away from Trotskyism. It is a programme for the
small (often very small) meeting room and not for reaching and convincing workers.
War
and Marxism
24) What is required today is not a
simple repetition of ideas which fitted the conditions of 60 years ago or even
20 years ago. The development of independent states and national bourgeois
regimes is a big change compared to when Trotsky wrote on these issues. Some of
them, like that of Saddam Hussein, have the most hideous and repulsive features
of dictatorship. They suppress the working class and deny national and ethnic
rights. This has changed the circumstances, to a great extent, in which
Marxists work today. It means that we cannot simply imitate the approach of
Trotsky at the time of the Chinese/Japanese war in the 1930s, in Ethiopia in
1935, or base ourselves upon the hypothetical situation sketched out by Trotsky
in relation to Brazil. We will comment further on these issues a little bit
later on, but they are related to the approach that we adopt to war and,
specifically, the war in Afghanistan, as well as Islam in general.
25) Marxism does not have a
‘general’ position on wars. We have never put all wars on the same plane. There
are ‘just’ wars, in which Marxists and Trotskyists have given critical support
to one side against the other in the course of a war. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels supported the revolutionary struggle of the Irish against British
imperialism in the 19th century, as they did also in the struggle of
the Poles against the Russian tsar. This was despite the fact that, in the
words of Trotsky, “These two nationalist wars and leaders were, for the most
part, members of the bourgeoisie and even, at times of the feudal aristocracy…
at all events, Catholic reactionaries”. We ourselves gave support, both
political and material, to the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the
nationalist war waged against French imperialism in Algeria, which culminated
in its liberation and the evacuation of French forces in 1962.
26) But there was nothing
‘progressive’ or ‘just’ in the brutal war of the US, Britain and the
‘coalition’, which they have waged against the Afghan people under the false
banner of waging a ‘war against terrorism’. The perceived ‘war aims’ of
eliminating bin Laden and al-Qa’ida have still not been achieved at the time of
writing. Our position has been explained very clearly in CWI material we have
produced on the war. This was primarily a war to restore the wounded prestige
and power of US and world imperialism. Moreover, given the capitulation of the
Taliban (if not yet of the ‘Arab Afghans’) imperialism has succeeded
temporarily in strengthening its own position and altering the relationship of
world forces to its own advantage. (This was shown by the bellicose words and
actions of George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and even the previously ‘dove-like’
Colin Powell in giving the green light to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli ruling
class to launch its 2001 offensive against the Palestinian people. The aim of
this was to seriously undermine the already fragile authority of Yasser Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority (PA). [See previous CWI documents on the Middle
East.])
27) This was followed by US
government officials declaring that Iraq would be the next target, and
‘military-police’ type operations were in preparation against Somalia and
possibly Sudan. This is a war to root out and allegedly crush al-Qa’ida once
and for all. In the bloody equation of war, it is not possible to accurately
predict the precise outcome. However, the outcome of a military conflict
between US imperialism, the mightiest military power the world has ever seen,
and the feeble Taliban was from the outset equivalent to a contest between an
elephant and a flea, which the elephant could not fail to win. However, what
could not be predetermined were the kind of social reserves the Taliban could
call on given foreign intervention in Afghanistan. Events illustrated the very
narrow basis for the regime, which ensured victory for imperialism in the main
through the use of air power backed up by the ‘ground troops’ of US
imperialism.
28) What was unexpected from all
sides was the rapid capitulation of the Taliban in the north and the minimal
resistance in the south. This has had important consequences. Victory to
imperialism, combined with the complete capitulation without real struggle by
the Taliban, has had big repercussions worldwide, particularly in the
neo-colonial world. It is perceived that US imperialism has once again been
militarily victorious. This is the third military victory in a little over a
decade – the Gulf war, Kosova/Kosovo and now Afghanistan. However, even more
than in the previous two conflicts, the rampant triumphalism of US imperialism
is open and unrestrained, with one of their representatives openly declaring,
“We are on a roll”.
29) Mistakenly, imperialism now
believes it can impose its power with minimal resistance anywhere on the globe.
Ultimately, all its problems will be compounded. It has undoubtedly
strengthened itself temporarily while the confidence of the world working class
and labour movement, particularly in the neo-colonial world, has suffered a
blow. How long lasting and how severe this will be is not possible to say at
this stage. It was for all these reasons that we implacably opposed US
imperialism and its war. Strip away all the ‘democratic’ phraseology and
camouflage and what we had was a new version of an imperialist war, not just
against Afghanistan but the whole neo-colonial world and, therefore, the
majority of humankind.
Not
a traditional
colonial war
30) But it was not, as the ‘United
Secretariat of the Fourth International’ (USFI) argued, simply a new version of
a traditional colonial war, motivated primarily for economic reasons: “A war
for oil”. The reality of US imperialism’s aims in Afghanistan is more complex
than this. Ultimately, of course, economic power, the financial stake of
imperialism and the source of its profits and income are all-important, even
decisive, factors. It was for these reasons that US oil companies feted the
Taliban and took them on lavish trips to the US in the 1990s. Their perception
of Afghanistan at that stage was as an important area for a possible pipeline
for the as yet largely untapped oil and gas riches in the Caspian Sea and the
Transcaucasus. However, given the organic instability of Afghanistan, let alone
the Transcaucasus region, the site of this country as a possible pipeline was
problematical to say the least. Even in the post-war situation, such is the
likely chaos dislocation and anarchy that it would be a very big gamble for the
oil companies to engage in such a risky venture.
31) The resources of the
Transcaucasus and the Caspian could be important issues for imperialism in the
long run. They were not, however, the immediate cause of this war. Prior to 11
September a mighty tussle was taking place between Putin’s Russian capitalism,
which still considers the Caucasus as a vital component of its ‘sphere of
influence’, and the US oil companies, backed up by the Bush administration,
which were struggling to supplant it. After the attack on the Twin Towers,
which revealed the involvement of Saudi nationals and also some of the figures
in the Saudi regime, at least financially, much discussion ensued in the US
bourgeois press about a switch in US interests from Saudi Arabian oil to a
possible alternative supply in the Caucasus. However, this is still the music
of the future, given the increased dependence of US imperialism on Middle
Eastern, particularly Saudi, oil since the Gulf war. The motivating factor,
therefore, in the first instance, for US imperialism’s intervention was to
restore its power and prestige, which was severely dented by the attacks of 11
September. Any increased income flowing from this victory was to come at a
later stage.
