As The Flames Of Revolution Cross The Middle East Today- From The "Workers Vanguard" Archives (2000)-Stalinist Class Collaboration: A Legacy of Revolutions Betrayed- Near East, 1950s-For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Workers Vanguard Nos. 740-741
25 August 2000, 8 September 2000

Stalinist Class Collaboration: A Legacy of Revolutions Betrayed

Near East, 1950s
Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Part One

The Near East is marked by abject poverty, benighted enslavement of women, the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Israel and the oppression of numerous other national minorities by Arab and Iranian nationalist regimes. This legacy of social backwardness and oppression is reinforced by the domination of the region by the imperialist powers. Ongoing imperialist intrigues and depredations like the U.S./British terror bombing of Iraq are impelled by a strategic concern: control of the supply of oil, the source of more than 40 percent of the world’s energy. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula hold three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves. Ever since the 1920s, control over the Persian Gulf oil fields has given American and British imperialism an enormous strategic advantage over their main rivals, Germany and Japan.

The development of the oil industry has also led to the creation of a proletariat in the region in whose hands lies the power to lead all of the oppressed in revolutionary struggle against imperialist subjugation. Repeatedly betrayed by left-talking petty-bourgeois nationalists and Stalinists and chafing under brutal bourgeois regimes, many anti-imperialist youth and the most downtrodden layers of the masses have turned to the fool’s gold of Islamic fundamentalism. But in the 1950s, this region was a hotbed of revolutionary working-class struggles which offered a real prospect for ending imperialist subjugation, social reaction and brutal exploitation.

A few months ago, the New York Times (16 April) ran a lengthy piece on the CIA-organized coup in Iran in 1953, at the height of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. Nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil monopoly had impelled the country on a collision course with the imperialists, leading to a deepening revolutionary crisis. The Times wrote, “Anti-Communism had risen to a fever pitch in Washington, and officials were worried that Iran might fall under the sway of the Soviet Union,” and with it the country’s vast oil reserves. Tudeh (Masses), the pro-Moscow Communist Party, exercised political hegemony over the proletariat and had a broad following among the urban petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals. Then CIA chief Allen Dulles insisted that the U.S. had to install a government in Teheran “which would reach an equitable oil settlement...and which would vigorously prosecute the dangerously strong Communist Party.”

A year earlier in Egypt, a popular uprising had led to the toppling of the British puppet, King Farouk, and the rise to power of the Free Officers Movement of Gamal Abdel Nasser. There, too, the dominant and most militant sections of the working class looked to the Communists for leadership. A few years later in Iraq, as a 1958 coup by left-wing military officers ousted the British-installed Hashemite monarchy, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower warned that leftist revolutions could “result in the complete elimination of Western influence in the Middle East.” In the ensuing period of revolutionary turbulence, the Iraqi Communist Party, with its solid base among the Arab and Kurdish oil workers and substantial support within the military itself, could indeed have taken state power.

Throughout the Near East, the Communist parties attracted the most class-conscious workers and radical intellectuals. In this patchwork of myriad national, ethnic and religious minorities, the CPs were about the only organizations with a base which cut across national and religious lines: Jews played a major role in the Egyptian Communist movement, Kurds in the Iraqi. The Communist militants sought to identify with the proletarian internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution (albeit refracted and perverted by Stalinism). They saw in the Soviet Union a beacon of liberation from imperialist subjugation and a model for economic development. As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Muslim regions of the former tsarist empire—Central Asia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus—had advanced from conditions even more socially and economically backward than the Near East to modern societies in which women were no longer enslaved by the veil and education and medical care were available to all.

Yet revolutionary upheavals in Iran and Iraq did not result in new October Revolutions. Instead, these opportunities were sacrificed on the altar of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy’s futile and treacherous pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. The leaderships of the Communist parties in the region were extremely loyal to and pretty tightly controlled by Moscow, both ideologically and through financial support. Despite the revolutionary aspirations of their ranks and supporters, the Communist parties of the Near East helped install bourgeois-nationalist regimes which then crushed the left and workers movement and persecuted national and ethnic minorities. How and why did this come about?

