Public letter on Ivan Drury’s resignation from Fire This Time
February 1, 2008 · 11 Comments
February 3, 2008
An open letter to the left and progressive community
on Ivan Drury’s resignation from Fire This Time;
My name is Ivan Drury. I’m writing this letter to inform the left and progressive community that I have broken with Fire This Time, MAWO, and all other related groups. Through this letter I also hope to begin to stand accountable for the many irresponsible and destructive things I am responsible for having done when I was a member of these groups.
I have been an activist in Vancouver for more than ten years. In 2002-03 I helped to found the Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice. FTT formed out of an ugly split within the Anti-Poverty Committee. I also played a big part of this split and remained in FTT, Youth Third World Alliance (Y3WA), Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) and other related organizations* as an active member and organizer until the beginning of January last year. I resigned quietly in January 2007, but did not send an ‘official’ resignation letter until October 2007.
This letter has been a long time coming. For better or for worse, I’ve not been up to writing it and going public until now. If it is necessary to explain why it’s taken a year to write, I will just say that leaving FTT was very hard. Emotionally and personally, my experience in the group really messed me up.
There are three things I want to deal with in this letter. And I’ll keep it as short as possible:
1. Why I left FTT;
2. The Fire This Time and the damage done (an apology);
3. What I believe in now.
Over the last two months I have had some discussions with some people in the left about these general themes. While I have apologized to these individuals, I feel that there is a lot of ground left to cover. These apologies have really only been openings to a longer rectification process involving a lot of responsibility-taking and work.
I understand that even those who have never had a direct negative experience with me or with FTT have been negatively impacted by the lousy, sectarian, and confrontational atmosphere kicked up by FTT groups. If you feel that you are owed more than a general apology from me and feel that I should (or have neglected to) contact you directly; I am probably planning to and am just working up the nerve. If you want to, please feel free to contact me:
[email protected]
This letter is meant for the broad left-progressive community. There is one additional group that I’d like to speak to that is sadly separate from this community: the remaining members of FTT/Y3WA. However, this group has been forbidden by the leadership (ie. by Ali Yerevani) from speaking to or even receiving emails from me. This letter, as well as another letter directed specifically to them is posted here: http://ivandrury.wordpress.com
WHY I LEFT FTT
In January 2007 I did not have a clear or well reasoned idea of my differences with FTT. A great deal of doubt had been building in me for a long time. I had gotten used to suppressing such doubts as part of the general emotional shut-down that I had performed for the four years I’d been a member of FTT. It took me by surprise when these doubts grew to such a weight that I could not think of anything else.
The main doubt that plagued me was at the foundation of FTT. The principal analysis of FTT is that the entire left in Canada is hopelessly corrupt (the “Status Quo Left” – “SQL”). For me, this analysis made sense based on my frustrations with my experiences up to that point in the activist scene. From my feeling that the activist community was too insular and too much of it self-satisfied, I was able to draw conclusions that I now see as bitterly sectarian. FTT took an extreme view of this “Status Quo” view of the left and reduced the entire left to a homogenous entity identified through the ‘unprincipled unity’ of mutually fulfilling self-interest. Taking a broader historical view of the left today, within a very low point of class and social struggle overall in Canada, these signs of what FTT called the “SQL” seem both inevitable and temporary.
The reductive “Status Quo Left” analysis led to the basic organizational program of FTT: to form a new revolutionary leadership capable of taking over and leading the inevitable revolutionary upsurge in Canada and thereby save it from the corruption of the “SQL”. From this program flowed an endless string of justifications on the part of FTT – from ultra-centralist, abusive internal dynamics to petty disrespectful conduct towards other leftists, to profoundly sectarian sabotage acts. For approximately six months leading up to my initial resignation, I felt that these acts and their justifications were fundamentally wrong. I felt that it was not working and would not work. I lost faith in FTT. And I left when I realized that the group could not be reformed.
With time and space from the group I realized how deeply my differences run – and how massive was the four-year long mistake I had made.
