Markin comment:
Some days it’s hard being a communist. Or, for that matter, a garden variety socialist, wild-eyed radical, weepy-eyed left liberal or a just flat-out plain vanilla “conscious” anti-imperialist. The only ones who can rejoice on those occasions are the usual line-up of abject pro-imperialist spokesmen, of one hue or another. Hell, let’s call a thing by its right name imperialist lapdogs. And what has drawn my ire, my communist ire, this day. Well, a little exchange on the Letters to the Editor page of
Workers Vanguard between that paper and one Daniel Lazare, a writer of some sort for the left-liberal
Nation magazine, over the question of support to the “rebel” side in the Libyan civil war prior to March 19, 2011, a war that has now expanded into a full-blown American-led imperialist intervention, complete with bombs advisers, drones, and, and… collateral damage. The now familiar face, too familiar face, of geared-up imperialist war.
What got Mr. Lazare’s goat was an article in the March 18th issue of
Workers Vanguard (Number 976) entitled “Imperialists Hands Off Libya” noting at that time that the proper course for communists, socialists of whatever variety, radicals whatever the condition of their eyes, ditto left-liberals, and anti-imperialist of whatever flavor that the developing civil war in Libya between long-time mad man leader of the country, Qaddafi ( I will use that spelling, the spelling of the exchange, although, truth to tell I have seen at least seven variations of the spelling of his name in the prints) and the “rebel” opposition of former henchmen (who backed even rotten thing the boss did until things got too hot, monarchists and assorted other political, tribal and religious factions was “revolutionary defeatist" on both sides.
Now this policy of revolutionary defeatism has a long, if abused, history in the international workers movement. Its most famous expression was the policy of the Russian Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914 among the imperialist powers in Europe where he declared, under traditional Marxist principles, that the international working class, and its then fighting various national components, has no interest in the victory of one imperialist power over another. Not as an abstract proposition but as a fighting propaganda slogan in order to advance the interests of the class struggle, the struggle for socialism. Those too were hard days for communists as the traditional leaders of the Socialist (Second) International capitulated to their own bourgeoisies against the interest of their own working class’ struggles.
And that was really the point then, and the point in Libya now. How does the support of any social struggle by reds, or progressives for that matter, help or hinder the advance toward socialism. For socialist purposes as well as just plain political "smarts" about the composition of the "rebel" forces which were, and are, murky to say the least that policy was correct at the time. That position changed, as noted by the International Communist League (see “Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack”,
WV Number 977, dated April 1, 2011) in a statement issued the day after the American-led NATO forces started dropping the bombs on Tripoli. At that point communists, socialists, radicals, left-liberals, and especially those vaunted anti-imperialists, who have this little habit of getting a little wobbly when the bombs start dropping and the patriotic furor in their own countries gets heated up, should have been crying to high heaven against these imperialist atrocities against Libya. And calling for the military defense of semi-colonial Libya. While holding one's nose, if necessary, but doing so while giving no political support to mad am Qaddafi.
The staff at the Nation, or at least Mr. Lazare, rather than planning another conference ocean cruise to nowhere on the plight of contemporary liberalism as endlessly advertised in the
New York Review of Books, should have been busy getting out the paint and poster paper to put forth slogans to oppose those imperialist actions. Instead he leaves, as liberals, even left-liberals are inclined to do, the question up in the air. Even when his beloved “rebels” acted as ground troops for the imperialist advance. Cheer- leading ground troops to be more exact. Obviously this is not a question that disturbs the sleep of imperialist apologists like the
Nation’s Mr. Lazare since they, and their ilk, have no interest in advancing the socialist agenda. Yes, these are hard days for communists but at least we know when, and with whom, to stand up for against the “monster” here in the “belly of the beast.”
Note: The
Nation magazine has a long, if checkered history, as a voice, if not the voice of left-liberalism in the United States. I note that the
Nation did yeoman’s, no beyond yeoman’s service, in defense of Northern side in the American Civil War. But I also note that they were more than willing to act as fellow-travelers, fair-weather fellow-travelers to be sure, in the 1930s when Joseph Stalin put the old Bolsheviks (and many, many others) up against the wall in the Moscow Trials. So that publication is not immune to the siren call of misinformation and disinformation, willful or otherwise.
