Resistance

Students across the country have been fighting back against job cuts in Higher Education as the government is attempting to offload some of the crisis onto students and education workers.  As part of the ‘National Wave’ organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts students at the University of Westminster went into occupation for three days in a couple of rooms at the Regent Street Campus. They went in to occupation because the management had announced that 250 job cuts were to be brought in this year. Over 200 students took part in a demonstration on March 1 which disrupted the meeting of the Court of Governors with many then going in to occupation. Their demands focus on education cuts and can be found here.

At the University College London  around 200 students and staff demonstrated on March 3. The demonstration was called against proposed job cuts with Life Sciences and Modern Languages being lined up for the biggest cuts in budgets, staff and courses. The demonstrators marched on the office of the Provost, Malcolm Grant and called for him to come and speak with the students, he refused. Demonstrators held a sit down protest for a while and then went on to discuss the next stage in their campaign. The lecturers union the UCU is organising a ballot for strike action. More information cane be found here.

Sussex University was the scene of a viscous attack by police after 80 students went into occupation on March 3 against proposed cuts and in solidarity with staff who have voted 76% in favour of industrial action, the UCU report can be found here. The demonstration and occupation was peaceful until management called in the police, who brought in vans of police to attack and control the demonstrations. Threatening at one time to break through the barricades students had erected inside to defend themselves. The demontration outside was attacked by police as the below video shows:

We must demand that the police are kept off university campuses and that a full investigation is organised with the full involvement of both students and staff into why the police were invited by Sussex University management to attack a peaceful demonstration of students on University grounds.

To keep up to date with what is going on check out and bookmark the website of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts

The British election season is heating up, in more ways than one.

Firstly, and most prominently displayed in the last week, the dirty tricks are getting dirtier. Gordon Brown has become the subject of bullying allegations once again; this time, wielding the hatchet is Blairite journalist Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer’s most prominent Westminster writer.

In an instalment of a new book serialised in that paper (February 21), Rawnsley alleges that Brown is prone to fits of temper, which occasionally results in physical violence against underlings. Much has been made of one particular story, in which a lowly typist frustrated Brown so much that he allegedly upended her out of her chair and sat down at the keyboard himself. Rawnsley also alleges that Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary, was alerted to these complaints, and issued a formal warning to the prime minister about his behaviour.

The government immediately moved to issue denials. Peter Mandelson, the career politician’s career politician, flatly denied any bullying at No10, saying that Brown was merely very demanding – of others, but particularly of himself. Mandelson did not seem overly concerned at what he at first regarded as a “storm in a teacup” – and indeed why should he be? Despite the big names involved, these revelations are hardly earth-shattering; for a start, it is well-known already, particularly in those sections of the media able to closely follow Westminster, that Brown has a short fuse under pressure. Revelations from former insiders already litter the bookshelves.

The new and specific allegations from Rawnsley are, for the most part, unsourced, as per the oleaginous shmoozer’s modus operandi. They also date from the period after Brown flip-flopped over the autumn 2007 election that never was; in other words, a time when Downing Street was more or less in a state of siege, from which the government – following the economic collapse and a million other things – has still yet to recover.

So why has this resurfaced? The answer is partly to do with a woman called Christine Pratt, who – with her husband – runs an anti-bullying charity and helpline. She went public, telling the BBC’s Daily politics TV show on February 22 that “three or four” people had phoned the helpline relating to conditions at 10 Downing Street. Though she made it clear that these complaints and communications had not been linked to Brown, she apparently took umbrage at Mandelson’s fairly categorical denial of any wrongdoing in the PM’s office.

Pratt’s exposure has backfired on her to a considerable extent – apoplectic reactions from Labour figures were followed by the resignation of key trustees of her charity, including hard-right Tory MP Anne Widdecombe. From there, it was merely a race to the obvious line that she had acted like a “prat” (the winner, in the event, was key New Labour reactionary Phil Woolas). Pratt insists that she is not politically motivated; but her evidence for this is merely that her charity is funded largely by business and not at all by the state, and that she is not personally a member of the Tories, which should not reassure us too much as to her pristine motives. Certainly, the further allegations from her side enabled the Tory and Liberal Democrat leaders to offer guarded condemnations.

The other side to this explosion, however, is the complete bungling of the issue by Labour. Firstly, we should note that Rawnsley’s book has been expected for some time. The Mail on Sunday made a meal out of it last month (January 31). Members of Labour’s inner-circle would have known about it even earlier.

Yet this was the time they chose to rebrand the puritanical son-of-the-manse, Gordon Brown, as a compelling human individual, with far more depth and substance than the superficial nice-guy antics of David (‘call me Dave’) Cameron. So badly prepared were Labour for these allegations that it arranged a one-hour interview with narcissistic media suit Piers Morgan, in which this all-new human side would come out fully. The initial media reaction included some surprisingly positive comments, contrasting, for example, Brown’s performance with the stiff, socially awkward persona that comes over on more formal occasions. Many were impressed, in spite of themselves, at Alastair Campbell’s media training programme; whatever Gordon Brown looked like on that show, he did not look like … well, Gordon Brown.

This was broadcast a week before Rawnsley’s book was to begin serialisation (and after its most sensational charges had been broken by the Mail on Sunday). The phrase ‘hostage to fortune’ does not quite cover the screening of this sycophantic interview a week before Brown’s hot head was inevitably going to hit headlines – if only in The Observer.

It has become usual to open articles with the sentence, ‘It has been another bad week for Gordon Brown.’ This time, however, in spite of all this, it is not clear that it has been. A Guardian/ICM poll, published on February 22 and conducted over the days before the Observer piece and after the Morgan interview, recorded another drop in the Tory lead. As things stand, a hung parliament is perhaps more likely than a Tory outright victory; David Cameron, meanwhile, has been made to look a bit stupid as he reverses positions on the economy, and shadow chancellor George Osborne is tied up in a family scandal involving the exchange of prescription medicines for sex. Brown’s chances are still pretty dire, but they are better than they have been for over a year.

A hung parliament would be no use to Brown, who would be immediately replaced. A weak Tory majority – or minority government – would probably do more damage to the Tories, however. Having based the appeal to Conservative Party grassroots on immediate public sector cuts, it remains to be seen whether such cuts are even possible; should Cameron succeed, they will greatly increase the likelihood of a second economic downturn, at any rate, which would scupper any minority government in moments.

The bad news for Brown is that the poll finds no evidence that the Morgan interview has made any contribution whatever to this reversal. Even this cloud has a silver lining, however, as many people unconcerned with Brown’s personal virtues are unlikely to be too concerned about his vices either.

Exactly how this will all pan out for him is singularly unclear. It is possible that there will be a dip in poll ratings, after all; though the opposition parties are actually fairly reluctant to come out in strong terms on what are at the end of the day unsourced allegations, we should not underestimate the capability of a flailing Labour government in profound decay once again to pick at the scab until it becomes infected. Every time these allegations come out, it seems, there is a Blairite with a finger in it somewhere – before Rawnsley there was former Labour general secretary Peter Watts and Blair spin doctor Lance Price. Not too surprising, since they would have all the good gossip …

All the sound and fury in the world, however, will not disclose a meaningful political difference between New Labour and the Conservatives at the coming election. Labour offers a less pressing timetable for budget cuts – but such things, as we have noted, are more or less imposed on governments anyway. David Cameron cannot substantiate his guff about the ‘broken society’ without talking like the very old-fashioned sort of Tory he really is. Gordon Brown simply lurches in whatever direction allows him to cling onto power. Both have every interest in bigging up their personalities (but neither really appears to have one of those, either).

That personality does not appear to have made much difference, despite its prominence, is not a huge surprise. Extended appeals to charismatic personal trust ring a little hollow when the headlines are still periodically dominated by fallout from the MPs’ expenses scandal. The battle between the PR man and the bureaucrat is not some clash of demigods interesting to the general public in itself. Left-leaning voters appreciate the values Brown attempts to sell them – intellectual and moral seriousness, an appreciation of people’s hardships and so on – only when they are not in stark contradiction with what he actually manages to pony up. If voters are told that Brown has a good moral compass, but observe a government which clearly has no purpose beyond increasingly desperate self-perpetuation, they will reject the personal appeal as so much irrelevant spin – and rightly so.

