Workers Vanguard No. 850	10 June 2005

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

The Left and the Occupation

For Class Struggle Against U.S. Capitalist Rulers!

Following the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there has been a lot of handwringing and whining among self-proclaimed socialist groups in the U.S. as to why the "antiwar movement" has fallen on hard times. Both the Workers World Party (WWP), builder of ANSWER and the "Troops Out Now Coalition," and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) now have the nerve to complain that "the movement" was diverted into supporting pro-war Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Workers World vows: "The antiwar movement should never again sacrifice its independence and demobilize itself on behalf of a political party that supports the war" ("Troops Out Now Coalition" leaflet for March 19 New York City protest). The ISO, for its part, boldly proclaims: "Backing Democrats has pulled the antiwar movement to the right" (Socialist Worker, 22 April).

Under the headline, "Are the Democrats Our Allies?" the 13 May Socialist Worker includes an exchange that proves that the debate is about tactics, not fundamental class interests. While ex-Maoist Carl Davidson insists that the antiwar movement should be lobbying Congressional Democrats, Elizabeth Schulte of the ISO writes, "We need an activist movement that doesn't compromise its antiwar positions in the name of defeating the greater of two evils—a movement that none of the politicians in Washington, Democrat or Republican, can ignore." So it's write your Congressman vs. action in the street to pressure your Congressman, be he a Democrat or Republican.

The antiwar movement did not undergo some fundamental transformation to end up in the "Anybody but Bush" camp. From the very beginning, the assorted reformist "socialists" subordinated the interests of the international working class to what would be acceptable to those capitalist politicians (e.g., Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton) who opposed the war because they deemed it was not in the best interests of U.S. imperialism. The socialist pretensions of these reformists—like Workers World (which built ANSWER), the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP—which built Not In Our Name) and the ISO (which worked within United for Peace and Justice—UFPJ)—were once again proven to be so much hot air as they devoted themselves to building a movement that did not and could not challenge the framework of the capitalist system.

Only a program of turning the antiwar movement into an anti-capitalist movement could point the way forward. The perspective of the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs was to wage a proletarian fight to break the disastrous unity of antiwar militants with elements of the bourgeoisie on a pacifist program. We fight to win antiwar activists away from classless appeals to "peace" and "justice" and to the perspective of mobilizing the proletariat in class struggle against the U.S. imperialist rulers. In the absence of such a perspective, the antiwar movement could only benefit bourgeois politicians, in particular the Democratic Party, and reinforce bourgeois rule.

Our starting point, as revolutionary, working-class and internationalist Marxists, is the understanding that the drive toward war is inherent in the world economic system as it is presently constituted. With economies dominated by huge financial conglomerates and a small number of monopolist industrial producers, the major capitalist powers (centrally the U.S., Japan and Germany) are in competition with each other for control of raw materials, markets, labor forces to brutally exploit and strategic military positions. The U.S. is currently overwhelmingly dominant militarily, and wants to remain so. The invasion of Iraq was designed to ensure its strategic military predominance in the Near East to the detriment of its rivals. There are now elements of the U.S. ruling class that worry that the U.S. military is over-stretched in Iraq and that it should conserve its forces for other battles (e.g., against the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states). However the various imperialist ruling classes conceive of their interests at any particular conjuncture, colonial wars—as well as wars among the imperialist powers themselves (e.g., World Wars I and II)—are inevitable as long as capitalism continues to dominate the globe.

The Achilles' heel of capitalism is its dependence on the labor of the working class for its profits. The proletariat has the social power and objective interests to sweep away the capitalist system. Only a series of working-class revolutions to overthrow capitalist rule can create a world-wide planned economy and put a stop to the incessant struggle for domination by the various imperialist powers. But the power of the working class has to be marshaled and mobilized by a revolutionary party. The aim of the Spartacist League is to forge such a party. Thus we approach every social struggle from the point of view of furthering the interests of the working class, raising its consciousness and instilling an understanding of its historic task—to overthrow capitalism. As then-Trotskyist James Burnham wrote in "War and the Workers" (1936):

"Since the victory of socialism, and this alone, will defeat war, every step on the path to socialism is a blow at war. In the struggle against war, properly understood, every militant workers' demonstration, every broad mass labor defense fight, every well-led strike, and in general every advance of the workers toward power, is worth a thousand 'Peace Leagues'."

