and prepares marriage to the RCIT
dazzled by the ‘Arab Spring’
Response by the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International
to the ISL of Israel/Occupied Palestine (ISL) - 28/03/2013
So now Yossi and his comrades are again accepting Israel as a nation and
are defending its right to self determination; the ‘bi-national state’ position
once more. But a fourth summersault was soon called for to seduce a new lover,
Wiki again:
On the question of the leadership of this ‘revolution’ that Yossi now
finds himself to the right of his former IMT comrades. In an article on 14th
March 2013 What the Assad regime was and what it has become – Part Three, the
IMT’s Fred Weston says:
But the masses in the cities, petty bourgeois and working class, backed
Assad and still do, because they know he is their only hope of retaining a
secular state where they have a modicum of civil rights for their trade unions
and religious freedom compared to the threatening imposition of Sharia law by
the more backward, rural fundamentalists that Yossi supports, despite ritual
disclaimers.
Response by the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International
to the ISL of Israel/Occupied Palestine (ISL) - 28/03/2013
The LCFI is committed to principled revolutionary regroupment of those forces fighting to re-establish Trotsky’s Fourth International programmatically based on the first four congresses of the Communist International and the Trotskyist Fourth International, in particular the Transitional Programme and the Communist method of the Workers United Front and the Anti-Imperialist United Front that produced that document. We seek to do that by splits and fusions leading to political, programmatic and ideological agreement in the first place with those claiming the name of Trotskyism. We understand within a few years of Trotsky’s assassination by Stalin’s agent, Ramón Mercader in Coyoacan, Mexico, in August 20 1940 the Fourth International began its political degeneration and decent into centrism, decimated by US isolationism and the terrible toll in cadres murdered by the Nazis, the Stalinists (often in collaboration) and the infiltration of its ranks by the CIA and GPU to send US Trotskyists sailors to their deaths on the Atlantic convoys and to murder the leading youth leaders, Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov, his secretaries Erwin Wolf and Rudolf Klement and Ignace Reiss, the defector to Trotsky from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Nonetheless there have been serious struggles to re-establish the Fourth International on the above basis post WWII and we intend to defend those theoretical and political gains and to build on them.
The current regroupment process between the International Socialist League (ISL) of Palestine and the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) is not based on these principles. The RCIT rejects the whole of Trotskyism since soon after the assassination of Trotsky, hence its Fifth International orientation, and Yossi Schwartz, a central leader of the ISL, has dipped into and joined almost every Trotskyist current in the planet without embracing any principles that cannot be junked at the next liaison. Hence the marriage proposal involves the sectarianism of the RCIT/Workers Power tradition and the opportunism of Yossi’s political career and his group.
The current regroupment process between the International Socialist League (ISL) of Palestine and the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) is not based on these principles. The RCIT rejects the whole of Trotskyism since soon after the assassination of Trotsky, hence its Fifth International orientation, and Yossi Schwartz, a central leader of the ISL, has dipped into and joined almost every Trotskyist current in the planet without embracing any principles that cannot be junked at the next liaison. Hence the marriage proposal involves the sectarianism of the RCIT/Workers Power tradition and the opportunism of Yossi’s political career and his group.
This is the response of the LCFI to the ISL and its centrist
pro-Imperialist positions after the Liga Comunista of Brazil received a letter from Yossi which was clearly influenced by the bourgeois positions of Hamas and
the elements of the ‘Arab Spring’. Dazzled by the apparent success of the Arab
Spring both groups have failed to identify the hand of Imperialism taking
control of the opposition groups in both Libya and Syria. Crucially they have
failed to defend the Anti-Imperialist United Front against the proxy forces of
Imperialism, foolishly parroting Imperialist propaganda that these are genuine
‘revolutions’. Paradoxically their political capitulation to Hamas in Gaza has
brought them close to the position of Israel and Zionism on the Syrian civil
war.