So how much is there left to play for in this election season? The Tories are, of course, still clear front-runners. Labour hopes of a successful fightback are fairly lean – they have begun to come back before, and then collapsed again, so the directionless New Labour project seems to have lost its ability to build on gains in any positive way. Alistair Darling’s stunning remarks on Sky TV about how Downing Street had “unleashed the forces of Hell” against him in 2008 being a case in point. For Labour to get a working majority at this stage would be almost miraculous; a hung parliament is likely, but would not favour Labour, as there is little in it for the Liberal Democrats to prop up a dying regime.

Whoever wins, however, may well come to think of it as a Pyrrhic victory. Short of some uncharacteristic good news from the City of London (or the city of Kabul), the new government will inherit an economic and political situation largely beyond its control – especially a weak, minority or coalition government.

The abiding lesson: bourgeois politics is running out of answers.

London

Friday February 22 saw a successful gig in Stoke Newington, north London, organised by Hands Off the People of Iran. Boredom Riots, Egg Timer and Technosapien entertained a merry crowd and helped us raise over £110 for Workers Fund Iran.

The next day, Hopi comrades organised a solidarity stall in Trafalgar Square together with comrades from the March 8 Women’s Organisation (Iran-Afghanistan). Together we gave out Hopi postcards, talked to many people about current developments in Iran and publicised the March 7 International Women’s Day march which Hopi is co-sponsoring. We are hoping to make the stalls a weekly occurrence and to organise monthly gigs.

If you would like to help organise this vital solidarity work, then get in touch via office@hopoi.org.

Ben Lewis

Cardiff

On Saturday February 20 comrades in Cardiff were on the streets to support the Hopi week of action. Among the normal glut of evangelists and chain store promotional campaigns on Queen Street, comrades with Hopi leaflets, petitions, badges and a collection can made a surprisingly positive impact.

On a busy shopping day, with most people making a beeline for the supermarket or fashion outlet, cash was raised for the campaign, constructive talks were had and many signatures were collected in support of Hopi’s principled approach.

After a promising day, plans are now in place to continue with more regular work in both Cardiff and Swansea.

Dani Thomas

Cork

Hopi Ireland held two successful events last week to commemorate the 1979 revolution and build solidarity with the Iranian democratic and working class movement.

On Saturday February 13 activists held a street stall in Cork. We distributed literature and signed up dozens of new supporters. Then on Friday February 19 we had a film night with a showing of Persepolis and some first-hand accounts from Iranian activists.

Nasim, who took part in the 2009 demonstrations in Iran, spoke of the bravery of the people who took to the streets. She described the shock of those around her as state forces opened fire, indiscriminately killing and arresting activists. Many ordinary protestors now face serious charges of anti-state activity for taking part. A significant number are still in prison and most have no money for lawyers to represent them. Nasim said she was determined to do all she could to bring the situation in Iran to the attention of workers in the west.

Another activist, Parvaneh, had visited Iran recently. She described a very highly charged atmosphere. People are frightened, but also very angry. They want an immediate end to the theocratic regime and its replacement by a secular and democratic state. She bemoaned the lack of organisation on the ground and said that people are desperate for real leadership against the regime.

There were a number of questions and contributions and the event helped give an insight into the living struggle in Iran. We also raised €50 for Workers Fund Iran, to assist prisoners and their families.

Hopi in Cork has other activities in the pipeline. We will be taking part in International Women’s Day events on March 8 and are also planning more film nights and street stalls.

To get involved, contact me at anne@hopoi.info, or on 086 234 3238 or via www.hopi-ireland.org

Anne Mc Shane

On Saturday February 13 Hands Off the People of Iran’s week of action was kicked off at Manchester University with a day school, followed by a fundraising event. Around 35 people attended for some or all of the day.

The first session was opened by Steven Monaghan from the Anarchist Federation and Manchester Hopi, who spoke about the current situation in Iran and the necessity to support the radical and democratic opposition. He said that our task in Britain is to organise militant opposition to sanctions and military threats.

David Mather from Glasgow Hopi recounted the imperialist meddling and threats against Iran since the revolution in 1979. He said that the pressure from outside had accelerated the reactionary moves by Khomeini against the left and progressive forces and the attack by Iraq gave the clerics an opportunity to liquidate even the most loyal leftwing cadres.

The discussion afterwards focussed on the role Iran has played in supporting the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, with Hussein Al-Alak pointing out the contradictions in imperialist strategy in the region. The US makes use of Iranian influence to maintain relative peace and stability in Iraq, but this does not stop it threatening military action and further sanctions against Tehran.

The second session of the day was opened by Steve Durrant from the Green Party, speaking at short notice (the speaker from Aslef, the rail union, had to pull out through illness). He spoke about how imperialism had manipulated democratic movements in other countries for their own ends and we should guard against that in Iran.

Yassamine Mather from the Hopi steering committee talked about the mass movement in Iran, its organisational basis and the need for the active involvement of the working class. She stressed that many sections of the opposition movement have or are moving beyond the ‘reformist’ leaders – such as the women’s movement, which has denounced Moussavi’s ‘five-point plan’, as it had nothing to say on women’s rights. This has led many to call for the separation of religion and the state – essentially calling for the end of the Islamic Republic.

In the discussion we exchanged ideas about who is and who is not part of the opposition movement. There were various suggestions about how we could extend our solidarity to comrades in Iran and in the evening this was put into practice when Hopi supporters gathered in the Whitworth Arms to raise money for those in struggle.

And it was all looking so rosy for the official green movement. After the low point that followed America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and the election in 2000 of president George W Bush, who openly flirted with global warming denial, the tide slowly seemed to turn – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change grew in prominence, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its fourth report, shared with Bush’s vanquished foe turned eco-activist, Al Gore. Green concerns eventually came to dominate what had been the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement. Even oil companies such as Shell started touting their ‘green technology’.

Now, after a particularly damaging series of circumstances, the climate change denial lobby is on the march again. In some respects, their arguments are simply silly – a February cold snap last week covered Dallas, Texas in snow, and led to particularly philistine comments on Murdoch’s meanest Stateside attack-dog network, Fox News. If the world was warming up, why was it snowing in Dallas? Once again, the US right makes the fatal mistake of confusing America’s borders with the entire world; America’s borders, in point of fact, cover about 2% of the Earth’s surface – and therefore about 2% of the world’s climatic conditions.

Moreover, nobody who has even bothered to sit through Al Gore’s narcissistic An inconvenient truth can be unaware that climate scientists have never claimed that global warming meant that on literally any slice of the Earth’s surface temperatures will rise. Some of the more alarming hypotheses, in fact, are of new ice ages in temperate areas, thanks to melting ice caps.

If this homespun nonsense was all the climate change denial lobby had going for it, it would be hardly in rude health. This comes, however, after a glut of high-profile failures and blunders on the side of those claiming to confront the problem. The Copenhagen summit in December was notably unproductive; it also offered the unedifying spectacle of imperialist countries nakedly trying to offload their emissions targets to developing countries – now there’s a ‘carbon offset’ to write home about.

Then came ‘Climategate’ – scientists at the University of East Anglia were caught in several acts of human frailty with a series of emails, leaked by persons unknown. The most ‘damning’ extracts in fact refer invariably to mildly dishonest cosmetic fiddles, and some unbecoming jostling for position in the academic hierarchy. To believe increasing sections of the rightwing press, you would expect there to be mountains of hushed-up evidence coming to light on the fraudulence of mainstream climate science. Needless to say, nothing is forthcoming.

Perhaps even more damaging has been the revelation that one prediction in the 2007 IPCC report is demonstrably false. The report claimed that by current projections, the Himalayan glaciers would disappear completely by 2035. This is no minor oversight. It turned out that there were no published scientific papers in support of this claim at all – the only citation available was to an interview conducted by the New Scientist with an Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain. If that was not bad enough, Hasnain now denies ever making that claim at all – “I have not made any prediction on date, as I am not an astrologer, but I did say they were shrinking fast … I have never written 2035 in any of my research papers or reports,” he told The Times (January 21).

