The AWL and Iraq

This is a contribution to a discussion on Iraq on the Disussion Board of the AWL.here. I would normally have replied to it there as the obvious palce, but the AWL having first limited me to writing only 3 or 4 lines of reply to their posts, have recently been deleting even those. This reply deals with points made by Clive Bradley of the AWL in response to comrades from Permanent Revolution.


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Clive tells us again that he doesn’t think the occupation is progressive. Fair enough, but he also says,

“(It is a matter of empirical fact that trade unions exist now and didn't used to, and we need to both acknowledge that fact and work out how best to support them. But that, for now, is a separate issue).”

Yes, that’s fair enough too. But, why make this comment? It is an empirical fact, but what does it really have to do with the point at issue. Clive admits that “how best to support them……, for now, is a separate issue”.

The only meaning that can be taken from this otherwise irrelvant statement is a suggestion that, well look if it weren’t for the Occupation there would be no unions, just as if it weren’t for the Occupation there would be a Civil War. It does become difficult to see how someone can keep pointing out all of these beneficient consequences of the invasion and Occupation without associating that with an intention to confer upon this invasion and Occupation some sense in which it is progressive, beneficial or whatever other term might be acceptable, even if that isn’t what the persohn that keeps pointing out these benefits actually believes is the nub of their argument.

That wouldn’t be so bad if the argument held up, but of course it doesn’t. Had their been no invasion there would be no Occupation. You can’t have the latter without the former. Without the former there also would not be millions of Iraqi refugees living in terrible conditions. There would not have been at least 100,000 Iraqis killed. There would not be a country ruled by mini-Talban states to use the AWL’s own words, ruled over by Shia and Sunni sectarian militia, armed and trained by the US and Britain, and who regularly kill and rape and torture those very same workers, women and gays that Clvie wants to tell us are beneficiaries of the US invasion and Occupation. Indeed, without that Occupation there would not be attacks on Trade Unionists by those same US and US backed forces that Clive implies in his statement above are the creators of those Trade Unions, rather than the brave Iraqi workers that actually established in the face of opposition form those Occupiers, and their sectarian allies.

“I really don't see why thinking 'troops out now' is a bad slogan commits me to 'supporting the occupation', or 'wanting the troops to stay' or any other similar formulation, any more than thinking 'overthrow Gordon Brown' now is a bad slogan commits me to support for the British government. It's fundamentally an argument about ultra-leftism, I suppose - or vague, unfocused, pseudo-revolutionary sloganising and all that, not an argument about whether to support imperialism.”

But, the problem is that as the debate within the AWL itself demonstated the argument is not really about the slogan, and the majority’s rejection of it, but about the methodology, the mentality, and the argumentation that lies behind the rejection of the slogan. The slogan is not rejected because the majority think it’s a bad slogan, but because they REALLy DO NOT WANT the Occupation to leave. If I’m asked would I like the working class to be able to mobilise to remove Brown and replace him with a workers alternative, I like the AWL would answer yes. Asked am I in favour of developinga struggle for that end, again we would both answer yes. But, the AWL Majority are not in favour of a workers mobilisation to defeat imperialism in Iraq. They are left in the same position in the face of workers struggles to that end, such as the US dockers, as were the Stalinists in WWII, they must logically oppose such action because it conflicts with their argument. They might half-heartedly say they are in favour of Iraqi workers being able to do that – though they believe, as the discussion in the AWL showed, that those forces will not be able to do that – but they are opposed to any Programme or development of any slogan around which the Iraqi workers might be mobilised for such a struggle, instead arguing again as Clive does above that all that is possible is Economistic struggle. So in fact they do have a stages theory that says, Tradde Union struggle now, hope something more bouregois democratic turns up, then political struggle. Of course, the problem is that last year the AWL were defining the "Resistance" as being only the Sunnis and foreign fighters. Clive told us that Sstani was really a Constitutionalist, who along with others among the US's allies really wanted to set up some form of rough and ready bouregois democracy! Sistani was not at all like the Iranian Ayatollahs he insisted. I reminded him then of the AWL's predecessor, Workers Action's, mistake in that regard as far as Iran. Since then Sistani and the militias connected with him, have issued fatwas against gays, murdered women on the streets of Basra where they rule in a way that looks all the world like the rul of the mullahs in Iran! At every stage the AWL's analysis has been wrong, it has coloured up the prospects of the Occupation and its Shia allies, including those Shia allies which anyone that viewed the situation through the eyes of Marxism would have recognised as bieng every bit as much clerical-fascist as the Sunni militias upon whse heads the AWL originally placed the label "Resistance".

Were it not for the fact that the AWL has form we might be able to accept their assurances of what they really mean, but the fact is that the whole of their politics is based on defeatism, on a belief that the working class in the current period at least is incapable of independent action – the same independent working class action they tell us defines their Third Camp politics. That is why they support Glotzer’s position of supporting Zionism for the creation of Israel, because they had no faith in joint Jewish-Arab workers struggle, why they supported Yeltsin’s counter-revoluiton because they had no faith in Russian workers, why they supported imperialist bombing of Serbia because they had no faith in the international working class or Serb-Kosovan workers joint struggle, why they support bourgeois nationalism as an alternative to proletarian internationalism in Kosova and Tibet, why they call for surgical US bombing of Iran, because they have no faith in Iranian workers, its why they support a bourgeois/imperialist imposed, bouregois nationalist solution of Two States in Israel-Palestine, because they have no faith in Jewish and Arab workers producing a workers solution, why they fall in behind the Economistic demands over the NHS, because they have no faith in workers being able to put forward a workers alternative to the current state capitalist set-up.
That is the real nature of the AWL’s refusal to engage in a struggle against imperialism, a refusal which would have barred them from entry of the Comintern under the rules established by the First Four Congresses whose basis they still claim to adhere to.

P.S. I noticed today, 21st June, that the AWL have even delted my link to this blog from the dicussion on their Board. They must be really uncomfortable with their views if they go to those lengths to prevent me challenging their ideas.

See Also:Three D's and Four X's - on the debate inside the AWL and

Class War Erupts in Iraq

Return of the Idot Imperialists