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Workers Vanguard No. 979
29 April 2011
On the Libyan Opposition
(Letter)
21 March
To the editor:
Apropos of the Libyan civil war, you declare in the latest issue of Workers Vanguard that “Marxists presently have no side in this conflict.” This is absurd. The civil war began with a mass civil uprising that the Qaddafi regime brutally crushed in Tripoli and then moved to extirpate in other cities as well. Are you neutral when unarmed protesters are shot down in the streets? Do you take no side when the most elementary democratic rights are violated? In your statement on the US, UK, and French intervention, you refer to the Benghazi opposition as a “cabal of pro-imperialist ‘democrats,’ CIA stooges, monarchists, and Islamists.” What about the thousands of ordinary workers fighting for their lives against the nationalist regime? Are they less worthy of support than the Egyptian, Yemeni, or Bahraini masses? This is a travesty of Marxism. You people have really lost your way.
Daniel Lazare
WV replies:
What began as an uprising against the bonapartist bourgeois regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi quickly turned into a civil war between the Tripoli-centered government and an imperialist-backed opposition in the eastern areas, heavily overlaid by tribal and regional divisions. For Marxists, the question of extending military support in civil wars and other conflicts is determined by whether the victory of one side or the other would further the cause of the working class and the oppressed. As we explained at the time in “Imperialists Hands Off Libya!” (WV No. 976, 18 March), from this class standpoint neither the Qaddafi regime nor the Benghazi-based opposition—a motley crew of former officials of the Qaddafi regime, monarchists, Islamists and tribal leaders who early on appealed for imperialist intervention—merited support. But, as the article noted, the world proletariat would have a side in opposing any intervention into Libya by the imperialists.
Indeed, immediately after NATO forces began their attack on Libya, the International Communist League declared in a March 20 statement: “The civil war in Libya has now been subordinated to the fight of a neocolonial country against imperialism” (“Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack,” WV No. 977, 1 April). In this war, it is the duty of Marxists to stand for the military defense of Libya against imperialism and the opposition forces that are acting as the imperialists’ ground troops, while not giving Qaddafi an ounce of political support. Daniel Lazare, who writes for the Nation and other publications, does not say where he stands on the imperialist war against Libya.
The ICL statement continued: “Every step taken by the workers of the imperialist countries to halt the depredations and military adventures of their rulers is a step toward their own liberation from capitalist exploitation, impoverishment and oppression.” We also note that militant opposition to imperialist intervention is a prerequisite for the working class in Egypt, Tunisia and throughout North Africa and the Near East to emerge as a revolutionary force under its own class banner.
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In the interest of completeness I have placed both articles from Workers Vanguard mentioned in my comment above here for the readers inspection.
Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011
Imperialists Hands Off Libya!
MARCH 15—The opposition in Libya to the decades-long rule of bourgeois strongman Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi appears to have taken the form, for now, of a low-intensity civil war, heavily overlaid by tribal and regional divisions, between the Tripoli-centered government and imperialist-backed opposition forces concentrated in the country’s eastern areas. Leadership of the anti-Qaddafi opposition includes Islamists, tribal leaders, former generals of Qaddafi’s army and former officials of his blood-soaked regime. Much of Libya’s diplomatic corps has defected to the opposition. Marxists presently have no side in this conflict, which is essentially a struggle to decide who will control the country’s immense oil and gas wealth while lording it over the exploited and oppressed masses.
The world proletariat does have a side, however, in opposing any intervention into Libya by the imperialists, who are backing the anti-Qaddafi forces. In the U.S., those beating the drums for imposing a “no-fly zone” over Libya span the gamut from Republican John McCain to Democrats Bill Clinton and John Kerry. If implemented, that would mean a direct military assault against Libya’s air force and air defenses. Washington has positioned a pair of amphibious assault vessels off the Libyan coast, reportedly to be joined by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, while the United Nations Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Libya and tens of billions in Libyan assets held in foreign banks have been frozen. As Marxist opponents of the capitalist-imperialist order, we oppose all imperialist sanctions against the Qaddafi regime. In the event of imperialist attack against neocolonial Libya, the proletariat internationally must stand for the military defense of that country while giving no political support to Qaddafi’s capitalist regime.
Particularly given the turmoil in North Africa and the Near East, the imperialists are somewhat between a rock and a hard place when dealing with Libya under Qaddafi, whose forces have been turning back the rebels. While insisting that “all options are on the table,” the Obama administration has shied away from being drawn into a possible quagmire in Libya when U.S. imperialism’s military forces are already stretched thin by their murderous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy has officially declared the opposition National Council, based in the eastern city of Benghazi, to be Libya’s “legitimate” government. The Arab League joined the Near East’s erstwhile colonial masters, Great Britain and France, in calling for imposing a “no-fly zone” over Libya. Britain’s cause was not exactly helped by Tory prime minister David Cameron’s Monty Python moment, when a Special Air Service mission to contact the Libyan opposition ended in debacle, with the rebels detaining the delegation and promptly dispatching it from the country. At a meeting of the G8 in Paris today, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle put cold water on talk of a “no-fly zone,” declaring that Germany did not want to “get sucked into a war in north Africa” (London Guardian, 15 March).