At root, the explanation lies in the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state and the replacement of Bolshevik internationalism with the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” and its corollary, class collaboration. The Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution, fought down the line against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Stalinist bureaucratic rule ultimately opened up the floodgates to capitalist counterrevolution, which destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92. As part of our struggle to reforge the Trotskyist Fourth International, the International Communist League seeks to win a new generation of revolutionary proletarian militants in the Near East to the banner of authentic Leninism.

“Two-Stage Revolution”: Road to Defeat

The history of the Near East in the second half of the 20th century demonstrates that even the most “left” bourgeois-nationalist regimes—“socialist” pretensions and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric notwithstanding—act as agents of imperialist domination and therefore perpetuate the social and economic backwardness of their countries. As Trotsky wrote following the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution in 1927, when the “left” nationalist Guomindang drowned the Communist-led working class in blood:

“Everything that brings the oppressed and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants is not weakened, but, on the contrary, it is sharpened by imperialist oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every serious conflict.”

— “The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin,” in Problems of the Chinese Revolution (1932); reprinted in Leon Trotsky on China (1976)

When the USSR existed, Soviet financial and military aid gave the Arab bourgeois-nationalist regimes a certain room to maneuver vis-à-vis the Western and Japanese imperialist states. But the room in which they maneuvered was dominated by Wall Street, the City of London, the Deutsche Bank and the Japanese keiritsu.

Despite limited land reform carried out in the 1950s and early 1960s by nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the pattern of land ownership still resembles what it was a century ago. Wealthy landowners possess large tracts of the best land while millions of desperate peasants, unable to scratch out a living on tiny plots of arid land, have moved into the vast shantytowns that ring Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad.

Many of these countries are riven by national, religious and ethnic antagonisms, including sharp divisions between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. In Algeria, the predominantly Arab ruling class lords it over the Berber national minority; in mainly Muslim Egypt, the Coptic Christian minority is hounded and persecuted, particularly by Islamic fundamentalists. The Kurdish nation is carved up among and oppressed by four capitalist states—Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. The oppression of women, symbolized by the veil, remains deeply rooted in Iran and throughout the Arab world. Laws governing personal status are largely based on the sharia (Islamic law), which sanctions polygamy, grants husbands the right to divorce almost at will and subjects women to the “authority” of their fathers and husbands. Especially in rural areas, the condition of women remains one of medieval backwardness. In Egypt, fully 60 percent of all women are illiterate.

At the same time, cellular phones and computers are commonplace items for Cairo professionals, while large numbers of Egyptian workers are concentrated in modern, foreign-owned auto assembly plants. Meanwhile, barefoot villagers in the Nile valley till their fields with tools that have scarcely evolved since the age of the pharaohs. Highly trained Iranian and Iraqi oil workers, with decades of trade-union and communist traditions behind them, coexist with medieval prejudices and social backwardness.

Such conditions of combined and uneven development, in which modern industry and a powerful industrial proletariat have been superimposed on largely peasant-based societies, prevailed in Russia as well on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. Though itself an imperialist power, Russia, unlike the more advanced capitalist countries of West Europe, had not had a bourgeois-democratic revolution and remained mired in social and economic backwardness. Emerging late in the capitalist era, the Russian bourgeoisie was dependent on Western capital and all the more venal for its weakness. The tsarist autocracy ruled over a vast prison house of peoples and a mass of impoverished peasants. At the same time, capitalist investment had given rise to a small but combative industrial working class, concentrated in modern large-scale industry, which showed its power in the 1905 Revolution.

Marx and Engels first raised the “revolution in permanence” in an 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” after the bourgeoisie had gone over to the side of the old reactionary classes against the revolutionary young proletariat in the failed German democratic revolution of 1848. It was this document that inspired Leon Trotsky, writing at the time of the 1905 Revolution, to advance the theory and program of permanent revolution, stressing that the agrarian revolution, political democracy and the other tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia could not be realized by the weak and dependent bourgeoisie, which feared the proletariat far too much to mobilize the worker and peasant masses for an onslaught against the autocracy. Rather, as Trotsky later summarized in generalizing the perspective of permanent revolution to all dependent capitalist countries:

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leaders of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses....

“Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie....

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution....

“In a country where the proletariat has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”

— The Permanent Revolution (1929); reprinted in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (1969)

The October Revolution was a confirmation of permanent revolution. Though Lenin came to agree with the programmatic conclusion of Trotsky’s analysis only on the eve of the revolution, he had forged the Bolshevik Party as an instrument for the proletarian seizure of power through just such an irreconcilable struggle against all variants of bourgeois nationalism and liberalism, not least against the Menshevik opportunists who tailed the liberal bourgeoisie.

But the parties which stood at the head of the Iranian and Iraqi workers in the 1950s were not programmatically based on proletarian internationalism and revolutionary opposition to bourgeois nationalism. The Stalinist bureaucracy which usurped political power in the Soviet Union in a political counterrevolution in 1924 repudiated the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution in favor of the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country,” a flat denial of the Marxist understanding that a socialist society could only be built on an international basis, through the destruction of capitalist imperialism as a world system and the establishment of a world socialist division of labor. The Communist International was transformed from an instrument for world proletarian revolution into an agency for Soviet diplomatic maneuvers with the capitalist countries, leading to the adoption of a program and strategy of class collaborationism.

In the Near East and other backward countries, this took the form of the old Menshevik schema of “two-stage revolution,” postponing the socialist revolution to an indefinite future while in the “democratic stage” subordinating the proletariat to an allegedly “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” national bourgeoisie, which inevitably turns on its former Communist allies and their working-class base. History shows that the “second stage” consists of killing the reds and massacring the workers! From the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 and Spain in 1936-37 to Iran and Iraq in the 1950s and Indonesia in 1965-66, two-stage revolution has been a recipe for bloody defeats for the proletariat.

Today, gutted by the consequences of their own betrayals and the demise of the Soviet Union, the Communist parties of the Near East are mere shadows of what they once were. Meanwhile, imperialist ideologues acclaim the supposed “death of communism” following the restoration of capitalism in East Europe and the former Soviet Union. But just as the Indonesian proletariat reawakened to social struggle in the 1990s after three decades of bloody, anti-Communist military dictatorship, the workers of the Near East will again embark on revolutionary struggle against their imperialist overlords and domestic capitalist exploiters. The key task is the construction of Leninist-Trotskyist parties committed to the principles of proletarian internationalism and the program of permanent revolution. To achieve this task it is necessary that the young generation of worker militants and left-wing intellectuals in the Near East learn the lessons of past revolutionary struggles which were betrayed by Stalinism and crushed by Arab bourgeois nationalism.

Stalinist Degeneration of the Communist International

The Russian October Revolution of 1917 had an enormous impact on the Near East. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its defeat in World War I, the region was carved up between the British and French imperialists. The Bolshevik Revolution, and its extension to largely Muslim Central Asia in the course of the bloody three-year Civil War against the imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary White armies, triggered a series of national revolts and popular uprisings in the broad swath occupied by British military forces from Egypt through the Fertile Crescent to Iran. An Egyptian observer reported at the time that “news of success or victory by the Bolsheviks” in the Russian Civil War “seems to produce a pang of joy and content among all classes of Egyptians” (quoted in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq [1978]).

In this climate of social upheaval, Communist parties were formed in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Persia (Iran). However, as throughout the colonial world, the working class in the Near East was as yet small and undeveloped, and the Communist parties were politically ungelled and inexperienced. As a result of internal weaknesses and external repression, most of these parties had effectively disappeared by the late 1920s.

By the time Communist parties re-emerged in those countries beginning in the mid-1930s, the Communist International had long since ceased to be an instrument for world socialist revolution. The smashing of the Trotskyist Left Opposition at the rigged 13th Party Conference in January 1924, coinciding with Lenin’s death, marked the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor, in which political power was usurped from the proletarian vanguard by a conservative bureaucratic caste whose chief spokesman was Stalin. By 1935, the Stalinized Comintern had passed over to outright reformism, adopting a program of class collaboration under the rubric of “the people’s front against fascism.” In the colonial world, this meant that the Stalinists were transformed into open supporters of the “democratic” imperialists who lorded it over the worker and peasant masses.