32) If, therefore, we perceive this
war as thoroughly reactionary on the part of imperialism, does this mean that
we throw in our lot, albeit ‘critically’, with those who have allegedly
‘resisted’ the US juggernaut, namely bin Laden, his al-Qa’ida and the Taliban
government? Unbelievably, this is the position of some small Trotskyist groups,
such as Workers Power and the Morenoite LIT. The latter is largely based in
Latin America. Their approach will find absolutely no echo amongst the world
working class, particularly the proletariat in the developed capitalist
countries. Nevertheless, because they utilised some of the past writings of
Trotsky to justify their position during the war they could, and did in some
instances, confuse and befuddle some young people and workers who came into
contact with them. It is necessary, therefore, to deal with their arguments
here as a means of clarifying the issues within our own ranks. They also show
utter confusion on developments within ‘Islam’.
Islam
– radical
and right-wing
33) Therefore, before proceeding to
analyse their positions, it is necessary to clarify our attitude to ‘political
Islam’. What is sometimes called ‘fundamentalism’ is often referred to within
the Moslem world as ‘political Islam’. This is adequate for bourgeois
professors and commentators, as well as some on the left, but for the CWI it
does not accurately describe the political antecedents as well as the position
of different Islamic groups within the current political spectrum.
34) Some of the trends and
organisations within the mass movement which led the Iranian revolution and the
overthrow of the Shah were examples of what we mean by ‘radical Islam’ or
‘radical Islamic fundamentalism’. Those who supported these ideas when
questioned as to what kind of society they were fighting for usually said they
wanted a ‘republic of the poor’. However, the world background against which
the Iranian revolution took place was entirely different to the present one.
Then, the Stalinist states – with a planned economy and the totalitarian regime
– existed. This, together with the evident bankruptcy of landlordism and
capitalism in the neo-colonial world, radicalised the oppositional movement to
the tyranny of the Shah and the Iranian elite who had fattened themselves on
Iran’s huge oil reserves. This opposition was largely based among the urban
poor in Tehran in particular, as well as the half-starved Iranian peasant
masses. The ‘model’ of a planned economy in the background gave the movement a
pronounced radical and ‘left’ character.
35) So powerful was this trend that
it compelled the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in its first stage to
adopt a very left radical phraseology and a virulent hostility to imperialism,
particularly US imperialism. This was matched by actions which led to the
taking over by the state of a majority of industry. There appeared at one stage
the possibility of Iran establishing a deformed workers’ state in the image of
Moscow, with a planned economy, albeit with a totalitarian political regime
where power was concentrated in the hands of the mullahs and the Moslem clergy.
However, the revolution stalled. An incipient civil war has ensued between
different factions of the Moslem clergy. The centre of gravity gradually moved
in a rightward direction. This in turn has led to the privatisation of formerly
nationalised sectors.
36) Today in Iran, there is a
ferocious struggle between different wings of Islam. At the bottom of this is a
conflict between a right-wing clergy which is determined to hold on to the
levers of state power and sections of the bourgeoisie, probably supported now
by a majority of the population and those who wish to move in a more ‘modern’,
that is Western capitalist, direction. Young people in particular are in open
revolt at the suffocating conditions imposed upon them by the mullahs and their
‘religious’ police.
37) In contrast to the early radical
phase of the Iranian revolution, the rise of Islam and what is now called
‘political Islam’, particularly in the Arab world, in the last decade is mainly
a right-wing phenomenon. The development of these organisations, and their
embrace by more and more sections of the population including big sections of
the middle class in countries like Egypt, is partly a reflection of the failure
of earlier Arab movements, and partly a conscious effort on the part of
imperialism and their local satraps – the feudal, dictatorial Arab regimes – to
use Islam against the left and radical forces within the Middle East.
38) In a searching article in the
New York Times (carried in the International Herald Tribune on 3 December
2001), Saad Mehio gave a graphic description of how the past use of Islam by
these regimes, fully supported by US imperialism in particular, had recoiled on
them with fatal consequences. Posing the question of what comes after bin Laden
and the Taliban, he concluded: “Probably more Talibans and new Osama bin
Ladens.” And the reason for this phenomenon “involves the immoral, unscrupulous
and irreligious exploitation of Islam as a political weapon – by everyone. The
West, the United States, Arab and other Moslem tyrannies have all used the
weapon of Islam. And they are all paying their different prices for it.”
39) He describes how Islam was
conscripted to combat ‘communism’ – a broad definition to include anybody who
was on the left or a socialist, not just Stalinists – during the Cold War. The
ability of imperialism and its local Arab agents was enormously facilitated by
the failure of Arab nationalism and of Stalinism. Mass communist parties, in
countries like Iraq and the Sudan, had the opportunity of taking power but
failed because of their false Stalinist policies. This together with the
collapse of the ‘socialist model’ in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
symbolised by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, led to the rise of the
right-wing Islam. Mehio comments: “The policy of using political Islam as an
anticommunist tool was a crucial reason why so much of the Moslem world came to
be dominated by stagnant, undemocratic but stable (or so it seemed) and
adequately pro-Western governments, on the one hand, and the traditional forces
of political Islam reconfigured for the latter half of the 20th
century on the other.”
40) He goes on: “The crowning
achievement of such a party was the defeat of the modernising alternative:
those movements that hoped to avoid aligning with either the Soviet Union or
America to develop their societies along secular lines by, ideally, even more
democratic means and to substitute nationalism for colonial humility and
Islamic traditionalism. Such movements were sometimes called Nasserite, after
President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. He struggled against the Moslem
Brotherhood for most of his political life. The Nasserite space has been
shrinking in the three decades since his death.”
41) Nasser’s heir, Anwar Sadat, and
the Egyptian ruling class as a whole, decided to move in a directly opposite
path of his patron and predecessor. He consciously fostered the growth of
Islam, as a counterweight to nationalism and the left, and also sought the
embrace of US imperialism. The Egyptian regime is propped up to the tune of $3
billion of US subsidies every year. Sadat’s actions recoiled on him in the most
deadly fashion; he perished at the hands of the very fundamentalists he had
helped to foster, because of his agreement with Israel.
Israel
fosters
Islamist groups
42) To a greater or lesser extent
the Arab elites followed in the footsteps of Sadat in nurturing their own
native breed of Islamic fundamentalism, exemplified in the financing (with
petro-dollars) of about 7,500 religious schools in Pakistan, India and the Arab
world. These schools taught the most backward isolationist interpretation of
the Qur’an and Islam and were the bases from which the Taliban sprang to wreak
such havoc in the lives of the Afghani people, which has resulted in the
present catastrophe. Even the dictatorial regime of Pervaiz Musharraf, after
witnessing the deleterious effects of the obscurantist mullah-dominated
madrassahs, made noises during the conflict about the need to curtail them.
