Most countries of the Middle East and the Global South operating under authoritarian regimes share a single structural crisis, one whose substance is the acute and chronic fragmentation and weakness that afflicts mass organisations, trade unions, feminist movements and student bodies, extending further to undermine coordination among the forces of the left themselves. This is not a purely Iraqi predicament; it is a recurring phenomenon in comparable contexts, one that finds in the Iraqi experience its most transparent expression.

Authoritarian regimes generated oppressive conditions that pushed the forces of the left to adopt tightly centralised organisational forms under the weight of repression and persecution, producing an approach built on constructing clandestine and sometimes semi-public trade unions and mass organisations closely bound to political formations, at the expense of their independence and their capacity to embrace broader social constituencies.

Fairness demands acknowledgement that this approach was not mistaken in all circumstances; it played a pivotal and undeniable role in specific historical phases, when organisational centralisation was a necessity imposed by the repressive reality. Yet time has changed fundamentally in the era of the digital revolution.

The masses today, and especially the new generations raised on a culture of instant access to information, horizontal organising and direct participation in decision-making, are no longer willing to serve as material for mobilisation in the service of a predetermined party agenda. It is for this reason that the present paper seeks to open a serious debate around the revision of the model of the affiliated union and the loyalist mass organisation, and to explore an alternative model.

From Organic Affiliation to Independence

After 2003, most left-wing formations were keen to maintain and establish their own unions, federations and organisations, giving rise to a mass landscape characterised by dispersed energies, a proliferation of names and a dwindling of actual effectiveness.

A union bound to a particular organisation finds genuine difficulty in embracing manual and intellectual workers in all their intellectual, ethnic and religious diversity. A feminist organisation tied to a specific party finds difficulty in attracting women from different political backgrounds. A student union gradually transforms into an arena for inter-party manoeuvring.

A personal experience I lived through in the summer of 1992 reveals the depth of this predicament, when we gathered with comrades from the left and the unemployed to build a union for the unemployed in the Kurdistan Region. Some comrades proposed a statement saturated with ideological language, and I disagreed with them, arguing that what we were striving for was the construction of a union for all the unemployed, of every persuasion and orientation. That fundamental question, raised in the summer of 1992, remains at the heart of the very predicament we are discussing today.

The Weakness of Coordination and Its Repercussions

There is a painful paradox worthy of reflection: the left raises the slogan of unity among the labouring masses, yet this organisational approach has inadvertently led to the dispersal of efforts and the weakening of the trade union and mass movement on the ground.

The mass fragmentation we observe in the union landscape reflects in part a prior political fragmentation, manifested in the multiplicity of left-wing formations and the divergence of their positions, a divergence that is natural and legitimate in itself, since the complex Iraqi, regional and global situation accommodates different left-wing interpretations.

Yet when this divergence transforms into conflict and resentment that weakens joint work, it casts its heavy shadow over the entire mass arena and redirects the left’s energies away from building popular strength toward squandering them in internal battles that serve no one but the enemies of change.

The absence of coordination has also produced a pattern of competition within the same mass circle rather than expansion toward new social constituencies. The mass map has remained limited in scope despite the multiplicity of organisations, because this multiplicity did not always lead to a division of labour and an address to different segments of society; rather, it led to overlap and repetition within the same territory.

Lessons from Effective Union Experiences

Historical experience reveals that effective independent progressive unions were a pivotal factor in social and political change, and that their strength derived from their rootedness in their working-class base rather than from their affiliation with one party or another.

In Tunisia, the Tunisian General Labour Union played a pivotal role in the overthrow of the dictatorship in 2011. In South Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Unions demonstrated that a strong independent union can serve as a front for the defence of labour rights without dissolving into any party.

In Brazil, an independent union movement developed and gave rise to the Workers’ Party, which reached power. In Denmark, left-wing parties work within existing independent unions, acquiring deeper social influence.

Structural Challenges

To the foregoing must be added deeper structural challenges, most prominent among them the rentier nature of the Iraqi economy. Oil accounts for approximately 90 percent of general budget revenues, making the majority of workers government employees bound to the state by a relationship of direct dependence that constrains the margin for their independent organisation. This was clearly evident during the October 2019 protests, when unions were unable to convert the momentum of the street into organised strikes.

Added to this is the role of some international donor bodies in reinforcing models of civil society that marginalise progressive trade unions, along with the reinforcement of the phenomenon of personalisation, which makes the continuity of an organisation hostage to particular individuals.

Towards a Renewed Popular Left

The absence of strong and independent unions and organisations has weakened the left in ways that go beyond what is visible, as it found itself in a painful organisational vacuum when decisive moments of protest arrived.

The digital revolution has redrawn the map of power and influence, and protest movements have revealed that flexible horizontal organising is capable of generating vast mobilising energy that structures of excessive centralisation are unable to produce.

The path to genuine unity passes through two complementary tracks. The first is collective participation in building independent and strong progressive trade unions and mass organisations that bring everyone together regardless of their intellectual, ethnic, religious or party affiliations. The second is coordination and joint work at the political level through diverse alliance frameworks as gradual steps toward building a broad and unified progressive left framework.

The true strength of the left lies not only in its intellectual propositions, but in its capacity to build independent progressive institutions rooted in the daily lives of the people, and to transform their social energies into a genuine force for change that opens the road toward the democratic socialist alternative.Email