It is, to be certain, difficult to imagine a more damning story of incompetent research, at least on a point as fine as the particular prospects for some particular glaciers. Even so, it is not in itself a reason to believe that the whole report is bunk – indeed, it is telling that only one error has been cited, despite the obviously considerable resources behind this persistent disruption.

Yet it is a serious blow for ‘official’ ecology, which has responded to the relentless assault of its denialist opponents by erecting an ideological fortress around an ever-extending body of multi-disciplinary research, often engaged in tangled disputes over particular phenomena. The science is solid enough, of course, to leave the denialists’ anaemic offerings in smouldering ruins; by posing things in a way that divided an immaculate body of knowledge from such unclean pursuits as politics, however, the IPCC and other such institutions have attempted to turn living research into a kind of absolute knowledge, inimical to the scientific process. When the latter inevitably fails to live up to the former ideal, the result is an ideological crisis, of which the denial lobby is taking full advantage.

This metaphysical error has drawn criticism before from the denialist camp. The former Revolutionary Communist Party, now organised around the Spiked website, has a long history of flirtation with, and sometimes open advocacy of, global warming denial. Its current phase is a flirtatious one – and so Spiked writer Ben Pile, fully in line with group orthodoxy, writes: “A scientific consensus about the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is not equivalent to a scientific consensus about human society’s sensitivity to climate. There is a huge difference between these two ideas, yet [energy and climate change secretary Ed] Miliband’s argument rests on the idea that they are equivalent. And it is on this point that sceptics have not yet made much progress. While banging away at the science of climate change, they have failed to tackle the wider argument about our capacity to deal with the unexpected. What sceptics need to explain is how climate and society have become so confused.”^[1]

This is in fact a legitimate concern – but if the journalistic carping of Spiked is insufficient to actually tackle it, the same is a fortiori the case with the sceptics. It is no accident that these ‘sceptics’ “have not yet made much progress” in establishing a better framework for examining humanity’s relationship to the natural environment – the vast bulk of them are in the pay of an influential, environmentally rapacious section of financialised capital. These people have absolutely no interest in thinking more ‘creatively’ about politics.

This is no ‘conspiracy theory’ – big oil’s fingerprints are found, again and again, all over research that apparently contradicts mainstream opinion on anthropogenic climate change. Any oil company that did not attempt to disrupt what consensus has been achieved on this issue would manifestly be operating outside of its own interests. One does not, furthermore, just receive potentially incriminating emails by chance. That requires either a sophisticated hacking operation or a spy – not things that a few rightwing cranks have lying around as a rule.

At the moment, it appears that this subterfuge is becoming more successful. A Populus poll, published by the BBC website, reveals that 25% of respondents did not believe global warming was happening at all – up 10% from November. The largest part of those polled (38%) believed that, though climate change is happening, a human component in that change has not been conclusively proven – again a noticeable increase on November.^[2]

Given the litany of failures that separate then from now, it is perhaps unsurprising. The proverbial ‘man in the street’ is subjected, whenever he turns on the TV news or glances at almost any newspaper, to a clear and unambiguous message from the climatologists, the political establishment and large swathes of civil society that global warming is happening, it is happening now and it is happening because of us. He is told that – whatever the date – in the not too distant future, cities and even entire islands run the risk of sinking, that extreme weather conditions will become the norm, that large swathes of the planet are due to turn into desert. He is told, in no uncertain terms, that something must be done about it.

So, when the great and the good get together and cannot find the will for any more serious action on climate change than that offered at Copenhagen (and the countless previous junkets on the subject), somebody ill-versed in climate science is understandably going to feel sceptical. Persistent appeals for us to make our lives more inconvenient – drive less, fly less, pay 5p for a plastic bag – for the good of the planet sit uneasily next to pictures of enormous diplomatic contingents getting off the chartered jets in Copenhagen. When cracks appear in the image of scientific consensus, the notion that it’s all a load of bunk designed to rip us off – however untrue – is a plausible explanation for the evident unconcern of bourgeois politicians and the capitalist class more generally.

A million miles away from the technologistic caricature peddled by its opponents in the green milieu, Marxism offers the only way out of this deadlock. The underlying problem which has prepared the population to swallow global warming denialism (or more accurately, start to give some quarter to it) is the immense democratic deficit that allows capitalism, and class society more generally, to reproduce itself. For Marxists, the anarchy of the market is always a tyranny – it prevents the mass of society from responding rationally and effectively to the impending ecological crisis.

Only from the perspective of Marxism, meanwhile, can the nonchalance of capitalists and their political deputies be explained. Capital is locked in an endless drive for expansion; it is structurally unable to sustain resources, as sustaining anything usually eats into profits in the here and now. The limits imposed on the actions of governments are thrown into sharp relief by the difficulties facing the climate change consensus, both in terms of defending itself against opponents and in terms of translating understanding of the reality into political action. Only a more rational society, where production is democratically planned, can give the human species a chance of prospering on this planet.

Notes

1. www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8057
2. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8500443.stm

Over 100 student activists gathered on Saturday February 6 for the Convention Against Cuts and Fees. Hosted by University College London Students for Free Education and given the green light by both the Socialist Workers Party’s and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s student fronts, the convention was the first time the left has had such a get-together since the student coordination organised by Workers Power last April, which saw a similar number of activists gather.

As well as the AWL and SWP, WP’s youth group, Revolution, Communist Students and a fair number of independent activists were present. It was good to see more than the ‘usual suspects’ – ie, the student sections of the far left – but the new faces from last year had mostly vanished. Despite talk of the need for unity, the left’s sectarianism prevented the coordination cohering anything in organisational terms, meaning that this year’s event was starting from scratch again.

Given that, the turnout was quite surprising. Clearly campus campaigns over funding and course cuts had brought people along, just as the wave of occupations over the Gaza invasion last year made the student coordination possible. The left wasted that opportunity to organise and further politicise student activists, and CS members were expecting the same again: the groups were likely to fish for a few green recruits but oppose any talk of organisational unity. We were to be pleasantly surprised in this regard, as the first speaker in the opening plenary, unaffiliated UCL student Joana Pinto began her talk by agreeing with the call made by CS in an article on our website two days earlier, for the convention to produce a national organisation and elect some sort of steering committee.

Further, in the discussion members of both WP and the AWL performed an about-turn and were arguing that, yes, we did need unity. After an intervention by a CS member comrade Pinto confirmed that motions would definitely be allowed – another improvement on last year, when the majority at the coordination had voted not to debate politics, only puerile ‘action points’. The SWP, present once again under its Another Education is Possible banner, did not appear to have pushed the event amongst its periphery and was represented by a core of mostly loyal members. SWP interventions were aimed at scuppering the formation of any new organisation. Evidently the SWP does not want a competitor to AEIP, and its actions on the day were entirely motivated by this narrow, sectarian outlook.

CS’s proposal for open talks about a united left slate in the NUS elections came under vociferous attack from Hanif Leylabi and another SWP comrade, who said that in elections you needed all sorts of policies, but there were “different opinions” in the room on topics outside of free education, like war and Islamophobia. A lame excuse. The SWP would prefer a stitch-up between left luminaries in a Euston pub, and had already approached National Union of Students officers Daf Adley and Bellavia Ribeiro-Addy about standing a slate. CS calls for an open and democratic process were ignored. Their arguments did not pass muster with the convention though, which proceeded to endorse our motion, albeit by a narrow margin, with many abstentions. Now we must make sure the steering group follows through on this commitment.

Last year’s shameless attempt by Education Not for Sale to maintain a diplomatic silence on the question of imperialism was attempted once again. No-one wants to lose ENS, which is essentially no different than the other student fronts. Yet the AWL, which effectively controls ENS, is infamous for its scab line on imperialism, refusing to call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq because they are ‘more progressive’ than reactionary Islamist groups.

