First published in the Weekly Worker 732

There should be no place for Sean Matgamna in any principled Marxist organisation, write CS member James Turley and Mark Fischer

After his article in Solidarity of July 24, it should be axiomatic that Sean Matgamna – the loose-cannon patriach of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – be expelled from that organisation. The AWL should have gone into (actually long overdue) outraged rebellion and demanded the man’s head on a pole when his shameful piece, ‘What if Israel bombs Iran: a discussion article’, hit the streets.¹

Even by Matgamna’s putrid standards, this contribution marks a new low in his political decay. Hedged around though it is by all sorts of caveats and the brand of mealy-mouthed obfuscation he is quick to accuse others of, at the core of this wretched piece are two bald and totally unambiguous statements.

• Not only is there “good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity”: it is indeed inevitable, as Tel Aviv “will act to stop [Iran aquiring nuclear weapons] while it can still be stopped without the risk of a nuclear strike against Israel”.
• When this inevitable horror-scenario unfolds, “international socialists should have no truck with” the type of knee-jerk condemnation that the “kitsch left” will predictably produce. “In the name of what alternative would we condemn Israel?” he wonders.

Independent working class politics perhaps, Sean?

Of course, there are numerous precedents in Matgamna’s nasty little corpus for such statements. What is new is that, in advance of the conflict, he is prepared to come out for Israel: “Our point of view is not that of Israeli or any other nationalism. We want Israeli, Palestinian, Iranian and other workers to unite and fight for a socialist Middle East. However, least of all should we back Ahmadinejad, or argue, implicitly or openly, that homicidal religious lunatics have a right to arm themselves with nuclear weapons – and that those they say they want to destroy should be condemned for refusing to stand idly by while they arm themselves to do the job” (our emphasis).

Well, there you have it. Israel has a right to bomb Iran, because that country’s president has made empty, rabble-rousing threats against it. And when it does, “international socialists” should not issue condemnations (despite the regrettable “great carnage” Matgamna concedes will ensue). No, they should excuse it and work to defuse and demobilise any protests the working class or peace movements around the world may attempt to initiate.

Clearly, here is an organisation in a pretty advanced state of political degeneration.         Indeed, even older comrades are starting to find it difficult to remember a time when the AWL (or its predecessors) was able to muster enough principle to get its priorities right on this issue. It is over five years since the AWL’s collapse over Iraq; over 10 since Sean Matgamna’s hysterical exchange with Jim Higgins on Israel-Palestine, which recycled most of the panoply of Zionist propaganda into a left-talking form²; and nearly 30 since his bilious Stalinophobia led him to support the CIA-funded Mujahedin in the Soviet-Afghanistan war.

Collateral

The July 24 piece sinks to new depths, however. Matgamna starts as he means to go on: “An attack on Iran will most likely lead to great carnage in the Middle East, and beyond, as supporters of Iran resort to suicide bombings in retaliation. There might well be large-scale Iranian civilian ‘collateral’ casualties … It would throw Iraq back into the worst chaos.”

So, let’s get this straight – carnage will result primarily from suicide bombers, and not from Israeli nuclear bombs, which “might” cause civilian casualties. Oh, and Iraq apparently isn’t currently in chaos – or, at least not the “worst” chaos.

Let’s deal with our author’s recurrent millenarian view of Tehran first. The view that certain of one’s enemies are “homicidal lunatics”, and thus too “irresponsible” to be trusted with nuclear weaponry, is as old as the cold war – replace nukes with any number of things, and it is as old as imperialism itself.

The most obvious problem with it is not its dubious provenance in official imperialist discourse, but simply that “homicidal religious lunatics” are everywhere. The Israeli Knesset is chock-a-block with these crazies – as you would expect for a nation so closely bound up with religion. George Bush has epic telephone conversations with televangelist Ted Haggard. Yet, for all the crimes of Israel and Bush, they have not launched us all into nuclear Armageddon, despite the availability of large numbers of nuclear warheads in both countries.

The point is not that Israel is more at the mercy of religious wing-nuts than Iran and therefore ‘worse’, but simply that the realities of the imperialist state system ensure that a certain level of Realpolitik can be expected from even the loopiest holders of executive office. For all his belligerent rhetoric, Ahmadinejad will not attack Israel unprovoked: that would be suicide (provided an internal coup did not see off his plans in advance).

The implication is that condemnation of Israeli action would be equivalent to support for a “mullahs’ bomb” – a theme AWL comrades Tom Unterrainer and Sacha Ismail have been busily developing online, of course. But this really is laughable.

