Leftline Winter 2004

national | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Thursday December 16, 2004 15:02 by Dan - ISN

Latest issue of Irish Socialist Network publication Leftline, contains articles on Iraq, water charges, the Labour Party and the Easter Rising

IRAQ & THE FAILURES OF THE LEFT

As the situation in Iraq goes from bad to worse, it would be easy for anti-war activists to pat ourselves on the back and say “I told you so”. But the left has no reason to be smug or complacent; the last year has revealed its own glaring errors. Many individuals and organisations on the left have been found uncritically supporting reactionary groups, and failing to offer solidarity to the secular left in Iraq. While our comrades in Iraq have been fighting the battle of their lives against both imperialist occupation and the threat of a fundamentalist tyranny, too many socialists have ignored their struggles and offered support to bitter enemies of the left.

The roots of these disastrous errors can be traced back to the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. In this crucial period, not enough attention was paid to the voices of the Iraqi opposition. Many Iraqi exiles supported the proposed invasion, because they were understandably desperate to see the Ba’athist regime overthrown. The left was certainly not obliged to agree with them, but they deserved the courtesy of a response; instead, they were mostly ignored, or dismissed as lackeys of Washington.

Even worse, those groups in the Iraqi opposition who opposed the war were also ignored. Many opposition activists objected to the one-side slogans adopted by anti-war demonstrations in Europe and North America. As veteran British socialist Peter Tatchell wrote: “The Stop the War movement largely ignores Saddam's murderous human rights abuses. Its leaflets and placards rightly demand "Freedom for Palestine", but not "Freedom for the Iraqi people". This is a shameful betrayal of Iraqis struggling for democracy and human rights.”

Tatchell was quite right: by taking a one-sided approach, raising slogans that condemned the Bush administration but not the Iraqi regime, the anti-war movement left itself wide open to accusations of appeasement. This was compounded when the British Stop the War Coalition allowed George Galloway to become one of its leading spokesmen. Galloway had notoriously been filmed praising Saddam Hussein on Iraqi TV during a visit to Baghdad.

These errors were all the more senseless because there were totally unnecessary; simply by adopting the slogan “No to war, no to dictatorship”, the anti-war movement would have been well able to answer the hypocritical taunts of “appeasement” raised by conservative politicians and journalists who had themselves been guilty of appeasing the Ba’athist dictatorship in the past. But that wouldn’t have been enough: the left needed to offer a credible alternative; we needed to show how the vicious regime could be removed from power, without relying on American military power.

Writing in March 2003, Peter Tatchell offered one possible strategy: “With serious military aid, the Iraqi opposition can demolish Saddam's dictatorship. Why isn't the Left lobbying our government to arm the Shias and Kurds? The anti-Saddam forces desperately need military hardware to defend themselves and to bring down the regime. Instead, the Left aligns itself with an anti-war movement that merely urges "Don't attack Iraq" ... there are 70,000 Kurdish troops in the north, and 5,000 more Shia fighters in Iran. Both armies need more and better weapons. The left should be pressing the government to arm the Kurds and Shias so they can liberate themselves.” As he pointed out, there was a precedent for such demands: “When the Spanish Republican government was under attack by Franco's forces in the 1930s, the Left didn't demand "Stop the War!". It urged "Defend the Republic, Guns for Spain!".”

Whether or not you agree with Tatchell’s proposal, arguments like this should have been widely discussed by anti-war activists. Instead, the dominant tendency in the anti-war movement offered no alternative to invasion, other than doing nothing; this was an important factor in the erosion of support once fighting began, and it remains the crucial argument used by Tony Blair to defend the war, even after his claims regarding WMDs have been exposed as false.

The errors continued after the fall of the regime. The Iraqi left and labour movement quickly re-emerged from decades of repression and began to organise; they were entitled to expect solidarity and encouragement from their comrades in the west. Instead, many socialists took the easy option and became cheer-leaders for the so-called “resistance”. Of course, we shouldn’t just accept the view that all resistance fighters are former Ba’athists or Islamic fundamentalists; but there’s no denying that these elements play a large part. We can’t just pretend that Iraq has a pristine national liberation movement like the ANC or Fretilin. There should be no question of socialists giving uncritical support to “the resistance” without making clear that we have no time for either Saddam loyalists or fundamentalists. And it should also be made clear that we oppose any attacks on civilian targets.