YOSSI’S SUMMERSAULTS
After a six year relationship the ISL has severed relationships with the
left Shachtmanite League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) and seems to be
gearing itself up to leap into bed with the RCIT, whose main section is the
Revolutionary Communist Organisation for Liberation (RKOB) of Austria, former
affiliates of the League for the Fifth International, whose British section is
Workers Power. [1] It will be a difficult courtship but Yossi has accomplished
some half a dozen similar manoeuvres in the past and we do not doubt his
capacity to pull this one off as well. Accepting the ‘Fifth International’ will
be a stumbling block (unprincipled bloc?) but having embraced Shachtmanism for
six years it should not prove insurmountable. If his followers can stomach it,
that is. Yossi has flipped-flopped so many times that pulling quotes from his
political history (unfortunately for him all too readily available online) to
refute his current positions is very simple indeed. The Sparts (International
Communist League) delight in this. And the RCIT has similar reactionary
positions to the ISL on Libya and Syria.
Yossi was a leader of the Trotskyist League, the Canadian section of the
Sparts (ICL) for many years, having joined from the Israeli Communist party. In
about 1995 he suddenly contacted RP of the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (LTT).
The British section was the Workers International League which LCFI leader
Gerry had joined a few years previously. He declared his unconditional
agreement with the main thrust of its programme and they in turn began to make
political statements on Quebec and its right to self-determination. He claimed
to have altered the line of the Sparts over Palestine; he had attacked its
refusal to take sides in the 1948 war that led to the formation of Israel. He
joined with his partner as the Canadian section of the LTT. He assisted RP in
changing the position of the LTT on Israel/Palestine from the ‘secular
democratic state of Palestine’ to one ‘bi-national state’, recognising Israel
as a nation and therefore its right to self-determination and orienting to the
working class, including the Jewish workers. Yossi and Gerry have always
opposed all two-state positions. He convinced Gerry of this position at the
time, the ‘secular democratic state’ position was just too obviously a
capitulation to Yasser Arafat, the PLO and the Arab bourgeoisie, whose slogan
it was. We will return to this vital point later.
The only conflict Gerry had with Yossi then was in 1996 when Gerry
produced a document on Guerrilla war tactics for the LTT journal In defence of
Marxism (same name as the IMT journal) and Yossi, supported by RP, objected to
characterising Mao and the Chinese Communist party as part of the workers’
movement. [2] Gerry was reluctantly forced to change the article, but he never
agreed. He felt it cast too many doubts over the theory of the deformed workers
state in China and did not take into account the international character of
Stalinism. The fact that Trotsky said the Chinese CP “tore itself away from its
class” when it adopted guerrilla tactics did not prove the matter for him. But
it did indicate Yossi’s turn towards Shachtmanism we can now see with the
benefit of hindsight.
The LTT broke up in 1999 and, according to a Wiki article, by 2002 Yossi
was back in Palestine; he is a Palestinian Jew. The Wiki piece (very likely written
by Yossi himself) says:
The SWL (Socialist Workers League, 2002-4) was built as a result of a
split initiated by Trotskyists who were part of the Israeli Committee for One
Democratic Republic of Palestine. The Trotskyists, led by Schwartz, believed that
only a program that struggles for a socialist Palestinian republic can unite
the Palestinian Arab workers and peasants of the region. With two comrades,
Schwartz founded a faction named Militants for the Fourth International. The
MFI contained only 5-6 comrades. [3]
It is noteworthy here that Yossi had here evidently changed his position
and that of his followers and was now rejecting the right of Israel to self
determination and denying it was a nation. The SWL immediately contacted the
Partido Obrero, (Argentina) and became a section of its International, the
Co-ordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, with
whom this position gelled. The popular frontist orientation of PO veteran
leader Georg Altamira apparently posed no problems for the SWL.