Communists oppose the development of nuclear weaponry in Iran, because it strengthens the Iranian ruling class against all its enemies – including its ‘own’ working class. We even more emphatically oppose Israeli incursions into Iran because that strengthens the hand of the ruling class as such over the proletariat, not just on a regional but a global scale. The ability of the working class to fight independently for its own interests and a better world are paramount, not ‘defence of the Zionist fatherland’ against phantom “homicidal religious lunatics”!

There is a reason that only the most swivel-eyed of establishment apologists join Matgamna in pursuing this logic – it is not so much that it is incoherent, but that it is not designed to be coherent. ‘Support democracy against the barbarians!’ ultimately is a statement in the same category as ‘Back our boys!’, a call to ritual and myth; in a word, ideology.

In Matgamna’s world, the only thing holding Iran back from destroying Israel is its lack of nuclear weapons. The Iranian regime is “a state whose clerical fascist rulers might see a nuclear Armageddon, involving a retaliatory Israeli nuclear strike against Iran in the way a god-crazed suicide bomber sees blowing himself to pieces”.

In reality, Iran has a record of support for imperialist interventions in the region, and that support remains the keystone in the fragile edifice of ‘official’ Iraqi politics. The mullahs have got extremely rich off the back of neoliberalism, and Ahmadinejad’s Revolutionary Guard faction is busily engaged in enriching itself too. By no stretch of the imagination are any serious forces within the state hierarchy in the market for anything more aggressive than bullish and forthright negotiations with the imperialist powers for a bigger piece of the pie, let alone the obliteration of Israel.

Ahmadinejad, however, does have an interest in making anti-Israeli noises. He was elected on a wave of anti-neoliberal sentiment, but, since he supports and benefits from neoliberalism, he is well advised to divert this anger into anti-western, anti-Zionist and anti-semitic expressions. Rhetoric is cheap.

The faux-terrified statements of the likes of Shaul Mofaz (and pro-Israel westerners from Bush to Brown to Obama to Matgamna) about Israel’s very existence being under threat are seizing on an insubstantial carrot used by Tehran to accompany the stick of generalised repression. In doing so, such western politicians both directly sweeten the carrot and indirectly sharpen the stick – and, as the cycle of rhetoric and repression continues, the imperialist powers are more and more able to sell war to war-weary populations.

Watchdog

The real elephant in the living room for Matgamna, and for the AWL in general, is the organic and symbiotic relationship between Israel and the USA. The axiom that keeps his analysis just about rattling along – which he openly states – is that “in the last reckoning here, Israel is no state’s puppet. It has pressing concerns of its own, and will act on them” (Rhodri Evans repeats this line, albeit using different words, in an article on the back page of the same issue of Solidarity).

Certainly, the interests of Israel and the US are not identical. However, Israel is not stupid. It is aware that its existence is fundamentally predicated on constant material military support from the US, amounting to billions of dollars a year. On issues of foreign policy, the interests of the two states almost invariably coincide, simply because each is reliant on the other for serious muscle in the Middle East.

As the editor of Ha’aretz put it, as early as 1951, “Israel has been given a role not unlike a watchdog … should the west prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes one can rely on Israel to punish severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the west has exceeded the proper limits.”

The article’s last feature of note is Matgamna’s straw-targeting of those who would condemn Israel for making a nuclear attack on Iran. He bundles together no less than nine varieties of deviation from his moronic viewpoint – most are figments of his imagination alone. Support for Ahmadinejad, he concludes, “expressed in duff ‘anti-imperialism’, pretend, one-sided pacifism and hysterical appeals to ‘international law’ and ‘the UN’, will be the response of the kitsch left to an Israeli attack.”

Here he exposes the meaninglessness of his dismissal of left groups as “kitsch” – in lumping together ‘duff anti-imperialists’ (in other words, all anti-imperialists) and starry-eyed advocates of international law and ‘multilateralism’, Matgamna brooks no distinction between the Stalin Society and the Liberal Democrats. His statement simply is not true – the left, barring the Labour soft left, will unanimously fall into ‘anti-imperialism’ of one type or another, with the Socialist Workers Party and (other) Stalinists vacillating into pacifism.

This kind of wilful blindness is the prevailing tone of the entire text. It has readers checking the date on the front cover, to see if they have not accidentally picked up the April 1 issue. Can a socialist – a Marxist! – paper really justify printing such a confused jumble of credulous naivety and imperialist ideology so unreconstructed it resembles in places the frothing extremes of Robert Kilroy-Silk editorials?

Whither AWL?

More importantly, how much longer can Matgamna hold his sect together? This is thin gruel indeed – reminiscent of nothing so much as the senile final writings of Kautsky. It simply does not bear even the most superficial comparison with reality. A few years ago, AWLers would happily defend their ghastly line on Iraq, using two or three arguments of varying degrees of sophistication. These were shown, repeatedly, by all-comers to be spurious. Now, it seems, they simply do not try to defend Matgamna’s latest outburst (who can blame them?).