Mehio comments: “The regional system [in the Arab world] that Washington had
nurtured during the Cold War but then left to its own devices after 1989 was
seen to have turned into a hatchery of human missiles and suicidal rage
directed against the United States itself.”
43) However, it was not just the US
but its local Middle East agents, the Israeli ruling class, which also fostered
Islamic groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as counterweights to what it
perceived in the 1970s and 1980s as the more radical, secular Palestinian
organisations, such as Fatah or the PFLP. Robert Fisk underlined this point
when he wrote in The Independent: “Hamas, the principle target of the Sharon
‘war on terror’, was originally sponsored by Israel. Back in the 1980s when Mr
Arafat was the ‘super-terrorist’ and Hamas was a pleasant little Moslem
charity, albeit venomous in its opposition to Israel, the Israeli government
encouraged its members to build mosques in Gaza. Some genius in the Israeli
army decided that there was no better way of undermining the PLO’s nationalist
ambitions in the occupied territories than by promoting Islam.
44) “Even after the Oslo agreement,
during a row with Mr Arafat, senior Israeli army officers publicly announced
they were chatting to Hamas officials. And when Israel illegally deported
hundreds of Hamas men to Lebanon in 1992, it was one of their leaders, hearing
that I was travelling to Israel, who offered me Shimon Peres’s home telephone
number from his contact book” [5 December 2001].
45) Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the
West Bank and Gaza are of a pronounced right-wing political persuasion. They
are very different to the Islamic militants who fought the Shah of Iran and who
existed in the immediate period after the Iranian revolution. The same goes for
the bulk of the Islamic political organisations throughout the Middle East – in
Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and, above all, Saudi Arabia. The growth of right-wing
‘political Islam’ in these and other Arab countries is due, for the reasons
described above, to the failure of other models, but is also a direct result of
the involvement of an estimated 30,000 Arabs who fought with the mujaheddin in
the struggle against Soviet forces in Afghanistan between 1983-89.
46) Many of these believed that
their support for the mujaheddin was crucial in setting in motion a movement
which culminated in the defeat of ‘communism’ and the humbling of one
‘superpower’, the Soviet Union. Many US Cold War strategists reinforced this
idea and are paying the price now in the activities of al-Qa’ida against all
aspects and symbols of US power. However, it was not the mujaheddin or the
30,000 Arabs who fought with them that led to the defeat of the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan.
47) This was the result of the
atrophy, the slow decline, of the ‘Soviet Union’. The tendency in the 1970s and
1980s was for the planned economy to disintegrate under Stalinist, obsolete
bureaucratic rule. However, the support of world imperialism, particularly US
imperialism, was the crucial military factor. This was facilitated by massive
airlifts of weaponry, supplied by the US and financed by $2 billion of Saudi
and US funds. Arab fighters were also offered discounts by Saudi Arabian
airlines on the Riyadh-Peshawar route.
48) This Arab ‘foreign legion’ had
nothing in common in its social composition and ideology to the International
Brigade which fought on the side of the republicans in Spain in the 1930s. One
expert on al-Qa’ida comments in the Financial Times: “Some came [to
Afghanistan] with the intention of staying one month. Quite a lot of Saudis
would come for their holidays. If you had spent some time with a whore in
Bangkok, you could come to fight the jihad to purify yourself.”
49) The social origins of the
leading group which formed al-Qa’ida are crucial because of the role that it
played in sustaining and organising the Taliban. This in turn is important
because of the mistaken idea, perpetuated by some on the left, that in some way
the Taliban and al-Qa’ida reflect the national liberation struggle of the
Afghani people and the Arab peoples.
50) Yet, as has been well
documented, bin Laden comes from a rich Saudi/Yemeni family. He inherited $300
million at the age of ten – on the death of his father – as his share of what
is today a $36 billion family business, the Saudi bin Yadin group. Some of this
personal fortune was used in the war against the Soviet Union to finance Arab
fighters. In addition to this, the Islamist organisations which are linked to
bin Laden can today draw on funds estimated at between $5-16 billion. The
Financial Times comments: “Much of this has been donated, particularly from
Saudis and from Kuwait, the source of millions a month.”
51) This money has not come from the
most oppressed strata of the Arab world but from the Islamic elite. Again, the
Financial Times comments: “A lot of his money comes from disgruntled Saudi
merchants.” A former Gulf banker, Jean-François Cesnec, an expert in Arab
politics and finance, has also pointed out: “A ‘mule’ will draw sympathetic
merchants in Jeddah, collecting $5,000 from each. They never give more than $5,000
a time so you have to go and see them regularly.”
Al-Qa’ida
– not a genuine national liberation movement
52) This is part of a requirement
under Islam for rich Moslems, that of zakkat – charitable donations calculated
to 2% of a person’s income – which are made to ‘good causes’. This has
redounded to the benefit of bin Laden. And it is not just rich Saudis or
Yemenis who form the ruling group of al-Qa’ida but similar types were drawn
into its ranks from nationalist Islamist movements in the Arab world and
elsewhere. Thus Ayman al-Zawahari was a surgeon from a rich Egyptian family in
Alexandria. He had fought in Afghanistan and had become leader of Jihad, the
Egyptian Islamist group which was responsible for the assassination of Anwar
Sadat in 1981.
53) After the defeat of the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan, many of the victorious Arabs went back to the Middle East
and North Africa where they were greeted as ‘Islamic heroes’. This in turn led
to the filling out and growth of Islamic organisations of a right-wing
character, such as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and Armed Islamic Group
(GIA) in Algeria, as well as the Islamic Group and Jihad in Egypt. Their fire
was also now directed against their own governments, the ‘godless bedfellows of
the ultimate enemies, the US and Israel, the crusaders and the Jews’. However,
a ruthless repressive policy was pursued by these regimes and, particularly, by
the army and their secret services, typified by the brutal civil war in Algeria
which has resulted in over 100,000 people being killed.
54) These facts underline the
conclusions made in previous CWI statements that bin Laden and al-Qa’ida do not
represent a genuine national liberation movement even in a mangled, distorted
fashion. They are from the rich, semi-feudal elite in Saudi Arabia and
throughout the Arab world and their ‘programme’, in so far as they have one,
means turning back the wheel of history to the 7th century. Their
particular obscurantist brand of Islam, Salifism (also known as Wahhabism),
which developed in the 18th century, sees ‘unbelievers’ as all whom
do not subscribe to their narrow definition of Islam, including other Moslems.
