Weekly Worker 629 Thursday June 15 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Don’t mention the regime

The June 12 ‘open organising meeting’ of Action Iran quickly focused on one question - should it take up a position on the nature of the Iranian regime or simply remain a ‘single-issue campaign’? Tina Becker reports

Summer Offensive 2006 Show some love IAs the second week of our two-month Summer Offensive financial campaign closes, comrades, supporters and friends of the Weekly Worker have contributed £1,039 in the last seven days, bringing our total for the first fortnight to £4,249; not a bad start towards the £30,000 target. Mentioned in dispatches this week is comrade MF for seeing off a £400 chunk of his £1,000 personal target. Also the CPGB comrades who diverted themselves with paper, book and badge sales during the terminal tedium of the Stop the War Coalition ‘conference’ on June 10 (more of an all-day rally, actually) - £80 raised there, primarily by comrade CD. Long-time supporter FJ sent a useful £20. Then there was big-hearted comrade EB from Manchester, who took pity on the plaintive noises coming from that lonesome PayPal button on our website and eased its pain with £30. She was one of 32,881 e-readers last week - a new record by a considerable margin. Thanks to them and all the others who contributed in the past seven days, we have managed to maintain a decent momentum after the heroics of last week when the start made was described in this column - with the sober journalistic gravitas that readers have come to associate with the Weekly Worker - as a “stonker”. Early days though it is, one negative feature of the campaign is worth drawing attention to already. The money so far comes almost exclusively from members, candidate members and close supporters. Even when cash is being raised from our wider periphery, it is being directly initiated or canvassed for by comrades from that smaller group. Yet, as I pointed out in my column last week, we really need friends of this paper to come up with solid financial backing to take us over £30k. So don’t wait to be asked, cajoled or even nagged, comrades! Send cheques and postal orders - marked ‘SO’ on the back - to our usual address. (And no more criminal neglect of our site’s PayPal button! Show it some love …). Howard Roak Click here to download a standing order form - regular income is particular important in order to plan ahead. Even £5/month can help! Send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX Donate online:

This gathering was organised as a follow-up to the June 2 public meeting with human rights lawyer and Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi in order to ‘mop up’ new layers of supporters drawn to the campaign. As it turned out, members of the CPGB seemed to have been the only new force at the small meeting, which was dominated by members of the Socialist Workers Party - although nobody said so, instead preferring to speak merely as Action Iran (AI), Respect or Stop the War Coalition. There was a fair number of Iranian women present - some of them involved in this or that group, others independent - but most seemed to have been to AI meetings before.

Despite the obvious failure to attract new faces, the event went ahead as planned - ie, not so much as an organising meeting, but as a mini-rally. STWC chair Andrew Murray (who never seems to openly admit to being a member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain) took more than 20 minutes to explain why we should be opposed to an attack on Iran. Not much controversy or indeed enlightenment there.

It only got interesting when he felt the need to talk about “our position” on the Iranian regime: “We in the Stop the War Coalition are clear about this. The Iranian regime is a matter for the Iranian people only.” His main argument on this question was that the US has no right to simply substitute one regime with another one. Fair enough.

But it became clear that he also objected to the British left making any judgement on the matter. It was “different for Iranians - they should openly say what they think”. Therefore Action Iran (clearly simply an add-on to the STWC) “needs to attract a lot of Iranians from all walks of life”. Apparently, only if you are born in the country do you have the right to criticise its regime. Maybe those with one parent from Iran can half-criticise the crushing of the democratic and workers’ movement or the slaughter of opponents. The left in Britain certainly cannot.

When I challenged this inverted nationalism and argued in favour of genuine internationalism (which naturally must include our active support for the struggles of the Iranian working class, women’s movement and the democratic opposition to the islamic regime), comrade Murray elaborated further. Apparently, if we openly criticise the Iranian regime - for example, when it brutally attacks our brothers and sisters on demonstrations and picket lines - we are providing the US hawks with ammunition. We are just “fuelling the danger of war if we start listing what’s wrong with the regime”, according to comrade Murray.

In reality, such ‘tactics’ do nothing but disarm our own movement - as well as deprive the growing opposition in Iran of our active solidarity. Other AI speakers tried to rescue the situation by saying that our “support for the democracy movement is implicit” in the group’s mission statement. There, it states that an attack on Iran would set back the democracy movement. And that in turn “implies” that we are “no fans of the regime”, as one comrade (not a member of the SWP) put it.

Well, how about saying so openly if we are implying it anyway? Because we “want to be broad”, as speaker after speaker said. “The success of the Stop the War Coalition has proved that this must be a single-issue campaign,” said comrade Murray. In fact, the STWC - as well as Action Iran - are extremely narrow in one sense. The STWC only mobilises for demonstrations and is unwilling to form an effective political movement that really could stop a war.

Action Iran is a even narrower and smaller. The only organised trends within it are the SWP and the CPB. Apart from a few exceptions, the Iranian exile community is staying well clear of the campaign. And who can blame them? Many of them have fled precisely from the kind of regime that the AI now wants to keep shtoom about.

When a comrade suggested that an AI conference in the autumn should “maybe feature a debate on the regime so that we can clear the air”, Andrew Murray cut her short: “And then we immediately have a split in the movement.” Because, you see, “there might be business people there who do not want to criticise the regime”. He was in favour of a conference, yes, but “a conference that does not discuss the future of Iran”, although obviously the gathering “should not look like it is run by the Iranian regime”.

At least this showed that he half-recognised that the logic of this dire ‘non-interference’ position leads precisely into the camp of reaction.

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