And now for the third summersault on this vital question. Wiki again:
During 2002 and the beginning of 2003, the SWL attempted to launch a
movement for one and democratic republic with Abnaa el-Balad movement. The
failure to build it, led the minority faction to conclude that it must ally
with the Communist Party of Israel and call for voting to its political front,
Hadash. The majority, led by the PO comrades, claimed that the 2003 elections
should be boycotted. As a result of the factional struggle, the SWL (Minority)
changed its views and accepted the right of the Israeli people for
self-determination, along the perspective of socialist federation of the Middle
East with full cultural and national rights to all minorities. In June 2003,
the SWL (Minority) decided to become political supporter of the International
Marxist Tendency (IMT) led by Alan Woods and the late Trotskyist politician Ted
Grant. It changed its name to In Defense of Marxism Circle (IDMC), starting
entry work within the Communist Party of Israel and later on within the Labor
Party (Israel). The SWL was dissolved and does not exist anymore. [4]
Alan Woods
and Hugo Chávez, Woods, IMT leader,
one of
Yossi’ close comrades less than a decade ago.
|
In July 2007 Yossi and his comrades left the International Marxist
Tendency because they correctly took issue with the IMT’s refusal to defend
Hamas against the Israeli-US-sponsored assault by Arafat on it following its
electoral victory in Gaza in 2006. Now Yossi re-adopted “some of the politics
of the SWL again but upholding the state capitalism analysis of the USSR and
changing their name to the Internationalist Socialist League.
Back again to the ‘one democratic state’ position. To justify this we
find that in 2007 he discovered big historical problems with Grant, Woods and
the IMT:
Further, the ISL comrades understood that behind the IMT’s refusal to
defend Hamas against Fatah’s imperialist-backed attacks stood an overall
accommodation by the IMT to imperialism. For example, in the case of the
Malvinas (Falklands) war of 1982, the IMT refused to defend Argentina, an
oppressed neo-colonial country, against British imperialism. Similarly, in the
struggles in Northern Ireland, the IMT had refused to side with the Irish
Republican Army fighting against British imperialism. And beyond the IMT, the
ISL comrades saw that all the major groupings claiming the banner of Trotskyism
had at some time or other similarly betrayed the principle of unwavering
defence of the oppressed against imperialist attack. [5]
The group’s newly-discovered state capitalist principles then led him to
approach the British SWP’s international, the International Socialist Tendency
(IST) and he had a number of articles published in International Socialist
(still online). The British SWP has a relatively good anti-Zionist position,
but in line with its opportunist anti-Imperialism, does tend to capitulate to
its Muslim fundamentalist opponents, the Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic Republic
of Iran. Yossi accepted that but apparently soon dug a bit deeper:
But a quick review (!) of the IST’s political record revealed a pattern
of opportunist positions no better than those of the ‘orthodox Trotskyist’
milieu they had broken from. In particular, the SWP was certainly anti-Zionist
but it habitually capitulated to the nationalist and Islamist leaderships of
Muslims both in Britain and in the Middle Eastern countries occupied by the
imperialists. The ISL had a brief correspondence with the IST, which also
revealed the IST’s stunningly cynical attitude toward the prospects for
working-class revolutionary struggle in the Middle East: the IST advised the
ISL to give up their efforts and move to Britain![6]
This really is too much. Yossi has been active as a Trotskyist for
several decades and then, in 2007 and 2008, he suddenly discovered these
blindingly obvious truths that any serious Trotskyist should know about the
politics and methods of two of the biggest far left groups internationally, the
IMT and the IST. The IMT are more obviously directly soft on Imperialism, the
IST softness on its fundamentalist Muslim opponents led both groups to a
similar position in Libya and Syria – for the IST any fighting anti-regime
fundamentalist Muslim zealots are anti-Imperialists which is why they supported
the Afghan Mujahideen against the USSR in the 80s. [7] Yossi certainly knew all
these details back in 1995-9 when the LTT discussed these matters, but Yossi
has an amazing capacity to ‘forget’ all uncomfortable political positions when
the next lash-up approaches.