In the lead-up to and during the March-April 2003 war, the SL raised as its central slogans: "Defend Iraq Against U.S./British Imperialist Attack!", "Down With U.S. imperialism!", "For Class Struggle Against U.S. Capitalist Rulers!", and "All U.S. Troops Out of the Near East Now!" Our slogans reflected our policy of revolutionary defense of Iraq and for the defeat of U.S. imperialism. We took a side militarily with semicolonial Iraq against the U.S. imperialist invaders, while politically opposing Saddam Hussein's bloody capitalist regime. We also clearly stated that the foremost means to defend Iraq was not on the military plane, given the colossal military advantage of the United States, but through international proletarian struggle, particularly in the United States. We called for class-struggle opposition to U.S. imperialism, noting, in a 19 March 2003 "Statement of the Political Bureau of the Spartacist League/U.S.":

"Workers in Italy, Scotland and elsewhere have already staged labor actions against the war, including blocking military goods destined for the Persian Gulf. Such actions point the way to the kinds of labor struggles that are necessary, especially in the belly of the American imperialist beast. The obstacle to this is the AFL-CIO labor officialdom, which pits American workers against their class brothers and sisters around the world by promoting national chauvinism and subordinating workers to the dual parties of capitalist rule, the Democrats and Republicans."

In contrast, the reformists consciously refused to take a military side with Iraq. The ISO enthusiastically built the demonstrations of the UFPJ coalition as well as the ANSWER and Not In Our Name coalitions. Typical slogans at these protests were "No to War," "Stop Bush's War," "Money for Jobs & Human Needs, Not for War," and "Bring the Troops Home Now."

These slogans are all premised on an acceptance of the framework of capitalism, at most calling for a reordering of the policies and priorities of the capitalist government. In no way do these slogans challenge capitalism as a system that is itself responsible for poverty and war. Far from raising the consciousness of the working class about the need to overthrow capitalism, they lull the working masses into thinking that it is possible to pressure the capitalist system to be peaceful and to change its priorities. The aim of the various reformists is to establish a movement in which a future bourgeois-defeatist wing of American capital would feel at home, a movement similar to the one the Socialist Workers Party and others built in the early years of the Vietnam antiwar movement.

Recently, Workers World initiated a new "Troops Out Now Coalition" that is "open to all individuals and organizations willing to work together to stop the war." Meanwhile, the ISO's self-declared goal is to "influence Congress" by building "a confident, coherent and growing opposition to the Iraq occupation" (Socialist Worker, 18 February). By promoting "broad unity" (i.e., unity with the bourgeoisie), the reformists keep American workers tied to their "own" capitalists, while cutting across the international unity that workers in the U.S. must have with their class brothers and sisters in Iraq under the guns of U.S. imperialism. If the U.S. working class does not mobilize in defense of American imperialism's victims, then it will never mobilize for socialist revolution.

Reform vs. Revolution

The fundamental dividing line between us and the rest of the left is program: reform or revolution. Ours is a program for the independent mobilization of the working class in opposition to the entire capitalist system, and the wars, poverty and desperation it breeds. The program of the ISO, Workers World and the RCP is based on class collaboration, which means subordinating the interests of the workers to those of the capitalist class. They push the illusion that war can be ended by pressuring the bourgeoisie.

The reformists did not fight to get the working people of the U.S. to understand that their fundamental interests lay in siding with the Iraqi people against the U.S. military machine. Rather, they wanted to build a "movement" tailored to "antiwar" bourgeois politicians—and no bourgeois politician is going to feel comfortable on a platform with those who support the other side in a conflict with the U.S. Nor did the ISO and Workers World, despite their socialist pretensions, call for the overthrow of the capitalist system from the platforms of the major antiwar mobilizations they supported.

In their press, the ISO and Workers World polemicize against the Democrats. For example, in "The Future of the Antiwar Movement" (International Socialist Review, January-February 2005), the ISO states: "The antiwar movement was quiet because it plunged itself headlong into the Kerry campaign." But their "opposition" to the Democrats is very different from ours. We oppose the Democratic Party on principle because it is a capitalist party that is the enemy of working people, blacks and all the oppressed. The reformist left, however, views the Democratic Party as a potential ally.

