Weekly Worker 409 Thursday November 22 2001
Socialist labour party
Celebrating September 11
It is an open secret that there are deep divisions within the Socialist Labour Party leadership over the events of September 11. After a tense three-hour meeting on September 22, the SLP executive eventually agreed to “condemn the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon”. This was in express opposition to the line promulgated by Arthur Scargill on the front page of Socialist News, and also posted on to the SLP website, which was to merely “deplore” the “appalling loss of life” - arguing that “the devastation and death that descended on the United States on September 11 is a direct consequence of global capitalism, and of the determination of the US - and Nato - to try to dominate the world by force” (my emphasis - October-November).
In other words, according to Scargill, the September 11 attackers were misguided in their fanatical act of mass murder, but ought to be defended. Even the SLP executive, normally loyal rubber-stampists, found this just a bit too much to stomach - perhaps some of them do actually live in the real world - and it rebelled against the wannabe labour dictator.
This NEC rebellion took the form of issuing a statement which asked “all branches to convene meetings to explain why we condemn both the hijack attacks in New York and the Pentagon and also condemn the state terror of the US, Britain and others” (SLP Information Bulletin - undated). However, this statement took almost a month to find its way into the hands of the SLP membership, and to this day Scargill’s original - and now minority - position on September 11 is still the only one to be found on its website. One can only guess what will appear in the next issue of Socialist News, but, given the fact that the paper is edited by Scargill’s devoted sidekick, Nell Myers, it might be expecting too much to hope that the official position of the executive - and hence of the party - will be accurately reported and commented upon.
What one can say in all confidence is that the views of the executive were not being promoted by the SLP members who on Saturday November 17 attended the annual meeting organised by the Committee to Celebrate the October Revolution at Woolwich Town Hall. Indeed, it would not be too unreasonable to describe the evening as a factionalists’ coven. Even though Scargill - for the first time in many a year - was not there himself, all the speakers voiced opinions which, to one degree or another, would have warmed the heart of the SLP general secretary (and all other apologists for the September 11 attackers and reactionary anti-imperialism in general).
Hardly surprising. The rally to ‘Celebrate the glorious October Revolution’ is essentially a showpiece for Harpal Brar and his Stalinite circle of admirers, sycophants and family members. Brar is editor of the Stalin-loving Lalkar, formerly the journal of the Indian Workers Association, and a leading member of the SLP executive. The Brarites - most of whom who are also members of the necrophiliac Stalin Society - control the London regional committee of the SLP, and quite shamelessly stifle and censor the ‘condemnation’ line of the NEC, and indeed any other ideas which violate sect orthodoxy.
Addressing an audience of around 80 people - composed overwhelmingly of British-Asian IWA members and supporters, and well down on the normal turnout when Scargill is the star speaker - were Ian Johnson of the international committee and North West region of the SLP; Dave Roberts of the SLP NEC; Hardev Dhillon of the Indian Workers Association, and SLP general election candidate for Erith and Thamesmead; Katherine Cremer of SLP Youth Section; and Brar himself, who was also chair.
To anyone who has read the latest issue of Lalkar, the opinions expressed from the podium would be depressingly predictable. Indeed, the speakers seemed to be taking their cue from the less than charming Fightback group of ex-Revolutionary Communist Group members, who proudly tell us: “We do not mourn, but welcome, the death of any workers at the Pentagon or any bankers at the World Trade Center; they have killed many times over before in their careers, Those cleaners, waiters, cooks and technicians who died were a tragic loss in a war which sees many millions of ordinary, innocent people die every year. The war against oppression will continue and many more will fall before its completion” (November-December).
In this vein, comrade Cremer, the first speaker, who began her contribution by venturing the opinion that Stalin’s USSR had “wiped out the social evils of society”, described the events of September 11 as heralding the start of the “fightback” - we had witnessed the “inevitable resistance of the oppressed”. The “oppressed” were in a “kill or be killed” situation - so what else could they do but hijack a couple of planes full of civilian passengers, cut the throats of the air stewardesses, and then fly them directly into two tower blocks containing thousands of workers, in the process killing hundreds of firefighters? For comrade Cremer, such actions objectively represented “the forward march of communism”.