These are, therefore, candidates for ‘elimination’.
55) One of bin Laden’s early mentors
was the Palestinian, Abdul Assam, who saw Afghanistan as the vortex of militant
Islam. It was an obligation, according to him, that every Moslem should fight
there. But this was only the first step: “Jihad will remain an individual
obligation until all other lands that were Moslem are returned to us so that
Islam will rein again; before us lie Palestine, Bokara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea,
Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent and Andalucia.” As
Justin Marozzi comments: “Never mind whether the peoples of those countries actually
want such a return to Islam. Why consult when Allah is on your side?”
56) This messianic, almost
pre-medieval, philosophy is at the heart of bin Ladism and al-Qa’ida.
Ultimately, of course, bin Laden is an expression of the Arab world’s
oppression at the hands of imperialism, which even affects, psychologically at
least, those from privileged layers. But his movement is not a real
bourgeois-national liberation movement.
57) In some senses his ideals and
recipe for the ‘future’ are a return to pre-capitalist forms of society. His
opposition to the House of Saud, fellow members of the Wahhabi Islamic sect,
and his determination to overthrow the Saudi regime has as its aim the
replacement of the present theocratic ‘fundamentalist’ Saudi regime with an even
more ‘fundamentalist’ one.
58) When Saddam Hussein’s forces
invaded Kuwait, for instance, in 1990 bin Laden offered his armed militants to
the Saudi royal family to defend the kingdom if Iraq invaded his ‘homeland’.
Instead, foreign troops – US forces in the main – were stationed on ‘Islam’s
holy soil’, which contains the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. The Saudi
regime, at the highest levels of the military and particularly the intelligence
service, sponsored bin Laden but his movement has inevitably been turned
against them: “The Saudi policy of riyalpolitik was intended to shore up
the kingdom’s legitimacy through the funding of militant Islamic groups. Since
these very organisations are dedicated to the overthrow of the Saudi royal family,
which they regard as guilty of apostasy, it has been a policy as hollow as the
regime which embraced it. How long before the mobs tear down the palace gates
in Riyadh and beyond.” [Financial Times, 17 November 2001]
Right-wing
‘political’ Islam
59) The CWI’s opposition to the
ideas of right-wing ‘political Islam’, and particularly the variant of bin
Ladism, is absolutely clear. However, this does not in itself solve the problem
of how to reach and convince workers who are presently under the banner of Islam.
Many of these workers in key areas of the Arab world or in Pakistan, Indonesia
and the Philippines are attracted to Islamic ‘fundamentalism’. Even the defeat
and death of bin Laden, or the ignominious capitulation of the Taliban, will
not automatically or immediately lessen the grip of Islamist ideas on big
sections of the masses and, particularly, on frustrated poverty-stricken youth.
60) In South Asia, home to 40% of
the world’s estimated 1-1.2 billion Moslems, millions of young students are
imbibing the teachings which helped to give rise to the Taliban in the early
1990s. Indeed, the number of madrassahs in Pakistan, which ideologically
fuelled the Taliban movement, is dwarfed by the more than 15,000 madrassahs –
up from about 9,000 in the late 1960s – throughout the world.
61) However, in approaching the
masses influenced by these ideas, as in all questions, socialists and Marxists
must avoid the pitfalls of opportunism or ultra-leftism. Our approach,
following that of Lenin and Trotsky, is not to attack Islam or other religions
in our day-to-day work from a philosophical point of view, but to point towards
the class contradictions in ‘Moslem societies’. A picture of class divisions in
society can be drawn out of the Qur’an, as much as out of the Bible.
62) On the other hand, we should
avoid an opportunist adaptation to Islamic ‘leaders’, particularly to
self-appointed ‘community leaders’ in many countries in the industrialised
world and in ‘Moslem societies’ who very often are drawn from privileged layers,
merchants, the middle class and bourgeois elements. We also oppose aspects and
interpretations of Islam which maintain and justify the ruthless oppression and
subordination of women to men, even if this brings us into confrontation with
ordinary Moslems as well as Islamic leaders.
The SWP and
Islam
63) This is certainly not the
approach of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). For instance, in the
anti-war movement in Britain, for fear of confronting some of the prejudices in
the Moslem population, including sympathy for ‘fundamentalist’ ideas, they
initially and wrongly refused to condemn the attack on the Twin Towers on 11
September. They tried to justify this by arguments like the following: “The
rest of the left have an undialectical understanding of religion in practice
[which] is resulting in a pandering to Islamophobia, where they are more
fixated with ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ than with US imperialism.” [SWP
pre-conference bulletin, 2001, p5]
64) In reality, the SWP has sought
to opportunistically adapt to the existing consciousness of workers in Britain
and elsewhere who are under the sway of Islamist ideas. They state the
following in the same bulletin: “It [Islam] can be a motivating force for the
masses to fight back against imperialism and poverty.” This statement is
completely unqualified, without any evidence being produced to show where and
how Islamist organisations fulfil the ‘anti-imperialist’ tasks allotted to them
by the SWP. Do they mean that the different Islamist organisations and parties
in the Middle East, or the Taliban, effectively fight back against imperialism?
Do they think that the methods employed by the Palestinian Islamic
organisations, Hamas or Jihad, are effective in fighting imperialism?
65) In the past, the SWP, on many
occasions, cheered on organisations uncritically which used the methods of
terrorism, as with the IRA in Northern Ireland. Today for instance, they do
support and report uncritically the methods of the suicide bombers used against
the Israelis within Israel itself. We understand that the horrendous social
conditions in the Palestinian areas, which have been enormously worsened in the
past few years and particularly since 11 September (reinforced now by Israeli
occupation), have produced a mood of absolute despair amongst big sections of
the youth. This is compounded by the stance of Yasser Arafat and the
Palestinian Authority. They are prepared to bend the knee to imperialism and
arrest Islamic fighters while Israel pounds hell out of the West Bank and Gaza
towns. At the same time, Hamas, which began as a charity organisation, has
emerged almost as a parallel administration to the PA, providing the most
comprehensive social safety net in the West Bank and Gaza. The mood of revenge
for Israel’s crimes, together with the discrediting of the PA, has led to a
rapid increase in support for Hamas and other Islamist groups to an estimated
27% in late 2001, as support for Fatah and Arafat diminishes.
