The SWP and the Iraq protest
Workers Power 291 - November 2004
Every honest SWP member should be ashamed of what their leadership's pact with the bureaucracy meant at the ESF. And nothing illustrated it more clearly than a plenary session on the Iraq war. For an organisation that proclaims that it sides with the resistance in Iraq and emphasises the absolute centrality to politics today of the war, the SWP ended up defending the presence of a collaborator with that occupation on a plenary platform.

When protestors at a plenary on Iraq demanded the removal of the IFTU general secretary Subhil al-Mashadani from the platform because of his organisation's support for the imperialist occupation and hostility to the resistance, the SWP took the lead in denouncing the protestors and defending the collaborator's "democratic" right to speak. Their special issue of Socialist Workers attacked "a couple of dozen people with no connection to the anti-war movement" for barracking the collaborator.

They then tried to get the protest condemned unheard at the preparatory meeting for the Assembly of Social Movement, pressured by the blustering bureaucrat Redmond O'Neill of the GLA. But their undemocratic plan collapsed when a member of the League for the Fifth International asked the meeting - to applause from everyone present not in the SWP or Socialist Action -for the other side of the argument to be put.

We remain proud of our role in bringing this protest about. First, it was legitimate, as the ESF process had never invited Mashadani of the IFTU to speak; it was a dirty backroom deal. Secondly, this protest has done more than anything to bring to light the role of the IFTU as collaborators. Third, and most importantly, it is a matter of principle, understood by the Iraqis at the heart of the protest, to deny collaborators in an ongoing war a platform at an anti-imperialist conference.

Nearly every political group, including those who now say we are right about the IFTU and that they should not have been allowed to speak, say we were wrong to "disrupt" or "break up the meetings". And that we violated democratic rights. As revolutionary communists we do not turn democratic rights into either an absolute or a classless abstraction. Strikers should not give a scab the right to speak at their meetings. Any trade unionist worth the name knows this. A fascist should not be allowed any democratic platform.
 http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?id=46,325,0,0,1,0