10-24-06, 9:08 am

A People’s History of Iraq: The Iraqi Communist Party, Workers’ Movements, and the Left 1924-2004 by Ilario Salucci Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005

All historians have an agenda. Sometimes the agenda is based on their sympathies towards a particular class; sometimes it is merely sectarian. The latter is the case with A People’s History of Iraq by Ilario Salucci.

A worthwhile read for its unique subject, Salucci’s tiny book (124 pages of text plus 50 pages of reprints of several political statements) mainly recounts the various positions of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) at key moments in Iraq’s history. From this perspective, readers will gain some insight into a portion of Iraqi history missing from most accounts of Iraqi society. Additionally, Salucci provides a chapter on the effect of the Saddam Hussein regime in transforming Iraq’s economic and political development from a non-capitalist economic orientation with pluralistic political potential in the 1970s to a neo-liberal (privatizing) capitalist economic system commanded by an authoritarian regime by the 1990s.

Clearly, the ICP has been a vital political force in Iraq’s history from the founding of the party to the present. Salucci’s work shows that the ICP’s willingness to grapple with the key issues of its day and to work along side other political forces for independence, democracy, workers’ rights and more put the ICP out front among Iraqi secular forces.

But Salucci isn’t content simply to recount events. Every step of the way, he overtly injects a critical perspective. While his point of view is sympathetic to radical politics, perhaps even has a socialist orientation, he clearly dislikes most of the positions adopted and actions taken by the ICP. Despite his extensive coverage of that party, he ultimately dismisses it as 'Stalinist' or as too closely following the mandates of the USSR, and then as compromising and even collaborationist.

Readers should be suspicious of history writing that claims to be objective, certainly. All historians incorporate their political views into the narratives they write, whether subtly by the selection of evidence and examples or by more overt means as does Salucci. But, sledge-hammering events into a narrow ideological outlook often has the effect of distorting history. This is the case with A People’s History of Iraq.

For example, Salucci’s sectarian approach has caused him to present an account that spends far more time criticizing the ICP than accomplishing the task suggested by his title. Salucci’s title is presumably intended as an allusion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, far and wide considered a superior narrative 'from below' by many historians of different political stripes. Unfortunately, Salucci’s ambitious goal falls far short.

A 'people’s history' of Zinn’s variety aims to accomplish two major things: to develop a critical perspective on the project of telling history and to provide accounts of activities of the subaltern majority: the working class, the racially and nationally oppressed, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, etc. The point is to shake official history at its foundations and to lend a voice to the agency of the exploited and oppressed. When done effectively, such accounts aren’t presented as a political guide to explaining what the working class, for example, should or should not have done, or adopting a tone that states or implies that this or that decision would have been better. There is a distinction between critical historiography and political commentary. Unfortunately, politics with a sectarian orientation seems to be the sole purpose of Salucci’s book. For this reason alone the book falls short as a 'people’s history'; but sectarian politics cause Salucci to present errors that fatally flaw it as adequate history. For example, one can find more space devoted to ultra-left organizations, which by Salucci’s own admission had little or no influence in Iraq except, at the most, as divisive forces, than to the activities and role of Iraq’s modern democratic labor movement.

In fact, Salucci neither mentions the Worker’s Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) and its successor organization the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU – now known as the General Federation of Iraqi Workers) by name nor discusses their activities. WDTUM was founded clandestinely in 1980 by communists and other labor activists after Saddam Hussein seized power and used the Ba’ath Party apparatus and secret police to expel and imprison the leftist leadership of Iraq’s trade union movement and turn it into a tool of control over Iraqi workers. WDTUM continued to organize workers, demand workers’ rights, protest human rights violations by the Iraqi government, and call for the unity of all patriotic Iraqis to overthrow the regime up to the current war, which it opposed. After the collapse of Saddam’s regime, the WDTUM reconstituted itself as the IFTU and proceeded to organize almost 300,000 workers in Iraq – in the midst of a brutal war and sectarian violence aimed partially at crippling Iraq’s economy and its secular democratic movement.

Presumably, Salucci would agree that this missing piece of the Iraqi trade union movement’s history is an important part of a people’s history of Iraq. Likewise, the activities of other democratic organizations with (or without) ties to or organized by the ICP – women’s and students’ groups and human rights organizations – would be significant components of a people’s history of Iraq as well. And don’t expect to learn anything about religious or ethnic complexities in Iraq either. Salucci simply neglects these issues. Instead, long quotes from ICP publications or party conference speeches (found mainly in secondary sources) are the preferable point of discussion.

At times, Salucci’s narrative appears simply to be extensive paraphrasing of other more scholarly portrayals of radical and leftist movement’s in Iraq, particularly Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Class and Revolutionary Movements of Iraq.

A more appropriate title for Salucci’s book might be 'A Critical Look at the Role of the ICP' or even, if one wanted to be sarcastic, 'Why the ICP was Usually Wrong.' Salucci’s general critique of the ICP is that it has developed a far too complex view of its own country’s political dynamics. Instead of saying simplistically that Iraq is a capitalist society that must be overthrown to establish socialism, the ICP has argued that because of Iraq's complexity there are stages of struggle that must be passed through in order to accomplish this ultimate goal. This complexity, Salucci seems to be saying, unfortunately led the ICP to emphasize the need to struggle for the unity of broad social forces – for independence, for national development, for overthrowing the dictatorship, and now again for national development – rather than a narrow struggle for socialism that few Iraqis would have accepted. In Salucci’s opinion, this broad view of Iraq’s social life appears to have resulted in too many decisions that compromised the party’s socialist principles.

Salucci even adopts a tortured position on a standard critique of most communist parties. He criticizes the ICP for making bad decisions that, in his view, appear to have been made solely as a matter of adhering to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. But within a breath of reading such an argument, one can read about the ICP’s faulty decision-making that conflicted with the USSR’s views. If your head isn’t spinning yet, just wait. Near the end of his commentary, Salucci admits that since the collapse of the USSR the ICP now determines its political orientation independently. But it’s decisions with respect to how to struggle against the current occupation of Iraq should be viewed as 'embarrassing' because political movements outside of Iraq and the ICP presumably know better the correct path the party should have adopted. In other words, if the ICP wants to get back on track being a real revolutionary movement again, its going to have to accept the political views of individuals, groups, and parties outside of its ranks and even outside of Iraq. In sum, if Salucci’s omniscient hindsight is accepted, the ICP failed to produce better results not because it – along with Iraq’s working and toiling classes – is buffeted by the contradictions and challenges of capitalism and imperialism that has divided and ruled Iraqi society and the Middle East, but because the party has failed to adhere to a static set of truly 'revolutionary' principles.

It is true: developing a strategy and tactics that are aimed at uniting broad social forces, as the ICP has attempted to do (and still does), presents a danger of diluting the purity of idealist versions of ideological principles. On the other hand, purity almost universally ensures divisiveness and isolation.

In the end, however, communist parties have always tended to view their roles to be as organizations deeply involved in the real life dynamics of the societies from which they spring. Mistakes are inevitable in the impure waters of real life. But the greatest mistake would be to reject actual involvement in the day-to-day struggles, side-by-side with the people communists claim to want to help lead. By contrast, ideologically pure, but socially isolated political groupings that say they are of the left simply cannot stake a claim to being communist, nor can they in any meaningful way claim to be part of a 'people’s history.' It is unfortunate that Salucci has adopted such a purist stance in this otherwise informative book.



--Reach Joel Wendland at