66) It is one thing to understand
how sections of the youth are driven to deploy terroristic methods, which they
see as a legitimate part of resistance against Israeli occupation of Arab
lands. It is entirely different for Marxists to give support, by omission as
well as commission, to such methods. In a sensitive way, it is necessary to
explain to the young people attracted to this course of action that it plays
into the hands of the Israeli ruling class. It drives sections of the Israeli
population into the arms of their own worst enemies, the Israeli bourgeoisie.
It is used to introduce further repression and the result is a further, almost
endless, cycle of violence in which the working class on both sides, and
particularly the Palestinians, pay the main price.
67) The minuscule grouping, Workers
Power, also made blunders in the course of the war, as has one remnant of the
Morenoites, the LIT, in Latin America. If anything, their errors are of a more
grotesque kind than the SWP. This basically involves giving ‘critical support’
to the Taliban in the war. For instance, the following is the advice which
Workers Power gave to the world labour movement in the midst of the war:
“Without giving an iota of support to the arch reactionary Taliban government
in Afghanistan or the movement of Osama bin Laden, we call for and support the
united action of all Afghan forces – including Islamist forces – to repel the imperialist
assault.” [Stop Bush and Blair’s Bloody War! Defend Afghanistan! Defeat
Imperialism]
68) Their ‘advice’ did not register
on the radar screen of the world labour movement, but it did confuse a few
young people. They would not give “an iota of support” to the Taliban and yet
call on workers and peasants in Afghanistan to engage in “united action” with
them. Why not also support, under the heading of “Islamist forces”, the
Northern Alliance who are only separated by degree from the Taliban, as we have
subsequently seen following its victory. Which is the progressive force here?
To merely pose the question shows how absurd the approach of these groups is.
Both are reactionary forces. The Taliban wish to force the Afghan masses back
to the past. The Northern Alliance was the ground troops of US imperialism in
its onslaught against the Taliban.
69) Yet the LIT also states: “From
our point of view, in this confrontation [the Afghan war] the ‘barbarian’
Taliban represents progress precisely because they challenge the imperialist
barbarism. If imperialism wins this war, they will feel free to colonise the
world.” [LIT letter criticising the Labour Party Pakistan over the Afghan war.]
70) But, if anything, the Northern
Alliance, on the issue of women, for instance, in words at least, was more
‘progressive’ than the Taliban. Why not then support these ‘barbarians’ as
well? The unconscious humour of the LIT is shown when it declares: “This is not
a simple discussion [tactics in the war] but it is not easy to confront the
fundamentalists daily, knowing that they on several opportunities… solved their
conflicts with the opposition with the simple resource of killing the opponent.
This fact, however, cannot become a stumbling block on the way towards a
Marxist analysis and policies.”
71) In other words, any attempt to
link up ‘militarily’, as suggested by the LIT, with the Taliban would result in
the slaughtering of any left forces, let alone Trotskyist or Marxist forces,
which tried to pursue this tactic. And this is not an accident because, as we
argue above, neither the Taliban nor bin Laden are genuine national liberation
fighters. Nor are they anti-imperialist, as the switch of the bulk of the
Taliban forces showed, from opposition into supporting the Northern Alliance
and, thereby also becoming the ‘proxy’ of imperialism. The Taliban, al-Qa’ida
and the Northern Alliance are counter-revolutionary forces which Marxists
should completely oppose.
Marxism and
the Taliban
72) The LIT, Workers Power and many
others on the revolutionary left argue that if the Taliban had won this would
have weakened imperialism and enormously encouraged the peoples of the
neo-colonial and semi-colonial world and, above all, in the Middle East. This
at bottom is also the reasoning behind the attitude of the SWP. It, in effect,
opposed any criticism of the perpetrators of the attacks on the Twin Towers. It
was compelled to abandon this by the pressure of those like the CWI within the
anti-war movement in Britain. Their method of reasoning is not a Marxist
approach, which takes phenomena and events and analyses them from all sides.
73) They do not even pose the
question of whether the Taliban could have militarily won the war. The contest
right from the beginning was an unequal struggle. There could only be one
outcome of the war, the military victory of US imperialism and its allies. The
Vietnam War was entirely different. That was a war for social and national
liberation, which meant that a country with a small population defeated the
mightiest military power on the globe. However, what could not be predetermined
was what the character of the Afghan War would assume, the degree of
resistivity of the masses of Afghanistan, how long and bloody it would be and
what effect it would have on world public opinion.
74) But in the unlikely event that
the Taliban would have won, would this have been a victory for the world
working class and poor peasants? On the contrary, it would have enormously
strengthened the backward, theocratic religious ideas which would have kept
Afghanistan, and others which followed in their footsteps, under the domination
of right-wing political Islam.
75) Even in Iran, where Islamist
ideas initially took on a left or radical hue in the struggle against the Shah
and in the first period of the Iranian revolution, the position of the
Communist Party in Iran, the Tudeh, under the sway of Stalinist ideas,
represented a baleful example of precisely ‘critical’ support for the forces of
the ‘barbarian’ Khomeini. The consequences were absolutely disastrous for the
Iranian revolution. No warnings were given to the left and the working class by
the Stalinists about the ingrained hostility to them of Khomeini and his
movement. In Iran it was correct to participate in the mass movement alongside
all kinds of radical Islamist forces, but without giving a shadow of support to
the leaders of this movement, like Khomeini. There was no comparable movement
in Afghanistan. The small left forces which existed scorned the idea that they
could fight alongside the Taliban.
76) The day after the overthrow of
the Shah, the suppression of the left began in Iran, leading to the hanging of
the leader of the Tudeh and the subsequent massacre of many of the best
militants of the Iranian Communist Party and others on the left. No doubt
Workers’ Power and the LIT can object that, unlike the Tudeh, they are critical
of the Taliban and bin Laden. However, there is no justification, given the
context in which these forces acted and the character of the movement described
above, to give even ‘critical support’ to these movements.
Trotsky on
Ethiopia and Brazil
77) In order to justify their false
position they quote some fragmentary remarks of Trotsky on the
Italian/Ethiopian conflict in 1935. They do this without explaining the
entirely different historical context in which that struggle took place.
Moreover, they are incapable of understanding the masses’ different attitude at
the time towards that conflict and the entirely different view of the Taliban
and bin Laden. We will not skate over or ignore what Trotsky said in the 1930s.
We give the full quote of what he said about Ethiopia and also his comments
about Brazil in 1938.
