John McAnulty of Ireland’s Socialist Democracy
25 January 2009
“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in
chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the
chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are
equals before a court of morality!”
–Leon Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours,” 1938
The month of total war waged by Israel on Gaza has halted for the time being, although the struggle to crush the Palestinian people continues unabated.
The Gaza massacre generated deep revulsion across the globe. In Ireland, as in many other places, substantial protests took place. The protests didn’t involve the main body of workers but they did offer the opportunity of building a substantially stronger solidarity movement. That opportunity was not taken. There are many reasons for this, but a key reason is the mistaken ideas about building united action held by many militants.
The majority of activists believe that any movement should be as broad as possible, and that the way to achieve that is to rely on humanitarian sentiment. This apparently common-sense approach is actually profoundly mistaken at a number of levels and fails every time it is applied.
The point is that unity requires an object. The broader the movement, the weaker and more diffuse its aims. The agreement may fall far short of the needs of the situation and may be so loose that in practice there is only limited common action.
These are really organisational issues. For socialists there are deeper political issues. We believe that only the working class can resolve the major issues facing humanity. In each new struggle we seek to promote the self-organisation and self-activity of the workers. Class struggle doesn’t stop at the door of a new campaign, so there are political battles to be fought to establish the class interest that will dominate.
These issues were worked out long ago in the mass struggles of the working class. In sudden crises single issue campaigns, cutting across classes, can be established but these are inherently unstable.
United fronts are meant to unite different sections of the workers, and sometimes sections of the small farmers and small shopkeepers with the workers. The different sections unite around a common policy. They act together but continue to advance their own programs. A democratic structure allows the movement to change and advance new demands as the situation changes.
The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the working class led to the policy of popular fronts. A good example of the popular front policy was the battle against fascism. Stalinists argued that this transcended class and was best advanced by an all-class alliance. They built alliances with the right and used savage repression against workers advancing demands of their own. The popular fronts, limited to the policy of the capitalists, were inevitably defeated.
Care must be taken in using the terms popular front and united front. As with all Marxist terms, they depend heavily on context. The working class in Ireland today is fragmented and demoralised by decades of social partnership and the defeat of the republican movement. Neither is there a dissident section of the capitalist class at whom a popular front could be aimed.
It makes more sense to talk about a popular front approach. In that way one can focus on the reality of the views of small groups rather than imagine we are talking about significant class forces. So what is the effect of this sort of thinking on the conduct of solidarity actions with Gaza?
The organisational effect is to establish a virtual movement, insubstantial as any other form of virtual reality. This had two effects. The first was to bring in essentially right-wing figures on their own terms, so platforms were crowded with speakers who did not oppose imperialism and with no real connection with a solidarity movement. The strongest example of this was the plethora of clerical speakers bolted on to the trade unions demonstration in Belfast in a vain attempt to defuse loyalist opposition. It was quite bizarre to witness the Socialist Workers party intervention in Dublin They themselves had moved to the left under the pressure of events, but were totally unable to obtain a response from the movement they had partially created.
The insubstantial nature of the movement also left it open to adventures. Again the Belfast demonstration was a good example, with republican activists staging stunts in local stores, making no attempt to discuss tactics with other groups in the campaign.
But the real weakness of a popular front approach is political. Any serious solidarity movement should demand an end of Israeli occupation and the siege of Gaza and the West Bank. As it was, the main demands were for a ceasefire, balanced in many cases by demands that Hamas should not respond with rockets. Calls were made for the ‘international community’ to intervene, ignoring the fact that it had already intervened decisively on the side of Israel. A number of the speakers were the left face of imperialism, supporting the aims of the massacre while bemoaning the bloodshed.
A humanitarian campaign cannot survive a ceasefire. Activists gravitate towards individual moralism, either in the form of charitable donations or individual boycott of Israeli produce. The political demands of the boycott remain unclear.
And it is here that the fundamental weakness of the Irish solidarity movement lies. One of the main organisations declaring solidarity with Gaza is Sinn Fein, closely followed by the trade union leadership and the left organisations. In practice they all support the Irish peace process and the partitionist solution it produced. It follows as night follows day that the Middle East peace process and the two-state solution represent the way forward. We should all be dancing in the streets at the news that heros such as Tony Blair and George Mitchell are to lead the Middle East process forward!
Of course this is all nonsense. The peace process in the Middle East is imperialist policy, with its main aim the crushing of Palestinian resistance. The two state solution is what we see already in Gaza and the West Bank – open prisons, constantly at the mercy of Israeli aggression. The difficulty for many is that to admit this would be to cast new light on the Irish peace process and the sectarian sewer formed in the North.
Just as solidarity with Gaza requires the self-organisation of workers, so to does a genuine peace and justice in Ireland.