When the Soviet Union entered into an alliance with the Allied powers following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the Communist parties in the U.S., Britain and France became the most slavishly social-patriotic supporters of their own imperialist ruling classes. The British and French Stalinists opposed the struggle for independence in British-ruled India, French Indochina and other colonies, while the Syrian CP leadership volunteered to fight for “democratic” France. After the defeat of Nazi Germany —at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives—Stalin honored his commitments to his imperialist allies, helping to quell revolutionary opportunities from Greece to Italy and France and thus immeasurably helping to restabilize the shattered bourgeois order in West Europe. In Yugoslavia, and then in China in 1949, the victory of indigenous Stalinist-led peasant-based guerrilla forces led to the creation of bureaucratically deformed workers states, like those formed under Soviet occupation in East Europe (see “Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism,” Prometheus Research Series No. 4 [March 1993]).

It was only the Trotskyist Fourth International that pursued the proletarian internationalist line carried out by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in World War I: revolutionary defeatism against all the imperialist combatants. For Britain, France and the U.S. no less than for Germany, Italy and Japan, World War II was a conflict for redivision of the world’s markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor, as had been the case in World War I. The Trotskyists continued to fight for liberation of the colonies from imperialism. Recognizing that the Soviet Union, though bureaucratically degenerated, remained a workers state based on collectivized property, the Trotskyists called for unconditional military defense of the USSR against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. At the same time, we did not cease fighting to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy through proletarian political revolution.

The 1948 War

World War II radically altered the face of the Near East. The U.S., emerging as the hegemonic imperialist power, moved to replace British and French domination in the region. The weakening of the West European imperialist powers, combined with the radicalization of the colonial masses, led to the creation of a series of nominally independent states. The working class, enormously strengthened by the development of regional industry to support the British war machine, now confronted indigenous bourgeois state powers. The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, and the Kremlin’s more militant posture in response to the onset of the imperialist Cold War, greatly enhanced the authority of the Communist parties in Iran and the Arab countries.

A postwar development of particular importance to the region was the creation of the Zionist state of Israel with the British withdrawal from Palestine. Having conciliated and promoted Arab nationalism for nearly two decades, the Soviet bureaucracy did an about-face and supported the imperialist partition of Palestine and the emergence of the Zionist state. Designed as a maneuver against British imperialism, the Kremlin’s short-lived support to Israel sowed massive disorientation among the Communist parties of the region. The position of revolutionary internationalism in the 1948 War between Israel and the Arab states was upheld only by the small Palestinian Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL). While recognizing the right of both the Hebrew-speaking and Palestinian Arab peoples to national self-determination, the RCL resolutely opposed the imperialist partition and took a revolutionary defeatist position on the war:

“This war can on neither side be said to bear a progressive character.... It weakens the proletariat and strengthens imperialism in both camps.... The only way to peace between the two peoples of this country is turning the guns against the instigators of murder in both camps!” [emphasis in original]

— “Against the Stream,” Fourth International, May 1948

This is the internationalist position upheld by the International Communist League today. We defend the national rights of the dispossessed Palestinian people, oppose Zionist repression and demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli troops and fascistic “settler” auxiliaries from the Occupied Territories. But we do not thereby deny the national rights of the Hebrew-speaking people. When national populations are geographically interpenetrated, under capitalism the right of self-determination can be exercised only by the stronger national grouping driving out or destroying the weaker one. In such cases, the only possibility of a democratic solution lies in overturning capitalist rule and instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only class that has no interest in perpetuating national antagonisms. The Hebrew-speaking workers must be broken from the poison of Zionist chauvinism and the Arab workers from the sway of petty-bourgeois nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism to join in a common struggle for socialist revolution against the murderous Israeli capitalist rulers and all the Arab regimes. While Zionist Israel has a particularly close relationship with U.S. imperialism, the Arab bourgeois states are no less an enemy of Palestinian liberation.

