> The Iraqi Communist Party has no future -- it
> not only fails to lead street demonstrations to
> the occupation:
Written as ICP cadre continue to organize in the oil refineries despite restrictions on collective bargaining rights in the public sector, not to mention looming repression. Are street demonstrations or armed actions the sole measure of practice?
> The Worker-Communist Party of Iraq's position
> is more promising than the ICP's.
How about some concrete evidence for preferring one over the other? Not just by the content of polemics, mind you, but details about on-the-ground work? The two parties may or may not be bitter rivals of one another and/or of other political groups in Iraq, and it's interesting to know all of that, but isn't the truth or falsehood -- or "promise" -- of the polemics best left to Iraqis to determine?
> A Third-Camper Alan Johnson
Distinctions among Trotskyites bore me to tears, but that's a detail.
> reports that "as of late June the UUI [Union of the
> Unemployed in Iraq, led by Worker-Communist
> cadres] was claiming 15,000 members with centers
> in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Nasiriya," but he also
> acknowledges that it is "impossible to know how
> accurate these figures are"
It may be impossible if you want to spend your time winnowing and refining the precise "line" in the pages of New Politics, but it's more possible if you participate in sending delegations of people to actually see the conditions on the ground and confer with the progressive forces there. US Labor Against the War has taken the reasonable position that they're going to offer their support to both of the emerging union federations there, and to the labor movement in general as it crops up, and that they're not going to decide from afar precisely which "tendency" is worthy of support. This was not a completely uncontroversial decision. I remember from the USLAW conference that one woman was talking about how her boyfriend from Basra told her that people in Iraq will not support unions because they are all controlled by communists who speak against Islam. As you can imagine, a number of people pointed out that what she was saying was basically old-school red-baiting, of the kind common in the AIFLD days, when the AFL-CIO tried to undermine "communist-dominated" unions abroad.
Yoshie questions whether democratic forces like these can survive. I prefer to ask what we can do to help them survive. USLAW, for example, hopes to send another delegation to Iraq soon, this time also bringing some material assistance for the emerging union federations.
The labor example is the one I know best, but I'll repeat what I said before: that it shouldn't be hard to imagine similar efforts in other sectors of society.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!