Ian Johnson concurred with this analysis. He also subscribed - hook, line and sinker - to the paranoid conspiracy theory that the current war is all about oil and direct economic interests. In this he finds himself in the good company of the Socialist Workers Party, which also subscribes to this brand of crude, pseudo-Marxist reductionism (which has so afflicted - and crippled - the left). So, comrade Johnson informed us, the “driving force” behind the war is the economic crisis of capitalism - which was forcing the imperialist powers “eastwards” in search of “new labour, new markets, new resources”. Seeing how these potential markets, he continued, had been previously blocked off, imperialism had “a lot of catching up to do”.
It does have to be said that comrade Johnson added a novel twist to the plot - by confidently asserting that the US and the UK want “control of central Asia” so they could “encircle” Russia and put the “noose around its neck”. He does not seem to have noticed that George Bush and Vladimir Putin are firm allies in the ‘war against terrorism’. In fact, the comrade seems to be under the impression that Russia is still the land of Lenin, carrying on the tradition of October. That nonsense should have finally been laid to rest in 1991.
Hardev Dhillon offered the interesting view that the masses of central and eastern Europe now realise that they had been wrong to reject the bureaucratic socialist regimes that had ruled over them - after all, at least then the workers had jobs for life. Look at the poverty and misery ushered in by the ‘post-communist’ governments. Surely, thought comrade Dhillon, it must now be obvious to all that ‘official communism’ (or Stalinism) represented an advance over capitalism and therefore should act as our model of what society should be like?
Dave Roberts ridiculed the “huge outcry” over September 11. The repeated showing of the two planes plunging intro the WTC was akin to “brainwashing techniques”. After all, said comrade Roberts, over 500,000 have died in Iraq thanks to imperialist sanctions - where is the outcry over that? He went on to describe September 11 as “a major blow against American imperialism”. Of course, Roberts added, we in the SLP “deplore the loss of life” (obviously forgetting the changed line agreed at the September 22 NEC meeting) and, yes, “maybe” the attack was “conducted by unsavoury characters”. But we should not forget that the attackers were aiming at the “three citadels of global capitalism” - the WTC, the Pentagon and the White House (so it seems).
Also, said comrade Roberts, the September 11 attack was “seen by the downtrodden of the world as resistance to US imperialism” - therefore we should go with such spontaneous sentiments. Comrade Roberts concluded by saying that US imperialism was striving for a unipolar world, but the events of September 11 were a reminder of “how vulnerable US imperialism, and the status quo, really is”. For this service, it seems, we should be eternally grateful to the September 11 suicide attackers.
As for Harpal Brar, he roused the Stalinist troops by declaring: “I love seeing the pictures of the burning Pentagon - it makes me feel absolutely elated.” One gathers that Harpal has the same feelings about the WTC, described as a place “where international bankers meet and decide how to screw the world”. Presumably also, socialists should feel “elated” by the sight of workers flinging themselves out of the WTC building in order to escape the flames and plunging to their certain deaths.
There has never been “a struggle where innocent people were not killed”, Brar continued. Indeed, it is in the nature of “revolutions to take innocent lives” - only an idealist could think otherwise. The significance of September 11 is that “it will encourage people to join the movement” and to take up “the anti-imperialist struggle”.
For Brar, the islamic fundamentalist terrorists responsible for the September 11 atrocities were part of “the vibrant national liberation movements” which can be found in Saudi Arabia, Palestine/Israel, Egypt, Algeria, etc, with whom the workers’ movement needs to ally itself. “We support”, emphasised Brar, whoever is attacking imperialism, declaring explicitly: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ - thus once more categorically rejecting the approach of VI Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whose entire outlook was centred on the fight for independent working class politics, a concept utterly alien to Stalinites like Brar.
Danny Hammill
