During Dublin’s Anarchist Bookfair in November 2010, a claim made by a Workers
Power supporter that the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM—Ireland’s leading
anarchist organization) had not called for British troops out of Northern Ireland was
promptly challenged by WSM members, who referred the comrade to their position paper,
“The Partition of Ireland” (October 2005). In addition to demanding the
removal of British troops, the paper made a broader observation: “As anarchists, we
oppose imperialism…and believe it cannot play a progressive role.”
The WSM’s statement, “Capitalist Globalisation and Imperialism” (July
2004), defined imperialism as:
“the ability of countries to globally and locally dictate trade
relations with other countries. This means the term can only be usefully applied to a few
countries, in particular those composing the permanent members of the UN security council
and the G8.”
While we consider this to be an impressionistic and one-sided description, the WSM,
unlike most anarchist organizations, at least attempts to make some sort of distinction
between imperialist states and their neocolonial victims. The WSM adds:
“While we oppose the imperialist powers we recognise that the states
that defy them do so in the interests of their own ruling class rather then [sic] their
people. So rather then [sic] supporting, critically or otherwise, these local ruling
classes we look to support the working class (including rural workers) of those countries
in there [sic] struggle against imperialism and their own ruling class. We make this
concrete by offering solidarity including material aid to independent working class and
libertarian organisations.”
It is true that neocolonial regimes which have come into conflict with the imperialist
powers generally do so in order to protect or advance their own interests, but
revolutionaries must uphold the right of subjugated nations to resist the predations of
the “advanced capitalist” global powers—which is why, for example, Lenin
and the Bolsheviks sided with the Easter Rising of 1916. Anti-imperialism means taking
sides—and it cannot be restricted solely to cases where “independent working
class organisations” are involved. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez
Canal in 1956, revolutionaries supported Egyptian military resistance to
British/French/Israeli attempts to restore colonial control. More recently when the
U.S./UK invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, no genuine revolutionary could have adopted a
position of neutrality. We called for driving out the invaders—despite the
reactionary character of the Taliban/Baathist regimes.
To its credit, the WSM does pose the issue in an international context and supports
military resistance to imperialist aggression (which, for those who are consistent, would
imply taking sides):
“to win any permanent improvements anti-imperialist/anti-neoliberal
struggles have to be transformed into the struggle for the international anarchist
revolution. That said we recognise that short of this any military defeat for imperialism
will not only reduce the ability of the imperialist powers to engage in future
interventions but is also an encouragement for those involved in similar struggles
elsewhere.”
The WSM further elaborated its view in a subsequent article,
“Anti-imperialism”:
“Anarchists believe that people should be in control of their own lives
and should have a say in how the resources in the places where they live are used.
Therefore, anarchists are opposed to imperialism and they are not alone in this. Almost
nobody likes it when a powerful group invades the place where they live, steals all the
resources and orders them to do as they are told and, inevitably, they organise themselves
to oppose the imperialists. Since imperialists use force of arms to control the countries
which they invade, this generally means that the natives will need to physically oppose
them. They aren’t going to leave just because they’re unpopular, after
all.
“Thus, anarchists support people’s right to fight against imperial
invasions. If somebody has decided to control you with violence, you have no choice but to
overcome this violence or else remain a slave. This is why anarchists call themselves
anti-imperialists.
“However, unfortunately, anarchists are currently a small minority in
the world. Nationalism has been the most powerful political ideology in modern times. When
people fight against imperialist control, they also generally fight for some version of
nationalist alternative.
“Anarchists are opposed to nationalism. We do not think that people can
be neatly divided up into areas where the populations have a shared culture, history and
heritage. The world is much messier than that and cultures and identities are fluid and
intermingled. What’s more, nationalist movements normally simply try to replace the
foreign imperialist control with control by a local ruling class, who might be just as
bad—or even worse—than the imperialist rulers. Therefore, while we support
anti-imperialist struggles, we always strive to argue against nationalist politics within
them. Instead we seek to promote the most progressive, libertarian and socialist strands
so that, if we can defeat the imperialists’ control, we won’t just be
replacing them with new masters.”
