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Commentary :: Labor

The IFTU?

Jennifer Horan and Stan Goff on the IFTU Tour
Dear Judith,

Someone has shared with me your letter to the UfPJ May 1 listserv, and I thought I would respond with some concerns that I hope you will, in turn, share with the United for Peace listserv. After all, your email marks the second time that United for Peace has asked progressives to support and assist a tour delegation that includes the US regime authorized Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). None of the material I’’ve seen put out by either USLAW or United for Peace mentions crucial facts about the IFTU. I realize some of these facts, such as IFTU’s alliance and words of praise for the former Saddamist agent and CIA ‘asset’ Iyad Allawi may cause some groups to not support the IFTU tour, but that makes it all the more incumbent upon United for Peace and USLAW to share this information, not withthold it. Otherwise United for Peace and USLAW can be accused of having gained support for the IFTU tour under false pretenses.

1. The IFTU is largely controlled by the Iraqi Communist Party and backed by Allawi’’s Iraqi National Accord; both parties collaborate with the American occupation regime at the highest political levels, and benefit, politically and financially, from that collaboration (Allawi’’s slate of candidates for the Jan 2005 elections, which included the ICP, was heavily funded by the US; the ICP and INA enjoyed tremendous media exposure on the US controlled television and radio; former proconsul Bremer appointed reps of both parties to the 25 member Iraqi Governing Council)

2. The IFTU says that US troops must not be withdrawn until US forces have restored order, via a US trained police and army. Their position is thus identical to that of Bush and Blair’s. If USLAW is going to say that IFTU wants to end the occupation, then they should be fair and say that Bush and Blair do also.

(I realize this statement may sound sarcastic: what it underscores is that if USLAW is going to fundraise and promote the IFTU, then it should so on grounds other than that IFTU is against the occupation, and it should state what those grounds are.)

3. In England they have championed Blair’s Iraq policy, and lobbied delegates at a Labor party conference to drop a plank calling for immediate or one facilitated through a definite, internationally guaranteed timetable.

4. The President of the IFTU is Rasim Alawadi, deputy premier of the INA, and second—-in-command to Allawi. The INA is composed of disaffected former leading members of Saddam’’s regime and military. It worked closely with British and US intelligence after its 1992 founding to overthrow Saddam. Allawi’’s 40 year+ career of supervising state and NGO apparatuses of repression and surveillance is widely known. The IFTU backed Blair in his attempt to have then Interim premier Allawi address the Labor party conference in the fall of 2004. More recently, in a 3/31/05 interview their rep. has said of him “We do support and respect him”.

5. The IFTU speaks of the armed resistance in the exact same way that Bush, Blair and the neocons do: fantatical fundamentalists or Saddamist remanants; in stereotyping the resistance they ignore the evidence that the percentage of foreign, Al-Quaeda-associated fighers in Iraq is quite low,and the observations from such credible journalists as Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn that the resistance is popular, decentralized, and often provoked by the brutality of the US occupation. Anthony Cordesman, the military analyst who serves US imperialism by giving its administrators tough love reality checks, corroborates Fisk and Cockburn’s analysis.

6. In its press releases, opeds, and interviews, the IFTU frequently and emphatically denounces the violence and suffering inflicted on Iraqi civilians from the insurgents; it rarely mentions the deaths and injuries Iraq’s people suffer at the hands of US soldiers and weapons, tho the former greatly ouweighs the latter.

7. The IFTU presents itself as “the real democratic resistance” inside Iraq. This presentation, its call for the US military occupation to continue, and its frequent condemmnation of all armed resistance inside Iraq as “Talibanist” or “Saddamist,” has been cited by pro-war, pro-occupation journalists and politicians inside England as (a) proof that all armed resistance inside Iraq should be condemmed (b) proof that the occupation should continue and © reason to condemm the antiwar, anti-occupation left for not agreeing with (a) and (b).