For example, Workers World, which ran its own presidential campaign in 2004, enthusiastically endorsed black liberal Democrat Cynthia McKinney for U.S. Congress, calling her "Unbossed & Unbought" (Workers World, 22 July 2004). This year's 19 March "Troops Out Now!" protest featured Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel as a speaker. Rangel had introduced a bill in Congress in 2003 (and again last month) for the reinstatement of the draft, i.e., more imperialist troops! The ISO's "alternative" to voting for Kerry was to support capitalist politician Ralph Nader's "independent" campaign for president. Nader did not even oppose the imperialist occupation of Iraq, proposing only that it be under the cover of a United Nations fig leaf, and explicitly promoting his candidacy as a vehicle to pressure the Democrats to "return" to liberalism. For its part, the RCP advised: "vote for Kerry if you feel you really have to" (Revolutionary Worker, 29 August 2004).

Attacking the reformist strategy on war, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution (1929) of "the boundary that separates Marxism from opportunism, the revolutionary from the pacifist position":

"It is a question of nothing less than the struggle against war, that is, of how and with what methods war can be averted or stopped; by the pressure of the proletariat upon the bourgeoisie or by civil war to overthrow the bourgeoisie?...

"Only a reformist can picture the pressure of the proletariat upon the bourgeois state as a permanently increasing factor and as a guarantee against intervention.

"The struggle against war is decided not by pressure upon the government but only by the revolutionary struggle for power."

The ISO and "the Resistance"

The imperialist war and occupation of Iraq are a direct consequence of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. The USSR was the military-industrial powerhouse of the degenerated and deformed workers states—with a nuclear arsenal that could challenge that of the U.S. Without the Soviet Union to stay the hand of U.S. imperialism, the world has become a far more dangerous place, a place of unbridled American military intervention. Although bureaucratically degenerated under Stalinist misrule, which included policies that conciliated imperialism, the Soviet Union was still a workers state with a planned economy and collectivized property. We fought to defend the USSR—as we do China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba today—against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we fight for workers political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies, which base themselves on the reactionary dogma of "socialism in one country," and to establish regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

In contrast, the ISO has from its inception been defined by the virulent anti-Communism of the Cold War period. In the name of "democracy," the anti-Communist ISO hailed nearly every force arrayed against the USSR, including the CIA-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan who took up arms against the Soviet Army and opposed elementary democratic rights for women and reforms that infringed on the economic and political dominance of the mullahs. The ISO cheered the cutthroats Reagan called "freedom fighters," who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and skinned Communist school teachers alive! We Trotskyists said, "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" When the Soviet Union was dealt a mortal blow by Boris Yeltsin's coup, the ISO and its international cothinkers crowed, "Communism has collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing" (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).

The collapse of the Soviet Union plays an important role in evaluating the ongoing debate in the left on the Iraqi "resistance." In "What Kind of Movement Do We Need?" (Socialist Worker, 22 April), the ISO reports that "New York City UFPJ leaders refused to endorse the March 19 'Troops Out Now' protest in Central Park—in part, they said, because 'some of the early materials for this protest' contained 'language about supporting the Iraqi resistance'."

In an article titled "The Future of the Antiwar Movement" (International Socialist Review, January-February 2005), Meredith Kolodner of the ISO wrote:

"The truth is that a mass demonstration isn't sufficient to end a war. The Iraqi resistance, whose impact on the U.S. is far more forceful than a mass demonstration, hasn't yet been enough to force the U.S. to leave. The U.S. took years to finally admit defeat and pull out of Vietnam—a country less strategically important than Iraq today. It was forced to do so by the combination of a mass movement at home, a unified national liberation movement in Vietnam, and the disintegration of the U.S. army as an effective fighting force."

The truth is the ISO is deeply dishonest. Kolodner holds the antiwar protests as equally responsible for the American pullout as the "unified national liberation movement in Vietnam." In fact, the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam because it was militarily defeated on the battlefield by the heroic workers and peasants of that country. Along with the army of the North Vietnamese deformed workers state, the workers and peasants of the South sacrificed so much because they were fighting for more than "national liberation." Their victory resulted in a social revolution—i.e., the overturn of capitalist property relations—something the ISO would like to disappear. Further, the defeat of the U.S. was a major victory for workers around the world, creating the "Vietnam syndrome," which stayed the hand of the imperialists from military invasions for over a decade. We were for the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution.

