Using ‘redbaiting’ charges
to silence ANSWER’s critics

By Nathan Newman

Vice President NYC, National Lawyers Guild / Former National Vice President, NLG

[Note, as will be obvious, my views are my own and those who agree with me within the Guild, and do not reflect those of the national leadership of the NLG or the collective views of the NYC local chapter leadership. Title for identification purposes only]

Is the antiwar organization ANSWER (act Now to Stop War and End Racism) a front group controlled by the Workers World Party (WWP)?

Apparently, this can no longer be considered a question of debate on the left; the national executive committee of my organization, the National Lawyers Guild, has declared in a resolution passed this week that such statements are “unprincipled,” a “witchhunt,” and merely “redbaiting” and a form of “McCarthyism.”

And how did the NLG come to pass this resolution? The resolution was proposed by a member of the DC-based law firm, the Partnership for Civil Justice, which does legal work for Workers World and was picked by the WWP as a member of ANSWER’s steering committee. And when he made the proposal, after a few obligatory noises about Ashcroft, he made it clear that the purpose of the proposal was to silence members of the NLG itself, particularly some people in the New York City chapter who had been critical of ANSWER’s role in New York City, and myself in particular for critical comments on Workers World and ANSWER on my personal web site at www.nathannewman.org/log/.

And the discussion on implementing the resolution was not about mounting a public campaign against some latter-day House UnAmerican Activities Committee, but about how to instruct and silence local National Lawyers Guild chapters and leaders to conform to the new ideological line.

Throwing the phrase “redbaiting” around works within the left like charges of “subversion” does within the right: it encourages people to fall into line for fear of being labeled disloyal and leads to suppression of dissent internally. And unfortunately, the national leaders of the Guild scurried to condemn “redbaiting,” while really endorsing the suppression of dissent— suppression which is what real historical redbaiting was all about.

Like the exclusion of Rabbi Michael Lerner from speaking at the Bay Area rally against war on Feb. 16 and other charges of “redbaiting” the WWP and ANSWER have leveled against their critics, this intervention of the Workers World Party into the National Lawyers Guild is part of a systematic campaign to silence those who criticize their politics and role in the antiwar movement.

This whole “red-baiting” defense of the role of the Workers World Party in ANSWER is itself a polemic used to avoid discussing the problems many leftists have with what’s been going on in the peace movement. Folks like myself are not critiquing the fact that large numbers of left groups are organizing to get people to these rallies or participating in them — they are criticizing a particular group, the Workers World Party, because its politics and allied regimes are as repugnant as the warmongering of the Bush administration, and the WWP’s methods are sectarian and exclusionary.

The Workers World Party does not represent some consensus of left values — it is an organization that hails the North Korean regime as a model of socialism, even as children starve there in favor of building weapons, an organization that praised the killings of students in the streets of Beijing back in 1989, and an organization that declares that no mass murders were committed by the Serbian regime of Milosevic.

And of course ANSWER is set up as a front group — the WWP established a national steering committee of either controlled organizations or small, closely allied groups in September 2001, and haven’t opened it up to larger national groups. Inviting major peace organizations onto the steering committee would be an obvious thing to do if this was a real national coalition, rather than a WWP-controlled front group, yet the steering committee is still restricted to mostly tiny, WWP-allied or controlled groups. Visit www.internationalanswer.org/endorsers.html for the list and the decided lack of major national peace groups on the steering committee.

Take the example of the Partnership for Justice, an NLG firm and legal counsel to WWP, whose lawyer-member made the proposal to suppress any criticism of the WWP and ANSWER within the Guild. If ANSWER is a real national coalition, why isn’t the National Lawyers Guild itself on the national steering committee of ANSWER, rather than one particular DC-based NLG law firm? Why? Because the WWP wanted only the closest allies of the WWP in leadership, not any group that might actually have a different opinion on how opposition to the war should be framed or how outreach should be organized.

Sure, the WWP invites other groups to endorse and participate in their rallies, but that’s a very different thing from creating a real coalition that is democratically controlled by mass movements. ANSWER is not a coalition. It is a sect-controlled organization, ie. a front group, that other groups are welcome to endorse or not in a take-it-or-leave it manner.

Some defend the WWP and ANSWER based on the need to defend their work in building rallies against the war. But as for the supposed WWP skill as organizers, many people were coming in large numbers to any rally in sight because they oppose the war — that is not the WWP’s or ANSWER’s doing, they were just managing the bandwagon. And I measure their organizing not by those numbers but by the even larger numbers, including many people I knew, who couldn’t bear to go to their events. Given the mass numbers of people against war in this country, the failure to get larger numbers early on is a real failure of the organizers.

New York City, as one example, saw the sectarian destruction of an initial broad-based antiwar coalition formed after Sept. 11. However, with a real democratic coalition, United for Peace and Justice, reconstituted recently, New York City exploded this past weekend with hundreds of thousands marching for peace, reflecting all the people who were against the war but had been reluctant to march as long as a sectarian group like WWP was designing outreach and running the show.

As for the threat to the movement of “divisive” public criticism, if lefties like David Corn and Todd Gitlin et al had not been criticizing the role of the WWP, the rightwing would be breathlessly “exposing” the nefarious role of “commies” in the movement. As it is, it was hard to accuse the people showing up at antiwar rallies of being puppets when they were fully informed and debating the issue. In that sense, I think this debate helped insulate antiwar activists from being accused of being “dupes” or other trash.

Honest debate does not weaken the movement. It in fact strengthens it by making dissenters feel comfortable participating even when they disagree with certain parts of what’s going on.

As for me personally, I’ve spent nineteen years doing progressive organizing of various kinds and have long experience working with the WWP occasionally and watching them mess up coalitions more often. And the WWP doesn’t build institutions that do the real day-to-day organizing work needed for progressive change. While rallies can be good for energizing people to do systematic political work, it is more effective when those doing rally organizing have a real plan for moving people into longer term organizing work. But this is where the core politics of the WWP – it’s really nasty identification with dictators and anti-democratic forces — makes them useless for building real democratic politics at the grassroots.

The history of the WWP is opportunistically jumping at the head of a crisis, building big rallies, then leaving nothing of significance over the longer term when the immediate crisis passes. Their history is littered with various “coalitions” — each controlled by them and built for a specific crisis — that essentially left nothing to build on afterwards.

All this while the Right has been systematically building broad-based, permanently mobilized networks for the last thirty years.

If the Left continually chooses short-term expediency by accepting leadership by opportunists like the WWP, they will continue to lose over the longer term. Remember, the WWP was in the leadership of one wing of the first anti-Gulf War mobilization. Yet here we are again on the march to war with Iraq — a testament to the ineffectiveness of the long-term organizing that came out of the WWP.

And I still can’t get away from the WWP politics — I wouldn’t care if they were the most effective organizers on earth given their repugnant views. The Nazis were also good organizers. The WWP to this day believes that the North Korea dictatorship is the model of how society should be run. They think killing students in the streets of Beijing during Tianemen was a good thing.

And they deny that women were raped and Bosnians killed in mass numbers at Srebrenica, making them little different from Holocaust deniers.

If the Left cannot build a movement based on an integrity in its politics and our associations, we will lose in the long term.

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