—Workers Solidarity No.93, September-October
2005
The Leninist/Trotskyist approach to such conflicts is to uphold the political
independence of the working class from its “own” bourgeoisie, while being
prepared to bloc militarily with indigenous petty-bourgeois or bourgeois formations
against imperialist invaders. In the 1930s, when Mussolini sent his troops into Ethiopia
(then known as Abyssinia), Trotskyists sided militarily with Haile Selassie despite
the extremely reactionary nature of his regime. If the WSM indeed considers
imperialism to be the central feature of the global capitalist order, then a neocolonial
ruling class could not, from the standpoint of the working class, be “just as
bad—or even worse—than the imperialist rulers.” Imperialism is not a
lever for lifting up the economically and socially more backward areas of the
world—but rather the primary reason that their backwardness is maintained.
The WSM’s anti-imperialism is confused in theory, and inconsistent in practice.
In the aftermath of the January 2010 Haitian earthquake, for example, the WSM’s
Haiti Solidarity Ireland correctly proclaimed:
“We call for the immediate departure of international troops from Haiti,
and for aid and reconstruction efforts to be controlled by Haitians themselves through
their unions and community organisations.”
—“US Troops out of Haiti,” 24 February
2010
Yet when Iraq was invaded by the U.S./UK et al, the WSM’s
“anti-imperialism” went out the window in favor of equating Saddam
Hussein’s brutal regime with the foreign imperialist expeditionary forces attempting
to seize control of the petroleum resources of the Persian Gulf:
“We take no side between the major imperialists led by the U.S. and the
would-be mini-imperialists led by Saddam Hussein. Saddam is no anti-imperialist and tying
Iraqi workers to an ‘anti-imperialist’ front with him would be criminal. The
regime would betray such a struggle as soon as it believed it was [i]n their own class
interests to do so.”
—“The Gulf War” [undated]
The WSM’s neutrality in this conflict between a neocolony and its former
imperialist patrons stands in stark contrast to the formally correct observation that:
“any military defeat for imperialism will not only reduce the ability of the
imperialist powers to engage in future interventions but is also an encouragement for
those involved in similar struggles elsewhere.”
The WSM’s attempt to get around the blatant contradiction by labelling
Iraq’s rulers as “would-be mini-imperialists” can only be described as
political cowardice. Of course the Iraqi regime, like every neocolonial bourgeoisie, was
quite willing to bully its weaker neighbors, but this does not change the fact that there
is a qualitative difference between the U.S./EU imperialists and dependent underdeveloped
countries like Iraq. The WSM’s own position paper provides an abstractly correct
description of the relationship of imperialism to neocolonial client states:
“In any specific region one country will be more powerful then [sic]
others. They will attempt to use their dominance to gain favourable trade and territory
concessions. They are however subject to the major imperialist nations, and are probably
retained as client states by one or more of them. It is not [sic] therefore not useful to
refer to such countries as imperialist.”
Neither is it “useful” to describe Iraq under Saddam (or Iran under
Ahmadinejad) as “would-be mini-imperialists,” particularly when the point of
doing so is to rationalize a refusal to defend them against imperialist attack.
The inconsistencies in the application of the WSM’s anti-imperialist stance
appear to directly correlate to popular opinion in the radical left. With opposition to
the British military occupation of the Six Counties a default setting for all Irish
radicals, the WSM was very clear that it favored the departure of the imperialist troops.
So too in the case of Haiti, where the reactionary role of the imperialist troops was
obvious to (almost) the entire international left. In Iraq, where Saddam’s
blood-soaked rightist dictatorship was deeply unpopular, the WSM refused to take sides as
the U.S./UK “coalition” launched its “shock and awe” terror
campaign.
The WSM’s inability to “swim against the stream” on this important
issue provides an index of how far it is from being able to provide the revolutionary
“leadership of ideas” to which it aspires. A genuinely revolutionary
organization determines its political positions solely on the basis of the inexorable
logic of the class struggle—opportunists, on the other hand, always have an eye on
what is likely to be most popular.