Just as the New York Times retailed the Bush administrations’ lies of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion, the bourgeois media quickly took on the role of press agents for the anti-Qaddafi opposition, making “facts” fit the imperialists’ agenda. Gruesome stories put out by the opposition about Qaddafi’s fighter jets deliberately bombing civilians were widely reported as fact. Virtually unreported was the March 2 admission by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that “we’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever” of those accounts. Meanwhile, the media has delicately refrained from going into the sordid pasts of the former Qaddafi loyalists in the leadership of the opposition forces in Benghazi. That rogue’s gallery includes Qaddafi’s former “justice” minister, as well as his former interior minister and head of the special forces. Of four former generals who have gone over to the opposition, two had been at Qaddafi’s side since he took power 42 years ago!
There is no doubt that Qaddafi is a butcher of his “own” citizens. This is also the case with the many kings, sheiks and colonels who have benefited from U.S. military aid. After America’s puppet regime in Iraq killed at least 29 people demonstrating for jobs and services on February 25, a U.S. military spokesman lauded the Iraqi forces’ “response” to the protest as “professional and restrained.” The military intervention by U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia in support of the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain demonstrates that, in the eyes of the U.S. imperialists, Bahrain’s Shi’ite majority is less than human, with no rights they are bound to respect. In recent years, the Libyan government has actively collaborated in the imperialists’ “war on terror” and introduced neoliberal privatization schemes. The imperialists are now shedding crocodile tears about the death toll in Libya only because they have not always enjoyed such civil relations with Qaddafi’s regime.
Not least of the crimes of the Qaddafi regime has been its racist treatment of black African migrant workers, who are subjected to arbitrary arrest and deportation—and at times outright pogromist attacks—while being used as scapegoats for unemployment and other ills. Currently, workers from sub-Saharan Africa are being set upon by both pro- and anti-Qaddafi forces, the latter of which often accuse them of being mercenaries for the regime. Over 100 black African migrants are feared dead and thousands are in hiding or seeking to flee the country.
As revolutionary Marxists, we have always staunchly opposed Qaddafi’s brutal rule while standing for military defense of Libya against imperialist attack. In March 1986, the international Spartacist tendency (precursor to the International Communist League) sent a journalistic team to Tripoli as U.S. warships and planes were attacking Libyan forces in and around the Gulf of Sidra. Our purpose, as we wrote in a telegram to the Libyan government, was to express our support for the “just cause of Libyan independence and territorial integrity.” Within days of our delegation’s visit, President Ronald Reagan launched bombing raids on Tripoli and Benghazi, killing scores of civilians. One of the victims was Qaddafi’s infant daughter, who was killed when his compound was targeted. For the Cold Warriors of the Reagan administration, a primary “crime” of the Qaddafi regime was that it was a military client of the Soviet Union.
Our team reported from Tripoli: “The memory of bloody imperialist rampage and spoliation is burned into the Libyan masses” (see “Under Reagan’s Guns in Libya: Report from Tripoli,” WV No. 401, 11 April 1986). Our reporters made the point that the Turko-Italian war of 1911, in which thousands of Arabs were butchered, was a barbaric conflict over the possession of what would become Libya. For the first time in a war, airplanes were used against a population whose most advanced form of military transport was camels. It was, as Lenin called it, “a perfected, civilised bloodbath, the massacre of Arabs with the help of the ‘latest’ weapons” (“The End of the Italo-Turkish War,” 28 September 1912). That conflict set off a 20-year resistance struggle, centered in the east, against the Italian imperialists. Italian forces dropped poison gas bombs on civilians and imprisoned more than 100,000 in concentration camps, where up to 70,000 people—nearly half the population of Cyrenaica
—died of disease and starvation.
During World War II, both Axis and Allied troops ravaged the country and its people. Following the war, the imperialists created an independent Libya by joining together three distinct regions: Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the west and Fezzan in the south. Italian rule was replaced with a British-imposed monarchy. It is the flag of that pre-Qaddafi regime that is prominently displayed today by opposition forces.