As revolutionary Marxists, we have a side in the current conflict in Iraq: against the U.S., its allies and Iraqi lackeys. Our starting point is to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops. We defend the peoples of Iraq against any U.S.-led attack and repression. Insofar as the forces on the ground in Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers, we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. Every blow struck against the imperialist occupiers is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed. But as we wrote in "The Left and the 'Iraqi Resistance'—U.S. Out of Iraq Now!" (WV No. 830, 6 August 2004):

"We do not imbue the forces presently organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces with 'anti-imperialist' credentials and warn that in the absence of working-class struggle in Iraq and internationally against the occupation, the victory of one or another of the reactionary clerical forces is more likely to come about through an alliance with U.S. imperialism....

"The so-called 'national resistance' in Iraq is a myth promoted by U.S. and Western imperialism and cynical leftists.... Resistance forces led by religious clerics are by definition sectarian. There isn't a unitary 'resistance' force in Iraq but rather disparate groupings organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces—and often against rival groupings and random civilians."

In a piece by ISO honcho Paul D'Amato in International Socialist Review (March-April 2005) titled "Iraqis Have the Right to Resist," he tries to paint the insurgency in Iraq as a "national liberation movement." D'Amato compares it to the North Vietnamese Stalinists: "North Vietnam was under the sway of a one-party dictatorship that suppressed dissent, and the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh's leadership murdered Vietnamese Trotskyists after the Second World War during the resistance against the reimposition of French colonialism."

It is grotesque to compare the Vietnamese forces that fought for social revolution, that actually defeated the U.S. militarily, with the religious and nationalist fanatics in Iraq whose existence is often defined by the national and sectarian divisions in the country among Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs and Kurds, and which often target other religious or ethnic populations in criminal bombings. During the Vietnam War, we exposed the crimes of the North Vietnamese Stalinists, such as the murder of Vietnamese Trotskyists. One doesn't need to prettify history to understand that D'Amato's comparison exudes fierce anti-Communism.

Throughout his article, D'Amato cites war after war to lecture about the importance of supporting national liberation struggles. This is chutzpah, considering that the ISO's international founder, the late Tony Cliff, was expelled from the Fourth International for refusing to defend North Korea against the UN-backed U.S. invasion of the peninsula during the 1950-53 Korean War. Behind this was Tony Cliff's Cold War anti-Communism, as the Korean War was more than a national liberation struggle. Like Vietnam, the Korean War was a conflict of forces of counterposed class characters, pitting the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states against U.S. and British imperialism and their South Korean lackeys. The Korean War is unmentioned in D'Amato's article. Also unmentioned is the fact that the Cliffites' anti-Communism was so deep that they refused to defend the Vietnam National Liberation Front (NLF) until quite late in the war, when it became clear that their anti-Communism would isolate them among left-radical youth in the U.S. at the time who were chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win!"

D'Amato, arguing against other reformists who renounce defense of the "Iraqi resistance," tries to equate these reformists with those who defended the workers states:

"Much of the Left in the U.S. suffers from the hangover of a Stalinist approach to national liberation, which identified certain movements worthy of uncritical support because they were led by secular nationalist forces strongly identified with Cuba, China, or the Soviet Union.…

"For those on the Left with illusions in the USSR as a socialist state (and this includes the majority of the U.S. Left), the whole project of national liberation seemed to fade in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall."

It is the Stalinists and Maoists, as well as the ISO, that have a tradition of political support to Third World nationalism. Genuine Trotskyists have always sharply distinguished between military defense, including unconditional military defense of the degenerated and deformed workers states, and political support, which Trotskyists never give to any non-proletarian party, government or movement. Genuine Trotskyists, i.e., genuine Marxists and Leninists, stand above all for the political independence of the proletariat.

