On Opportunism Within Workers World Party and the Partition of Syria

Reprinted from INTERNATIONALIST DISPATCH
https://internationalistdispatch.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/on-opportunism-within-workers-world-party-and-the-partition-of-syria/

I am adapting a thread I made on twitter to describe a struggle over the partition of Syria that I and others within the former Detroit branch of Workers World Party engaged in with the national editorial leadership last year. As of July 15th, the Detroit branch of the party elected to resign en masse from Workers World Party due to the intractable opportunism and liberalism exhibited by the party. The full resignation statement can be found in the following post.

In this article I will address information regarding the internal ideological struggle in Workers World Party surrounding the role of the YPG/SDF as imperialist mercenary armies working toward the partition of Syria. When I began the process of joining WWP Detroit about a year and a half ago, I was highly aware of the criticisms of many on here, especially those concerning Taryn Fivek’s propaganda about Syria and her public friendship with Brace Belden (f/k/a @PissPigGrandDad on twitter), a “punk florist” who is in reality a  tech industry heir and member of a fascist, Israeli-themed band who went to fight in Syria with the YPG and publicly boasted of calling in airstrikes from US armed forces. From the start I and others in Detroit felt a need to publicly rebuke our implicit support for the US/YPG partition of Syria. The only legitimate avenue for that was through the newspaper and website.

Beginning in March or April, I and several others in Detroit and the Midwest collaborated on an article to condemn the role of the YPG as imperialist collaborators and to bring attention to this front in the proxy war virtually blacked-out in anglophone party media. I proposed an article to the editorial board with the support of Detroit leadership and over the next few two months I had an editorial struggle with editors in NYC, primarily John Catalinotto. J. Catalinotto’s role was to disabuse me of this view and to steer me away from any condemnatory language, explicitly encouraging me write the article “as if I was explaining it to a Kurdish friend.”

Through the edits, J. Catalinotto and other NYC editors made various additions that totally blunted the edge of the article and made it essentially a propaganda piece for “Kurdish national liberation” in Syria, again supporting the partition and delegitimizing the very legitimacy of Syria as a sovereign, multiethnic nation-state. I regret to say that after this editorial struggle that it still felt important to me to have at least SOMETHING go up so the article was published. This piece can be found here. (https://www.workers.org/2017/05/22/syria-the-kurds-and-u-s-divide-and-conquer/amp/)

I published it under a pseudonym and saw many responses to it online, some harsher than others, but recognized that it was all that could be done in the framework of the party and deferred to our attempts at centralizing the party to gain a position to push our line on this. I regret that I was not able to publish an article rightly denouncing the YPG and SDF as imperialist, Zionist running dogs and that I was complicit in maintaining anything to the contrary via the WWP newspaper and site.

Another notable question: why was the article taken down? For background, I had pushed firmly to include Brace Belden’s role in the article both to have a public record that would prevent T. Fivek from claiming that her friendship with him was legitimate and to counter the disinformation about Belden in the press. J. Catalinotto took out the most condemnatory language but still allowed me to call him a mercenary. However, within 12 hours of the article being posted, it was unilaterally taken down. It was J. Catalinotto who did it and I believe it to have been done at T. Fivek’s behest.

The editors and leaders in Detroit and I then got calls from him urging us to TAKE OUT the language on Belden or else he wouldn’t put it back up. It was a brazen breach of party discipline, as the responsibility for the article should have rested with the managing editor (who is a Detroit leader and who I will not name here). We adamantly refused and said that the article must be put back up as it stood, otherwise it would have been a blatant defense of Belden given the attention the article and its retraction has received. From that point on I followed and learned from criticisms of the article, both the content that the NYC editorial staff included and that of mine as well.

Not much happened internally after that other than support from my local leadership for having waged the struggle. I also got messages from T. Fivek asking for my original draft, which I didn’t answer. In conclusion, I believe that Workers World Party supports the partition of Syria under the cover of “Kurdish national liberation.” I’m not sure if this is due to T. Fivek’s infiltration but many leading intellectuals in WWP NYC support this line as well, in particular J. Catalinotto.

To the extent that WWP had any correct analysis of Syria it was due to the insight and efforts of comrades in Detroit. All I will say otherwise is that I and the former Detroit branch of WWP denounce the imperialist, Zionist partition of Syria via the YPG and SDF and that there were attempts to silence us by party leadership a year ago. Please feel free to ask me any other questions.