Debate on trade unions in Iraq

This is a personal view (by Martin Thomas), not a statement by the IWSG. It's my assessment of the debate on trade unions in Iraq at the Iraq Occupation Focus meeting in London on 9 November 2004.
About 50 people - many more than usual - were at this month's meeting of Iraq Occupation Focus to hear Sami Ramadani and Ewa Jasiewicz on "Trade unionism in occupied Iraq" (London, 9 November).
The first speech, Ewa's, was informative and sober, but entirely detached from the debate which dominated the rest of the meeting. Ewa described the activity of the Southern Oil Company Union in Basra, an IFTU affiliate with which she worked for some months; expressed doubts about Communist Party control in most of the IFTU and the IFTU's "ambiguous" stance on privatisation; and mentioned the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions of Iraq, which she saw as "more grass-roots" than the IFTU but "naive" in its implacable opposition to what it calls "Islamic terrorism".
Sami Ramadani's speech covered the same ground as his widely circulated letter to Alex Gordon. The Communist Party of Iraq, he said, is collaborating with the occupation, and the IFTU under CP leadership "diverts the Iraqi working class from the main contradiction". The IFTU are "Quislings".
I argued that to support the Iraqi labour movement, including against the Islamist militias, should be our priority.
The CP's "realpolitik" - trying to get the best deal by working with whatever power-that-be it thinks most amenable - is wretched. But a trade union with bad politics is a very different matter from a Quisling organisation. Quisling was a fascist!
We want a free Iraq with free trade unions and no occupation. For a labour movement to build itself up, using the de facto openings for free organisation that exist now, and then play a central role in ending the occupation, is a possible route to that. For the labour movement to be crushed as "Quislings" in the cause of anti-imperialism, and then to hope for the triumphant Islamists to allow free unions to emerge at a later stage, is not.
Not just the IFTU but all the main trade unions and communist groups in Iraq oppose the Islamist militias. Activists in Britain should not dismiss their views.
All the other speakers favoured Sami Ramadani's view. Arguments included the following:
* "Collusion" by the IFTU with the occupation was something qualitatively worse than "bad politics". (So class collusion is venial, but national apostasy is a mortal sin?)
* There really is no labour movement in Iraq - only a shell, only union offices. (So what about the struggles and organisations which Ewa had described? So, if the union movement is weak, and some of it is more hopeful sketch than reality, then it doesn't matter if it is branded as fascist and crushed?)
* The Communist Party of Iraq became fascist when it joined the Ba'thist government in the mid-1970s. (The same as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was deemed by the ultra-left Stalinists of 1928-33 to have become "social-fascist" when it collaborated with the ultra-right Freikorps in 1919?)
* Any labour movement that supports an occupation becomes fascist.
(So when it accepted the Treaty of Versailles the Social-Democratic Party of Germany became... fascist? The All India Trade Union Congress, led by the Communist Party of India, became fascist when the CP line during World War Two was to support Britain?)
* The imperialists say that the Iraqi militias are Islamist and terrorist, and that they would clash with each other in civil war if the occupation troops vanished tomorrow. "We must combat their propaganda".
So when the rulers of the West were saying that the USSR was a tyranny, we should have insisted that it was a paradise? When the US said that victory for the NLF in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia would lead to police states, we were duty bound to deny it?
An "opposition to imperialism" which can sustain itself only by pretending that any force opposed to the USA must automatically be benign is made of thin stuff!
On a secondary but telling level, I found this insistence that any recognition of class conflicts within Iraqi politics must be rejected as "diverting from the main contradiction" (with "imperialism") doubly unimpressive because, in an earlier quick practical discussion, we had found that only four or five of the fifty enthusiasts present had attended either of the two recent protests against the US blitz on Fallujah, and I was apparently the only person present who had attended both.
Sami Ramadani concluded by saying flatly (as he did not in his letter to Alex Gordon) that the IFTU is "not a working-class organisation".
He "reserved judgement" on the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions, believing that their recent denunciation of Islamist attacks on women was "disgusting" at a time when Fallujah was under attack by US forces.