Litmus test for the soul
James Turley welcomes the declarations supporting the masses in Iran but warns against fake anti-imperialism
Hal Draper’s excellent pamphlet, The two souls of socialism, ends with a challenge: “When the demonstrations and boycotts of the southern negroes threatened to embarrass president [Lyndon] Johnson as he faced an election, the question was: which side are you on? When the Hungarian people erupted in revolt against the Russian occupier, the question was: which side are you on?”1
To that list, the socialists of 2009 can now add the events in Iran, which have seen thousands on the streets day after day, protestors shot in cold blood and now the spreading of workers’ strikes: which side are you on? It is a litmus test – the masses come into conflict, in however confused a way, with reactionary oppressors and exploiters, with a state machine which dictates everything from their dress to whom they are allowed to vote for. The left has a choice: engage with that struggle or abstain from it (or even oppose it).
It is perhaps not enormously surprising than not everyone has passed the test. The ideological decrepitude of the left in the last decade has been pronounced, and a particularly prominent aspect of this degeneration has been the spread of the classic Stalinist approach to anti-imperialism – bourgeois governments in conflict with ‘imperialism’ (ie, the world hegemon state and its allies) must be supported; opposition to them amounts to aiding, ‘objectively’, the imperialists.
Will the left continue to deny reality?
In the case of Iran, this has meant prettifying the anti-western right wing in the country and/or portraying president Mahmood Ahmadinejad as a consistent rebel against imperial domination and playing down his periodic lurches into cynical anti-semitic rhetoric (which has become increasingly difficult as his holocaust denial has become more obvious). Perhaps the nadir of all this came at the Stop the War Coalition’s November 2007 annual conference, when Somaye Zadeh – the dictionary definition of a useful idiot – claimed that anti-gay repression was not so bad in Iran, as at least homosexuals could get a sex change!2
Some who have failed the test are crude – one Scottish ‘left’ nationalist on the increasingly farcical UK Left Network e-list proudly proclaims in support of the Revolutionary Guards – “crush these scum”.3 Others mutter rather pathetically about conspiracies – was Neda Agha-Soltan, a protester shot to death on the streets, killed by CIA black-ops agents provocateurs? Was the footage of her death faked entirely? As usual, the first recourse of those whose political cowardice is outed is to proclaim it all to be some kind of trick.
Moving up the opportunist food chain, we find George Galloway. On his show on Press TV, the English-language station owned by the Iranian state, Galloway is perfectly clear which side he is on – “the brutally frank presidential debates … the fact that the media reported freely on the election, the fact that so many people participated, and even the fact that there are demonstrations now protesting about the result” bear witness to the “difference between Iran and the countries in its neighbourhood”. Ahmadinejad has the “support of the poor masses and the people in the countryside, and the people in the towns off the beaten track, where they don’t speak English and they don’t make a bee-line for the BBC or the CNN cameras.”4
If all this sounds entirely familiar, it is simply that it is the holding pattern of Stalinist bullshit ever since it adopted its supine stance towards those to its right. Those who rise up are derided, accurately or otherwise, as affluent, middle class rebels – they are in league with “those who hate Iran”; they yearn for the return of the shah, or some other tyrant. So it was that the Parti Communiste Français refused to support the ‘petty bourgeois’ rebels in May 1968; so it is that the ‘English-speaking rich kids’ of Tehran get sniffy dismissals from the likes of Galloway (who, ironically enough, owes his seat in parliament to a layer of petty bourgeois patriarchs).
His Respect ‘comrade’, Yvonne Ridley, has her own lies to spin: “I’m quite a fan of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is adored by the common man and woman in Iran. Anyone who vows to narrow the gap between rich and poor can’t be all that bad … unless you’re one of the rich!”
Or, indeed, if his vows are emptier than Ridley’s supplies of political principle – Ahmadinejad has presided over total economic collapse, with inflation running at nearly 25% and repeated labour struggles brutally repressed by the regime’s thugs. The “common man and woman” in Iran have more sense than Ridley (or Galloway) attributes them. Hospital workers are on strike; sections of workers in the oil and auto industries – both key elements in the Iranian economy – have called for a general strike as well (see p4). In the countryside, it is true, Ahmadinejad enjoys more support – but a majority of Iran’s population now lives in the city.