USLAW is quite right to admonish us not to engage in Cold War unionism, and of course we have no right to choose for Iraqis who they want to have represent them, or even to judge the political choices of Iraqis inside Iraq, given the politically harsh terrain they must navigate. But we are obligated to be as responsible and conscious as possible in deciding what forces we ally ourselves with in Iraq. We are obligated to act in ways that that will empower our efforts to end this occupation, and to help Iraqis resist it. And so I ask you again, as someone whom I assume is committed in the struggle to end the nightmare of US imperialism, to share this email, so that people can decide for themselves what action they should take in respect to IFTU, and to USLAW’s support for it.

Sincerely, Jennifer Horan

*******

Stan Goff responds:

This issue gives me the opportunity to address together several issues I have pointed to separately. First there is the issue of moral imperialism - that peculiar penchant western ‘progressives’ have for telling other people how to ‘democratically’ run their nations, and how to fight their wars when those nations are under attack. Next there is the issue of workerism, which has a great deal to do with the failure of the left to effectively engage either gender of ecocide in any meaningful way, and a lot to do with how some leftists cling to trade unionism as the last word in organizing. Finally, there is the problem of semantic affinity - a form of philosophical idealism that seeks out formations based on their bullet-listed program points, and even their names ("Communist"), instead of measuring their practice against the actual conditions, and tries to escape from living history into communist fantasy-land. I say that last as a communist, and it is painful.

Moral Imperialism

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it is more offensive for a national guerrilla resistance to send a suicide bomber on a mission to target a collaborator police station, where the attack kills two civilians in its execution, than for a $500 billion a year imperial military warplane to reduce entire city blocks with uranium munitions and calls everyone who is killed or wounded “terrorists,” or “insurgents.”

And if anyone wants to know who is targeting mosques, and so on, the first place to look is at Rumsfeld’s special P2OG outfit, and to the Badr militias - who are aiming to become Uncle Sam’s surrogate death squads. The Badr militias, by the way, hang out with precisely the same people as the vaunted IFTU.

Were this kind of hypocrisy not maddening enough, there is an equally twisted construction that determines the legitimacy of an attack by a series of ideological litmus tests. What is the resistance’s position on burkhas? We should be asking what is the occupier’s position on pornography? Talk about taking the beam out of one’s own eye…

There is so much plain western racism tucked away in this bullshit - carefully concealed under expressions of deep concern, of course - but this is White Man’s Burden, and there is no escaping it. WE are the enlightened ones who will teach civilization - even ‘progressive’ civilization - to those poor, dusky, benighted beings.

Workerism and Trade Unions

Workerism is defined many ways, but what I mean here is the tendencies to (1) idealize workers, (2) tail workers’ attitudes, and (3) conflate workers with labor unions. It’s more than that, of course. It is also clinging to the historically discredited schema that revolution against capitalism will begin and end only with “workers,” narrowly defined. The stubborn facts are that (1) every successful revolution in the epoch of the capitalist world system so far has been carried out by either the bourgeoisie or with peasants as the most turbulent and energetic base, (2) that this exclusive focus has ignored - by desing in some cases - women, and (3) that trade union movements are as often reactionary as they are progressive, and that they have a very short half-life as a vehicle for social uprisings.

I know what Lenin wrote about ultra-leftism as an infantile disorder, and that he said we have to work in reactionary trade unions. I’m not challenging that, exactly, but the deeper idea that only the working class pursuing the interests of itself-as-a-class is THE vehicle to get us closer to the transformative day. For that matter, as someone who admires Lenin a great deal and believes he is one of the most influential characters in history, his self-appointed acolytes have done neither him nor anti-imperialists who came after him any great service by their apotheosis of him. He himself said more than once that he had made many errors. Moreover, and regretfully, Lenin died quite some time ago, and things have changed a great deal.

Some of his warnings about labor aristocracies, however, have been borne out again and again. And the vast majority of the world’s proletarians are not members of trade unions.

In the United States, unions have a very sketchy history, and are led to this day almost exclusively by white males, who continue to sign off on imperial adventures - and will do so more emphatically as a greater share of the unionized labor force is articulated into various military contracts. the very structures of labor unions were developed in response to a reality that has gone the way of the dodo - with the consolidation of more and more enterprises within vast holding companies within deriviatives leviathans.

