Cliffites Deal in Religious Opiate

(Young Spartacus pages)

The following article is reprinted from Spartacist Canada No. 154 (Fall 2007), newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

Those unfamiliar with the misnamed International Socialists (I.S.) [followers of the late Tony Cliff and formerly associated with the International Socialist Organization in the U.S.] may have anticipated red flags and singing of the “Internationale” at Marxism 2007, the group’s main annual event in Toronto. Instead, the organizers were baked in a green haze of environmentalism and Islamic reaction.

A comrade of the Trotskyist League and Spartacus Youth Club intervened sharply from the floor in the discussion period of their May 10 opening meeting, “Building Unity: Muslims and the Left.” The spectacle was covered in a front-page article of the right-wing National Post, which used the I.S.’s abject political surrender to religion as an opportunity to sneer at the supposed death of communism.

The meeting featured Zafar Bangash, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), a Toronto-based group that has long propagandized for Ayatollah Khomeini and the other theocratic rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran, under whose rule tens of thousands of left-wing activists have been massacred and millions of women imprisoned under the stultifying chador (veil). The ICIT’s Crescent International (16-29 February 2000) includes a report by Bangash on a “Conference on Imam Khomeini and the Islamic World Order” in Ottawa, where he says, “The best tribute the Muslims can pay to the Imam is to follow in his footsteps.” The I.S. introduced Bangash’s speech at Marxism 2007 by showing a video of his campaign to open a mosque in the Ontario town of Newmarket, which was met with vile racist reaction by some local residents. “We need mosques; we need churches; we need synagogues,” said one mosque spokesperson, flattered by the camera.

When our comrade asserted the hostility of Marxism to all religion and the necessity of the struggle for women’s liberation, this proved too much for the I.S. Merely introducing our Trotskyist position hailing the Soviet Union’s 1979 intervention into Afghanistan against CIA-backed Islamic reactionaries sent I.S. members into hysterics and failed attempts at censorship. Virulent anti-Sovietism has always been the hallmark of the I.S., who howled with the imperialists against the Red Army’s intervention.

Trotskyists understand that the former Soviet Union was a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. While political rule had become concentrated in the hands of a bureaucracy whose nationalist outlook and program conciliated imperialism, collectivized property forms inherited from the 1917 revolution embodied enormous gains for workers, especially women. We were intransigent defenders of the Soviet Union.

The Red Army entered Afghanistan in 1979 at the repeated urging of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, whose secular leftist regime had fought to seriously advance the rights of women and was under siege by Washington’s Islamic insurgents. Soviet leader Gorbachev’s 1988-89 pullout of the Red Army was an historic betrayal, which the I.S. hailed. Two years later, they cheered again as capitalist counterrevolution engulfed the Soviet Union. Thus the I.S. bear their own small share of responsibility for the post-Soviet world, where barbaric imperialist capitalism rides roughshod over the world, stirring up all-sided religious reaction.

We print below an unedited transcript of our speaker’s intervention at the meeting.

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I’d like to address my remarks to those leftists in the audience who are questioning whether Islam and Marxism are in fact compatible.

Now, as revolutionary Marxists, as a member of the Trotskyist League, we stand second to no one in the forthrightness of our opposition to the racist “war on terror.” We oppose the racist scapegoating of Muslims at home and the draconian occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan abroad. But that does not detract whatsoever from us being, in the words of Lenin, “absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.” That’s a cardinal of Marxism.

Why? The goal of Marxists is to build a revolutionary party to make the working class conscious of its historic task of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. And all religions and all religious organizations serve to mystify and obscure the class basis of oppression in capitalist society and the road forward for the proletariat to seize power through its assimilation of the principles of scientific socialism.

So that’s what Lenin and Trotsky did in the Russian Revolution, and that’s what we stand for today. And it’s manifestly not what the misnamed International Socialist Tendency stands to do. Rather than build a genuine revolutionary party, they are a member of something in Britain called the “Respect Coalition” whose basis for unity says nothing about socialism, nothing about class struggle, nothing about women’s liberation or even something as basic as the right to abortion. Marxists [heckling from the chair] are for free abortion on demand [chair begins speaking uninterruptedly].

This is not an abstract question. There was a shooting war over this in Afghanistan [other heckling, chair’s mic loudens] where the Red Army went in to free women from the walking prison that is the veil and to defend women who were wearing secular clothing [a New Democratic Party candidate stands up and begins his remarks; I.S.-dominated audience applauds him]. We said “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend the gains of the October Revolution!”