THE ISL’S OPPORTUNISM ON DEFORMED WORKERS’ STATES
In the liaison between the ISL and the LRP the repudiation of Trotskyism
on the question of the degenerated and deformed workers states could not be
more explicit:
The core faith of the orthodox milieu is that the Stalinist states were
workers’ states. That view was refuted by the fact that the working class
barely lifted a finger to defend ‘their’ states from collapsing and in many
cases had been a key force in anti-Stalinist mass struggles. But if the
Stalinist states were not workers’ states, what was their class nature? The ISL
comrades correctly concluded that if the working class had been oppressed and
exploited by those states, then the Stalinist bureaucracy that ruled them must
have functioned as a capitalist ruling class. [8]
But the bride to-be is now furiously proclaiming her political virginity
despite her large flock of offspring:
It is therefore important to understand the difference between state
capitalism with a Bonapartist regime as Syria still is, and a deformed workers
state as Cuba or North Korea still are. State capitalism is an economy where
the ruling class is the capitalist class and the nationalization of the economy
serves the interests of this class. In Cuba the capitalist class was eliminated
as a class and escaped to Miami. However the Stalinist state apparatus blocks the
road to socialism and unless this block is removed by a political revolution
the capitalist class growing out (of) the Stalinist bureaucracy will take over
the economy and the state and turn Cuba once again (in)to a capitalist state.
We saw such a process already in China that by now is an imperialist state. [9]
Anthropologists have discovered that the myth of ‘Mary’s virgin birth’
arose because of a mistranslation from Aramaic to Greek – the original
proclaimed that a ‘young woman’ had given birth, a miraculous event for the
parents surely but really rather a commonplace and unremarkable occurrence for
humanity as a whole. [10]
We are again obliged to assert that what was involved in the struggle
against Shachtman and his followers in 1939-40 was not just some obscure debate
about how exactly revolutionists should characterise the USSR but what
programme was necessary to steel the revolutionary vanguard of the class to
lead the masses to overthrow the US ruling class. That is why we must always
seek the defeat of ‘our own’ Imperialist ruling class in conflict with
semi-colonial nations or deformed workers’ states as Trotsky defended the USSR
under Stalin and China under Chang Kai-shek. We note the defence of
semi-colonial nations against Imperialist assault is missing from Yossi’s
rediscovered ‘orthodoxy’ above.
YOSSI, THE ISL AND THE JEWISH WORKING CLASS
The quotes in the IMT’s IDOM from Yossi are still online where he
defends Israel’s right to exist:
These liberals argue that because of these human rights abuses, Israel
cannot be a ‘real’ democracy like the Western states. This however, is a very
weak argument. The crimes of the Israeli ruling class are not fundamentally
different from those of the ‘Democratic’ Imperialist states. If the radical
liberals who insist that Israel is not a Western democracy use the same
criteria to classify the imperialist ‘democratic’ states themselves, then they
will have to conclude that democracy in any of these countries is a fiction.
The actions of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank are no different from those of
the US in Iraq. Does that mean there is no form of democracy in the US as well?
Furthermore, attention must be drawn to the fact that Israel was not the only
capitalist state that created a massive refugee problem in 1947… Israel is not
different from any of this. Israel is an imperialist and capitalist state,
ruled by the big corporations. [11]
Now all that has had to be junked and:
This development is explained by the unique nature of Israel as a
colonial settler state. It is a basic truth that the great majority of the
world’s workers have “nothing to lose but their chains” and therefore have a
fundamental interest in overthrowing the capitalist system. The same cannot be
said of Israel’s Jewish workers. Like other labor-aristocratic layers in
imperialist countries, they enjoy certain material privileges based on the
imperialist status of their ruling class. But unlike even other labor-aristocratic
workers, their gains are enjoyed at the direct expense of the Palestinian
masses and they live on land stolen from the Palestinians. Thus they see the
aggressive actions of the Israeli state as the guarantor of their privileged
existence. While the IMT, like most socialist groups, stubbornly closes its
eyes to these facts, the future ISLers soon realized that they could not afford
to do the same if they were to advance a genuine perspective for the struggle
for Palestinian liberation and for socialist revolution in the Middle East.