Instead, we have the British Stop the War Coalition offering its support for “whatever means necessary" to end the occupation, while John Pilger tells an interviewer: “a resistance is always atrocious, it's always bloody. It always involves terrorism. You can imagine if Australia was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War the kind of resistance there would have been.” Statements like this are totally senseless; they give the impression (whether or not it is intended) that anti-war activists have no problem with murderous assaults on Iraqi civilians. And they contrast sharply with the line taken by the Iraqi left, which has been united in its hostility to terrorist attacks.

Of course, the resistance is not homogenous, and not every group has been implicated in bloody carnage. But there is no denying the fact that most resistance militias are dominated by reactionary elements, whose vision for a post-occupation Iraq should be anathema to the left. The various strands in the Iraqi labour movement are sharply divided on many questions, but one thing that unites them is hostility to the “resistance”. It’s appalling to hear western socialists urge the Iraqi left to form an anti-imperialist front with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. We know from the experience of the Iranian revolution what the results of that strategy would be. There, the secular left underestimated the strength of reactionary Islamic groups and formed an alliance with the Ayatollah Khomeni; Khomeni and the mullahs used their naïve allies on the road to power, then imposed a brutal dictatorship that crushed the left just as ruthlessly as the Shah’s regime had.

This does not mean, of course, that we have to support the line taken by Iraqi socialists and trade unionists without any reservations. It’s perfectly fair, for example, to criticise the ICP and the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions for their overly tolerant stance towards the Allawi government. But words like “collaborator” and “quisling” have been thrown around far too casually. It’s quite possible that many Iraqi left-wingers would have taken a different line if they had been assured of the support of the western peace movement. The alliance that brought millions of people onto the streets to oppose the invasion could certainly have mobilised valuable support for the organisations of the Iraqi working class, support that would have been of incalculable benefit for them. Instead, they’ve been left to fend for themselves.

Despite this isolation, many Iraqi socialists remain totally opposed to the occupation force and its puppet government, but they’re in a desperate position. The willingness of some sections of the left to align themselves with reactionary fundamentalists is a scandal. The twentieth century saw the western left turn a blind eye to the crimes of Stalinist tyrants; this moral blindness is largely responsible for our present weakness. We shouldn’t repeat the same mistakes again.

The Irish left, for its part, should take a clear stand against both imperial occupation and fundamentalist terror, and offer solidarity to our Iraqi comrades. If a democratic, secular government with a strong leftist influence was to emerge in Iraq, against all the odds, it would be a huge blow to American imperialism, and undercut the growth of reactionary Islam. We should be doing everything we can to make this outcome more likely.

More information on the Iraqi labour movement can be found at www.iraqworkerssolidarity.org or at www.uuiraq.org

Daniel Finn



WATER CHARGES

It is obvious to all but the most blind of observers that all around us there are the signs of the continued capitalist onslaught aimed at attacking the gains made by the working class after World War II. The attack on workers can be seen through low pay, job insecurity, privatisation, redundancies and 'flexible' working. Communities see it through the lack of decent social housing, the erosion of public services and profiteering in the health service and schools. Throughout the world the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

The most recent sign of this onslaught on working people is the imposition of service charges. Services that people took for granted, as being paid by the state from general taxation, are now being passed on to the ordinary taxpayer. In short, we are being asked to fund the tax breaks to the super rich. It is no coincidence that report after report shows increased inequality in society.

Dublin recently went through 'the battle of the bins'. In two council areas there is still a high level of resistance. In the UK, there is the embryonic signs of campaigning against the 'Council Tax'. In Northern Ireland they are facing the imminent introduction of water charges. The Minister with responsibility in this area is due to set down the charging structure early next year with a view to full implementation in April 2006. It is expected that the charge will be between £400 and £600. The Government is expected to offer a 25% discount for those claiming benefits. This is an exercise in deception. They are attempting to win support and gain political approval by pretending to show a compassionate face but in truth a 25% reduction will mean nothing to those who can’t afford to pay. On top of this it is expected that 900 jobs will be lost in order to centralise the service.

The Government claims that the charges are necessary and that the service must become self-financing. In all likelihood it will be sold as an essential exercise for preservation of the environment, in the same way as the bin tax in the south was sold. Of course they refuse to acknowledge the years of under investment in the service by central Government. This Government has in fact found no problem in finding money be it for going to war in Iraq in the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the funding of PPP/PFI white elephants or follies like the Millennium Dome.

