What is the GCI (Internationalist Communist Group) good for?

I know that I am refenrring to an old article, but way back in 2006 you published an article entitled 'What is the GCI (Internationalist Communist Group) good for?' In this general critique of the ICG, it is stated that: "at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, confronted with the nationalist movement of Algerian Kabilia (1988) or the one that developed in Iraqi Kurdistan (1991), the GCI used the most sophisticated excuses to support these movements." The article then discusses the nature of the movement in Algeria. But nothing is said about the movement in Iraq in 1991, which seems like a bizarre absence - are you saying that the movement the ICG say took place was actually nationalist? Or that there was no movement at all separate from the armed movements of Kurdish nationalism in the north?

Given the strong claims that the ICG makes about this movement, about the existence and content of an uprising not reducible to, and in conflict with, the Kurdish nationalist militias, I think you should clarify what you are saying, and the basis on which you are saying this. Of course, you may have done this somewhere else and I have not seen it, but either way please let me know what is being claimed.

Hello benjamin and welcome to this forum.  

A project we have often talked about but have never carried through is to make a precise analysis of the movements which took place at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. From what I recall, there was some evidence of real workers' struggles and of more general social revolts in both the North and the South of Iraq as the Saddam regime wobbled. However, I think that the GCI at best vastly overestimated these movements - assimilating them almost to a proletarian revolution -  and underestimated the strength of the Kurdish nationalists in the north and Shia forces in the south. I don't think the class content of the movements was anything like strong enough to resist the domination of these forces, whose omnipresence could be seen very clearly a decade or so later when the regime did actually fall. The GCI also talked about 'communist groups' who had a significant influence on  these struggles, without supplying any evidence that these groups were fundamentally different from the various Maoist/Stalinist groups which have tended to dominate the political scene in that region. The GCI has a long history of supporting 'anything that moves' in the countries of the capitalist peripheries - the most dangerous example being their amalgam between proletarian violence and jihadi terrorism in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is why we do not see the GCI as a very reliable witness, to say the least.  

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2006/groupe-communiste-internationaliste. 

 I think the ICC is correct about pointing to ICG's exaggerations. Except ICG's articles there is no proof that there were workers' councils in south Kurdistan. And what ICG do not talk about is the influence of Iranian stalinist immigrants in the south Kurdistan, the so-called "Hekmatist" Iranian Workers' Communist Party. My impression is the so-called workers councils emerged in south Kurdistan at the time may in fact be a rhetorical propaganda of IKIP not corresponding to any real situation in Iraq.

This IKIP is a radical stalinist group fixed its politics to anti-islamism. However, they like to use the concept of "workers' councils" in a deceiving and contradictory way. For instance this is their union:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Workers_Councils_and_Unions_in_Iraq

First of all, thanks for responding to my questions. These questions have been in my mind for many years now, ever since I read the ICG texts on struggles in the North of Iraq at the very beginning of the nineties, i.e. in the period of US/Iraqi conflict which followed the Iraqi state's invasion of Kuwait. Eight years ago I included those ICG texts, amongst other materials from broadly Left Communist/'ultraleftist' tendencies, in the discussion group on conflict in Iraq that took place at the Melbourne 'State of Emergency' conference in May 2004.

(The 'State of Emergency Convergence of Ideas, Actions of Experiments', as it was sometimes titled, probably turned out to be the most substantial, and certainly the largest, conference centred on radical/revolutionary theory to emerge from and engage with the more radical tendencies of the anti-summit and related movements within Australia at the time. Within the context of very early twenty-first century 'anti-capitalism' in Australia, it is not surprising that the conference was more notably inflected by a spectrum of versions of autonomist marxism than by any idea of revolutionary politics which might directly engage with those theories associated with, for example, that Communist Left which emerged in early twentieth century Italy or the Dutch-German Left Communists of broadly the same period, or indeed any of the more recent efforts to think revolutionary theory and struggle that have significantly engaged with such currents.)

In any case, these questions came to my mind again when I read the polemical account of the ICG on this site, and directly intersected with assertions being made, so I asked them directly, even if in retrospect I should maybe have posed them directly to the ICG. (I know that the ICG have more recently expressed what I take to be frustration at people disbelieving their accounts of events in the North of Iraq.)