The other groups’ terrified avoidance of big politics, and their desire to unite solely around the question of free education, ensured that imperialism and war were missing from the timetable, and conspicuously absent from the proposed ‘statement of intent’ drafted by the organising committee. Motions being allowed though, CS and the Commune agreed a joint amendment calling for opposition to imperialism, international solidarity and the immediate withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this was passed by a large majority.

In between plenaries the conference split up to attend bland workshops such as ‘Busting myths, fighting cuts’ and ‘Working with trade unions on and off campus’. Information and skill-sharing is, of course, useful, but is something any student movement worth its salt would be doing on all campuses. After lunch the conference was split up into regional workshops, which seemed achingly pointless, given that comrades can meet regionally any time, and many had probably travelled together that very day. A national conference should be an opportunity to discuss what strategy we need to achieve our aims, and to deepen the politicisation of radicalised students. It was an opportunity to create what is vitally needed: a national student movement to fight the attacks.

The convention did elect a steering committee from the regional meetings. This is a positive step forward, but the politics of this new formation must be deepened – there is the question not just of what we are against (the AWL’s Dan Randall, in opposing our Marxist platform, said we should be “anti-capitalist” and no more) but also what we are for. Effective unity has to be based on a clear political vision.

What sort of unity? Both the AWL and WP want to ‘keep it broad’ and play down their Marxist politics in order to ‘build the movement’. No-one is opposed to organising with and fighting alongside non-Marxists in common struggles, and CS welcomes the small steps conference did take toward putting together some structures. Our point was that, if the people in that room had argued and voted for the politics they believe in, we would now have a Marxist organisation, at least formally, not a loose anti-cuts network.

In the final session, CS put forward an alternative platform to that drafted by the convention organisers. Theirs demanded free education, with a nod to solidarity with education workers, but conspicuously avoided the question of imperialism (no doubt to keep the pro-Zionist and increasingly deranged AWL from storming out). Our platform put forward the politics of Marxism. The convention (now campaign) is not a united front. A ‘united front’ is for orthodox Marxism an alliance, made from below or above, between  revolutionaries and reformists, whose aim is actually to further the immediate interests of the working class. For us it is a means to win those influenced by reformism to the politics of revolution.

I am short-sighted, but I do not think even I would have failed to notice the presence of significant numbers of students who were not self-proclaimed revolutionaries. Maybe I missed the bit where the courageous Marxist minority got up amidst heckling reformists to argue that free education was insufficient and that we needed working class unity in a revolutionary organisation to fight for a communist society. Actually, I did argue that myself, but was surrounded by dozens of quiet and rather bashful looking far leftists. Yes, there were new faces – but only a few, and no date was set for another conference. If setting up united fronts is the task Marxists have set themselves, their performance so far suggests they should not give up the day job.

It is, unfortunately, only worsening objective conditions which are waking the student left up to the need for unity. Nevertheless, a growing awareness of this and the minimal structures which came out of the conference are a step in the right direction. But if we are to build an effective alternative to the system, the student movement must make political debate a priority.

Free and open discussion is the only way to win the best politics and achieve the most effective unity. Not just sharing tips on the effectiveness of this or that tactic, or ‘Trade union work’, which are the sort of talks we can have any time in local groups or on the internet, but debating the critical questions facing the left today – questions of principle and strategy.

One of the ironies of the day was that, after voting down CS’s Marxist platform, conference proceeded to adopt several ‘motherhood and apple pie’ motions – not only opposing Islamophobia, but supporting workers’ struggles, etc. Instead of a coherent platform which puts the blame on the system and clearly identifies the international working class as the agency of change, we have a list of statements against every single bad symptom. To take Marxist politics out of the equation is actually to burden the student movement with a huge handicap.

Our analysis enables us to expose the workings of the system and explain why capitalism can never willingly grant us a decent education. It points to the militant and united action necessary to take on the state, the impossibility of a fully human existence for the working class under capitalism, and the possibility of socialism. The working class needs these politics if is to mount a united and effective fightback against cuts and not be led down blind alleys by the trade union bureaucracy.

If it is not the right time for Marxism now, comrades, when exactly will it be?

Since Die Linke shook the German political scene by achieving a tremendous 11.9% in the national election of September 2009 (leading to the election of 76 of its members to parliament), it has been followed keenly by the German media. And in the last few months the party has provided them with plenty of ammunition.

The particular story currently occupying the minds of the bourgeois media started just after the elections, when Oskar Lafontaine announced that he did not want to continue as leader of Die Linke’s parliamentary fraction (in addition to being the national co-chair of the party and its leader in the federal state of Saarland – both positions he wanted to retain at that time).

Because he did not give any reason for wanting to step down, rumours were rife: the media branded him the “eternal resigner”, who had again ‘betrayed’ the voters. After all, didn’t he quit in 1999 after two years as Germany’s finance minister? And didn’t he at the same time resign his parliamentary seat and the chairmanship of the Social Democratic Party? The fact that this was preceded by a battle with then chancellor Gerhard Schröder over the introduction of a package of very unpopular, neoliberal measures known as Agenda 2010, apparently slipped the minds of the commentariat.

Then, in November, the news magazine Focus ‘broke’ the story (which was further expanded upon by the weekly Der Spiegel) that Lafontaine was having an affair with Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of the Stalinite Kommunistische Plattform of Die Linke. His wife was apparently so furious that she demanded his immediate return to the Saarland, to which he agreed, according to the reports. But the day after publication of the article, Lafontaine finally broke his silence and explained that in fact he was actually suffering from prostrate cancer and needed an operation.

Then, while he was recuperating, Die Linke national secretary Dietmar Bartsch was ‘outed’ as having told Der Spiegel that Lafontaine was already thinking about resigning back in February 2009 – ie, before his cancer scare. A storm broke out in the party, most likely fuelled by the furious Lafontaine himself. Almost all regional party structures in the west of Germany sent protest letters to the party leadership (usefully copying in magazines like Der Spiegel), branding Bartsch disloyal and a burden to the party. Party members in the east of the country, however, vehemently defended Bartsch.

Although born in the west, Dietmar Bartsch is one of the few Germans who have moved to the east, rather than the other way around. Politically, he is very close to the east German Realpolitiker of the party. They are actively pursuing red-red government coalitions with the Social Democrats everywhere and on every level possible, to prove how ‘responsible’ Die Linke has become. A national red-red government coalition with the SPD at the next general election has been the openly expressed aim of many people in that wing of the party.

With the media gleefully reporting every twist and turn of the confrontation, Gregor Gysi, the ‘wise old man’ of Die Linke and with Lafontaine co-chair of the party, had to make a choice. And he decided to go with Lafontaine. While in the east, the vote for Die Linke (and its predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism, PDS) has remained stable at around 25%-30% for the last 10 years, Lafontaine’s popularity in the west of the country has played a crucial part in securing the massive increase in the party’s vote there.

In the west, the PDS was for a long time seen as not much more than just another loony fringe group. All that changed when in 2005 Lafontaine joined the newly emerging organisation, the WASG (Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative), which was made up of disappointed left social democrats and union officials. Without Lafontaine, it would have remained a small fringe group, like so many others. With Lafontaine at the helm, the PDS and the WASG merged in 2005, opening the way to the party’s electoral success.

Clearly, Lafontaine had become indispensable for Die Linke. Gysi used a packed press conference at a party meeting in early January to announce that Bartsch – for many years one of his most loyal right-hand men – had acted “disloyally” and had ceased to enjoy the support of the leadership. Bartsch, deeply hurt, announced that he would not run for the post of party secretary again at the next congress in May. Gysi hoped that this was enough to convince Lafontaine to stay.

So Lafontaine had ‘won’. But after a few days, he announced that because of his ill health, he would also resign his parliamentary seat and the party’s chairmanship. He will continue to do some limited work for the party regionally, but he has departed from the national stage for now.

Left versus right

So what is really behind the confrontation? And what will the impact of Lafontaine’s departure be? Much of the bourgeois media talked of a “deep personal dislike” between Bartsch and Lafontaine. This might be so, but it is hardly the point. Both are seasoned politicians who can rise above such things.