Northern Ireland is already a deeply poverty stricken area. Half a million are living in poverty according to statistics. On average household incomes are 20% below the UK average, 20% of households are dependent on benefits compared with 12% for the rest of the UK. Yet householders in the North are already paying on average 25% more for fuel, light and power than the rest of the UK.

ISN members in Belfast are in the process of circulating 10,000 leaflets door to door. Our literature advocates a policy of non-payment, which was successful in defeating both the anti-water charges campaign in the south and the poll tax in the UK. We would urge all of those opposing the water charges to come together and discuss the possibilities of a unified campaign. Already there are at least three different umbrellas groups for those campaigning against the charges. This can only lead to confusion and will be used by the right to divide and conquer. We also call upon the unions to organise and make a stand with the community. It will not be good enough for the unions to run a paper campaign of opposition and at the same time help with the implementation of the charge, as was done in the South during the bin tax battle.

There will be those who will buy into the Government spin of environmental responsibility. But these people are ignorant of the reality of life in working class communities. They fail to see that behind the popularity of the anti-water charges campaign lies a deep-rooted alienation and anger amongst communities that have gained little from economic growth. This is not a question of environmental responsibility but a question of who should pay for the water service. The Government will be paying the boss of the Water Service £150,000 plus bonuses to ensure they push this through.

This issue is a question of class. Whether the state provides water to the house of a working class family who refuse to pay their bill is the frontline of the class struggle. This will be the most intense period of class struggle in the North for years. It would be mad, not to mention unprincipled, for any section of the left to fail to engage in this struggle. The ISN believes that the only way to successfully defeat the charges is by advocating a policy of non-payment through a strong united campaign with deep roots in the communities. We say Can’t Pay – Won’t Pay, Together we can beat the Water Tax.

Paul Moloney



LABOUR PAINS

Labouring Under an Illusion:
No matter how many times Labour enters coalition government, breaks its election promises and fails to defend working people on even the most basic level, the party seems to recover after few years in the wilderness. The reasons for this pattern are complex, although the lack of a radical workers party to the left of Labour certainly plays a role in its cyclical recovery. The local election results of June 2004 were a partial victory for Labour despite the breakthrough for Sinn Fein and it is possible that the party may be in a position to form a government with FG and the Greens after the next general election. So it is important for socialists to analyse Ireland’s primary social democratic party.

Critical Marxists attempt to look behind the façade of election propaganda and media spin to dissect the real nature of a political movement. We look at its ideology and the policies that flow from this ideology, the class composition of its membership and voters, its activities on the ground and within the political and social institutions of capitalist society and its broader relationship to the various classes in that society.

Class Politics:
The Labour Party today is largely a ‘middle class’ organisation, in the commonly used (and inaccurate) sense of that word. Most of its members belong to the middle and upper strata of the working class i.e. white collar or professional workers. In terms of electoral support, the most recent data available reveals that Labour has roughly the same level of support amongst middle class and working class voters, contrasting sharply with Sinn Fein whose vote is almost exclusively working class. This class composition is reflected in the politics of the membership (as opposed to the cautious leadership) of the party. They are willing to take a radical stance on issues that are not overtly (though in truth these are profoundly tied to class struggle) linked to questions of class: a woman’s right to choose, the citizenship referendum, the anti-war movement etc. These same members are entirely absent from struggles that represent more obvious manifestations of class struggle, such as the Anti-Bin Tax campaign. The popularity of the darling of the Irish Times set, Ivana Bacik, amongst the grassroots is an indication of the true nature of the party: a left liberal organisation.

In most traditional urban working class areas, the party is almost non-existent in terms of active members, even in areas such as Finglas where they have public representatives. In these areas the party relies on a network of contacts in the community sector to pull out the vote when the time comes, but has close to zero visibility on the ground in between elections. The primary way Labour maintains a connection with the ‘traditional’ or blue collar working class is through its bureaucratic domination of the main unions. This is done largely through mafia-like anti-democratic practices: one only need recall the stolen election for SIPTU president that Carol Ann Duggan of the SWP won, and the (happily unsuccessful) plot by SIPTU leaders and Bill Morris of New Labour to oust left-winger Mick O’Reilly in the ATGWU.

What is the relationship of Labour to the capitalist class? Again it would be mistaken to see this relationship in too deterministic a way, but surely it is significant that Pat Rabbitte and others have gone out of their way to reassure the business elite that Labour is a safe pair of hands. They are trying to gain the confidence of the ruling class by assuring them that there will be no rise in corporation tax. Their message is: there’s no need to worry, Labour is not dogmatic about public services and privatisation - all that matters is the quality of service provided! This is classic Blairism: we can provide a better, more streamlined environment for business and as an added bonus we can keep the uppity workers in place through our control of the trade unions.