Rustbelt Radical 
John’s overall analysis is as relevant to the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements here in the US as it is to Ireland. As most readers of this site well know, the US left has long been dominated by the “Popular Front,” ie, class collaborationist, approach, courtesy of two generations of Stalinism. There is, of course, the geriatric remnants of the 1930s Moscow loyal CP and its social democratized spin-off, the COC. They have been pushing “fight the right,” “lesser evil” Popular Front reformism since Uncle Joe was calling the shots in the Kremlin and Earl Browder was carrying out his orders here. Then there are their once youthful reinforcements from the burned-out baby boomers of the 1960s “New Left.” They made their peace with the “revisionists” they once scorned by way of Stalin and Dimitrov when they couldn’t find anything in Mao’s Little Red Book to cope with Reaganism and had to fall back on the Popular Front for guidance.
These two groupings have a common home within the UFPJ, which, unfortunately, remains the main anti-war umbrella organization in the US. It’s main, if not only, role, within the left and the “mass movements” is to keep them united…with the Democratic Party, even though the later barely differs with its Republican rivals on issues relating to the wars and occupations in the Middle East. Indeed, UFPJ only came into being when the reformists saw the anti-imperialist ANSWER coalition, then dominated by the Workers World Party, along with the Maoist run “Not in Our Name” drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters to the antiwar demonstrations that they organized in the period from after “9/11” through the start of the Iraq war. With the “most important election ever” just around the corner, the reformists were not taking any chances of leaving the antiwar movement in unrealible hands.
UFPJ proceeded to put the anti-war movement on the back burners during the run-up to the 2004 presidential election under the banner of “Anybody But Bush,” even though the “anybody” was the pro-war John Kerry. They continued to do so in 2006 under the guise of “Taking Back Congress” for the Democrats. When the later took back Congress, they promptly gave Bush all the money he asked for to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as to keep Israel well funded. Needless to say, in 2008 they all lined up behind Obama, who was one of those doing the funding in the Senate. Now they are trying their best to continue keeping people off the streets, even though Obama has kept Bush’s war minister and generals on board as he escalates the war in Afghanistan and continues to stand firmly behind Israel.
Palestine, of course, has always been a touchy subject with the reformists. To begin with there are not a few liberal and social democratic Zionists within UFPJ whose “liberalism” and “socialism” doesn’t extend to the victims of Israeli apartheid and expansionism, at least those who dare to fight back against it. But more importantly for UFPJ, Israel is the main ally of US imperialism in the Middle East. Since the Democrats, as a partner party of America’s ruling rich, are as committed to its upkeep as the Republicans are, criticisms of it are not a welcome addition to their laundry list of demands.
Why not? As good reformists, UFPJ believes that the only way that progressive social change will ever come to the US is through the efforts of “our elected representatives” in Washington and elsewhere. They may, on occasion, need to be “pressured” from below. But only so gently, as that may disrupt putting (or keeping) the Democrats in office, and, of course, plays into the hands of the Republican “right.” Therefore anything associated with Palestine is to be avoided like the plague…even if Israel is engaging in a massacre, like a week or so ago in Gaza, or in Lebanon in 2006, or in Jenin and on the West Bank as a whole in 2002. Especially if it’s during an election year like in 2006. Then they’ve got priorities to adhere to.
So all the major demonstrations in NYC in solidarity with Gaza and against Israeli aggression were, in effect, boycotted by UFPJ. The fact that they were called by their rivals, the anti-imperialist ANSWER coalition and various Arab-American groups, didn’t help either insofar as UFPJ was concerned. In the past UFPJ has consistently stayed away from ANSWER anti-war rallies as well. UFPJ also endorsed a UN resolution which explictly avoided calling for Israel to withdraw from Gaza and was mainly aimed at keeping the Palestinians there unarmed and at the mercy of the Zionists or their Egyptian stand-ins..
Of course, the uninitiated might inquire as to why ostensible opponents of the war, like UFPJ, would want to keep away tens of thousands of Arab-Americans, who would certainly bolster the ranks of a dwindling and declining antiwar movement. Dwindling and declining, that is, because of UFPJ’s putting it out to pasture, not because the American people supported the war. Far from it as we all know. Surely the Israel-Palestine conflict has some relation to what’s going on in the Middle East as a whole. The imperialists and the Zionists certainly think it does.
The answer, no pun intended, is simple. The Popular Frontists prefer a united front with a handful of Democratic party politicians to one with tens of thousands of Arab Americans and anti-imperialists, because to them, another world is not possible. To those of us who still think it is, solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Israeli apartheid and aggression, like opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is part and parcel of the same struggle against the same enemy.
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