Those imperialist-backed forces have the willing and avid support of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which at the outset of the conflict embraced the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, an outfit founded in the early 1980s with start-up capital supplied by the CIA and the Saudi royal family. Presenting Qaddafi as someone with whom the imperialists feel “they can do business,” the ISO ludicrously lauded the National Front as “less likely to be so pliable” (Socialist Worker, 24 February). Day after day, representatives of opposition forces parleyed with U.S. and European officials and issued pleas for the imperialists to impose a “no-fly zone,” launch air strikes, arm the rebels or otherwise intervene militarily in Libya. Utterly exposed, the ISO tried to backtrack, declaring in Socialist Worker (9 March): “The CIA-backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya is an unsurprising advocate of U.S. action.”
Equally unsurprising is the fact that the ISO lined up with the imperialists against Qaddafi’s bourgeois regime. From supporting the CIA-backed, woman-hating, anti-Soviet mujahedin forces in Afghanistan and cheering the destruction of the USSR to lending its voice to the imperialist chorus against the deformed workers states of China and North Korea, the ISO, born of social-democratic anti-Communism, has always been squarely in the camp of “democratic” imperialism.
Writing in Socialist Worker (28 February), Todd Chretien derides the Workers World Party (WWP) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) for refusing “to take a stand with the Libyan people against a dictator.” While opposing imperialist intervention in Libya, the WWP and PSL are mainly driven by their longstanding political support for any and all forces in Third World countries that make a pretense of being “anti-imperialist.” This has included everyone from bourgeois-nationalist rulers like Qaddafi and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez—who along with Cuba’s Fidel Castro is supporting Qaddafi in the current conflict—to reactionary Islamists like Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and Hamas in Gaza.
Workers World (12 March) goes so far as to praise “Libya’s record on human rights,” citing a section of a January 4 UN report that summarized the testimony of the Libyan delegation! The PSL, for its part, is disappointed in how yesterday’s “anti-imperialist” Qaddafi has turned out. Liberation (24 February) refuses to characterize his bonapartist regime as capitalist, complaining only that the government “included bourgeois forces” that were strengthened “over time.”
Lastly, mention should be made of David North’s Socialist Equality Party (SEP), best known as the “World Socialist Web Site,” whose propaganda today appears rather critical of Qaddafi and states opposition to imperialist military intervention. We urge any readers who take the SEP’s “Marxism” for good coin to take a closer look at these political bandits, who comprise a special category in the annals of renegades from Trotskyism.
The SEP self-servingly disappears its history as participants in the squalid pro-Qaddafi machinations carried out by the dominant party in its “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC), the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain led by one Gerry Healy. After years of hailing the mythical “Arab Revolution,” Healy’s IC openly championed blood-drenched bourgeois regimes like Qaddafi’s. Healy’s embrace of Qaddafi coincided with the reappearance of a Healyite daily paper, News Line, in England in May 1976, two months after his previous daily, Workers Press, had folded. In “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi” (WV No. 158, 20 May 1977), we noted of Qaddafi’s Libya, “where communists are to be jailed and butchered and their books burned, ostensible leftists would have to do some pretty peculiar things to survive—and News Line has made it clear the WRP would be more than willing to do them.” The Healyites went on to hail the murder of Iraqi Communist Party members by Saddam Hussein in 1979.
As we wrote in “Healyism Implodes” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86): “It has been perfectly clear for some time that the Healy/Banda organization has been a captive creature of despotic ‘Third World’ capitalist regimes which have the blood of the workers and peasants on their hands.” This was a logical application of the WRP’s adulation for “anti-imperialist” Arab rulers combined with its vicious anti-Sovietism. The Spartacist article noted: “Once you discard the struggle for the building of Leninist parties to lead the working class in the liberation of mankind, and take off in search of get-rich-quick schemes, you will end up in a despicable place—if not a Healy, perhaps the more ordinary kind of scoundrel voting war credits for his own ruling class.”
For our part, we struggle for the political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois forces. A fundamental difference between the events in Libya and the popular upsurges in Tunisia and Egypt is that in the latter two countries there is a powerful, concentrated working class that has emerged as an active force. However, the workers organizations are subordinated to one or another bourgeois political force. Marxists must fight for the proletariat, the only class with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to come to the fore to lead all the oppressed in a revolutionary assault on the capitalist system.
The Libyan proletariat has clearly been devastated in the current conflict, as migrant workers—a major component of the working class in that country—have fled the chaos, armed violence and racist attacks en masse. The future of the Libyan masses will be decided by working-class struggle that extends beyond the national terrain to include the proletariats of Algeria, Tunisia and, especially, Egypt. That requires the forging of revolutionary working-class parties as part of a genuine Trotskyist Fourth International, which would link the fight for socialist federations of North Africa and of the Near East to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers.