Instead, the line is held by dishonest, bureaucratic means. Internal debate on Iraq surfaces occasionally to take up a page of the paper, before returning to cold storage for months on end. The AWL summer school dodged the issue entirely this year (and last), despite the group’s supposed work on ‘solidarity’ with Middle East workers in struggle, and it has refused to send any speakers to debate at this year’s Communist University (suggesting, instead, that we go over the pressing issue of the Soviet-Afghanistan war).³

Matgamna’s article ends with the afterthought: “The left needs to discuss these issues” – risible enough given the context, of course. But the AWL needs very urgently to discuss where it is going – or rather, where Matgamna and his crew of oafish henchmen are taking it.

For decades, its “kitsch” competitors have speculated as to when it will end up like the sorry Shachtmanite rump in America, Social Democrats USA, living a meagre existence, isolated from both the radical milieu and the political mainstream. Today, the transformation is starting to near completion.

The disgracefully muted and, in the main, profoundly dishonest response this has so far provoked in the ranks of the AWL goes some way to proving the point made in Mark Fischer’s’ article last week – AWLers actually fear that “a thorough and rigorous open debate in their ranks would split the group”. Thus they adopt “tactics of denial to deal with the painful questions that are increasingly hemming them in”.⁴

Certainly this is more credible than the laughable suggestion from Matgamna’s slimy attorney, Sacha Ismail, that the article was just “intended to provoke discussion, to help the AWL and to an extent the rest of the left clarify our position(s) before a possible Israeli attack on Iran”.⁵

Indeed, the debate as it has so far unfolded on the organisation’s website starkly illustrates that AWLers are acutely aware that this question threatens the basic integrity of the group – in both conventional meanings of the word. And typical of the organisation’s scurrilous method, leading AWL comrades Unterrainer and Ismail have attempted to simply divert attention from the article, despite what Ismail calls “serious problems with the way it presents things”.⁶

We will have to take comrade Ismail’s word for his “serious problems” with his leading comrade’s pre-emptive strike on behalf of Israel. He has so far not mentioned what those problems are and – along with comrade Unterrainer – has enthusiastically pointed to ideas used by Workers Power’s Luke Cooper (‘mullahs’ bomb’, “semi-colonies”, etc) in a futile atttempt to divert attention from the fact that the leading member of the AWL has collapsed politically into explicit, warmongering apologetics for a deeply reactionary capitalist state – and even before the war has begun.

Indeed, they attempt to play the same thoroughly dishonest game with the most prominent spokesperson of their own minority opposition, David Broder. To the comrade’s credit, he pens a reasonably cogent and effective polemic against Matgamna – “what an awful, awful thing to write”, he can’t stop himself saying at one point.⁷ His lengthy comments are ignored, except for a lame attempt to enlist him for a bit of WP-bashing (unlike WP, we are told, for “all the sane reasons, [Broder] is against all nuclear weapons”).⁸

Speculation on why this article appears now and the reason for the form it takes is secondary, but of some use in revealing the morphology of unsavoury sects such as the AWL. Clearly. Matgamna is a ‘stick-bender’ and this an attempt to maintain his hold against what he sees as creeping ‘kitsch leftism’ in his organisation’s ranks. However, if it was just a matter of the micro-manoeuvres of some cult atop a mountain, then who would care?

The AWL operates in our common movement. It publishes a paper, it promotes a website, its cadre fight for its views and to recruit others to them. It disseminates its poison widely, in other words, and so – as we observed at the start of this polemic – it should be axiomatic that, in the interests of the political hygiene of the wider movement, all comrades take a view on the repugnant, pro-war opinions that are emanating from the top of this group.

‘All comrades’, including the likes of Ismail and Unterrainer – and, indeed, all AWLers, of course. If they have “serious problems” with the Matgamna piece, let’s hear what they actually are. While they remain silent, it is perfectly legitimate to conclude that they and their organisation as a whole in effect endorse a call to bomb Iran and will excuse this barbaric attack if and when it happens.

And such a position should - and will, if we have anything to do with it – have political implications for the AWL’s position as part of the workers’ movement.

Notes

1. Solidarity July 24. All Matgamna quotes from this article.
2. marxists.org/archive/higgins/1998/03/wliberty.htm
3. For the AWL’s most recent attempts to squirm out of debates, see Mark Fischer’s article last week (‘Courting controversy’, July 24).
4. Ibid.
5. July 29 posting – www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/07/28/discussion-article-what-if-israel-bombs-iran
6. Ibid.
7. July 28 posting.
8. July 30 posting.