[12]
And here is the nub of the problem, from which springs all other
problems. The Israeli working class, as a class, uniquely on the planet, are
apparently beyond the pale. And this springs from the fact that they are a
unique form of labour aristocracy because the “their gains are enjoyed at the
direct expense of the Palestinian masses and they live on land stolen from the
Palestinians. Thus they see the aggressive actions of the Israeli state as the
guarantor of their privileged existence”.
We cannot accept this uniqueness. Yossi admits that the Israeli Jews now
constitute a nation and we agree. He further says that this nation has no right
to self-determination because historically and today, it can only be exercised
at the expense of the Palestinian nation. We agree with this also; the Zionist
state must be overthrown but the Israeli Zionist state is not the same as the
Israeli nation. As we agree on the right of return of all Palestinians expelled
from 1948 onwards we must also assert that it surely would not be beyond the
wit of a revolutionary Palestinian workers’ state to house, feed and provide
for health care and education of all Jews and Palestinians in the region in a
Multi-Ethnic state. Personal property, house and land disputes could be settled
amicably in arbitration courts without ethnic cleansing.
The bi-national state slogan adopted by the LTT on Yossi’s urgings and
then by the International Trotskyist Current (forerunner of the Socialist Fight
group) is incorrect we all agree now. It does imply Israel’s right to self
determination at the expense of the Palestinians. And we know that no isolated
revolution in any state in the region or on the planet could survive on its own
for long to the perspective of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East is the
correct one.
But we must be far more rigorous in how we apply these slogans as they
reflect our perspectives. As Trotskyists we not only believe that bourgeois
revolutions must be led by the working class but they must also go on to tackle
the tasks of the socialist revolution for that revolution to be permanent. So
we advance the slogan of a workers and peasant’s government as a transitional
demand leading to the strategic goal of a Multi-Ethnic workers’ state of
Palestine as a part of the Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
YOSSI ON THE LEADERSHIP OF ‘THE REVOLUTION’ IN SYRIA
… the situation is now far more complicated. Many revolutionary youth
are still fighting to remove the hated dictator and all his hangers on. But
what determines the real nature of the opposition as a whole is its leadership
and its programme (our emphasis).
It is true that some sections of the Free Syrian Army have clashed with
the fundamentalists that they see as having hijacked their revolution, but what
is their alternative? The programme is fundamentally one of bourgeois democracy
at best and Islamic fundamentalist reaction at worst. We must speak the truth
and explain honestly what has happened. We are for the downfall of Assad, but
we are also against imperialist intervention and the manoeuvres of the
reactionary regimes in the region. [13]
Yossi’s article, Victory to Revolution in Syria assesses the opposition
to Assad thus:
The ability of the Bashar al-Assad regime to survive so far is largely
due to the lack of working class independent mobilization at the head of the
opposition. There are many local committees that could become Soviets and which
are continuing to provide services. But they lack coordination and a
revolutionary strategy. Equally, the resistance is still made up of countless
formations of loosely connected armed militants, with no credible unified
revolutionary command. The fractured character of this armed resistance is a
result not only of the social segmentation and isolation policies enforced for
decades by Damascus but also because of the class nature of the opposition at
the moment.
The middle class leaders of the uprising are blaming each other for the
failure. The seculars blame the Islamists while the Islamist are blaming the
secularists. The simple truth is that the middle class organizations – whether
they are secularists or Islamists – do not have the program, strategy or
tactics to mobilize the masses workers and peasants to overthrow the bloody
regime. If the leaders of the opposition hate Assad they are at the same time
afraid of working class revolution. If there is a clear lesson to learn it is
that without the working class, women and men leading the masses including the
lower middle class and without a revolutionary leadership of the working class
the stalemate can continue for a longer period. [14]
This is all “if your aunt was a man she’d be your uncle” stuff: “There
are no working class independent mobilization at the head of the opposition” –
because it is an imperialist sponsored counter-revolutionary opposition. “There
are many local committees that could become Soviets”. But they are pigs’ ears
and not silk purses. “But they lack coordination and a revolutionary strategy”
because they are counter-revolutionary. There is a problem with “the class
nature of the opposition at the moment” – it is a reactionary,
imperialist-sponsored bourgeois movement. If only, if only, if only it was not
what it is it would be something else. At least Fred Weston can acknowledge the
bitter truth: “But what determines the real nature of the opposition as a whole
is its leadership and its programme”.