The Unfair Economy:
It is not possible in the space available to deal with the policies of the Labour Party. In any case paper policies are often nothing more than electoral hooks to attract voters which often bear little relationship to what a party actually does in practice. However Pat Rabbitte has done us a favour by recently outlining his ‘philosophy’ (and presumably that of the Labour leadership) in the document ‘The Fair Economy’. In essence Rabbitte argues for the ‘social market’ model long promoted by the ideologues of Blair and Clinton: it’s all about individuals being ‘enabled’ to find a useful role in the market economy. No radical transformation of society is possible, indeed there is no alternative to neo-liberalism so the best we can do is to ‘civilise global capitalism’ through the EU and give everyone the necessary rain gear to weather the storm (In the next issue of Leftline ‘The Fair Economy’ will be analysed in more detail).

A Labour Left?:
The Irish Labour Party is experiencing a strange phenomenon which has occurred in many social democratic parties: as the party shifts to the right the timid centre leftists such as Michael D. Higgins (remember the tax amnesties?) and Declan Bree appear extremely radical. Even more bizarrely the old ‘Springite’ right such as Ruairi Quinn and Brendan Howlin also move to the left by standing still. The emergence of old-style social democrats as guardians of the left arises out of the fact that Rabbitte and the old DL grouping value ‘pragmatism’ (i.e. short term political gain) over all else. This ruthless pragmatism is all they have inherited from the old WP tradition.

The absence of an organised left in the party is clearly shown by the lack of any open dissension on the question of coalition with Fine Gael. Of course in a party where power is seen as exclusively located in government, one could hardly expect any opposition to the idea of presenting an ‘alternative government’ in the next election. We can get a sneak preview of what the alternative programme will be by perusing the famous ‘Westmeath Accord’ drawn up by Labour and Fine Gael now that they control the council in that county: It is nothing but generalised waffle about better services which any politician left of Mc Dowell’s stromtroopers could subscribe to. Basically it proposes to make the Council more efficient and to lobby government for more funding. The few crumbs thrown at the ‘socially excluded’ along with other ‘reforms’ are to be financed from the Development Levy Fund and ‘more focused value for money approach’. There’s nothing there that Bertie or indeed any other Fianna Fail populist couldn’t subscribe to.

Unlike the parent organisation, Labour Youth has managed to win some genuine young activists over by its use of radical rhetoric. The fact that Labour Youth seems to be democratic in organisational terms, contrasting strongly with the authoritarian structure of the Leninist parties and their youth movements, is an added pull. The reality, however, is that what passes for “revolutionary” in Labour Youth is plain old-fashioned social democracy. This is not to denigrate those genuine socialists in that organisation; it is simply to indicate the results of the milieu they operate in. If LY members from T.C.D think poor people are lazy sods who should be forced to work, other members who simply defend the idea of a welfare state naturally believe that they are on the extreme left. Equally the idea that adopting the Starry Plough as a LY symbol automatically renders the organisation radical or challenges the right wing leadership, indicates a great degree of political naiveté.

Radical Socialists & Labour:
What should the attitude of radical socialists be towards the Labour Party? Firstly we must have no illusions: the Labour Party can never be an instrument for the transformation of society. We must work incessantly to build a broad, democratic party of the working class which will expose, challenge and overtake Labour. We must draw a clear line in the sand between socialism and social democracy. We do this not by preaching purity from the sidelines but by engaging in struggle for changes in the here and now, but in a manner that exposes the limitations of reforms. The emergence of such a movement would have the added bonus of forcing the Labour leadership to take positions which are more radical than they would wish to.

It would be mistaken however to dismiss all members of the party as Blairites. Many are genuine socialists, even if they still view socialism as a return to the Welfare State or a reforming government dominated by Labour. We need to convince this element to break with Labour, to help build a new party which would have space for them even if we disagree fundamentally on certain issues. Such a party will only succeed if it operates as a fully democratic space where the various strands of left thinking can compete openly to convince the members of the merits of their ideas. In such an atmosphere we are confident that the revolutionary, democratic and participatory socialist ideology espoused by the ISN would win over by strength of argument and by active example many of those who identified with either ‘Old Labourism’ and authoritarian Leninism, but most importantly the mass of people which such a party would bring into political activity for the first time.