78) On Ethiopia Trotsky wrote: “Far
too little attention is paid to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict by our sections,
especially by the French section. This question is highly important, first for
its own sake and second from the standpoint of the turn by the Comintern. Of
course we are for the defeat of Italy and the victory of Ethiopia, and therefore
we must do everything possible to hinder by all available means support to
Italian imperialism by the other imperialist powers, and at the same time
facilitate the delivery of armaments, etc., to Ethiopia as best we can.
However, we want to stress that this fight is directed not against fascism, but
against imperialism. When war is involved, for us it is not a question of who
is ‘better’, the Negus or Mussolini; but rather, it is a question of the
relationship of classes and the fight of an underdeveloped nation for
independence against imperialism. The Italian comrades might give us a short
historical summary indicating how Crispi’s defeat had a positive effect on the
further development of Italy.” [The Italo-Ethiopian Conflict in Writings of
Leon Trotsky (1935-36) (italics in original).]
79) While on Brazil he wrote: “In
Brazil there now reigns a semi fascist regime that every revolutionary can only
view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters
into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict
will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally – in this case I
will be on the side of ‘fascist’ Brazil against ‘democratic’ Great Britain.
Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of
democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another
fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on
the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national
and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of
the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a
blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary
movement of the British proletariat.” [Anti-Imperialist Struggle is Key to
Liberation, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39).]
80) The clear implication of
Trotsky’s words, contained in an interview with him in 1938 and not in an
article by him, was that in the event of an armed attack on backward,
semi-colonial Brazil by British imperialism he would be on the side of the
former not the latter. He would support the people of Brazil against an
imperialist attack on them and their territory irrespective of the political
regime. This is the meaning of Trotsky’s words. The Malvinas/Falklands War was
different and much more complex. If, in the Malvinas/Falklands War, an attack
had been made on Argentina by British imperialism along the lines suggested by Trotsky
in his article on Brazil, all Marxists would have opposed this. We would have
been on the side of ‘Argentina’, the people, not the hated Galtieri regime,
against British imperialism. But the presence of 2000 Falkland islanders, and
no Argentineans, made this conflict much more complex than the hypothetical
situation sketched out by Trotsky on Brazil. Their democratic rights had to be
taken into account by Marxists. We opposed the war but we could not just give
carte blanche support to the Galtieri regime’s invasion.
The
Malvinas and the CWI
81) And yet, this quote from Trotsky
on Brazil was used by the LIT quite wrongly, to justify its opportunist
adaptation to the Argentinean Galtieri dictatorship in the 1982 war with
Britain over the Malvinas/Falklands. We opposed British imperialism in this war
and the sending of the “British task force”. Genuine Marxists in Argentina or
Latin America as a whole would also have opposed the Galtieri dictatorship in
Argentina’s drive towards a war over the Malvinas/Falklands in 1982, as we
opposed Thatcher’s war preparations in Britain. However, once the war had
begun, Marxists in Argentina would go into the army if called up, at the same
time advancing a revolutionary programme. They would have demanded the
expropriation of British investments. But why stop there? All imperialist
assets should be nationalised, which in turn would pose the need for the state
take-over of Argentine capital. Not an atom of support – ‘critical’ or
otherwise – would have been given to the Galtieri dictatorship, which the LIT
unfortunately did. In effect, a revolutionary war against the British would
have been advocated by real Argentine Marxists.
82) This was the programme advocated
by us at the time of the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. This was not a classic
conflict between an imperialist power and a ‘colony’ in which Marxists were
called upon to ‘critically’ support the latter. Argentina was a relatively
developed capitalist power. It was not a feudal or semi-feudal regime in which
the bourgeois-democratic revolution needed to be completed (apart from freeing
Argentina from the economic vice of US imperialism and the world market, which
is a socialist task). It was itself ‘imperialist’ towards other countries in
Latin America – exporting capital and exploiting them – as well as being
‘exploited’ by the major imperialist powers. Moreover, it had a more developed
capitalist structure than pre-1917 Russia, for instance. The latter, according
to Lenin and Trotsky, was both a ‘semi-colony’ of Anglo-French imperialism and,
at the same time, an ‘imperialist’ oppressor of the 57% of the population of
the Tsarist Empire who were non-Russians. Lenin and the Bolsheviks never
supported Russia, a ‘semi-colony’, in the wars against Japan in 1905, for instance,
or German imperialism in the First World War.
83) It is true that the past
super-exploitation of Latin America by British imperialism and then
particularly US imperialism has heightened the sensitivity amongst the masses
to any incursion from outside, particularly direct military intervention. This
was the case in the Malvinas/Falklands conflict with overwhelming opposition in
South America towards the sending of the British military ‘task force’ to the
region. Latin American, and particularly Argentine, Marxists, were compelled to
take account of this, to be sensitive to the mood in their approach,
propaganda, demands put forward, etc. But this would not involve supporting the
war which was an adventure by the Galtieri dictatorship in a desperate but futile
attempt to avert its overthrow by means of a successful military attack on the
Malvinas/Falklands. The approach of the LIT was to bow to the pressure of
Argentine nationalism and support the Galtieri regime’s war, albeit
‘critically’.
84) They freely confess that, at
this time: “Our international trend issued the statement entitled, In the
Military Camp of the Dictatorship, which, among other things said: ‘In
accordance with the Leninist/Trotskyist tradition which supports the
nationalism of the oppressed countries, regardless of their regime and
government, against imperialism, the International Workers’ League – Fourth
International – proclaims that we shall fight, if it were necessary, in the
battlefield of the Argentinean government. But this was not a mere statement.
Our militants, running the risk of being killed by the dictatorship (over 100
of our comrades have already been killed) went out to organise a great
anti-imperialist movement while our comrades who were in prison at the time
from their cells, demanded to be freed so that they may go to the Falklands and
fight there together against the oppressing army.” (Letter from LIT to the
Labour Party of Pakistan on the issue of Afghanistan.)
85) It was wrong for the LIT to put
itself in the camp of the dictatorship and to line up with the policies of the
Argentinean junta in this war. Even if a decision is made to join in the war
against British imperialism on the issue of the Malvinas – which was
understandable in the Argentinean context – nevertheless, this should be done
entirely independent of, and not part of, the hated Galtieri dictatorship.
86) Trotsky’s remarks on Brazil were
obviously in the context of a hypothetical attack being made, an invasion in
effect, by British imperialism on Brazilian territory. This was not the case,
we repeat, in the Falklands/Malvinas War. This was not an attack on the
Argentinean mainland. Moreover, the 2000 Falklanders wanted to remain under
British rule. The right of self-determination applied to the islanders, despite
their small number. It was correct to suggest, not just for the Brazilian
workers but for the British workers and workers worldwide, opposition to
British imperialism and to ‘support’ Brazil, the Brazilian people not the
government, in this conflict. In no way was Trotsky here outlining a clear
programme, and particularly agitational demands, but the broad position that
would be adopted by revolutionaries. We have dealt with the Malvinas/Falklands
conflict above (see also The Rise of Militant and our material at the
time of the 1983 conflict) and it is not possible to re-rehearse all the
arguments on this issue here.