But Fred ignores Imperialist sponsorship so the unstoppable Arab Spring
still dazzles him into support; Yossi ignore these problems and plumbs for the
Sunni Muslins.
THE ISL AND MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISTS
The correct attack by the ISL on the IMT for refusing to defend Hamas
against Arafat’s Zionist-US-sponsored thugs has now morphed into a strategic
alliance with the fundamentalist Muslims. “Palestine united and free from the
river to the sea is a Hamas slogan used by the ISL and makes difficult any
alliance with Israeli workers. This turn away from the working class is far
clearer in Yossi’s Victory to the Revolution in Syria statement. In the split
debate the ISL charged the LRP with failure to defend the fundamentalist against French Imperialism. We have looked at
the LRP statement and the subsequent notes in reply to readers and can find no
substance in this charge at all. Despite big differences with the LRP over
Libya and Syria the LRP statements on Mali seem principled and correct to us.
Moreover the LRP counter charged the ISL with a failure to criticise the
fascistic barbarism of the fundamentalist
in Mali and assert that as the source of the disagreement that caused
the split. We feel there is substance to this charge. In Yossi’s statement on
Syria he explicitly defends his position on ‘Islamism:
Thus it is clear that at least until now the Western imperialists have not
armed the rebels and the reason they have not armed the rebels is because they
do not trust them as many of them are Islamists. The problem the imperialists
have in Syria is the relative strength of the Islamists in the mass movement.
[15]
Of course Imperialism has armed the rebels, both on their own accord and
via Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They have not supplied them with heavy
weapons or air cover; apparently Syria’s air defences are very sophisticated.
And it is true that they are nervous about what the fundamentalist might do to Israel and the reaction of
Russia, China and Iran. Yossi’s criticism amounts to a demand that Imperialism
arm the FSA now; he may get his wish soon. But the next statement brings out
his capitulation very clearly:
At this conjuncture of history in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Mali the
imperialists are on one side and the Islamists on the other. This of course can
be changed and this would not be the first time in the history of the last 100
years that the Islamists would serve the imperialists. But today the Islamists
are fighting against the imperialists and today Revolutionary Marxists are on
the same side as the Islamists in the conflict against Assad’s tyranny without
giving the petit bourgeois or bourgeois secular or religious forces any
political support. (our emphasis)[17]
We do not have to go back 100 years to find ‘Islamists’ in the service
of Imperialism. The CIA sponsored Bin Laden and armed the Afghan Mujahideen
against the USSR in the 80s. The CIA sponsored the fundamentalist Muslim
zealots in Libya against Gaddafi. And at this very moment they are sponsoring
another wing of the same movement that now dominates the Syrian opposition, the
Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt to smash that revolutionary struggle in which the
working class has played and is playing such a vital part.
Imperialist-sponsored fundamentalists are leading the attacks on the working
class in Tunisia. The Turkish AKP government have accepted Israel’s
Obama-dictated apology over the murders of their nine citizens on the Mavi
Marmara by Israel better to co-ordinate their assault on Assad. And the very
same Hamas, in which Yossi places such faith, has made clear that it will cut a
deal with Israel if possible to betray the Palestinians, just as Arafat did
before them and Abbas is doing now. It has rejected its traditional alliance
with Shi’a-dominated Syria and Iran and now proclaims itself Sunni Muslims in
alliance with the Sunni/Whabhi reactionary Imperialists stooges in Egypt and
Saudi. On 28 March 2013 the Times of Israel approvingly reported that the FSA
had: “retaliated against what it claimed were Hezbollah hostilities and
bombarded the group’s interests inside Lebanon”. The Hezbollah are Shi’a
Muslims and the third target of the US and Israel.
