The statement from Your Party's new executive on Iran gets some things right. The attack is a war of aggression. British complicity through the bases is concrete and damning. The children killed in Minab are casualties of imperialist recklessness.
But read this sentence carefully: "The Iranian people must determine their own future, not Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu." Sounds like anti-imperialism. Functions as something else entirely. https://www.yourparty.uk/cec-statement-iran/
The regime that executes trade unionists, hangs women for removing their hijabs, and is at this precise moment using the cover of war to intensify arrests and repression, disappears from the frame. The Islamic Republic becomes, by implication, the legitimate vehicle of Iranian self-determination. Sovereignty language. Campist politics.
Revolutionary anti-war politics says: we oppose the bombs from Washington and Tel Aviv, AND we stand with the workers, women and democratic forces fighting the theocracy. Both. Together. Not as a balance, but as a single position.
The Your Party statement would have needed one additional sentence. It wasn't there. The statement was unanimous. That's the significant datum.
One final comment on Woods' article. He writes "In saying this, we in no way wish to gloss over the crimes committed by the regime of the mullahs in Tehran." However, his article does exactly that. Rather than offer a critique of the regime, he continues: "But, by comparison, these shrink into insignificance next to the appalling record of mass terrorism, criminal wars and aggression, slaughter and destruction perpetrated by US imperialism."
For those of us who were at the conference of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Easter 1982, dominated by the 'Militant Tendency' of Ted Grant and Alan Woods, the hypocrisy and 180-degree turns of Woods' lines is stomach churning.
The military dictatorship in Argentina had just taken over the colonial legacy in the South Atlantic of the Falklands/Malvinas islands, and the Thatcher government was dispatching a massive naval fleet to defend "British" territory thousands of miles away. The Labour left in parliament, led by Tony Benn and including Joan Maynard who addressed the LPYS in almost total silence from the Militant throng, were campaigning against the sending of a war fleet and the continuation of a bloody war for defence of colonial commercial loot, calling for negotiations through the UN - a pacifist argument but one that was objectively progressive.
But the mood across the UK state was of jingoism (though not in Ireland), including among working class communities mistaken over the role of UK's imperialist history and its colonial territories.
Militant adapted to this jingoism by calling for a "socialist war" against Argentina and refusing to defend the isolated Labour left in their opposition to an bloody war being fought by a still imperialist snd colonialist UK state.
Militant failed a test of both principled and practical politics, adapting to imperialism and backward class sentiments, and their heirs have zigzagged without principle ever since.
Thanks to Mike — the LPYS Easter 1982 conference is genuinely under-documented and this account of the atmosphere matters. On the specific charge of "socialist war": the published Militant record is slightly different from what you describe, Mike, though your instinct about their failure is entirely correct. Ted Grant's May 1982 article opposed the bourgeois war on both sides but argued that a socialist Britain would wage a revolutionary war against the Argentine junta to create a socialist federation of Britain, Argentina and the Falklands. "British workers and the Marxists will be willing to wage a war against the Argentine junta, to help the Argentine workers to take power into their own hands. But only a democratic socialist Britain would have clean hands."
This is not jingoism. It is something arguably worse: substituting a hypothetical future socialist position for any practical engagement with the actual anti-war movement that existed. By counterposing this imaginary socialist federation to Benn and Maynard's concrete opposition to Thatcher's fleet, Militant isolated the Labour left at the moment it most needed solidarity — all while maintaining the appearance of a more "advanced" position.
That is the same method the article identifies in the RCI today. On Ukraine, they counterposed hypothetical workers' revolution to practical solidarity with Ukrainian self-defence. On Iran, they declare unconditional defence of the IRGC while simultaneously calling for the Iranian working class to build soviets and overthrow the regime — two positions that are never reconciled because the second exists mainly to provide cover for the first.
The organisation has been doing this for forty-four years. You were in the room when it happened.
Thanks for the correction to the juxtaposition of "socialist war". It's not a direct quote but is in inverted commas because of the contradiction of the two terms in the context of the UK and Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas.
The full quote from Militant International Review is worth looking at in detail:
"The labour movement should be mobilised to force a general election to open the way for the return of a Labour government to implement socialist policies at home and abroad. Victory of a socialist government in Britain would immediately transform the situation in relation to the Falklands. The junta would no longer be able to claim to be fighting British imperialism ... A Labour government could not just abandon the Falklanders and let Galtieri get on with it. But it would continue the war on socialist lines."
The idea that a general election in 1982 would produce a "socialist" Labour government was a repeated illusion peddled throughout that period by the Militant tendency in their accommodation to British social democracy. But even worse is the notion that a Labour government would "continue" a war begun by Thatcher's Tories for a chunk of colonial land thousands of miles away, but "on socialist lines". It beggars belief. Yes, they didn't use the term "socialist war" but the illusions they theorised and peddled on the role of a Labour government and on the nature of the imperialism of the UK state were in many respects even worse than that term.
