RE: [Marxism] Is author of WCPI tract a "CIA operative"?...

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Zivko Vukolaj wrote:
The truth of the matter is, if WCPI trully was a CIA funded organ, there
is
no realistically possible way we could come to affirm or disprove that,
at
least not conclusively. So you see, placing burden of proof on such
claims
rarely goes beyond meaningless rhetoric. For this reason the main point
of
concern should be the causes for suspission, not suspission itself.

So people who want to charge that the WCPI is a CIA front do not have to
meet any burden of proof because proving the charge is impossible! First
of all, proof is not IMPOSSIBLE, unless evidence simply does not exist.

Some conclusions can be reached now on whether the WCPI is the product
of Iranian and Iraqi politics (especially, in fact, Iranian) or whether
it is the creature of a bureaucracy in Langley, Va., whose creative
thinkers invented a sectarian far left line for them.

Every indication that I see is that the WCPI is primarily a product of
the profound disorientation of the left, above all in Iran, about the
popular attachment to Islam and about "political Islam" that goes back
well before the Iranian revolution.  But the confusion has been greatly
increased by the reactionary policies and overall course of the
bourgeois regime that Khomeini established in an Islamic form after the
toppling of the shah to contain and control the masses.  This confusion
also exists in Iraq.

They are a product of the same disorientation that produced the
Mujahedeen Khalq, which is now bidding for US support against Iran, and
the more traditionally leftist Fedayeen and many other disoriented
groups.

I don't know what is the exact political solution to the problem of
Islamism in Iraq and Iran, but I know that it is not along the line of
equating Islamism and imperialism as equal main enemies (with greater
hostility in practice to Islamism) and the advocacy of a form of
secularism based on the perspective of smashing and outlawing "political
Islam."  Nor can the solution be achieved by refusing all solidarity
with "political Islam" when it comes into conflict with imperialism. But
this is common to many of the left groups coming out of the experience
of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, including those who have
come out of the Iranian and Iraqi Communist parties.

Nor, I might add, is the problem of "political Islam" solved by issuing
papal bulls proclaiming them "exhausted" -- whatever that is supposed to
mean exactly -- and refusing solidarity against imperialism on that
cloudy basis. Proclaiming a particular ideology or current to be
"exhausted" does not provide the slightest justification for refusing
solidarity to fighters who are in battle against US occupation.


There is simply no necessity to posit any CIA maneuvering at all to
explain the creation of the WCPI.  And until some proof comes out, the
speculation is just baiting and a red-herring diversion from the
discussion and debate in this country or in Iraq and Iran.
Fred Feldman


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