Their fight is certainly over political outlook. The confrontation between them has been billed as a fight between the left and the right of the party and there is a certain amount of truth in that. But it is not the whole truth.

As one of the main spokespersons for the ‘respectable’ right wing, Bartsch has vigorously promoted the ‘red-red’ coalitions of Die Linke and the SPD in Berlin and the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Die Linke has been in government for many years and where there have been draconian cuts and closures. But how could it be any different? As a minority in a bourgeois government, Die Linke is forced to manage capitalism, which especially in this period means cuts, cuts and cuts again. Subsequently, it lost a lot of support in those areas.

And now, after last year’s general election, it also governs in the east German state of Brandenburg. Lafontaine has spoken out against the government contract that was drawn up between the SPD and Die Linke, which openly promised to drastically reduce “expenses in the public sector” – ie, make deep cuts in social provisions and sack hundreds of employees.

Lafontaine has definitely moved to the left since leaving the SPD. Of course, he is no revolutionary. But he is certainly to the left of those power-hungry elements in the east. His are the typical Keynesian politics of the social democrats who have turned their backs on the right-marching SPD. Like many trade unionists and traditional SPD supporters, he believes in some kind of nationally restricted social welfare state. Back to the 1970s. That puts him on the left of German politics, although not so much in Die Linke, of course.

He was never against taking the party into ruling coalitions – quite the opposite. But he and his supporters kept formulating ‘principles’ or ‘conditions’ which would have to be met before they would agree to government participation. Putting conditions is generally not a bad tactic. However, as a minority in a capitalist government, Die Linke would always be forced to take responsibility for attacks on the working class. That is in the nature of the system.

The left rudderless

Because he is rather charismatic and enjoys a high level of popularity in the country, Lafontaine was adopted by the left within Die Linke as their own little Bonaparte. Especially by the Kommunstische Plattform, which dominates the party’s Antikapitalistische Linke grouping, and the German section of the Socialist Workers Party, now grouped around the magazine Marx21 and the Sozialistische Linke platform. Smelling breakthrough and the big time, they mostly kept their mouths shut, supporting Lafontaine almost uncritically.

Lafontaine had held on to his post long enough to force the party leadership to make a move against the Realpolitik of Bartsch and co. But it was nothing more than a symbolic move. It does not mean that ‘the left’ in the party has won. Quite the contrary. It has been left rudderless, because it gave Lafontaine so much leeway.

In a rather undemocratic procedure smacking of its Stalinist heritage, the current party leadership tried to defuse the situation by publicly announcing its suggestions for the next leadership – four months before the membership will actually have a chance to vote on it at the party’s May conference. Not surprisingly, most can be counted on the right of the party. There might be opposition to the leadership-in-waiting in May, but, having concentrated so much on Lafontaine, the left now has no serious contender to fall in behind.

In fact, Klaus Ernst, designated new co-chairman and previously a trade union official in IG Metall, is not only on the right: he has made himself a name in the party by being particularly bureaucratic and ‘against the sectarians’ – ie, against the left. For example, he has been leading the campaign to exclude members of Sozialistische Alternative (SAV), the German section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (run by Peter Taaffe and co in London). Of course, the CWI behaved stupidly in the past by forming organisations that stood against Die Linke in Berlin elections, thereby providing bureaucrats like Ernst with an open goal. When the CWI rival came to nothing, it tried to sneak back into the party, but was firmly and very publicly rebuffed. The Taaffeites made themselves look completely unprincipled when they tried to force their way back in via the bourgeois courts.

In an attempt to incorporate the left, Sarah Wagenknecht has been promoted to vice-chair designate. But she is a bit on the eccentric side, to put it mildly. She still defends the building of the Berlin wall as a “necessity” and continues to praise the “many good things” that existed in the German Democratic Republic. She can be useful in public debates and TV shows, because she can memorise tons of facts. But she has zero charisma. She is not going to be able to unite the left within Die Linke.

While Lafontaine’s Keynesian programme should have been challenged more by the left, he certainly brought it closer together. He kept the lid on the pressure cooker. Hopefully, the left will now stop playing ‘follow my leader’ and finally start to formulate its own, independent working class programme around which to fight within Die Linke. The time is ideal for such a move, with the party about to start a debate precisely over programme. It still does not have one in fact – only various sets of ‘programmatic points’ and election platforms.

Die Linke’s body politic is currently held together by a very thin skin. Is it fighting for socialism? If so, what is socialism? Was East Germany a socialist country? These are only some of the questions that have been bubbling under for many years.

The left could galvanise, I would guess, around 30-40% of the membership if it drew up a joint platform, which must include a clear commitment to oppose participation in all capitalist governments. Die Linke must concentrate on becoming the main opposition party – especially now that the SPD has been gradually moving to the left and could end up with similar wishy-washy positions. That would create a strong pull on Die Linke and the possibility of a good section of its voter base being sucked back towards the SPD.

Two social democratic parties in Germany is – at least – one too many.

At the 2007 Barcelona world school of the International Marxist Tendency – a not insubstantial, relatively speaking, Trotskyist ‘international’ led primarily by its British section – spirits were as high as the grandiose title of such an event, held in a culturally iconic city (especially on the left), would imply. After days of discussion, apparently involving comrades from more countries than ever before, the IMT’s In Defence of Marxism website reported that “the general feeling is one of a tendency that is going forward, growing in numbers and sections”.[1]

Now, however, the comrades have somewhat less to be cheerful about. In the last few weeks a long-running dispute between the IMT leadership and several national sections, overwhelmingly in the Spanish-speaking world, has apparently erupted into a full split, with the rebels calling themselves, with the left’s usual lack of lexical originality, the Corriente Marxista Revolucionaria (CMR – Revolutionary Marxist Current), also the name of the Venezuelan group.

This follows another recent split, during which the IMT lost almost half its Pakistani section after a dispute with former national assembly member Manzoor Ahmed led to him and his allies leaving the organisation. The IMT did not even acknowledge it had broken with Manzoor for another six months. (Manzoor, for his part, claimed to have taken far more members than acknowledged by the IMT group, whom he accuses of bumping up conference attendance figures by inviting and counting NGO activists in large numbers.)

The Pakistani section was, and remains, by some distance the largest in the IMT, and all the lost sections this time round in all likelihood do not add up arithmetically to the number of departed comrades in Pakistan. Yet among them are those in Spain and Venezuela – both flagship sections, and both larger than the British group, Socialist Appeal.

Ted Grant

The IMT has its roots in the British Militant Tendency, which became in the 1980s the largest Trotskyist formation in Britain. Strongly committed to Labour Party entry – a strategy adopted by Militant earlier than its 1980s rivals, whose principal remnants today are the Mandelite International Socialist Group, Ken Livingstone’s former hired flunkies, Socialist Action, and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – Militant was by far the most successful in Labour entry’s history (if you discount the CPGB’s record in the 1920s and 30s). At its 1980s peak, Militant had around 5,000 members, three MPs and effective control of Liverpool city council.

This was all a little too much for the Labour right, whose rising star was former Tribunite left MP Neil Kinnock. After assuming the party leadership in the wake of the catastrophic 1983 election showing, Kinnock bided his time until a budget crisis in Liverpool – the result of a battle between leftwing councils and the government of Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to bring them to heel – saw Militant issue redundancy notices to thousands of council workers. Seeing his chance, Kinnock moved to purge Militant and other entry groups from Labour’s ranks.

His success was not total – by the 1990s, Militant still existed, and by some counts had only seen 200 members expelled; but its movements were constricted far more severely in the new conditions. The majority – led by Peter Taaffe – initiated an ‘open turn’, declaring Labour a dead duck and reorganising themselves first as Militant Labour and then as the Socialist Party in England and Wales (SPEW’s bureaucratic regime saw it lose whole swathes of its membership in the late 90s, including most of the Liverpool organisation and the Scottish section).