I came to understand that the basic program of FTT is sectarian. That the group itself is sectarian. FTT has never involved itself in a coalition or founded a committee or worked on a project or written an article or taken on a campaign or done anything for any reason other than for the purpose of cadre building. The construction of a ‘pure revolutionary cadre’ has stood above all other purposes as the driving motivation of FTT.
It is a group that has taken an exceptional view of itself. Regardless of the state of class or social struggle, regardless of the level of organization of the left or of the forces of oppressed people FTT stands exceptional as the ‘one-true revolutionary group’. The philosophy of the group is that an individual must be ‘exceptional’ to be a member of this group, to be a ‘true revolutionary’ in a time and place ‘like this’. If the group is the revolutionary exception, and if the members are all the revolutionary exception then surely they stand as exception to all the rest of the left. Thus, you are with us or against us. Thus, one rule applies for what is done to Us and another for what We do to our Opponents (especially in the radical left). Every single principle that is traditional or expected of the left (or, hell, of a decent person) has been systematically sacrificed in order to build the cadre under the umbrella of exceptionalism.
The rationale of exceptionalism is deeply reductionist. It glosses over the multi-faceted complications and complexities that make up the politics of society and the left and pretends that one group can voluntaristically ‘fix’ these problems simply through the will of a ‘small determined group’ with a ‘correct political program’. This reductionism is visible in even the most basic political lines of FTT. From opposing the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan through the slogan: ‘all the people of ____ demand: OCCUPIERS OUT!’, to approaching Cuba as model society with a model democracy where everyone is happy, to the question of the defense of John Graham against extradition, this reductionism appears again and again in FTT’s practices. The question of John Graham’s defense is a significant example. Only an isolated sect could overlook the broad political principle of not allowing a colonial state to extradite an Indigenous man and political organizer to another colonial state to face a necessarily unjust trial because of ‘working class principles’ against ‘violence in the movement’. I won’t attempt to go into the details of this case or incident: I had already resigned from the group when it was decided to bring Robert Robideau for a tour. But I will point out that the trial Graham is now awaiting in the US has already been conducted (without even the most basic legal rights) by FTT. Is this the job of a revolutionary group? To hold court over oppressed people?
However, while there are sectarian ‘vanguard’ groups all over the world, there is something particularly problematic with FTT. FTT is the production of the vision of one man: Ali Yerevani. He did a one-man entry into the Anti-Poverty Committee (as he had in numerous groups before) with the purpose of dragging out with him some recruits for his own ‘vanguard’ group. Unfortunately, I was among those who left with him.
Since APC I watched Yerevani (and helped him) employ the same tactics in every group or coalition we were (allowed to be) members of. The same stood for student groups, like the Social Justice Centre at UBC. While recruiting, Yerevani would use his charm and charisma to make young people, and predominately young women, feel important and exceptional. However, this sense of exceptionalism came with the steep price of complete devotion to Yerevani. Impatient for his cadre to develop into ‘professional revolutionaries’ he drove these recruits’ political development in his image with a constant one-two of Yerevani-dependent confidence building and Yerevani-dependent ‘ego-smashing’. When a potential conflict arose in a left-progressive coalition or group he would do everything in his power to escalate the situation into a ‘principled’ showdown. If he came out of such fights with new recruits ‘steeled’ in battle; then it was a success.
Hence:
The APC split? A success, it was where the initial FTT cadre came from!
The Stopwar.ca expulsion? A success, it was where the expanded Y3WA cadre was ‘consolidated’!
That these recruits were more and more dependent on Yerevani’s political leadership with every passing conflict and factional fight did not bother him. Yerevani considers this dependency, above all, the sign of what he calls an “advanced element”. He even rationalizes his authority by citing the lineage of his revolutionary ideas back to Lenin, evoking the tired claims of being the one-true-inheritor of the Bolshevik legacy. Yerevani enforces the idea in the group that rebellion against him is egotistical, and a sign of ‘petit-bourgeois tendencies’.