The 1948 War had a profound and continuing impact. The expulsion of nearly a million Arabs from Palestine—most of them to squalid refugee camps where they and their descendants live to this day—was accompanied by a mass migration of the so-called Oriental or Sephardic Jewish population from the Arab countries to Israel, encouraged by both the Arab regimes and the Zionists. The Arab defeat thoroughly discredited the traditionalist Arab regimes, whose incompetence and corruption were sharply revealed, and led to the fall of governments and monarchies throughout the region, helping pave the way for a series of Arab nationalist regimes to come to power. Meanwhile, Israel served the Arab nationalists as an “external” enemy, directing the masses’ anger and frustrations away from their capitalist oppressors.

Egyptian Communists and the Rise of Nasser

The impact of these developments was particularly evident in postwar Egypt. Historically the political and cultural center of the Arab world, the land of the Nile is by far the most populous of all Arab countries. Egypt was also militarily the strongest state directly confronting Zionist Israel. Consequently, Egyptian strongman Colonel Nasser was the dominant figure of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s, intervening in and influencing developments in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Near East.

Two generations ago, Nasser was widely viewed as embodying a mythical “Arab Revolution” and a non-Communist “socialist” alternative for so-called “non-aligned” countries of the Near East, Asia and Africa. He burnished his “anti-imperialist” credentials through the 1956 Suez War in which he stood up to Israel, Britain and France. Yet the fact that enthusiasm for Nasser was so widespread was in no small part due to the Stalinists themselves helping to foster illusions in Nasser’s “Arab socialism.” In reality, Nasser came to power largely with the aim of crushing the combative Egyptian working class, which was mainly under the leadership of the Communists.

The upsurge of class struggle in Egypt at the close of World War II, while not reaching the levels of Iran and Iraq, nevertheless allowed the young Communist groupings, the most prominent being the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation (EMNL) founded by Jewish intellectual Henri Curiel, to achieve a measure of mass influence. The traditional Egyptian nationalist organization, the Wafd, had been widely discredited by its corrupt and oppressive rule during the war years, when it served as undisguised flunkies for British rule. As a mass upsurge against British occupation swept the country and workers increasingly asserted their power in strikes, the Communists were able to steadily displace the Wafd as the principal leadership of the labor movement, especially in textile, the country’s main industry.

In February 1946, a police attack on student demonstrators in Cairo resulted in the deaths of a number of students. On February 21, the Communist-led National Committee of Workers and Students called a strike, completely shutting down the country, in which several more demonstrators were shot dead. As the country erupted in strikes and demonstrations, a strike on March 4 again shut down the entire country. In Alexandria, British forces in league with Egyptian cops fired on the demonstrators, killing 28. Desperate to put a stop to the upsurge, the British announced they would withdraw their troops to the Suez Canal Zone. The government then launched a wave of repression, especially targeting Communist leaders.

Following the 1948 War, the discredited regime declared a state of siege, while mobs incited by the fascistic Muslim Brotherhood pillaged Jewish businesses, burned synagogues and slaughtered dozens of Jews. In at least one case, Communists organized the defense of a Jewish-owned store against the pogromists. As the mass expulsions and emigration of Jews began, among the first targeted were Henri Curiel and other founders and leaders of Egyptian Communism.

A wave of popular agitation against the British military occupation again erupted in October 1951 when the British ignored an edict by the Wafd government to withdraw from the Canal Zone. With the Egyptian government exposed as powerless, the Communists put themselves at the head of the tide of anti-British sentiment that swept the country. As government repression proved incapable of stemming the mounting strike wave, the Communists continued to extend their influence in the Greater Cairo textile union, the Cairo transport unions and elsewhere. By late 1951, the EMNL’s successor, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL), had become the leading political force in the Egyptian labor movement.