The unwanted outcome of the Iraq war for Imperialism was to strengthen
Shi’a Iran in the region. US imperialism has now adopted a tactic of allying
with former Sunni supporters of Saddam in Iraq and Sunnis through the region to
bring down Assad and Iran and seize control of the whole area in alliance with
the Sunni/Whabhi Muslims. Sure the US would prefer its own secular stooges,
they want Ghassan Hitto, “a pro-imperialist Syrian-American capitalist who has
been resident in the United States for decades, as prime minister for
rebel-held areas of Syria” as Yossi says. But as in 1996 when the Taliban took
Kabul and lynched the former President Najibullah the CIA will celebrate in its
Langley, Virginia HQ if Assad falls to the FSA. Israel will too, despite some
trepidation.
Yossi attacks his opponents on the left who gave uncritical support to
Assad, like the Workers World Party, George Galloway, the Maoists and the CPGB
(ML). His ‘demolition’ of these groups consists in quoting what they have to
say and leaving it to the reader to imagine what is wrong with it. In fact most
of what he quotes is principled anti-Imperialist stuff – he could surely find
many unprincipled sections uncritically supporting the reactionary Assad if he
tried. But he is anxious to employ the traditional amalgam tactic of lumping
them all together to direct his attack at the Liaison Committee for the Fourth
International. Again there is no refutation of the LCFI quote apart from the
assertion what we think all these counter-revolutions were CIA plots.
Of course there were many sincere but politically naïve anti-Imperialist
and anti-Gaddafi-Assad revolutionists in Libya and Syria when the uprisings
broke out; they supplied the forces for the first uprisings. But reactionary
leaders and Imperialist sponsorship quickly swept them into political oblivion.
The CIA surely plotted furiously in Libya, but it was the Saudis and the
Qataris who did that in Syria – right from the outset they had armed forces in
the ground who opened fire on the army and police during legitimate peaceful
demonstrations, drawing the fire of the security forces. These were clearly
pre-planned operations to bring on the conflict that they knew was brewing
because of the legitimate opposition of many to the brutal Assad regime. Also
many Sunni sheikhs and mullahs were seeking revenge for the appalling Hama
massacre in 1982.
Mohammad
Najibullah Ahmadzai (right)
President
of Afghanistan 1987 – 1992.
The CIA
celebrated when he was tortured,
mutilated
and lynched by the Taliban on 27/09/1996.
|
And then he goes on to prove at length what a fake anti-Imperialist
Assad is, as if we did not know. The point is the Assad government is fighting
Imperialism now and so we are obliged to
form an Anti-Imperialist United Front with him against the Muslim
fundamentalist reactionaries and bourgeois secular agents of US imperialism.
Must we quote Trotsky’s 1837 letter to Diego Rivera again to show it is current
conflicts that counts? That Spain in 1936-39 was an Imperialist country and
China in 1937 was a semi-colonial country as is Syria in 2013? Didn’t Trotsky
know about Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre of the Shanghai Soviet in 1927 when he
advocated such a bloc in 1937? Or what Haile Selassie was in 1935 or Vargas in
Brazil in 1938? And still Trotsky was for the defeat of the Imperialist forces,
even by these reactionaries. In China Trotsky and the early Comintern always
advocated an Anti-Imperialist United Front with Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek
during the civil wars against the northern warlords who were agents of Imperialism,
very like Syria today.
THE ISL, MALI AND THE LRP
But let us finish with the LRP quote where they cogently state the
correct Marxist position on Mali (despite their errors in Libya and Syria):
So let us be perfectly clear: when we said that we stand in defence of
all those facing imperialist attack, we meant it. Yes, since we stand against
the French invasion of Mali, identify the imperialists and their allies as the
main enemy and call for their defeat, of course we stand in defence of even the
most reactionary Islamist groups being attacked in Mali such as Ansar Dine, the
Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
(AQIM).
