Weekly Worker 627 Thursday June 1 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Third camp to first

Alan Johnson, the editor of Democratiya, spoke at the launch of the Euston Manifesto. He spoke to Mark Fischer about the initiative and also about his political conflict with his erstwhile comrades in the Alliance for Workers Liberty

How did you get involved with the Euston Manifesto group?

I have been involved right from the start, from the first meeting. I was one of the original group that pulled together individuals involved in various blogs and campaigns.

Fundamentally I believe that we need what I call a decent left. One that makes no concessions to reactionary anti-imperialism, but in relation to Iraq seeks to work with the labour movement and materially aid its emergence during the difficult period of transition in that country.

We are not big fans of the left as it is currently constituted. But what about imperialism? At the launch, the word only made an appearance in the form of denunciations of the “idiot anti-imperialism” of the likes of the Socialist Workers Party. The notion that imperialism actually exists and it is to be fought made no appearance whatsoever.

Yes, some people involved in the Euston Manifesto did support the war. But what they would say is that it was never a war on Iraq, but rather on Saddam. The coalition has got rid of Saddam and the Ba’athists, opened up the mass graves, overseen the return of the marsh Arabs, the return of the refugees, the UN-supervised elections and constitutional referendum, and there is a new trade union movement and freedoms to publish and to organise: is all that ‘imperialism’?

If the Ba’athist and islamist resistance was not active, this process would look like it was set to achieve some sort of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in Iraq. The people involved in the manifesto who supported the war would contend that this is what the intervention in Iraq was about, that it consisted of the imposition of democracy. They would suggest that the idea that it was about oil is hard to maintain when we see the continued autonomy of the Iraqi oil ministry and the absence of a real takeover of any kind.

My own view would be this. If your definition of imperialism is simply the presence of capitalist companies in Iraq, then this is not adequate. Capitalist countries operate all around the world. Is it being said that any country where foreign capitalist companies operate and exploit an indigenous working class is subordinated to imperialism and therefore any political force is to be backed against it, no matter how reactionary? Down that road political madness lies.

Okay, we don’t like reactionary anti-imperialism. But - presuming it exists - we are opponents of imperialism as well. We fight for a positive, working class alternative. But surely - unless we have travelled the ‘mad road’ ourselves - we recognise which is the greater evil judged from the standpoint of global humanity? The victory of the forces of reactionary imperialism in Iraq would be defeat for our side, no question. But the Ba’athists and the islamists are not the military personifications of a world system of exploitation and force that condemns hundreds of millions to starvation and oppression, that has introduced barbarism to sub-Saharan Africa …

There is a partial difficulty here for me. We have a difference over Iraq, obviously. But then we have the problem that I have moved on from a set of more general theoretical politics that you will still hold to.

One of the reasons I have moved politically is because I was writing a book about Hal Draper. In course of that work, it became clear to me how absolutely central to the politics of ‘third campism’ was the notion of the death agony of capitalism, as outlined in Trotsky’s 1938 work. Some of the assumptions of this are: that capitalism is totalitarianism-in-waiting; that it is finished as a viable social system; that it is synonymous with decay; that no reform is possible and it is an integrated system of exploitation verging on the fascistic.

I think this is wrong. From my reading about the development of capitalism since World War II, it does not fit. But the theory of the death agony is the theoretical basis for a certain form of propagandistic third campism.

Irving Howe - one-time member of the US Workers Party and International Socialist League, later the editor of Dissent - made the point this abstract third campism only has meaning if you have a revolutionary perspective. I now think that is correct. That revolutionary perspective is, in turn, based on the notion of the death agony of capitalism. It all fits together.

For me, what fell apart was the entire theoretical analysis that is constructed on the basis of this ‘death agony’ presumption. What shifted me was the fact that I was ‘Iraqed’. I was working with the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. I just didn’t find that the third camp politics I had adhered to were any use. Okay, it kept certain broad socialist principles alive, but it couldn’t provide a guide to how the IFTU should respond to the fact that on one side you had the US army arresting IFTU leaders, on the other it had the so-called resistance torturing and killing its militants.

In trying to develop some sort of ‘real-world’ political response to that, I didn’t find third campism at all useful. At concrete political junctures, there are lesser evils we must plump for - simply because the physical survival of the workers’ movement itself may be at stake.

As a one-time member, you have criticised the AWL for not taking this choice - to follow through a logic that is strongly implicit in its politics.