So, what can I work out from all this? It didn't seem to me that the ICG were enacting a cunning plan to justify supporting nationalist movements in the North - for example by constructing a fake anti-nationalist movement of the proletariat in direct and violent conflict with such (Kurdish) nationalist tendencies, toward which the ICG of course articulated unremitting hostility. That would seem an odd way to go about it. If the ICG wish to collapse proletarian revolution or even struggle into nationalism, or wish to overlook the nationalist overdetermination of struggles in which proletarians are directly engaged en masse, I didn't see any evidence of this in their accounts of the events of early 1991. I still don't.

But other than discussing the violent conflict with Kurdish nationalist groups and militias, the ICG did reflect upon contradictions within the 'shoras'/councils whose development they discuss. A print-out of an ICG article I have in front of me, I think left over from the handouts used at the State of Emergency event all those years ago, states that "the shoras, rising out of the flames of the struggle, contained enormous contradictions, the class oppositions between revolution and counter-revolution being defined within them. This is why, contrary to the councilists and the sovietists who make an uncritical apology of the shoras, we have tried, in this process, to seize upon the strength and weaknesses of the proletariat by supporting and acting openly to assert the revolutionary pole. [...] As we can see from their slogans and flags, the shoras concentrated the same type of strengths and weaknesses as the councils, the soviets and other proletarian organisations characteristic of insurrectionary moments. Side by side with democratic, nationalist and even openly conservative demands, are slogans expressing the combativity, strength and class determination of workers in struggle."

Saying that the ICG over-estimated the strength or (anti-nationalist for example) proletarian content of such struggles is one thing - a statement which incidentally surely cannot be sufficiently justified by reference to the subsequent invisibility of these movements or even political positions, given the scale of repression which made possible and immediately followed the restabilisation of state power. But regardless, this statement seems to me very different from suggesting that the ICG were in this instance finding excuses to support nationalist movements. The latter is a very strong statement that is not, in my opinion, sufficiently supported just by saying that you think the ICG didn't prove that those playing significant roles were not stalinists or maoists. (The ICG did translate some leaflets from these movements, I'm sure, which we looked at; I'll try to find them to see what they suggest rather than make any statement from my memory now.)

The ICG does say that the development of these shoras was preceeded by a "committee formed from a insurrectionist minority". If I understand you correctly, you are asserting that these shoras either didn't exist or weren't very significant, and in any case were created by largely unspecified but bad people - nationalists or stalinists, maybe the worker-communists - who the ICG are thus finding excuses to support. I don't think you have much evidence for this understanding of the dynamics of these struggles. I'm genuinely not trying to be polemical or to dismiss what you have written, but the evidence I see for this assertion amounts to the fact that (a) no-one else has written of these events in ways clearly confirming the ICG's accounts, and (b) hekmatists are in the area and say that they are for councils. And (c) in general you think that the ICG are unreliable interpreters of events, who in relation to other places in mostly subsequent times have taken positions you think fit this pattern.

In relation to (b), the subsequent activities of hekmatists in Iraq seem to give a fairly strictly trade-unionist content to their idea of councils, which may not reflect very well upon the worker-communists but doesn't amount to much evidence that they were playing any significant role in the events discussed by the ICG, or indeed any role at all. Nor, incidentally, does it prove anything about the content of their role if they had one (and certainly not that if they had been involved in 1991 they would have attempted, for example, to have 1991 councils become the equivalent of their trade-unionist 'councils' of more recent times).

(More broadly, as to whether the Hekmatist groups are stalinist: in a broad sense they may be, but only a fairly broad one so far as I can tell, whatever the origins of some involved in founding the parties involved. Their break from the previous political positions hegemonic in the Iranian and Iraqi lefts may have been a break largely internal to leftism, but neither was it a trivial shift, in my opinion. Nonetheless what they are, no doubt, is leftists, in the critical sense of the word, and this has become all the more pronounced in more recent years, certainly for the whole of this century. Though they have historically put quite a lot of work into articulating an opposition to nationalism - which is, to say the least, quite rare amongst 'third world' leftisms -, they remain, I think, fundamentally statist, a basis of their politics which, again, has become ever more obvious as the years have gone by, in ever-decreasingly impressive or interesting ways, even within their own historical terms. At present they act as a form of leftism overwhelmingly unambiguous in its capitalist politics, with ever-less of the radical edge or rhetoric, with the more radical possible theoretical implications of the hekmatist break within regional leftism marginalised and left about as significant to their practices as the re-publication of Das Kapital is to the contemporary Chinese communist Party.)