87) But one thing was absolutely
clear, we did not adopt a ‘neutral’ position, as suggested by LIT, but opposed
the war. We opposed the Thatcher government but, at the same time, once the war
was taking place, raised democratic demands for the army ranks and a radical
programme to be taken by sections of the working class and the youth who would
be involved in the event of a long drawn out conflict.
88) On the other hand, we did not
support the Argentinean military dictatorship as the LIT did. Its support for
Galtieri on the Malvinas fitted in with their false theory of the ‘enclaves’.
This meant that Malvinas/Falklands, with a tiny population of 2,000 largely
British people, together with Israel, Northern Ireland, etc, were ‘outposts’
and ‘enclaves’ of imperialism – relics of the past – and should be dissolved.
By this logic, Northern Ireland should be returned to the South of Ireland in a
‘united Ireland’ against the wishes of the loyalist population if necessary.
The Israeli state should be dismantled and in its place a new Palestine should
be constructed and, by military means, the 2,000 Falkland Islanders should have
been driven out by the Galtieri dictatorship from this imperialist ‘enclave’.
The
National Question
89) This abstract, false idea, which
is entirely removed from the objective reality which exists today, will lead –
and, unfortunately in the case of the LIT, led – the forces of Trotskyism into
a theoretical swamp. They invariably limit their demands on the national
question to ‘independence’, never putting this in a socialist context. The only
conclusion which could be drawn from the LIT’s position is that it is based on
a geographical concept and moreover comes very close to a ‘stages position’ on
the national question. According to their approach, it is bits of territory,
which may at one stage have ‘belonged’ to a particular state, which is
decisive.
90) This is irrespective of the
consciousness of the population which may inherit such a territory and may
implacably reject, for historical, social, national and even psychological
reasons, returning to the embrace of such a state. This would particularly be
the case for one dominated by bloodthirsty military dictators who had
slaughtered 30,000 of their own citizens in a ‘dirty war’ against the left and
the working class as had the Argentinean junta.
91) Indeed, the issue of the
consciousness of a population, whether it be in Israel, Northern Ireland or the
consciousness of the ‘settlers’ in the Malvinas/Falklands, let alone the
worldwide consciousness of the proletariat, is of secondary importance to this
organisation. We, on the other hand, take into account territory, culture,
history and language, and above all the consciousness of any nation, would-be
nation, grouping, etc. A study of Lenin and Trotsky on the national question
shows how carefully they analysed the consciousness of populations inheriting a
particular territory and, moreover, the way consciousness changes under
different historical circumstances.
92) For instance, Trotsky and those
who followed him, to begin with, set their faces against the creation of an
Israeli state in the Middle East, with Trotsky correctly describing it as a
‘bloody trap’ for the persecuted Jewish population throughout the world. How
apt is that phrase now in the context of the murderous cycle of mutual
slaughter which takes place between the Israelis and the Palestinians today?
But the development over time of the consciousness of a settled population in
Israel, specifically a national consciousness, the evolution of a new nation
since 1948, changed the situation fundamentally. Not just the PLO but bin Laden
in his first video implicitly accepted the fact of an Israeli state.
93) The irony is that it is the
sectarian organisations – the self-proclaimed ‘vanguard of the vanguard’ – who
reject the existence of this state and the national consciousness which goes
with this, rather than the Palestinians themselves. They consequently demand
that it be replaced by a secular Palestinian state with democratic rights for
Israelis. Confronting the reality ‘on the ground’, something which these
ultra-left organisations fail to do, the Palestinian leaders abandoned their
previous approach. This is not just because they opportunistically adapt to the
situation and the power of imperialism but because it is unattainable now, and
particularly on a bourgeois basis, given the resistance of the Israeli population
and the massive financial and military assistance by imperialism itself which
underlines this.
Two
states
94) In other words, the LIT and
others pick up the discarded ideas of the Palestinian leadership of yesterday
which does not apply to the present reality. They effectively propose that the
Israeli population accepts that it should comply with the liquidation of ‘their
own state’. Needless to say, the Israeli population will fight tooth and nail
against such a proposal as they did when it was the policy of the Palestinian
organisations and leaders themselves. The CWI’s ‘two-state’ solution, an
Israeli and a Palestinian state within the context of a socialist federation of
the region, is the only way to approach both the Israeli and Palestinian masses,
which seeks to satisfy their national aspirations and cement an alliance of the
working class and poor in the region.
95) The counter-argument to this,
put forward even by some more open-minded comrades coming from the LIT
tradition in discussions with the CWI, is that this programme is ‘for the
future’. It is exactly the opposite. The only way to approach the Palestinian
and Israeli masses today is to put forward a programme on the national question
which begins to satisfy their national aspirations. A proposal for a
‘Palestinian state with democratic guarantees for the Israelis’ will be
completely rejected by the mass of the Israeli population. This is even more
the case when a new state and a new national consciousness have been created,
as is the case in Israel, albeit on the basis of the gross violation and
repression of the Palestinian rights 50 years ago and since. On the other hand,
to propose to the Palestinians that they accept minority status within a
‘democratic Israel’ is equally unacceptable to them.
96) The idea of a separate
Palestinian state is now supported by the mass of the population in the West
Bank, Gaza and, probably, in the Palestinian Diaspora as well. On the basis of
capitalism, however, it is impossible for this to be fully established as we
have explained in our previous material. So our programme, rather than being
‘for the future’, as some of our critics have argued, is for the here and now.
97) Paradoxically, the idea of a
‘two-state’ solution may not be realised in the ‘future’. After the socialist
revolution, the Israeli and Palestinian masses may decide to live in a combined
state with autonomous rights for both. There will be no compulsion. It will be
left for them to decide democratically what the character or borders of a future
state or states will be, and the national and social composition in population
terms, etc. So, the CWI’s programme is not ‘for the future’. Both Palestinian
and Israeli workers may decide democratically that separate states are not
necessary in the future. But today, this programme is an important weapon which
allows us to approach both the Israeli and Palestinian masses, to win their
confidence and forge an alliance between the working class and the poor in the
region.
