[Marxism] The SWP (U.S.) deepens its rightist turn

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The latest issue of the Militant deepens and extends the SWP's evolving
third campist, rightist position on the Iraq war.

Now people who go to the home page, and look at the main headline for
this week's issue, may wonder, "what's José been smoking?" 

Because the home page headline reads, "Bush visit to UK bolsters
imperialist ?war on terror,?" which seems to be a clear denunciation of
the war and in that sense, at least, contrasts favorably with what's
been there for the past few weeks. (The front-page coverage had been
"objective"-sounding reporting in which the U.S. forces were described
in neutral terms and presented as the only protagonists, and the Iraqi
resistance dismissed in terms identical to those used by Bush
administrations propagandists, as "remnants" of the "Baathist regime.")

And, actually, what I'm ending up *sending* to the list is very
different from what I sat down to write originally. My original subject
line was "A shift in tone by the SWP (US) on Iraq" and the first
sentence said, "After three or four weeks of being almost
indistinguishable from the rest of the U.S. press on Iraq, the SWP's
Militant has pulled back." Part way through writing it, I went back and
looked through it and added "at least a little," to that first sentence.


But by the time I was getting fairly along in writing it, it seemed more
and more that what the headline represented wasn't a retreat, but
sucker-bait. So I went back and re-read the key pieces from this week's
issue as well as some previous one, and came to the conclusion that the
SWP leadership was deepening its rightist turn.

The main point of the front page article isn't in the headline but
rather starts to unfold in the subheadline: "?Stop Bush? protests,
marked by nationalism, aid British rulers." 

The central idea underlying the article is that the overriding feature
of world politics is the inter-imperialist conflict between the U.S. (to
which the Militant adds the UK) and Europe (dominated by the Germans and
the French). That's what the Iraq war was about.

Now, you will struggle to try to extract that cleanly from the
Militant's front page article. Instead, I would urge people to read the
"Reply to a Reader" column: "What?s the ?war on terrorism,? resistance
in Iraq?"

There you will find the deepening rightist line expressed without much
obfuscation, and in the form of selected quotes from an editorial from
last March:

>>?This is not just a war for oil,? the editorial said, calling on
working people to oppose not only the Anglo-American assault but the
entire imperialist system and its wars. ?It is about which among the
competing imperialist powers will control the mineral and strategic
Mideast platform that Iraq sits on. It is part of a wider conflict over
the redivision of the former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle
East among the ?civilized hyenas??as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin aptly
called the imperialist powers. This interimperialist conflict, with
Washington-London on one side and Paris-Berlin on the other as the main
unstable poles, is at the center of the ongoing UN-sanctioned assault on
Iraqi sovereignty and the imminent U.S.-led invasion. This war is the
first of a number of imperialist wars in coming years, as the capitalist
system worldwide sinks deeper into a prolonged depression.?<<

Just how *much* the SWP's line has changed in 8-1/2 months is clear if
you go back and actually read the original editorial. 

>>Bring the troops home now! 
 
>>Bring the troops home now! UN inspectors out of Iraq! End the
imperialist trampling of Iraq?s sovereignty! 

>>We urge working people and youth to join the peace marches of March 15
and March 22 planned for many cities, and campaign on college campuses
and high schools, street corners, door-to-door in working-class
communities, on the job, and at factory gates with the above demands....

>>At most antiwar rallies around the world today pacifist demands
predominate. At the same time, these actions *are* against the strongest
imperialist power on earth assaulting Iraq.<< (in the original, "are"
was in italics).

What has changed is that then the Militant considered the right of Iraq
to self determination, the national and colonial question, as being the
main question. I think they gave the undoubtedly real factor of
inter-imperialist rivalries way too much weight as a secondary factor,
but why quibble -- at least in that editorial they expressed clearly
what was the main, overriding issue -- an imperialist attack on a Third
World nation.

TODAY they say the *overriding*  feature is inter-imperialist rivalry,
that's what is really going on, and have adopted a completely
*reactionary* stance of dismissing and slandering the struggles of
peoples of the Third World, the vast majority of humanity!

"A number of groups in the middle-class left have attempted to paint up
resistance to the U.S. occupation as a national liberation movement,"
the Reply to a Reader says. It goes on to quote a WWP article, "The
anti-war movement here and around the world must give its unconditional
support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance."

The Militant then tries to explain what's wrong with giving
"unconditional support" to a nation fighting imperialism.  "The logic of
these statements is a stance of political support for the Baathist
regime of Saddam Hussein and favoring its return to power." 