The factional struggle over this move was understandably intense in an organisation which by then had over 30 years’ history as an entry group, and had formed its whole ideology and identity around this strategy. The minority leader was Ted Grant, a Trotskyist since the 1930s and the founding leader of Militant. His differences were announced to the wider world, as is the way with bureaucratic left organisations, not in his organisation’s public press, but in a letter to The Guardian protesting the ‘sectarian’ drift of Militant’s majority. Grant was expelled; his supporters regrouped around the new publication Socialist Appeal, founded in 1992, by whose name the group is generally known.

This split was reflected in the international support accumulated over the years – the Committee for a Workers’ International had been founded in 1974, and remains one of the largest and widest-spread Trotskyist ‘internationals’ to this day. Grant’s side became the Committee for a Marxist International and then the IMT.

From the beginning, the IMT was a demographically peculiar group. Its earliest bit of good fortune came with the development of the Pakistan section, known as The Struggle and pursuing a course of long-term entry into the Pakistan People’s Party, the mass bourgeois party associated with the Bhutto dynasty. Lal Khan, the Struggle’s principal leader, had become closely acquainted with Grant ally Alan Woods, and brought his supporters into the IMT in the early 1990s. That meant an organisation dominated by a British section which was by all accounts tiny, yet featuring a several-thousand-strong subordinate group abroad. As time went on, the IMT grew substantially in Spain as well, and Grant and Woods became increasingly reliant on the human and financial resources of the hundreds of Spanish comrades.

Then history delivered unto Grant and Woods a messiah, in the form of a Venezuelan former junior army officer turned populist politician. Since Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in that country, the IMT has become the most energetic Marxist cheerleaders of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. Unsurprisingly, as an increasingly popular Chávez cemented his power, a sympathising section of the IMT grew in strength and influence. Unsurprisingly also, it too soon outstripped the mothership in these terms. And, given the centrality of Chávismo to IMT propaganda, all comrades’ eyes have been on Venezuela.

The split

Losing Spain and Venezuela, then, is an unmitigated disaster for Woods. Exactly how he managed to lose them is a rather more obscure matter. Numerous candidates for the political basis have been advanced – it was suggested, for example, that the rebels no longer believed China to be a ‘deformed workers state’, as per orthodox post-Trotsky Trotskyist dogma, but IMT comrades have hotly denied that this was the splitting issue; the debate over China, such as it has surfaced publicly, does not apparently coincide with the organisational pattern of the split.

Other rumours suggested that the IMT’s dedication to entry into what it calls the mass parties of the working class (and, in Pakistan, of the popular masses) was in question. This looks a more likely candidate, with a particular leadership document referred to widely on internet discussions criticising the Spaniards for being insufficiently energetic in pursuing “the need for organised entrist work in the Spanish Communist Party; a better approach to the left leaders; mistakes made in organising the Spanish students strike last March, and in the approach to the one-day work stoppage in May in the Basque country.” This paraphrase comes from a perceptive statement issued by former IMT comrades in America, centred on an e-list called Learning from our Past, a couple of weeks before the split was finalised.[2]

There is also the case of a statement, Venezuelan in origin, on the struggles in Iran. The IMT website apparently refused to publish it – I have not seen a translated version yet, but its title, ‘Marxists must stand firm against Ahmadinejad’, says it all.[3] The IMT, it has to be said, came out with if anything too rosy an estimation of the protest movement that emerged last year in Iran – but one Hugo Chávez certainly did not, immediately congratulating Ahmadinejad on his victory in patently rigged elections. It was always unclear how Woods would square this circle – now, it seems, he has done it to the detriment of the Iranian masses. The IMT section in Iran, meanwhile, has not come out on either side – it is the only remaining IMT group linked on the CMR’s website.

The real cause of the unrest, however, is different – as the statement from Learning from our Past makes clear. It is obvious, furthermore, that the CMR, like the IMT leadership, remains for the time being committed to both Chávismo and entryism – the political differences are those of nuance.[4]

In reality, the whole thing appears to be almost completely apolitical – the Spanish and Venezuelan sections have complained of persistent interference in their affairs by the international majority. This unrest reached its peak last year, when the international majority’s supporting faction in Spain came into fierce conflict with the local leadership, getting accused of breaking the organisation’s rules. Many comrades were expelled, although a split was averted at that point. A million tiny complaints and sallies from each side later, we can only conclude that the contradiction between the IMT’s demographics and its structures has finally ruptured, with the Spanish and Venezuelan comrades finally rejecting their ‘junior partner’ status.

And why not? They are, after all, bigger – they are more powerful in their own countries, and provide both foot soldiers and prestige to even the runts of the IMT litter. It is patently ridiculous that in a supposedly ‘democratic’ organisation numerically and politically more significant sections are under orders from people who have effectively gerrymandered them out of their share of leadership representation. Trotskyist leader James P Cannon once quipped that in any split there were two causes – the good reason and the real reason. This time around, the good reason is the real reason.

Furthermore, the IMT, despite its surreal, pre-Marxist fawning before petty bourgeois nationalist leaders in Latin America, is the most rhetorically urgent claimant to the mantle of Trotskyist orthodoxy on today’s left (excluding the likes of the Spartacist League). The web address of In Defence of Marxism is www.marxist.com – naturally. This orthodoxy has had, it has to be said, the positive side effect that the IMT’s politics – however wrong – are not philistine: dogmatists at least take their dogma seriously. Its main function, however, is to consecrate a ‘Marxist’ priesthood whose mandate comes from the Word and, thus, cannot be challenged by the earthly powers of the rank and file. The Learning from our Past comrades note an increasingly reverential cult of personality developing around Grant, who died in 2006. It is here, as everywhere else, an alibi for bureaucratic control. It was the entirely dogmatic attachment to entry work – applied in all IMT sections – which caused the problem in the first place when, predictably, this strategy produced vastly varying results in a complicated world.

In its fatal lopsidedness, the IMT poses in a peculiarly sharp way the problems of this style of ‘international’-building. We have called this type of grouping an ‘oil-slick international’ in the past, and indeed the IMT has spread outwards from London over the world. An oil slick, furthermore, can stretch out until it is only a single molecule thick, and the IMT indeed has a particularly large swathe of tiny sections from Canada to Iran. Building organisations in a way that pays no attention to local conditions of necessity produces this unevenness – it just happens that, this time, the strategy was politically bankrupt at the centre and intermittently successful on the periphery. The oil spreads out not from London any more, but Barcelona.

International organisation is a burning necessity for our class. It is so important that it has to be done properly, on a sound basis – effective international unity grows out of serious national political organisations, bringing serious forces together. None of this can be done by opening ‘foreign bureaus’ in sundry states around the world – parasitic from the beginning on pretty ramshackle foreign support, these groups almost invariably fail to take off in any real sense.

The split in the IMT is an unorthodox take on a tale we have, depressingly, told many times in this paper – bungled unity, bureaucratic manoeuvring and a whole lot of hot air. It appears, at least, that some ex-IMTers are learning from their past on this one. Let us quote them again: “There is a natural inclination to look for fundamental differences in political principle behind such splits. Yet the question of democracy is itself a supremely political question.”

Notes

1. www.marxist.com/2007-world-school-international-marxist-tendency.htm
2. weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2010/01/comments-on-current-crisis-in.html
3. elmilitantevenezuela.org/content/view/6659/179
4. For these rumours and others, see the perennial Leftist Trainspotters e-list: groups.yahoo.com/group/leftist_trainspotters

Moussavi: no friend of socialists

The Reesites no longer peddle the line that Iran is a democratic country. But despite Lindsey German’s resignation from the SWP, their support for the ‘green movement’, including the butcher Moussavi, shows that the comrades still have not learned what principled international solidarity is, says Tina Becker

On February 3 Campaign Iran organised a meeting in London to discuss ‘Iran: what lies ahead? The movement, sanctions and the west’. The meeting was attended by about 60 people, many of them Iranians.