Colm Breathnach



EASTER RISING

John Bruton has recently provoked another frenzy of historical debate in the media by claiming that the war of independence was unnecessary. This should remind us, as if it was necessary, that current political questions are very much affected by the attitude we take towards the Rising and the subsequent war. It also shows the need for socialists to have our own view, independent of either sentimental nationalism or conservative revisionism.

Firstly, Bruton’s claim that independence could have been achieved by following the strategy of Redmond and the Home Rulers won’t stand up to scrutiny. By 1914, the Home Rule party had been attempting to win self-rule by working through the structures of the British political system for decades. Despite the years of moderation, there was no faction of the British ruling class willing to support their demands on principle. The Liberals were willing to support Home Rule when they were dependent on the votes of Irish MP s, which was a very different thing. The Conservatives were violently opposed, and quite willing to subvert their own political system in order to defeat the Home Rule bill. Their leader Bonar Law openly encouraged armed resistance by unionists.

Even if the Liberals had had the guts to face down this opposition (including attempts to stage a military coup) and implement Home Rule, which is very unlikely, its continued existence would have been dependent on the vagaries of British political life. If an election had brought the Tories back to power, they would have cancelled Irish autonomy straight away. It took years of conflict before the British establishment was willing to concede the Treaty.

We should also recall that those, like Bruton, who praise John Redmond as a “man of peace”, ignore his active support for the British Empire in the First World War, a bloody imperial slaughter vastly greater than the national revolution of 1916-23. Redmond did not have a problem with all forms of violence, just anti-imperialist violence.

This doesn’t mean that the national revolutionaries don’t deserve criticism. With the exception of James Connolly and the Citizens’ Army, the Rising was launched by romantic nationalists who spent more time on composing heroic speeches than on hard-headed political calculation. Their insurrection could not have been successful; it would have made far more sense to continue with political agitation until they had broader popular support, then launch an armed campaign. Their lack of a social programme was another major weakness. But we should also remember that Connolly, for one, threw himself into the Rising in the hope that it might undermine the war effort and help end the unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields of Europe.

There’s a lot more that could be said about the national revolution (the left should certainly recall the role played by labour militancy in persuading the British to quit Ireland - standard histories keep very quiet about this side of the story). But when all is said and done, attempts to denigrate the armed campaign as a pointless bloodbath that achieved nothing should be firmly rejected. If, as Bruton and his ilk would have preferred, Ireland had slithered quietly out of the British Empire like Canada and Australia, then it would have had very little effect on that Empire’s stability. But by defying the world’s most powerful empire by force, and carving out some autonomy for themselves, the Irish revolutionaries set a powerful example; nationalists from Egypt to India took heed, and the demise of the great empire “where the sun never sets and the blood never dries” was accelerated.

In a world where imperialism is far from historical, it’s not hard to see why John Bruton regards this anti-imperial past as an embarrassment as he takes up his new post as EU ambassador to Washington. The sustained campaign by the Irish elite to integrate Ireland into the western military bloc and bring the Irish people to identify their interests with the main imperial powers was disrupted by the strength of anti-war protests. Our inconvenient history is another irritant they’d rather be without.

Finally, it has once again been claimed by Eoghan Harris and other prominent revisionists that if we condone the violence of 1916, we must also endorse the Provo campaign of 1970-94. This is a phoney argument, but a revealing one. In reality, there were always a powerful case to be made against the “armed struggle”, particularly against the way it was conducted; and nothing obliges us to condone PIRA attacks on civilian targets. But by demanding that republicans accept the bona fides of unionism and the British state, Harris and his allies in the southern establishment played their part in prolonging the war. If they had expended some of the energy they used to denounce the IRA speaking out against state abuses in the North and urging the British government to seek a political solution, the republican leadership might have been quicker to accept that there were alternatives to war, and pointless killings might have been avoided.

Of course we should resist attempts to glorify and whitewash the Provo campaign with the benefit of hindsight; the IRA committed its own atrocities, just as much as the British state, and this shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. But the likes of Harris and Conor Cruise O’Brien deserve no credit for the fact that most republicans came to realise that their campaign was a dead-end; if their advice had been heeded, there would have been no ceasefire.

Daniel Finn



Views expressed in these articles are those of individual ISN members, but not necessarily those of the ISN

Should you wish to hear more about the ISN, Phone 0879487554, or alternatively, Email irishsocialistnetwork@dublin.ie