Behind Newsline's Frenzy, Redgrave Feted by Feudal Tyrants

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Sadat (left) with Arafat and Boumedienne in the days when Arafat with 'moderate' Arab leader Hussein-he wiped out they all posed as opponents of Zionism and defenders of PLO forces in the Black September massacre It is not very often that a Workers Socialist League leaflet becomes the subject of a double page article in a daily newspaper.

So when the Workers Revolutionary Party takes two pages in its daily Newsline to launch a violent attack on a WSL leaflet handed out on a march organised by the General Union of Arab Students, we must look seriously at the reasons for it, and the arguments put forward.

Of course we welcome this belated attempt by the WRP leadership to publicly defend their Party's opportunist positions on the struggles in the Middle East against the long-standing criticisms we have raised.

Less detailed But it is revealing that Palestine sooner than answer the extended and documented polemical articles that we have carried in Socialist Press in booklet form (WRP Leaders Junk the Old Trotskyism), the Newsline editorial board chooses instead to take up the far less detailed points contained in one leaflet.

Clearly they hope that this provides them with an themselves with rage, wildly easier task: But so indefen- alleging that: sible is their policy of giving uncritical support to motley assortment of bourgeois and petty bourgeois struggles, maligning every nationalist leaderships in the leadership, including the Middle East, that they fail to achieve even this limited the Egyptian nation! —as objective. a leadership which has 'sold Sensing their failure they out that struggle to the desperately throw in lying dictates of imperialism and allegations about the WSL's their own political needs'. record in British Leyland at Cowley and on the Labour Not even mentioning government which we do Nasser, it simply pointed not intend to bother with finger at the obvious truth: here.

Arab leaders who claim to Quaint support the Palestinian struggle have been in the From their characteristicforefront of deals which ally quaint style of polemic -a mixture of arbitrary sold out that struggle to the dictates of imperialism and insults combined with their own political needs. distortions of both fact and Marxist: theory-two points treaty with the Zionist state clearly emerge.

is only the latest in a long One is that the WRP line of 'many such leaders are incensed that the betrayals".

Workers Socialist League should put out a leaflet to Fear of struggles Arab and Palestinian students (whom they regard as their own property). impetus behind this back But, more important, stabbing treaty was they are furious that our imperialism's fear that the leaflet should put forward a aftermath of the Iranian class analysis of the revolution would unleash struggles in the Middle East, mass struggles throughout and differentiate sharply the Middle East. between the interests of the And it showed how this Arab and Palestinian masses same fear of mass revoluand the policies of the petty tionary struggles also haunts bourgeois and bourgeois the feudal and bourgeois nationalists uncritically heads of state within the supported by the WRP. Arab League.

This is so unthinkable to "It has driven the WRP leader Gerry Healy Ba'athists of Damascus and and his Newsline scribes Baghdad back towards each that they are almost beside other in search of comfort.

It has forced the Iraqi and Saudi regimes to renew their "The leaflet began by military understanding. The pouring scorn on the entire first fruits of that history of Arab liberation strengthened agreement have already been seen in their defence of the reacpast Nasserite leadership of tionary Yemen Arab Republic"

Home truths For the WRP, who were What did our leaflet say? busily distributing Ba'athist leaflet on the demonstration, these home truths were too much to "Again and again the take Stung into a reply, they spell out in Newsline their explicitly revisionist view of the struggles in the "Marxists, however, begin not with the individuals or aspects of «Sadat's sordid peace reality, but with a comprehensive analysis of the whole-i.e. the nature of the imperialist epoch whose central feature, as Lenin explained, is the division of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations"

It showed that the All of a sudden the WRP while still posing Trotskyist, movement has ceased to pay any regard to the class struggle that continues within both the oppressed and oppressor countries.

Instead the question of a policy for the Arab masses is crudely simplified as "whose side are you on; the oppressed or the oppressor?"

Lamely

you are on the side of the oppressed "nation" then this in the WRP's eyes now means you trail lamely and uncritically along behind every twist and turn of policy of Yasser Arafat, Gaddafi, the Iraqi Ba'athists and the Ayatollah Khomeini and their chosen allies of the moment, (up to and including the Ugandan butcher Amin).

But of course this policy is not without contradictions. For instance, the "oppressed" Iraqi Ba'athists are also the oppressors of the Kurdish national minority imprisoned within the Iraqi state.

Khomeini (whom the WRP defend against our description of him as a religious. bigot) is also engaged in oppressing the Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Turkomeni and Arab minorities in Iran.

Annexed

Gaddafi's "oppressed Libyan dictatorship has only recently annexed a substantial chunk of northern Chad.

It is not good enough therefore, to place such general labels on Middle East regimes.

It is necessary to analyse the class contradictions within these states as well as their relationship to imperialism if the masses are to be offered a revolutionary way forward.

But the WRP dodges any such analysis. Its position is an almost exact echo of the revisionist conceptions of Michel Pablo who in 1951 put forward the non-class view that the world was divided into simply the "Soviet bloc" and the "capitalist world" , as a premise for his adaptation to the Stalinist bureaucracies.

Liquidated

By leaving out both the independent struggles of the working class in the capitalist countries and the struggle for political revolution in the deformed and degenerated workers states and baldly posing the question of "which side are we on?" Pablo's position effectively liquidated the programme of Trotskyism.

Now Gerry Healy and the WRP leaders, who correctly fought and broke from Pablo in 1953, and fought the drift of the American SWP back to Pabloism in 1963, explicitly turn their backs on their own history and embrace Pablo's method and politics in their adaptation to the Ba'athists, Gaddafi and Arafat.

Their uncritical support for bourgeois leaders leads sop to head off the militancy of the Arab masses.

•Financial Times In arguing in support of the boycott policy, the Newsline scribes rely extensively on quotations from the Financial Times and the Economist to 'prove' that boycott wil be effective.

Of course they ignore evidence to the contrary put forward in the analysis in the Daily Telegraph, which points to the fact that there was no decision to withdraw the Arab League countries' huge investments from Egypt, and that Egyptian trade with these countries accounts for only 6% of its exports.

But even if the boycott were effective, the central point made in our leaflet would remain valid: that the bourgeois Arab leaders remain implacably opposed to the mobilisation of the Arab and Palestinian masses, which is the only means of successfully carrying through the Palestinian revolution and the struggle for a Socialist United States of the Middle East.

This is why our leaflet stated clearly:

"The Palestinian liberation struggle will not be won by any number of boycotts or other actions from the Arab nationalist leaders.

«The workers and peasants of Iran have clearly shown the way-only mass mobilisations of the oppressed classes can lift the yoke of imperialism in the Does this mean that, as the Newsline article falsely suggests, we draw no distinction between the role of imperialism and that of its sattelite bourgeois leaders in the colonial countries? Clearly not.

But we stand by the position cogently argued in 1963 by the WRP's forerunner, the Socialist Labour League. Challenging the opportunism of the Pabloites on Algeria, the SLL pointed out:

"In Algeria, the revisionists, as we have seen, in fact give support to the petty. bourgeois, nationalist "There was even published an article by one Sadi both in the SWP International Socialist Review and the Pabloite Fourth International advocating "entry" into Nasser's national movement, and specifically disavowing any organised independent

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