The AWL response to Socialist Appeal says,
“In so far as he has a clear point here, Attard seems to be suggesting defensive or liberation struggles by oppressed or vulnerable nations only have validity if they are dominated by working-class forces. Again, apply this to the Vietnamese struggle, whose leaders aimed not only to win national freedom but to create a totalitarian state without a labour movement…”
Well if that is what he's suggesting, he'd be right, as that is what The Theses on The National and Colonial Questions also says, and indicates why the Left was also wrong in giving uncritical support to the Viet Cong. Its also why Trotsky insisted on the Chinese Communists being independent from the KMT, the Spanish workers from the Popular Front, and so on. It is also the basis upon which the AWL correctly refused to support “the resistance” against US occupation in Iraq, dominated by political Islamists, why they refuse to support the struggle of Hamas, or Hezbollah, and so on. So, which is it to be?
The response says,
“Attard ignores small but real initiatives by Ukrainian socialists, anarchists and trade unionists to organise their own (not at all ordinary!) units and networks within the Ukrainian military struggle – unsurprisingly, given Socialist Appeal does not care what Ukrainian (and Russian) left-wingers think about the war. More fundamentally it suggests that, since the Ukrainian resistance is dominated by regular bourgeois armed forces, whether the Ukrainians can defend themselves against slaughter and oppression is of no real interest.”
But, how does that differ from the way the AWL argued that the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq was dominated by the Islamists, whatever role actual workers and revolutionaries might have played subsidiary to it, and so it was that concrete nature of the dominance of those Islamists that determined the AWL's refusal to support demands for troops out, or for the liberation struggle? As for the sniping comments about not being concerned with what Ukrainian workers think, that amounts to tailism, as the position of Marxism flows from class analysis, not concern to keep in step with trades union consciousness or public opinion.
In 1939, Tom Wintringham, on the basis of his experience in the Spanish Civil War, helped set up the Local Defence Volunteers. There were undoubtedly some revolutionaries, like Wintringham, involved in it. There were undoubtedly many British workers who felt that they were engaged in a war against fascism, but, that could not, in any way change the nature of WWII, as an inter-imperialist war. Indeed, although Wintringham was used to set up the LDV, and train its members at Osterley Park, he was not allowed to be a member due to his previous membership of the Communist Party, and association with the US Trotskyist Kitty Bowker!
The AWL response concludes with a reference to
“what Trotsky called “nose-picking” in the face of massacres”, but of course, the AWL completely distorted that comment, by Trotsky, in relation to the Balkan Wars, too. They presented it as a justification for liberal interventionism or at least for not opposing such intervention, when, in fact, the comment was made by Trotsky, arguing against the call for liberal intervention in the Balkans, by the Russian Milyukov. Indeed, such systematic bowdlerisation and distortion of the works of Lenin and Trotsky to suit whatever needs their current positions require gives little faith to have any respect for any of their arguments or positions. It is no longer a question of errors, but of deliberate betrayals.
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