In Iraq, unions have been apparatuses of surveillance and control, and that has not changed. It has simply been distorted, as former Baathist overseers who have decided to become collaborators have penetrated the IFTU - a federation controlled form the top-down by the Iraqi Communist Party.

See www.workersliberty.org/files/Occupied_Basra_19.pdf

I’m astonished that many of my own comrades are preparing to fete these people around the US - astonished for the same reasons as Jennifer - and no one is asking how they managed to get visas. Fucking Cat Stephens can’t get a visa, but Iraqi “Communists” can?!

Semantic Affinity

This brings me to the subject of semantic affinity. Ever since it has become apparent that (1) the Iraqi resistance need only survive to win, and (2) that political Islam - not a more secular political from - has become its opposite, from its origins as a tool of imerialism against Arab nationalism, to its current and irrefutably anti-imperialist form, people on the western left have choked.

They want imperialism to die at the hands of Robin Hood… I suppose because that makes a better docu-drama. This is the same reason western leftists have been so enchanted by the utterly symbolic shenanigans of the Zapatistas (I’ll get some hate mail on that one, I’m sure).

The Iraqi resistance now, and the growing political resistance throughout the region, will not sell florid little dolls or organic coffee in your local anarcho-head-shop.

Western progressives have been so chagrined by this development that they have taken to calling the resistance Islamo-facsist and the like (just as some will criticize the IFTU as Stalinist - which is not my issue). This kind of rhetorical shorthand is worse than meaningless; it substitutes purely symbolic thinking for criticism. Neither term has an ounce of validity. They are just impressionistic epithets, and in the case of “clerical fascism,” “Islamo-fascism,” and so on, they short-circuit the most important task the left may have in the western metropoles with regard to Southwest Asia, and that is studying and understanding the *political* content of political Islam.

And so they grab at outfits like the IFTU, precisely because it articulates a program that sounds secular, and they ignore the fact that the fucking IFTU (read the Iraqi Communist Party) supports the occupation and collaborates with it. But hey, they are called the Iraqi COMMUNIST Party, so they must be doing something right.

There are a couple of big problems with this. One, the armed resistance enjoys popular support and even sympathy among many of the Shia, and the Iraqi Communist Party has opposed it from the beginning. Two, they have no substantial popular base. Even the rank-and-file members of the ICP-controlled IFTU largely abandoned it in the last elections… for Islamist candidates.

A Word on Military Realities

One of the biggest expressions of outrage against the resistance from western leftists was when some component of it assassinated Hadi Salih of the IFTU last January.

There is no way to be delicate about this, and it goes to the heart of what I said about moral imperialism.

A guerilla movement that is trying to liberate its country from a brutal foreign military occupation by the most expensive and lethal conventional military in human history cannot confront that conventional military in conventional military terms. To do so in the name of some asinine sense of fair play would be suicidal and a betrayal of their own cause.

One of the premier tactical necessities for such a guerrilla movement is to deny the occupation military useful, timely intelligence. Given that the Anglo-American occupiers are clueless about most of what’s going on around them and thoroughly incapable of translating these activities into their own congitive frameworks, they must rely on human intelligence inthe form of collaborators. Any and all Iraqis who work in any capacity with the occupation are sources of intelligence to the Americans.

There is one way, and only one way, to effectively “blind” the occupation forces in order to maintain the freedom of maneuver necessary to ccontinue effective guerrilla actions: Target the collaborators.

Any call from any western ‘progressive’ for the resistance to do otherwise is a call for the resistance to stand down. it is tantamount to a demand of surrender, and is therefore synonymous wiht the very demand of the occupying forces themselves.

This is not advanced calculus.

Hadi Salih may have been a very nice guy, for all I know. But he was also a collaborator.

Wars, even wars of liberation, do not conform to the logic of your favorite television serial or bedtime story.

This is why, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why some of my dear comrades are among those who simultaneously demand immediate withdrawal, then promote an American tour by US-supported Iraqis - with their visas enthusiastically stamped - who are saying exactly the opposite.
 
 

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