IRAQ CHINESE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS AGO POINT DANGERS FOR IRAQ’S WORKERS

Tue Communist Party’s wrong estimate of Nasser was — not just a ‘mistake’ that can be corrected like a wrong addition in the accounts; it has involved the temporary defeat of the working-class movement in the United Arab Republic, and it has thrown away the initiative that is so vital in revolutionary periods.

It is the task of working-class parties to alert their class to its needs and to mobilize it for action against all enemies.

By sacrificing independent working-class demands and organization to the ‘national struggle’ the communist parties have set the movement back for years.

Strength of armed people In Iraq the situation is different in many ways. The Labour movement has a longer standing and continuity than in the United Arab Republic and the popular forces aroused in the revolution of 1958 are still extremely powerful.

‘So far all attempts by the Right to settle down to peaceful exploitation under the cover of peaceful ‘parliamentary politics have been beaten back.

Despite several decrees saying the popular militias in the towns must be disarmed, these forces have remainéd ‘in being.

And recently they were strengthened in their claim to This is the conclusion of an article whose first part > appeared in The Newsletter of April 25, p. 124.

protect the revolution by the strength of the armed people; the treachery of many army officers and the failure of their conspiracy at Mosul emphasized the need for the workers to protect their gains themselves.

More and more the Right will concentrate around a ‘Nasserite’ movement, and unless the workers and peasants insist on independent armed organization and _ political leadership, they are in danger of being rolled back.

-Kassem. has been forced to oppose the Nasser supporters because there was no other way. for him to remain in power.

It is not enough for the communist parties and the Iraqi people to trust Kassem as the defender of the revolution and of democracy. There is no evidence that he is a socialist of any kind.

He has come to the top in politics through the school of return of foreign imperialism against the Chinese people. If he cannot have Chinese capitalism, he will have American capitalism, not Chinese socialism.

Betrayal of ‘ungrateful allies After Chiang’s betrayal, the Communist Party found other ‘Left-wingers’ or ‘democrats’ among middle-class politicians.

Again it told the peasants to hold back on the expropriation of all landlords who were ‘sympathetic’ to its new-found _ revolutionary allies, or who were fighting as commanders in the regiments which might swing against Chiang. These allies turned in just the same way as Chiang had done.

Instead of recognizing before the disaster that people will behave according to class interests, the Chinese communists, under Stalin’s influence, waited until afterwards, and then complained about being betrayed by their ‘ungrateful’ allies.

Chinese histories still portray Chiang as the traitor who went over to the enemy, and make no proper estimate of the responsibility of Stalinism.

Did they expect a party of business men and officers to be delighted at the prospect of armed workers’ councils?

Before the defeat of the reactionary officers at Mosul, Kassem in. Iraq had called into his government various ministers who had been prominent in the régime of Britain’s puppet, Nuri-es-Said.

Resurgence of mass movement Reports from Iraq in January said that the popular militia was everywhere being replaced by army units in controlling the towns. Since the attempted coup by the generals there appears to have been a great resurgence of the mass movement.

But if the leadership of the Iraqi workers and peasants remains in the hands of leaders who put Soviet foreign policy requirements before the workers’ needs, this mass movement will be defeated.

It is to be hoped that the Marxists in Iraq can guide the movement to a sustained struggle for workers’ power.

This will require the shedding of all illusions about Kassem and the routing of Stalinist ideas inside the Communist Party and outside it.

The Times of March 14 of this year—no doubt trying to raise a Red scare—saw the situation more clearly than many a socialist in this country:

‘It was the temporary control of the streets in Baghdad by these “popular resistance groups” in December which gave the régime a serious shock, and led General Kassem to lay down the rules for their future conduct ....

‘If these embryonic soviets are consolidated, and if their urban backers are armed, Iraq would be approaching the penultimate stage of a revolution along the October model.’

_Constant Reader Workers in Uniform THE Shepton Mallet ‘glasshouse’ scandal brings to the fore the need for trade union rights for soldiers, as Bob Pennington pointed out in The Newsletter last week.