As well they might be.
The statement from Your Party's new executive on Iran gets some things right. The attack is a war of aggression. British complicity through the bases is concrete and damning. The children killed in Minab are casualties of imperialist recklessness.
But read this sentence carefully: "The Iranian people must determine their own future, not Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu." Sounds like anti-imperialism. Functions as something else entirely. https://www.yourparty.uk/cec-statement-iran/
The regime that executes trade unionists, hangs women for removing their hijabs, and is at this precise moment using the cover of war to intensify arrests and repression, disappears from the frame. The Islamic Republic becomes, by implication, the legitimate vehicle of Iranian self-determination. Sovereignty language. Campist politics.
Revolutionary anti-war politics says: we oppose the bombs from Washington and Tel Aviv, AND we stand with the workers, women and democratic forces fighting the theocracy. Both. Together. Not as a balance, but as a single position.
The Your Party statement would have needed one additional sentence. It wasn't there. The statement was unanimous. That's the significant datum.
One final comment on Woods' article. He writes "In saying this, we in no way wish to gloss over the crimes committed by the regime of the mullahs in Tehran." However, his article does exactly that. Rather than offer a critique of the regime, he continues: "But, by comparison, these shrink into insignificance next to the appalling record of mass terrorism, criminal wars and aggression, slaughter and destruction perpetrated by US imperialism."
For those of us who were at the conference of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Easter 1982, dominated by the 'Militant Tendency' of Ted Grant and Alan Woods, the hypocrisy and 180-degree turns of Woods' lines is stomach churning.
The military dictatorship in Argentina had just taken over the colonial legacy in the South Atlantic of the Falklands/Malvinas islands, and the Thatcher government was dispatching a massive naval fleet to defend "British" territory thousands of miles away. The Labour left in parliament, led by Tony Benn and including Joan Maynard who addressed the LPYS in almost total silence from the Militant throng, were campaigning against the sending of a war fleet and the continuation of a bloody war for defence of colonial commercial loot, calling for negotiations through the UN - a pacifist argument but one that was objectively progressive.
But the mood across the UK state was of jingoism (though not in Ireland), including among working class communities mistaken over the role of UK's imperialist history and its colonial territories.
Militant adapted to this jingoism by calling for a "socialist war" against Argentina and refusing to defend the isolated Labour left in their opposition to an bloody war being fought by a still imperialist snd colonialist UK state.
Militant failed a test of both principled and practical politics, adapting to imperialism and backward class sentiments, and their heirs have zigzagged without principle ever since.
Thanks to Mike — the LPYS Easter 1982 conference is genuinely under-documented and this account of the atmosphere matters. On the specific charge of "socialist war": the published Militant record is slightly different from what you describe, Mike, though your instinct about their failure is entirely correct. Ted Grant's May 1982 article opposed the bourgeois war on both sides but argued that a socialist Britain would wage a revolutionary war against the Argentine junta to create a socialist federation of Britain, Argentina and the Falklands. "British workers and the Marxists will be willing to wage a war against the Argentine junta, to help the Argentine workers to take power into their own hands. But only a democratic socialist Britain would have clean hands."
This is not jingoism. It is something arguably worse: substituting a hypothetical future socialist position for any practical engagement with the actual anti-war movement that existed. By counterposing this imaginary socialist federation to Benn and Maynard's concrete opposition to Thatcher's fleet, Militant isolated the Labour left at the moment it most needed solidarity — all while maintaining the appearance of a more "advanced" position.
That is the same method the article identifies in the RCI today. On Ukraine, they counterposed hypothetical workers' revolution to practical solidarity with Ukrainian self-defence. On Iran, they declare unconditional defence of the IRGC while simultaneously calling for the Iranian working class to build soviets and overthrow the regime — two positions that are never reconciled because the second exists mainly to provide cover for the first.
The organisation has been doing this for forty-four years. You were in the room when it happened.
Thanks for the correction to the juxtaposition of "socialist war". It's not a direct quote but is in inverted commas because of the contradiction of the two terms in the context of the UK and Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas.
The full quote from Militant International Review is worth looking at in detail:
"The labour movement should be mobilised to force a general election to open the way for the return of a Labour government to implement socialist policies at home and abroad. Victory of a socialist government in Britain would immediately transform the situation in relation to the Falklands. The junta would no longer be able to claim to be fighting British imperialism ... A Labour government could not just abandon the Falklanders and let Galtieri get on with it. But it would continue the war on socialist lines."
The idea that a general election in 1982 would produce a "socialist" Labour government was a repeated illusion peddled throughout that period by the Militant tendency in their accommodation to British social democracy. But even worse is the notion that a Labour government would "continue" a war begun by Thatcher's Tories for a chunk of colonial land thousands of miles away, but "on socialist lines". It beggars belief. Yes, they didn't use the term "socialist war" but the illusions they theorised and peddled on the role of a Labour government and on the nature of the imperialism of the UK state were in many respects even worse than that term.