98) The dialectical, extremely sensitive,
subtle approach of Lenin and Trotsky – who did not hesitate to change policy,
demands, or even the emphasis of their programme depending on the circumstances
– is foreign to these organisations. The struggle in the 1930s between
imperialism and the masses in the neo-colonial world was quite clearly one
between an oppressing foreign power and countries that were clearly still
‘colonies’ or semi-colonial, most of them under the direct military domination
of one imperialist power or another. It was quite clear that Marxists gave
unconditional support to these colonies in the struggle against imperialism
irrespective of the political regime. We still did this in the sense of
supporting the people of Afghanistan against imperialism in the current war.
99) But neither Lenin nor Trotsky
advocated unconditional support of any bourgeois regime, or aspiring
bourgeoisie, in the colonial world. Lenin insisted on the separation of the
proletariat, even when it was in an incipient stage, and in its organisations
from even radical national bourgeois politicians who struggled against
imperialist domination. Yet the task was simpler then. The consciousness of the
advanced layer, of instinctive support for the colonial peoples against
imperialism, made the approach of Marxists clear.
The
Vietnam War
100)
Since
the time that Trotsky wrote, however, particularly in the post-1945 period with
the growth of Stalinism and the influence of Stalinist ideas in the
neo-colonial world, it was not as simple. Separation of any colony from
imperialism represented a step forward, as with the Algerian liberation
struggle against French imperialism, in which we gave not just political but
very practical support. However, we did this without entertaining even the
slightest illusions as to what would happen almost on the very next day after
the victory of the National Liberation Front. We predicted it would become, in
all probability, a bourgeois Bonapartist regime, but with some radical features
at its base. (In fact, we saw examples of ‘self-management’ of abandoned French
farms in Algeria in the first period after the defeat of France in 1962.) The
USFI, on the other hand, entertained illusions in the ‘socialist’ character of
the Algerian regime.
101)
In
the Vietnam War, as well, we were for the defeat of US imperialism and for the
victory of the Vietnamese revolution which, in practice, meant the coming to
power of the NLF (Viet Cong). But we never put this forward as a mass slogan as
others did. Never on demonstrations did we, as the USFI did, chant, ‘Ho, Ho, Ho
Chi Minh’ (Ho Chi Minh was the president of North Vietnam and leader of the
liberation forces as a whole in Vietnam).
102)
Why
did we adopt this approach? Because of the consciousness of the working class
worldwide and in the advanced industrial countries, with their suspicion of
Stalinist regimes, their lack of democracy, suppression of workers’ rights,
etc. In our propaganda, theoretical and public analysis, we explained that the
victory of the NLF would represent a victory. Nevertheless, because of the
social forces involved in the Vietnamese revolution – largely a nationalist,
peasant-based movement – the regime that would issue from this would be a
one-party regime. This would be in the image of North Vietnam or Moscow. Politically,
it would be a one-party regime but resting on a nationalised, planned economy.
This, we argued, would in one way represent a big step forward for the
Vietnamese people and would detonate movements elsewhere. It would strike a
blow against imperialism and, above all, of US imperialism. But, because of the
one-party regime which would be established, it would mean that a new political
revolution would be necessary in the future for Vietnam to move towards
socialism.
103)
The
movement in Vietnam was progressive but the demand for ‘victory to the NLF’ and
similar slogans would never attract the support of the mass of the working
class, particularly in the US, for a mass anti-war mass movement. Therefore,
the more correct position from a Marxist point of view, as opposed to the stand
of many groups, was mass agitation for the withdrawal of all foreign troops
and, specifically, of US troops. In the context of the Vietnam War this was a
‘revolutionary’ demand because US bayonets alone propped up the rotten
landlord/capitalist regime in South Vietnam.
104)
We
correctly anticipated that the withdrawal of US forces would lead to the
collapse of this regime and the triumph of the revolution, which is what
subsequently happened. It was the combination of the heroic struggle of the
Vietnamese workers and peasants with the mass revolt of the US workers and
population, on the very simple premise that the war was unwinnable, which led
to the first military defeat of US imperialism in its history. But the forces
of the Vietnamese revolution could not attract, in the same way as the victory
of the working class in Russia in 1917 did (the ‘ten days that shook the
world’), the conscious support of the American working class.
Relate
Marxist ideas to the level of understanding
105)
It
does not even enter the minds of the sectarian left of how to take an idea and
relate it to the existing level of consciousness of the working class, seeking
to change it with skilful propaganda and slogans. Bin Laden and the Taliban, as
a political formation, are entirely repulsive to the overwhelming majority of
the working class worldwide. The growing anti-war movement during the war did
not express support for these figures – unlike in the Vietnam War for the NLF –
and was largely of a pacifist character, of opposition to bombing, of ‘let the
Afghan people themselves decide’, etc. There was nothing in the medieval
obscurantism of Islamic fundamentalism that could possibly attract the mass of
the proletariat in the advanced industrial countries. Moreover, as was
subsequently demonstrated, support for the Taliban rested on chickens’ legs,
which folded at the first serious challenge.
106)
Therefore,
‘political Islam’ or Islamic fundamentalism, which is now of an overwhelming
right-wing character, offers no way out to the oppressed and enslaved peoples
of the Middle East, Africa or of parts of Asia. It would, therefore, have been
wrong for a Marxist organisation both in the industrialised countries and in
the neo-colonial world to give political support to their reactionary ideas.
107)
We
clearly differentiate between support for the Afghan and Iraqi peoples, and for
all peoples in the neo-colonial world under attack from imperialism, and
support for quasi ‘liberation’ organisations such as the Taliban and al-Qa’ida
organisations. Even where they are temporarily successful, according to their
own lights, as in the case of 11 September, the net result is reactionary.
108) It lowers the level of consciousness of the
peoples in the Middle East, seeking to teach them to look for salvation from
lone fighters, or a group of avenging angels in the form of al-Qa’ida, rather
than the mass activity, demonstrations, the arming of the masses, the general
strike and insurrection, to overthrow landlordism and capitalism. War is a
crucial test for Marxists and revolutionaries. Once more, the small ultra-left
groups, like Workers’ Power, the LIT and larger organisations, like the SWP,
have failed this test.
109) During the war the CWI provided timely
slogans – through a process of discussion and dialogue. This allowed us to
intervene very effectively in the war. This is a harbinger for the future when
all ideas will be put to the test, before massive audiences of workers.
To read more about the policies of the CWI,
visit our site:
http://www.worldsocialist-cwi.org/index.htm
Or visit the site of the SP in Ireland:
http://www.oocities.org/socialistparty