There was a time when the Communist Party interested itself in this important question.

A ‘soldiers’, sailors’ and airmen’s charter’ printed in the pamphlet ‘The Soldier’s Conscience’, by Robert Dunstan (1925), included demands for the right to join and to form trade unions, as well as a number of points for immediate improvements in servicemen’s conditions—and provisions that no troops be used against workers on strike.

There was even a time when that last matter was taken up by official Labour.

‘Severed from society’ .

When British soldiers were being used at a Baltic port to unload arms, for use against Soviet Russia, which the loca! workers had refused to touch, Ernest Bevin himself declared:

‘It is the view of the whole Council of Action that it is an abuse of the undertaking given by a soldier when he enlists to turn him from a soldier into a blackleg.

‘Military discipline has no right to be used to outrage the conscience of a soldier’ (Central Hall, Westminster, August 13, 1920).

It is just because the ruling class needs to use the armed forces against the working people that it tries to keep them isolated organizationally from the latter.

The more the soldier is cut off from the masses of the ,people, the better—this ruling-class principle goes back to the war against the French revolution, when soldiers were first systematically taken out of billets in pubs and private houses and put into barracks.

With the frankness of those days, prime minister William Pitt explained that ‘the soldier must be severed from society’.

Who are ‘parasites’ ?

A reader asks whether ‘it is the view of the Socialist Labour League that everyone whose work does not directly produce a palpable object, such as a house or a heap of coal, is a parasite?

If so, he says, ‘railwaymen, let alone clerical workers, must eee OS ee ee be out of place in your movement’.

Well, the idea is certainly not a Marxist one. The category of ‘socially-useful’ work is a great deal wider than that of ‘productive’ work.

Take book-keeping, for instance, a thoroughly ‘unproductive’ activity: in a well-known passage in volume ii of ‘Capital’ Marx pointed out that it will be still more necessary under socialism than it is already under capitalism!

What is ‘workers’ controP ?

This reader asks also if by ‘workers’ control’ we mean that everybody in a position of authority must be chosen by those immediately under him.

That was one of the ideas of the so-called ‘Workers’ Opposition’ which came out against Lenin and Trotsky in 1921.

In an article written then, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune, Trotsky argued that ‘the methods of shapeless democracy (simple electibility) must be supplemented and to a certain extent replaced by measures of selection from above.

‘The revolution must create an organ composed of experienced, reliable organizers, in which one can have absolute confidence, give it full powers to choose, designate and educate the command....

‘Electibility, democratic methods are but one of the instruments in the hands of the proletariat and its party. Electibility can in no wise be a fetish, a remedy for all evils. The methods of electibility must be combined with those of appointment.’

What is essential is, as our own National Workers’ Committee put it in its policy statement on ‘Consolidation and Contral’, also issued in 1921, that ‘any tendency to bureacracy’ be ‘curbed by giving the workers collectively a power over those who direct the industry’.

Gaitskell and the printers What are we to make of the placing of the banners of the printworkers’ unions at the head of the Labour Party’s May Day procession, immediately behind Gaitskell himself?

Can it be that all the resources of Her Majesty’ s Opposition are to be thrown behind these workers in their dispute; the sacred distinction between the ‘industrial’ and ‘political’ sides of the movement being scrapped?

Perhaps this is not exactly what Gaitskell has in mind. Though he certainly knows as well as anyone what methods get results with the British working class.

In the little book he wrote on Chartism for the Workers’ Educational Association, thirty years ago, Gaitskell referred to the existence of ‘two nations’ in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and to the concessions made by the capitalists in the second half of the century.

‘Without going so far as some historians, who are apt to put down to the credit of Chartism the greater part of the social legislation in the latter part of the century,’ he went on, ‘we can agree that the attitude of one “nation” towards the other was considerably softened after the events of the early forties.’

BRIAN PEARCE