There were no profound differences in the initial contributions from the three platform speakers – professor of Iranian history Ali Ansari, university lecturer Ali Fathollah-Nejad and Lindsey German officially representing the Stop the War Coalition and at the time still a member of the Socialist Workers Party. After being instructed not to go to a Newcastle Stop the war meeting she quit the SWP “after 37 years” on February 10.

All three speakers agreed that sanctions, as well as any military measures against Iran, should be opposed. However, after a small group of very vocal Iranians in the audience put forward the view that “We have to support sanctions – we can’t just sit around and do nothing”, professor Ansari actually changed his mind in his closing remarks. “What if there is a massacre in Tehran? What if Moussavi calls for sanctions? Do we just say no? This is a difficult decision and we cannot simply stick with dogma.”

It is typical of the Reesites to invite platform speakers who are politically on their right. It allows them to pose as the left. Lindsey German and her comrades had no trouble delivering the main arguments as to why socialists should oppose sanctions against Iran. In fact, SWP dissident Dominic Kavakeb actually repeated the earlier contribution of Ben Lewis (CPGB) almost word for word, when he stated: “The last thing the people on the streets of Tehran need is sanctions. The last thing they need is to worry about day-to-day survival when they’re engaged in a fight with the regime.” Not insignificantly his blog links with John Molyneux, Alex Snowden (Luna 17) and Clair Solomon (Solomon’s Mindfield).

Comrade German was also very keen to show her support for the people on the streets of Tehran – contradicting, of course, what the SWP central committee has consistantly stated until recently. She said that the Stop the War Coalition had not taken a position on the movement, but “I personally think people have a right to democratic protest. Our principle should be to be in solidarity with people who are facing serious repression. We should support the movement – that’s my personal position.” This has “practical ramifications for us today”, as Tony Blair “referred to Iran 58 times” in his appearance at the Chilcot inquiry. This, linked to Barack Obama’s recent announcement about the need for an anti-missile shield in Europe against the “emergent threat from Iran”, meant “we are now closer to war than we were a few years ago”.

A number of important points need to be made in response to this initial contribution of comrade German.

• Firstly, it is high time that the Stop the War Coalition did adopt an official position on such matters. It is not as if Lindsey and her comrades could not do anything about that – after all, the STWC is staffed by prominent Left Platform members and they previously allowed the STWC to act as an apologist for the Tehran regime and gave free rein to those who believe that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an “anti-imperialist” who should be supported. In the Campaign Iran meeting, incidentally, SWP Left Platform members said that Ahmadinejad was not an anti-imperialist. But in the STWC, they still promote a ‘no comment’ policy on such dictators and their anti-working class politics.
• In reality, of course, the steering committee of the STWC did take a position – namely, by refusing to let Hands Off the People of Iran affiliate. A decision that was backed up by the last two STWC annual conferences on the grounds that Hopi’s policy of opposition to both imperialism and the theocracy was “divisive”. But following last year’s upsurge in Iran, with millions demonstrating against the regime, suddenly the Reesites have no problem with such ‘divisiveness’. Comrade Kavakeb actually warned against the “false dichotomy” that “to support the regime is to be anti-western and to oppose the regime is to support the west”. Of course, until recently, this is exactly the argument used against Hopi.
• It is to be welcomed that Left Platform members have finally recognised that there is “serious repression” in Iran. We should remember though that only just over a year ago, Campaign Iran speakers were still arguing that Iran was a democratic state – or at least, in the unforgettable words of Left Platform member Somaye Zadeh, was not a “repressive and undemocratic country” (see ‘A reminder: The disgraceful role of Campaign Iran’).
• It is also to be welcomed that comrade German has discovered the “principle” of “solidarity” with people who are facing such repression. In the past, our calls for principled, active solidarity with the people of Iran were rebuffed, voted down and ridiculed. We were told not to interfere in Iranian politics and that we should not “tell the Iranian people what to do”. In reality, the only solidarity that the STWC and the SWP were giving was solidarity with the theocratic regime, with Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

So now there is a sea change. Or is there? What kind of solidarity does comrade German propose, and with whom?

We should be clear that the repression in Iran has not qualitatively changed in recent years (though, of course, with the increase in the movement’s radicalism, existing repressive measures have been stepped up). Thousands of people have been fighting for more democracy for many years. Hundreds of activists within the most radical women’s, workers’ and students’ organisations have been harassed, beaten, brutalised, jailed and killed. And not just since the rigged elections of June 2009.

But this is obviously not the kind of movement that the Left Platform wants to be in solidarity with. In fact, arriving at the February 3 meeting, we were castigated by comrade Kavakeb for Hopi’s “sectarian position” towards “the green movement”. In other words, for our attempt to actively support, raise funds and promote the most radical elements – the ‘red’ aspect of the multi-coloured melange of the protest movement. Those who have no illusions in Mir-Hossein Moussavi and other ‘reformists’ (all of whom are united in their effort to retain the theocracy).

In my contribution I reminded the meeting of the early 1980s, when – under the watch of Moussavi, who was then prime minister – thousands of communists and leftwing opponents of the regime were jailed, killed or exiled. Still, comrade German refused to differentiate between different elements in the anti-Ahmadinejad movement or to say a single critical word about Moussavi. “The question is not, ‘Do you support this or that part of the movement?’,” she said. “People who see themselves in the tradition of Karl Marx should know that.”

Marx considered himself the “extreme left wing” of the democracy movement of 1848, she correctly said. But she went on to falsely imply that he saw his role as uncritically supporting that movement. She also did not mention that back then the bourgeoisie was not the ruling class, as it is in Iran today, and that Marx was supporting the democracy in its fight against the remnants of feudalism. Later, he and Engels were very critical of the capitulation of the German bourgeoisie to the Junker class and the selling short of the movement for democracy.

Similarly, the poverty of the German line will undoubtedly be brought out to the full in the very near future. The divisions in the green movement are bound to get a lot deeper very soon. In early January, Moussavi published his ‘Five suggestions for reconciliation’, in which he basically accepts the government of Ahmadinejad. And only last week, the ‘reformist’ cleric, Mehdi Karroubi, declared Ahmadinejad the rightful “leader of the government”, to the dismay even of his own supporters.

While the ‘leaders’ of the green movement prioritise the defence of the Islamic Republic (while hoping to secure positions of power for themselves in the process), the people on the ground are likely to become ever more radicalised. Even the BBC reports that recent demonstrations have been dominated by calls to overthrow the whole regime – ie, the theocracy itself, which, of course, includes Moussavi and Karroubi.

So, while the Reesites have ‘adjusted’ their line in response to the mass movement on the streets of Iran, they have yet to draw the ccamporrect conclusions about the need for international solidarity, let alone consistent and principled anti-imperialism.

A reminder

The disgraceful role of Campaign Iran

In 2005, the SWP joined forces with Casmii (Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran) to form Campaign Iran. Casmii’s leading figure, Abbas Edalat, was used by the SWP to argue against Hands Off the People of Iran’s policy of opposing both imperialism’s war plans and the theocratic regime of Iran.

In various meetings organised by Campaign Iran, he assured the audience that there are “no forces in Iran who are fighting both against the threat of an imperialist intervention and the regime” (Weekly Worker April 26 2007). Arguing (successfully) against Hands Off the People of Iran’s affiliation to the Stop the War Coalition in 2007, he told the STWC conference that you cannot condemn any move to invade Iran if you also tell “ordinary member of the public” that it is headed by a “vicious, repressive regime”, as this would only “confuse” workers who were “already confused by the massive demonisation of Iran” (Weekly Worker November 1 2007).

He said Hopi should not be allowed to affiliate because its politics of opposition both to war and the regime was “divisive”. A line that was then repeated by SWP members, not least those now supporting the Left Platform – for example, when SWP delegates tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the Public and Commercial Services union from affiliating to Hopi (see Weekly Worker May 29 2008).

Also speaking at the 2007 STWC conference was Somaye Zadeh, a member of the Left Platform and a steward at last week’s Campaign Iran meeting in London. In October 2007, she moved the main motion on Iran, which was adopted at conference – clearly in response to Hands Off the People Iran’s motion for affiliation.