In his piece, D'Amato admits that the "building of a secular resistance" in Iraq that is "on a class basis" would be a good thing, but nonetheless writes, "We do not make our support for the Iraqi resistance conditional upon our criticism of the resistance's tactics and politics." The ISO is seeking to prettify the insurgencies in Iraq, which have large aspects of criminal sectarian violence in which Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds are all targeted. Since April 28, when the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government was installed, more than 600 Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence. The present-day "resistance" forces—whether Ba'ath nationalists or Islamic fundamentalists—are virulent reactionaries with a long and bloody history of murdering Communists. In fact, should the proletariat in Iraq attempt to raise its head as an independent force, it will face not only the occupation troops but the very anti-working-class "resistance" celebrated by D'Amato.

As opposed to outright craven liberals, the ISO is trying to strike a leftist posture with its position on the Iraqi insurgency. But behind this seemingly leftist position lie rightist politics. The ISO is extending its program of class collaboration to the international field—in this case subordinating the interests of Iraqi workers to reactionary Muslim fundamentalists and bourgeois-nationalist remnants of the Ba'athist regime. Subordinating the interests of the international proletariat to anti-proletarian forces is nothing new for the ISO. For example, the ISO, which has always had a fascination with Islamic fundamentalism, hailed the 1979 rise to power of Khomeini and his mullah forces in Iran—which butchered leftists, forcibly imposed the veil on women and rules the country through sharia (Islamic law)—painting the "Iranian Revolution" as "anti-imperialist."

Equitable resolution of the democratic rights of all the peoples of Iraq, and the Near East more broadly, cannot be achieved under capitalism but only with the overthrow of bourgeois rule in the region and the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East. This is the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This means combining the struggle against the occupation with a struggle against all manner of bourgeois nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and poses the urgent need to forge Marxist parties to lead the working people to power throughout the region. International extension of the revolution to the wealthy centers of imperialism—the U.S., Germany, Japan—is vital, or, as Marx noted, "all the old crap" will return.

Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!

How is it that a group that refused to take a side with Iraq in the war now cheers on the "resistance"? It is more than just a coincidence that the ISO began publishing articles on the insurgency in Iraq as last November's election approached. As we wrote in "The Left and the 'Iraqi Resistance'," the adulation of the resistance then stemmed from the fact that "every blow against the U.S. in Iraq redounds against Bush in the run-up to the November election and plays to the Democrats' advantage." Today, D'Amato writes, "We can never lose sight of the fact that it is the resistance in Iraq, above all, that is currently driving down Bush's popularity, is making possible the rekindling of the antiwar movement at home, and is acting as a brake on U.S. imperial ambitions elsewhere." Given their appeals to the liberal United for Peace and Justice coalition to rejoin the common fold of the "antiwar movement," it is clear that the ISO does not propose that a "rekindled" antiwar movement break with the fundamental class-collaborationist and pacifist character of its program. D'Amato makes this clear:

"There is, to be sure, a difference between the need to introduce this discussion [about whether or not to support the resistance] into the antiwar movement and what kind of slogans and demands most effectively widen and deepen the reach of the movement. The antiwar movement today should have as its general watchword 'Troops Out Now'."

Thus, D'Amato says there is no need to split with the liberals and pacifists who refuse to countenance the spilling of American blood in Iraq, since everyone can unite around the single demand for "Troops Out Now." Furthermore, and most fundamentally, the ISO (and WWP, RCP, etc.) reject the Marxist perspective that the only effective "antiwar movement" is one based upon the mobilization of the social power of the working class in opposition to the capitalist system. D'Amato "supports the resistance" not with any perspective of promoting workers revolution, but with the perspective of building a "movement" to pressure imperialism to be more peaceful.

The only successful "antiwar movement" was the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew capitalist rule in Russia and thereby took the country out of World War I. Throughout the antiwar demonstrations of the past two years, we intervened to counterpose our revolutionary program to that of the reformist organizers. At issue is which class in this class-divided society one looks to in order to end war, racism and poverty. The reformist organizers of the antiwar movement did everything in their power to spread the lie that the capitalist system can do otherwise than breed imperialist war; we Spartacists took the side of working people and the oppressed in Iraq and throughout the world to combat the rapacious capitalist class. Join us in the struggle to build the revolutionary workers party needed to end this system of imperialist war and misery and build a socialist society.