This is as clear a demonstration as one could want that Jack Barnes and
Co., have taken up the White Man's Burden of telling the Iraqis what
government they may or may not have. 

The "Reply to a Reader" then goes on to regurgitate the White House
propaganda line that this is all just happening in the "Sunni Triangle."


It even goes a fair bit down the road towards claiming that, actually,
the Iraqis *support* imperialist tutelage: "That?s why the claims by the
U.S. forces of support or at least acceptance of their occupation by
many, if not most, Iraqis are not simply a hoax."

You only need to look at what happened to those two paratroopers in
Mosul in the north, and to the Italians in the south, in the last couple
of weeks to see how off-the-wall this judgment is. 

But, worse, the Militant *extends* its condemnation of those fighting
arms in hand against its *own* imperialism to encompass the entire Arab
nation, and beyond.

>>Not only in Iraq and Iran but throughout the Mideast,
anti-imperialist-minded workers and farmers have no leadership that
represents their interests. Decades of Stalinist counterrevolutionary
policies, both by Moscow and by Stalinist organizations throughout the
Middle East, created a void that bourgeois nationalist organizations
waving Islamic banners fill today?groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and
al-Qaeda, which have nothing in common with the popular liberation
movements that marked an earlier period.<<

That last phrase is taken pretty much word-for-word from an editorial
they printed a few weeks ago that marked the public unveiling of this
new line of giving the finger to those fighting against imperialism in
the colonial and semicolonial world. The reasoning is that now that the
"counterrevolutionary" Stalinists are gone, the national movements of
oppressed peoples against imperialism have lost completely any
progressive character. 

In fact, they should be *ignored*, they play no role, the *real* action
is at places like the New York where the Security Council meets and
Vienna where the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hangs out.
What this is ALL really about is the conflict between the mainland
Europeans, on one side, and the Washington-London axis, on the other.

That this is exactly the line that the SWP leadership is trying to sell
to its members and supporters is evident from the headline on the
article about Iran and the IAEA: "Rivalry between U.S., European powers
flares over next steps to halt Iran?s nuclear plans."

The article goes into painful detail on the negotiations between the
imperialists on the terms of the resolution and its exact wording,
rather than making the axis of the article defense of Iran against this
imperialist imposition.

Contrast that to what the Militant was writing last March: 

>>The U.S. rulers and their allies are serious about pursuing the "axis
of evil." Iran and north Korea are now clearly in their sights. As part
of opposing this disastrous course, working people need to reject all
the rationalizations presented by the rulers, including their calls for
so-called nuclear nonproliferation. 

>>We need to defend the right of oppressed nations to defend themselves
by any means necessary. We should emulate the stance of the
revolutionary leader Malcolm X. Malcolm took pride when the Chinese
people developed the atomic bomb in 1964. "I had to marvel at that," he
said. "It made me realize that poor people can do it as well as rich
people."<<

What the SWP leadership is abandoning is precisely "the right of
oppressed nations to defend themselves by any means necessary." 

Now they condition it on the nation having the right leadership, one
acceptable to the SWP.

In the "Response to a Reader" column, they *explicitly* quote and
reiterate the shameful, non-struggle, third campist line unveiled in the
front page editorial a few weeks ago:

"Revolutionists in Iraq today would fight for Iraqi sovereignty, which
the U.S. armed forces prevent. At the same time, they would be opposed
to the return of the Baathist regime." 

Well, since those fighting arms in hand to drive out the imperialist
invaders are supposedly "Baathist remnants," their victory would mean
"the return of the Baathist regime." So where does that leave those who
would follow the Militant's advice?

"They would use whatever civic space exists to build and consolidate a
revolutionary organization that could lead working people there down the
road to get rid of the U.S. troops and keep the United Nations out as
well.?

I have no opinion on exactly how the Iraqi people should organize their
struggle to drive out the imperialist invaders. But to advocate that
fighters in Iraq *limit* themselves to "whatever civic space exists"
means advocating acceptance of the occupation, and the Militant makes
this totally explicitly by saying people should FIRST build a
"revolutionary organization" (again, limited to the "civic space"
afforded by an imperialist military occupation) and consider the task of
actually driving out the imperialists to be "down the road." 

I do not believe the role of Quislings befits communists.

This is much, much bigger than a question of tactics or of emphasis at a
London demonstration, which at first blush might seem  the focus of the
front page article. If systematically followed through and internalized,
this represents not just a break with Lenin, with Marxism, but will lead
to a break with the workers movement, a fundamental and qualitative
transformation in the nature of the group.

José