As our statement noted, we take this stand with full knowledge of the
crimes these groups perpetrated against the people of Mali’s North during their
time in power. Just how terrible was the rule of Islamist groups in the North?
So bad that apparently even Al-Qaeda criticized their version of
‘Sharia’ for being too extreme!
On February 14 the Associated Press reported the discovery in Timbuktu
of documents authored by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) leader Abu
Musab Abdul Wadud (a.k.a. Abdelmalek Droukdel) that were left behind when the
Islamist forces abandoned the city. Those documents criticized local Islamist
forces for going too far, too fast, in imposing their conception of religious
rule. They reportedly singled out for criticism the stoning-to-death of
adulterers and the whipping of people for other supposed crimes, attacks on
Sufi Muslim sites of worship “and the fact that you prevented women from going
out, and prevented children from playing, and searched the houses of the
population.”
Because the terribly oppressive nature of the Islamist groups’ rule in
northern Mali’s was already well known (as was the brutal role of the
nationalists who at first shared power with them), our statement made clear
that while we stand in defence of the Islamists against the imperialists’
attacks, we do not think that the masses should sacrifice their struggle
against any of those forces that oppress them:
At the same time, our opposition to the imperialists does not mean that
we call for the oppressed to necessarily pause their struggle against local
oppressors, forgo an opportunity to overthrow them or to in any way compromise
their ability to defend themselves by necessarily rushing to the defence of
those who were, before the imperialist attack, acting as local rulers and
oppressors themselves. Indeed, despite the imperialist attack, in concrete
instances armed Islamist or nationalist groups may prove a more immediate
threat to the masses; under such circumstances necessity dictates that the
oppressed must defend themselves against whoever is the most immediate and
grave threat. [18]
If you substitute Gaddafi and Assad for the ‘Islamists’ that was the
policy of the LCFI for Libya and is for Syria today. It is, in fact, a clear
elucidation of the principles of the Anti-Imperialist United Front. Except the
LRP have great problems with proxy forces acting on behalf of Imperialism.
Their Shachtmanite origins oblige them to defend the political cowardice of
Burnham, Shachtman, Carter and their middle class milieu which Trotsky and the
revolutionary US SWP fought as recorded in In Defence of Marxism. Their
traditional softness on Imperialism on the former USSR compromises their
position on the struggles of oppressed nations today.
Notes
[1] ISL’s Resignation Letter to the LRP (March 2013), http://www.the-isleague.com/isl-lrp-split/.
[2] In defence of Marxism, Theoretical journal of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency, Number 4 (May 1996), Guerrilla warfare and working class struggle,http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/ltt/ltt-idom4d.htm.
[3] Wiki article, Socialist Workers League,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_League.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Joint ISL.LRP statement, http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/lrp-isl_100809.html.
[6] Ibid.
[7] We do not use the pejorative terms ‘Islamacist’ and ‘Islamist’ that lumps together all Muslims.http://www.publiceye.org/frontpage/911/islamacist.html.
[8] Joint ISL.LRP statement.
[9] Victory to the Revolution in Syria! by Yossi Schwartz, http://www.the-isleague.com/syria-15-3-2013/.
[10] Behind The Bible Fraud—By Robert Adams, New Dawn Magazine.com,http://rense.com/general66/hide.htm.
[11] IMT, Is Israel a Democracy? Interview with Yossi Schwartz IDOM 2005,http://www.marxist.com/israel-democracy140105.htm.
[12] Joint ISL.LRP statement.
[13] What the Assad regime was and what it has become – Part Three, by Fred Weston, IDOM,http://www.marxist.com/what-the-assad-regime-was-and-what-it-has-become-3.htm.
[14 ]Victory to the Revolution in Syria! by Yossi Schwartz[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] LRP/Cofi, February 17, 2013, In Response to Questions from Readers, http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/mali_response_021713.html.