Inside the group Yerevani is a tyrant who tolerates zero dissent to his absolute control. “Discussions” in meetings consist of two or three hour lectures from Yerevani. “Democratic centralism” means agreeing with and enforcing his often arbitrary and mood swinging political rulings on the fly. “Organizational norms” mean constant phone contact with him to receive constant marching orders on everything from speakers’ lists and the admission of ‘opponents’ to events, to which button to wear on which side of your coat. No joke. These “norms” also address every aspect of personal life, like how to hang car keys, what clothes women members are allowed to wear, how to invite someone to coffee, how to flush a toilet. Yerevani actually (shortly before I left) forced every member of Y3WA to sign up on a schedule to clean the bathroom in his house every day for a month because someone had clogged the toilet! (OK, I’m ranting now.)
However, I am not saying that the members of FTT/Y3WA do not have agency. They all choose to remain where they are. They are all accountable and responsible for what they are part of. FTT does function like a cult, but it is still made up of a group of young people who voluntarily contribute their time, money, and effort completely to the group – just as I did as a founding and leading member for four years. There are problems with dismissing FTT as a “cult”. This designation denies the role of the young people who are the activist workers of the group. Regardless of the negative impact of this group, it is not a universally negative group. The members of this group have committed themselves completely to work that they believe to be revolutionary and have done important work in forcing discussions on campuses and in some communities about issues of war, social and class struggle, and internationalist solidarity. Merely dismissing their work as simply the machinations of a cult is unfair, and it further isolates the group, closing even more the psychological hold that Yerevani lords over the rest of the membership. In other words: if it’s not a cult now, the continued stigmatizing of FTT by other left groups is only going to help bring FTT members into an increasingly vulnerable and dangerous situation.
However, on the other side of the coin is the qualification that many supporters of FTT or MAWO or VCSC have made: if the group is so bad, why are they so active? They’re the most active group in the city! And they’re attracting so many new activists and young people!
I held many of these justifications throughout my membership in FTT. The breakthrough I reached, shortly before I resigned, can be summarized as follows:
1) FTT’s hyper-activity is for the purpose of ‘cadre building’ and not for the sake of anti-imperialist or pro-Cuba education work.
2) FTT’s ‘cadre building’ is done outside of and exclusive to the dynamics of class and social movement in Vancouver, so non-FTT/Y3WA people lose the opportunity to learn from their own experiences and actions. Instead they are fed ready-made actions and lines.
3) FTT’s energy is directed in these actions only at those who are deemed ‘recruitable’ or otherwise imagined to be of service to the group.
4) FTT’s actions take up space that might otherwise be filled by the organic self-action of oppressed people (rather than this small group of wannabe ‘professional revolutionaries’)
5) Thus the group has stolen a new generation of young activists out of more authentic, spontaneous, organically occurring movements and brought them into this ‘exceptional’ state. Here, they are cut off from the dynamics of society to be burned out through such hyper-activity or (in select cases) to be permanently recruited into Yerevani’s sub-universe. Therefore, they are unable to play the important roles of instigators and counterweights to older and more conservative activists in coalitions such as StopWar.ca. FTT is not building ‘revolutionary fighters’, it is building a ‘good cadre’. What exactly that means can be left to Yerevani’s therapist. Mine thinks it sounds like the construction of automatons.
A focus on cadre building to the exclusion of movement building was rationalized in the days when “small vanguard party/group” meant one had a membership of 100,000 (like the Communist Party of America in the 1930’s) or 10,000 (like the Socialist Workers Party around the same time). Extending this same rationale to a group holding steady at around fifteen members in one city in one country is absolutely absurd and unforgiveable.
There is no easy answer to the question of whether FTT should be isolated or not, as has been called for by some people in the left. If other left groups completely isolate FTT then the walls of their little nightmare world close tighter. But it must also be acknowledged that if they are allowed to participate in some actions or coalitions, their presence can be incredibly destructive. I believe that, as much as possible, these two dynamics should be assessed and balanced out on a case by case basis.