What relationship the hekmatist worker-coms may have had to events in the North at the time thus seems to me far from obvious, and the precise relevance of the point thus far from immediately clear. (A number of years ago I asked a member of the largest Iranian hekmatist group some questions about the early 1991 events in the North, and the ICG's account, and I didn't get the impression that they believed any of the hekmatist groups were substantially involved either in such struggles or in the mythologisation of such struggles as anti-nationalist insurrections, though this obviously is only evidence in a limited sense. Mikail, have you seen instances of this "rhetorical propaganda" asserting the existence of workers councils in either the north or south at the time?)

Of course, there simply does not seem to be much in the way of (first-hand or otherwise) accounts of the precise dynamics of these struggles in Iraq, certainly not in English, and even more certainly not by people writing from a perspective even broadly within a communist perspective. Though this makes a suggestion off mythologisation or even of lying more difficult to refute, I think that it is also all the more reason to be careful.

About hekmatists in general:

I have been involved in discussions with various hekmatists in Turkey some of them representing the party line. It was a few years ago but I still remember that, they defended;

1- the idea that there existed soviets in 1991 in South Kurdistan

2- that Hekmatists were influencial in those organizations

However ,in the short period between march 1991 when the rebellion begun and the mass exodus of kurds towards north in april started, I do not read any convincing and clear report, detailed enough to prove that there were authentic workers' councils in South Kurdistan. One cannot simply avoid answering that question by saying that, this question represents a "fetishism of form."

There are certain facts we know, for instance that the army in the northern Iraq mutinied since the majority of it comprised of Shia from the Southern Iraq and that Kurdish insurgent troops belonging to biggest tribes were quick to seize the opportunity. Beyond that point I only see speculation. There may have emerged some sort of municipality organizations w/o clear class lines - in response to the crisis situation - in the brief period before Talabani and Barzani forces could got hold of Erbil and Suleymaniyah, but I think even that is not proved.

So, in one sense I think it is fair to ask some proof for the existance of the workers' councils. In my perspective the terrible slaughter in the war gave only one chance to the wast majority of the northern Iraqi peasants; and that is to escape. Except Saddam's forces (and that is only for a short while) no real mutiny occured in non of the armies fighting.

When I look at 1991 I see Kurdish peasants and proletarians suffer under various competing imperialist forces terribely and some opportunists seeing a power vacuum to replace Saddam using the destruction caused by the war. As it happens in such cases the strongest Kurdish nationalism (Barzani) was succesful in that regard against the other weaker leftists alternatives such as PKK etc.

So I think 1991 is a case in which the imperialist war did not provide the best chance to make a succesful revolution, and national-question or national sentiments could not be manipulated to serve revolution. I think those are valid more or less in every situation.

Interesting that Mikhail mentions "authentic" workers' councils--what makes a workers' council authentic as opposed to "inauthentic"? Is it only when the workers' express a dynamic towards deepening that they are authentic? The "fetishism of form" is an intersting idea also. It seems that as long as the consciousness within the councils is something less than revolutionary, is there a a "fetishism of form," in continuing to see them as organs of revolution?

 by authentic I mean councils established by workers themselves to defend their class interests. Unlike those established by various organizations that claim to defend the working class only "representing" a minority of workers, i.e. front organizations.

If I remember correctly Hekamat, the leader of IKIP was once a Maoist.  I also found this article on their english website under their Iranian wing that mentions their positions towards Left Communists

http://www.wpiran.org/English/wb179-80lenin%20mao%20trotsky%20left%20comm%20and%20the%20wpi.htm

It becomes easy to see their position in the radical Bourgeosie Left, they seem to be a mixture of Stalinism and Trotskyism.  These "Workers Councils" are probably similar to the ones Mao put up during the Chinese Revolution as a front for his party.