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Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) calls on workers around the world to take a stand for military defense of semicolonial Libya against the attack begun yesterday by a coalition of rapacious imperialist governments. The French, British and U.S. rulers, in league with other imperialist governments and with the blessings of the sheiks, kings and military bonapartists of the Arab League, wasted not a moment in acting on the green light given by the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to slaughter countless innocent people in the name of “protecting civilians” and ensuring “democracy.” French air strikes were quickly followed by U.S. and British missile attacks, while Egypt’s military regime is providing arms to the Benghazi opposition forces. From Indochina and the Korean peninsula to the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan today, the “democratic” imperialist rulers wade in the blood of millions upon millions of their victims. Recall that Britain and France historically carried out untold massacres in the Near East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent in order to pursue their colonial subjugation of those areas. Recall that Italy, now providing the use of its air bases for the attack, is responsible for the deaths of up to half the population of Cyrenaica in eastern Libya during its colonial rule prior to World War II.
Prior to the current attack, the conflict in Libya had taken the form of a low-intensity civil war, heavily overlaid by tribal and regional divisions, between the Tripoli-centered government of strongman Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi and imperialist-backed opposition forces concentrated in the country’s eastern areas. Workers Vanguard No. 976 (18 March), newspaper of the U.S. section of the ICL, noted that “Marxists presently have no side in this conflict.” But as the article continued: “In the event of imperialist attack against neocolonial Libya, the proletariat internationally must stand for the military defense of that country while giving no political support to Qaddafi’s capitalist regime.” The civil war in Libya has now been subordinated to the fight of a neocolonial country against imperialism. Every step taken by the workers of the imperialist countries to halt the depredations and military adventures of their rulers is a step toward their own liberation from capitalist exploitation, impoverishment and oppression. Defend Libya against imperialist attack! U.S. Fifth Fleet and all imperialist military bases and troops out of North Africa and the Near East!
Recall that the slaughter of well over a million people in Iraq began with the imposition of a UN-sponsored starvation embargo and a “no fly zone” in the 1990s. The latest action by the Security Council, including the neo-apartheid South African regime led by the African National Congress, underscores yet again the character of the United Nations as a den of imperialist thieves and their lackeys and semicolonial victims. The abstention by the representative of China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, gave tacit approval to imperialist depredation, emboldening the very forces which seek to overturn the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
The crocodile tears shed by the imperialist rulers and their media mouthpieces over the Libyans killed by the Qaddafi regime during the recent wave of protests stands in sharp contrast to their muted response to the continuing massacre of protesters in Yemen—whose dictatorship is a key component of Washington’s “war on terror”—and their ongoing support to the Bahraini kingdom, which hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. To aid in crushing mass protests, Bahrain last week invited in troops from the medievalist and theocratic Saudi monarchy, a key bulwark of U.S. imperialist interests in the region. In the eyes of the imperialist rulers, Bahrain’s Shi’ite majority and the Yemeni masses are less than human, with no rights they are bound to respect.
Numerous social-democratic leftists, typified by the United Secretariat (USec) and the British Cliffite Socialist Workers Party, have done their part to prepare the ground for imperialist massacres in Libya by cheering on the so-called “Libyan Revolution.” Having urged support for the cabal of pro-imperialist “democrats,” CIA stooges, monarchists and Islamists that comprise the Benghazi-based opposition, these reformists now feign to balk at imperialist military intervention in support of the opposition. The New Anti-Capitalist Party, constituted in 2009 by the USec’s French section, signed a call for a demonstration yesterday demanding that the Benghazi outfit be recognized as “the only legitimate representative of the Libyan people”—which French ruler Sarkozy had already done! At the same time, those left groups that have promoted illusions in Qaddafi’s “anti-imperialist” pretensions—such as the Workers World Party in the U.S.—seek everywhere and at all times to chain the working class to a mythical “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie.
We pledge today, as we did at the time of the U.S. Reagan administration’s bombing of Libya in 1986, to “undertake every effort to propagandize the need for the world working class to take the side of Libya” against its imperialist enemies (“Under Reagan’s Guns in Libya,” WV No. 401, 11 April 1986). In the pursuit of profit and domination, the same capitalist ruling classes that brutally exploit the working class “at home,” only to throw workers on the scrap heap during periods of economic crisis, as today, carry out murderous imperialist attacks abroad. The struggle against imperialist war cannot be conducted separately and apart from the class struggle. Only socialist revolution can overthrow the system of capitalist imperialism which breeds war. Our path is that of the October Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which was a beacon of revolutionary internationalism for the proletariat everywhere. We struggle to reforge the Fourth International as an instrument that can lead the working masses, from the Near East to the imperialist centers, forward to new October Revolutions and a world socialist society.
—20 March 2011