And what of Respect’s remaining organised left, the International Socialist Group? Its site is conspicuously empty of any statements of support or opposition – a rather disgraceful silence, which underlines the compromises these so-called Trotskyists have made to keep an out-and-out Stalinist hatchet-man like Galloway onside. Having given over most of their publishing capacity to the extremely dozy in-house Respect paper, I do not hold out much hope that the comrades will soon step up to the plate.
It is with some relief we note that the ranks of our side – the side of the Iranian masses – are larger than they have been. Organisations have been falling over each other to offer support to the protests, in the hope that they will move to the left (as indeed they may well do). Most strident, perhaps, is the International Marxist Tendency, a major split from the Militant Tendency; its leader, Alan Woods, headlined his first article on the events “Iran: the Revolution has begun!”. Elsewhere, the IMT has produced an open letter written by one of its Iranian comrades to Mir Hossein Moussavi, the spurned presidential candidate whose likely-rigged defeat triggered the present movement, which is unsparing in its criticisms of his supine conservatism. Perhaps the IMT is a little too starry-eyed (note the capital R in “the Revolution has begun”), but it is a broadly correct line.
The IMT is not without difficulties on this question, of course. Primarily, it has set itself up as the most gratingly uncritical of all Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s many fan clubs – the same Hugo Chávez who immediately congratulated his friend Ahmadinejad on his election success, which was a victory “for all people in the world and free nations against global arrogance” (ie, the US)5. Perhaps el presidente’s reactionary stance will prompt some re-examination – it is certainly a serious contradiction for Alan Woods, as his group is as consistent in its opposition to the theocracy and Ahmadinejad as Chávez is in his support – the IMT has already published important documents on the 1979 events.
One could not accuse the Socialist Workers Party of such consistency; it has of late thrown itself into Stalinist ‘anti-imperialism’ with considerable enthusiasm. At a recent Campaign Iran meeting in London, its erstwhile Supreme Leader John Rees described the Iranian state as “conjuncturally anti-imperialist”, and its comrades at the 2009 STWC conference again voted down the affiliation of Hands Off the People of Iran. The SWP-sympathetic blog, Lenin’s Tomb, published a short piece happily accepting Ahmadinejad as the winner, and calling it a “class vote”.6
How surprised Richard “Lenin” Seymour, its administrator, must have been when the following edition of Socialist Worker7 ran as its front page: “People power rocks Iran”, plus an extremely enthusiastic article, which made much of the key slogan, ‘Marg bar diktator!’ – death to the dictator! – pointing out its roots in the anti-shah protests of 1979. “Whatever happens over the next few days,” concludes the unidentified author, “the people of Iran have shown their power – and their thirst for change.”
This week’s follow-up no longer takes the front page, but is clearer about what is at stake – it points out the wide involvement of sections of workers, for example, as well as the undifferentiated “poor” referred to by Galloway et al as Ahmadinejad’s base (by no means strictly terminological sloppiness, in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are simply outside the main economy), and marshals eyewitness reports as well.8
It is obvious, of course, that there is something of the SWP’s trademark ‘ambulance-chasing’ approach to politics here; its zeal for being behind ‘anything that moves’ is matched only by its lack of discrimination in choosing allies along the way. Yet this approach to the Iranian protests – both in the line the SWP has taken and the prominence it has been given – is a total switcheroo from the embarrassingly prostrate stance that saw the central committee’s ‘red professor’, Alex Callinicos, describe the Islamic republic as having always had “elements of bourgeois democracy” at the group’s annual Marxism school in 2007, and a shift that communists sincerely welcome. It is relieving, at any rate, to see that the pseudo-‘anti-imperialism’ of the last few years has not yet solidified into unshakeable dogma.
In fact, the likes of Galloway and Ridley are isolated – not one significant organised left group in Britain has come out publicly against the protests. The Socialist Party, Workers Power, Permanent Revolution – all have issued statements of support. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has also covered it extensively – in its case coming out with an uncritical tout for the social-imperialist ITUC’s solidarity protest on June 26 … but, after all, it is the AWL.
The left may have been called scum, middle class and pro-American by Islamists and Stalinist misanthropes alike, but the message from the protestors on Iran’s streets and the workers in its car plants is simple: what side are you on? For the most part, the left in Britain just about measures up.