My criticism of the AWL is that it knows that questions are posed in this way on occasion - Iraq being a concrete example. Sean Matgamna knows this; he has written it. But the organisation seems too squeamish to follow through the logic of its own politics.

Thus, in Solidarity (April 20 2004 and June 10 2004), he argued that the position taken by the Independent Labour Party in Britain during World War II was the best guide for socialists today - ie: critical support for capitalist democracy, while continuing to work for socialism within that framework. There may be some dispute as to the actual position of the ILP at the time - and I don’t want to get too ‘textual’ about it - but if it said that at the time then it was clearly correct. It seems to me that this is generally the right position to take whenever democracy is threatened by totalitarianism. A position of critical support of the forces standing up for democracy.

The only reason we have not done this historically, it seems to me, is as a result of an analysis that suggests capitalist democracy is only a sham that it is in truth fascism-in-waiting: it is incipient moribund reaction.

That, palpably, is not true. If you look at capitalism as it has developed since 1945, it is nonsense to talk about its death agony. It has been the most explosively productive period in capitalism’s history. I’m not trying to sound like an apologist, but look at the facts. Those countries that have been fully integrated into the world economy have grown much faster than those that have not. Also, it simply isn’t the case that only a thin layer at the top of society has benefited from that growth: the poor also benefit from that inclusion and relationship to the world market.

I’m not trying to come to too many general conclusions from this. I’m simply trying to state what the statistics tell us about this period. These are facts. It does not mean that we have to make our peace with capitalism. But it does mean the premise of the death agony - that capitalism is terminally ill and the choice is simply between different forms of totalitarianism - is nonsense.

This is the type of thinking that has informed my personal involvement with the Euston Manifesto.

My personal evolution has been quite interesting here. In June 2000, I debated the AWL’s Sean Matgamna on Kosova. Looking back, I think Sean was right back then and I was wrong. At the time I had a more or less straight third campist position of ‘a plague on all houses’ and propaganda for what I thought was necessary. Sean described this as ‘an incoherent pastiche of contradictory stances’. I could see the dilemma, he said, but I “refused to choose”. Specifically he said: “We dispose of no forces here. There will either be a short-term rescue of the Kosovars from their plight or there will be none.”

In reply, I pointed out that people had been down this political road before. When Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik and Manny Geltman and others left the ISL in 1952 to form Dissent, their resignation letter anticipated almost exactly Sean’s words in 2000. They called the third camp an “isle of rectitude” and said it involved a “psychology of the saving remnant”.

In retrospect, I was clearly wrong and I decided to take that road myself. One thing that helped me - and you no doubt will see this as very significant - is that I became more aware of the writings of Max Shachtman (and of another WP member, Susan Green - see Democatiya 5 for her article on Korea). Something Schachtman wrote is worth quoting, I think: “We are opposed to such defeats of the bourgeoisie whose consequences are, and cannot but be, a disaster and an inferno of exploitation for the working class. Our perspective is not one of seeking to take revenge on the bourgeoisie for its social crimes, but that the working class emancipates itself from all class rule.”

Large elements of today’s left are seeking revenge on Bush, Blair and capitalism in general for their “social crimes”. The left seems unable to build in - either theoretically or tactically - the second part of what Shachtman says is our actual job: to help make sure the working class “emancipates itself from all class rule”. Yes, I think that must involve a certain form of stageism, a criticism Sean has thrown against me. That’s fair enough. The task now is to build up the forces of the IFTU and the other trade union groups that exist in Iraq, fight real campaigns around practical aims that allow the labour and progressive movement to organise more effectively.

And, yes, that means the lesser evil is the presence of coalition forces and the UN-backed transition period. This, whether it is conceded or not, is actually the operative position of the AWL anyway. The comrades may wish to deny this - and I have never been able to hold a sensible conversation with one of them about their self-evident contradictions. But look, it can be ‘Troops out, not a penny!’ or ‘Troops stay to present the “vast regression” of Iraqi society’ - but can it really be both? I’m with Susan Green when she wrote in the ISL internal bulletin in 1950: “There are some junctures in human affairs of national or international scope, when everything depends on defeating the immediate menace”.

Related articles

Off the rails
The launch of the Euston Manifesto on May 25 in London’s Union Chapel showed that this ‘initiative’ - which has attracted a large amount of media attention - is totally bereft of vision, repeats all the standard CIA tropes about terrorism and, more than that, fears open debate

Lawrence Parker takes a closer look at the Euston Manifesto

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