Solidarity with Iraqi workers

Solidarity with Iraqi workers!

A Workers' Liberty/ Solidarity pamphlet, March 2005. Trade unionists or Islamists? Who represents Iraqi workers? The "reactionary anti-imperialists" Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 1) Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 2) Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 3) Self-determination and democracy in Iraq Is Iraq another Vietnam?

Trade unionists or Islamists?

In October 2004 Subhi al Mashadani, general secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) was shouted down at the European Social Forum. The meeting was abandoned. After the ESF Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi leftist living in Britain, wrote a partial defence of the shouting-down. It was originally a letter to Alex Gordon, of the railworkers’ union RMT. The article was printed, abridged, in Socialist Worker on 30 October, and another article by Ramadani on similar lines was in the Guardian on 27 October. Martin Thomas critically examines the arguments. Ramadani says the shouting-down was...

Who represents Iraqi workers?

This article by Sami Ramadani appeared in Socialist Worker, 30 October 2004 THE Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) leadership appears to have succeeded in convincing some union leaders in Britain that it is a staunch opponent of the occupation. Alas, this self projected image is false. Before I explain, let us bear in mind that George Bush and Tony Blair also claim they are against the occupation of Iraq and want to end it “as soon as possible”. After all, they handed “sovereignty” to the Allawi regime, which in turn “invited” them to remain in Iraq as the “multinational forces”. Bush and...

The Left and "reactionary anti-imperialism"

“Reactionary socialism… half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love” W B Yeats The left is defined, grouped and regrouped, and redefined again and again, by responses to major events — for example, to the October Revolution of 1917. The left is now undergoing another redefinition, around its responses to the series of wars that began with the Kosova war of 1999 and continued...

Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 3)

Part 1 ; part 2 . Capitulators of today and yesterday An example from the history of the USSR will also shed some Marxist light on the question of the attitude Marxists take when alien, anti-working class forces, are, or seem to be, doing work we want done, and would like to be strong enough to do ourselves, in our way. In the mid 1920s, Trotsky and the Left Opposition, then the United Opposition (with Zinoviev), advocated a programme of industrialisation for the USSR. Their opponents, the Stalinists and the Bukharinites, scoffed at such an idea. Then in 1928-9, faced with an upsurge of...

Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 2)

Part 1 ; part 3 . Not a penny for this system! Amost instructive misunderstanding occurred when one of the New Blairites took issue with an editorial preface to some texts from Lenin and Luxemburg in Solidarity (3/52, 27 May 2004). The preface said: “Solidarity thinks it good that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq has been smashed. Does that mean that we should have supported Bush or Blair’s war? Does the political judgement that the smashing of Saddam’s regime was a good thing necessarily imply support for those who smashed it? Again, we say, no. These sorts of issues and dilemmas have always...

Why socialists can not support the USA in Iraq (part 1)

Part 2 ; part 3 . Replying to 'Don't think twice, it's alright' “The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflicts to oblige all humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas. This method is as old as bourgeois society, or more exactly, as class society in general. No one is obligated to become a Marxist; no one is obligated to swear by Lenin’s name. But the whole of the politics of these two titans of revolutionary thought was directed toward this, that the fetishism of two camps would give...

Self-determination and democracy in Iraq

By Barry Finger The demand for national liberation, for the right of self-determination of a people, is understood by socialists to be a demand for radical, consistent democracy. This at once separates us from those who, such as the Buchananite paleocons, place the inviolability of the national principle above all other considerations and who may consistently oppose imperial interventions on that basis. Yet, this demand on the part of socialists for the right to self-determination may even seem self-contradictory insofar as the final aim of socialism is an international political and economic...

Is Iraq another Vietnam?

Chris Reynolds answers some questions How is Iraq today different from Vietnam in the late 1960s? In Iraq there are workers’, unemployed, and women’s movements which oppose both the US and other occupation forces and the Islamist and neo-Ba’thist militias which fight them. Socialists’ main duty is solidarity with those workers’, unemployed, and women’s movements. There was no “third force” like that in Vietnam? Anti-Stalinist socialists in the USA like Irving Howe, who were dissatisfied with just saying “US out now” because they saw that meant Stalinist victory which would crush all...

Solidarity with Iraqi workers

At the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005 there was a strike wave in Iraq, which affected many sectors of industry. The fledgling labour movement is beginning to raise its head. But it is still organisationally weak. It faces many dangers, both from the US/UK occupation which keeps Saddam’s labour laws on the books, and from the Islamist and neo-Ba’thist “resistance” gangs, which have killed and kidnapped trade unionists. Despite the urgent need for solidarity, it was only after a lot of dawdling and fumbling that the British labour movement began to organise for the Iraqi workers. The biggest...

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