In her unforgettable speech, she outlined the “five lies” that were being spread against Iran, including “lie number five: Iran is a repressive and undemocratic country”.

Yes, she said, “there are restrictions on who can stand in elections”, but “both the current president [Ahmadinejad] and his predecessor Khatami were voted in with overwhelming popular support.”

Yes, Ahmadinejad does not like homosexuals much, but “Iran does allow sex changes and in fact the average number of sex changes in Iran is seven times that in the whole of Europe”.

Yes, “there are restrictions” against women, but “the literacy rate amongst women is 98%. And 64% of university students are women … Iran has the only squad of female firefighters anywhere in the Middle East. It has had a female champion race car driver.”

Her extraordinary contribution, which was featured on the STWC’s website until very recently, is still available on YouTube[1] and the Weekly Worker published the extracts of her outrageous speech.[2]

About a year ago, the SWP’s central committee fell out with Abbas Edalat. Since then, there have been two Campaign Irans: the Left Platform’s lot (campaigniran.wordpress.com) and Edalat’s group, which also trades under the name of Casmii (www.campaigniran.org). For a taste of the latter’s politics, go to its website, where you will find prominently featured on the home page an article entitled ‘Analysis of multiple polls finds little evidence Iranian public sees government as illegitimate’.

At least those reactionaries stayed true to their line. The SWP, as so often, quietly changed its tune without ever justifying it or explaining why.

Notes

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hq5hKzx6O0
2. Weekly Worker November 1 2007.

“How many more smoking guns do we need before Tony Blair is behindbars?” asks the Stop the War Coalition website. The visceral hatred for Blair and what he represents could not be more apparent.

This is perfectly understandable. Many activists in the anti-war movement are quite rightly outraged by the patently spurious justifications cooked up for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The two main reasons given were: Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an immediate threat (none were found) and the violation of ‘human rights’ under Saddam Hussein’s regime (not only have abuses continued under the occupation, but the US and UK actively support barbaric regimes such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to name but three). Thus it was at the STWC’s recent protest outside the Chilcot enquiry that several activists sported ‘Jail Blair’ t-shirts and STWC stewards were selling handcuffs to activists seeking to perform a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair à la Peter Tatchell on Robert Mugabe.

This citizen’s arrest initiative seems to have come from George Monbiot – darling of the liberal middle classes and political commentator in The Guardian. He has launched the website Arrest Blair.org, which offers a “reward” for anybody daring to take up the challenge. Monbiot put forward the first £100, and the site claims that much more has flown in since. In one of his articles republished on the STWC website, he explains why he thinks ‘arresting’ Blair is a good idea:

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called ‘the supreme international crime’: the crime of aggression.”

Indeed, Grace McCann, a demonstrator at last Friday’s protests, keenly rose to the challenge and attempted to place handcuffs on Blair, amid much media attention. According to the STWC site, she is estimated to have received around £3,000, a sum that she is to donate to “relevant charities”.

McCann is doubtless very brave and on Sky Television she put forward an eloquent defence of why she, like the STWC, thought the war was illegal. But the claim of illegality is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons, and thus not an argument that Marxists and revolutionaries should employ in order to build anti-war sentiment.

It is utterly utopian to believe that Blair can “face a court” for his crimes, as ‘official communist’ Kate Hudson from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament believes. Firstly, war crimes legislation requires the attorney general’s consent. In this limited sense, Monbiot is right that nobody in government or the opposition is therefore going to take prosecution seriously.

But there is something more obvious missing from STWC propaganda. The invasion of Iraq happened nearly seven years ago without the consent of international law. It did not particularly bother Bush and Blair back then, and will not present any genuine obstacle to the future warmongering plans of the US and its allies either. Indeed, even if it was technically possible for Blair to follow Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, the Chilcot enquiry provides a telling example of how that investigation, too, would focus on trivialities and superficial points. Whereas the trial and punishment of a figure such as Milosevic allows the ‘international community’ (ie, the US and its allies) to feign democracy and respectability, any kind of genuine exposure and criticism of a figure such as Blair would amount to self-harm for other core imperialist states.

There is a further point. The current US-UK drive to increase sanctions on Iran is fully in compliance with international law. So were the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which effectively starved the population and killed at least as many as in the 2003 US-UK invasion. Indeed, although the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was formally ‘illegal’, as soon as the Ba’athist regime was overthrown, the occupation which followed was legally sanctioned by the UN. Or take the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan – perfectly legal in terms of the USA’s claim to “self-defence” following 9/11. That is why it is shameful for the ‘revolutionaries’ who lead the STWC to run with Monbiot’s contention that the main problem with the Iraq war was its illegality. Some on the left even went along with UN-backed sanctions on Iraq as an alternative to full-on invasion. I doubt they do now.

Instead of focussing on the legality or otherwise of imperialist manoeuvres we must oppose them in principle. To fix on the legal question is tantamount to sifting through deliberately obtuse and skewed documents whilst whole populations are starved, bombarded or both. Rather, we need to focus on the dynamic towards war inherent in the global imperialist hierarchy of states under the sway of the US hegemon. This is the real elephant in the Chilcot room, not the question of legality. And it is a political question, not a legal one, as Monbiot would have us believe.

As argued by Mike Macnair back in 2003, a ‘law-governed world order’ based on the UN charter “fundamentally misunderstands the nature of law as a social institution, and as a result, international law” (‘The war and the law’ Weekly Worker September 25 2003). Indeed, the very essence of ‘law’ and the ‘rule of law’ is the sanctity of private property and the associated inequality that comes with this. This is true of every ‘human rights’ document, treaty and declaration since the rise of the bourgeoisie as a force right through to the present day – from the English Petition of Right (1627) through to the European Union’s Charter of Rights.

Thus, the ‘rule of law’ is the very basis of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie – not ‘bourgeois democracy’, as some think. So we have to think outside the parameters of this ‘legality’: A law-governed world order is not an alternative to US world domination: it is another form of US world domination.

The problem with STWC’s popular frontist approach is that it silences working class politics and voices in the coalition in favour of ‘respectable’ forces such as Monbiot and far worse – former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and senior Tory Michael Ancram have both spoken on STWC platforms.

Instead of challenging people’s desire to lock up Tony Blair, the STWC approach holds it up as some sort of solution – mirroring the sentiment and ideas spontaneously created in bourgeois society.

Blair is, of course, a repulsive individual. He is bereft of anything close to a coherent political ideology and is the incarnation of a generation of PR-savvy Labour politicians whose sole aim was to expand their career and pay packets. Frankly, following his utterly disdainful display at the Chilcot inquiry, many would not bat an eyelid if he was on the receiving end of a bullet to the head. But this is not the point. Focussing on him as a ‘war criminal’ who must be jailed is still playing within the rules of a bourgeois order that is rigged from the outset – skewed in favour of their property interests.

As such it is a distraction from what is actually needed – mass class opposition to imperialist war: agitating, educating and organising around the idea that stopping war is inseparable from challenging the state hierarchy and the rule of capital itself. This would require threatening the stability of the war government through organising in the armed forces as well as in workplaces, localities, etc. We are a long way from this, but campaigning to bring war criminals into the courts of the bourgeoisie will certainly not further this aim.

Back in 2003 when I, like tens of thousands of other young people, became radicalised for the first time around this question, marching with millions around us, the Stop the War movement could have made enormous steps forward. But one of the main slogans, ‘Blair must go!’ encapsulated the problems of political leadership. Instead of a real focus on the inherently corrupt and undemocratic British state and the way it had fallen in with the US war drive, things were personalised and thus trivialised. Instead of counterposing our mass democracy to their corruption and patronage, the most the STWC could offer us was replacing one prime minister with another.

This timid and uninspiring outlook missed a huge opportunity. We might not have been able to stop the Iraq war, but with patient organisation we just might have been in a better position to stop the next one that the imperialists have in mind. We might have had more to show from it than the wreckage of Respect and another round of disillusionment.

It is high time to break with this strategy. It is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie – masked in pretensions to democracy, human rights and justice – that is criminal. We must fight it uncompromisingly.