In January 1952, an armed clash between British and Egyptian forces in the Canal Zone touched off rioting in Cairo in which much of the downtown commercial district was burned down. With the government totally discredited and virtually paralyzed, the country was increasingly polarized between the rapidly growing Muslim Brotherhood and the Communists. Student members of the Muslim Brotherhood carried out military training at the universities, driving around campuses in military jeeps and spraying machine-gun fire in the air to intimidate their opponents.

The DMNL also had a military section, but its work consisted of providing support for Nasser’s Free Officers Movement, a heterogeneous coalition in the military including Muslim Brothers, Wafdists and the DMNL. Nasser looked to the DMNL to print the Free Officers’ leaflets and perform other tasks. Meanwhile, the Free Officers provided military support to the Muslim Brotherhood for its “liberation battalions” in the Canal Zone. Central in this was Nasser’s comrade-in-arms (and future Egyptian president) Anwar Sadat, who in a 1952 newspaper interview praised Adolf Hitler as a great patriot who worked for the good of his people.

In July 1952, the Free Officers seized power, sweeping away the despised monarchy. The DMNL supported the military coup as an expression of the “national democratic movement.” The following month, when textile workers in Kafr Al-Dawwar near Alexandria went on strike, believing their leaders’ assurances that the new regime was on their side, Nasser threw down the gauntlet to the organized workers movement. Two strike leaders were arrested, condemned to death for “a grave crime against the state” and hanged on the factory grounds. The Communists were banned, strikes were outlawed and a corporatist regime of labor control was set up in which the trade unions were placed under effective control by the military regime.

Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the subsequent invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel was a milestone in the postwar history of the Near East. Washington’s successful strong-arming of Britain and France to withdraw their troops confirmed U.S. imperialism as the top dog in the region. The U.S. was then intent on cohering the Baghdad Pact (CENTO), a regional anti-Soviet military alliance akin to NATO in West Europe. Standing at the head of a campaign against adherence by Arab governments to the Baghdad Pact, Nasser shifted to a pro-Soviet posture, while continuing his anti-Communist repression. Less than one month before nationalization of the Suez Canal, a military tribunal sentenced 40 Communists to prison terms of hard labor.

The establishment of closer relations between the Soviet Union and Egypt led to a Soviet reappraisal of Nasser, whose July 1952 coup was now described as an “anti-imperialist revolution.” The various Communist groups in Egypt, united by their enthusiastic support for Nasser, moved to fuse their forces. In their desire to ingratiate themselves with the rising tide of Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism, the unified Communist Party of Egypt stipulated that Jews were prohibited from playing a leadership role in the party.

With the Egyptian Communists firmly under Nasser’s thumb, the nationalists in power in Syria sought a merger with Egypt in order to stifle the growing influence of the Syrian Communist Party. As in Egypt, the Syrian Communists tied themselves politically to bourgeois nationalists who showed themselves to be the workers’ worst enemies. The fiercely anti-Communist Syrian Ba’ath Party in power had adopted a “left” stance. Resisting Western pressure to join the Baghdad Pact, it made overtures to the Soviet Union and welcomed the Communists into the ruling coalition.

The Syrian Communist Party continued to grow spectacularly, leading the three trade-union federations by 1957. While objecting to the proposed union with Egypt, the Syrian CP continued to hail Nasser as the “leader of the National Front of Arab Liberation.” But the formation of the “United Arab Republic” under Nasser’s leadership in 1958 led to the suppression of the powerful Syrian CP, then the largest in the Near East, and the arrest of its leaders and hundreds of members.

The next year, Nasser turned on his Egyptian Communist supporters with a vengeance, rounding up almost every known leftist in the country. The Communists in prison were humiliated, tortured and pressured to repudiate their political ideas. Yet even as their comrades were beaten to death or left to die for lack of medical aid, the Communists maintained their political support for Nasser.

During its diplomatic alliance with Nasser’s military bonapartist regime, the Kremlin Stalinists showered Nasser’s capitalist Egypt with more anti-aircraft missiles and other military equipment than they gave to North Vietnam as the Vietnamese workers and peasants waged a heroic—and ultimately victorious—struggle against U.S. imperialism. Not surprisingly, the bourgeois-nationalist Nasser ultimately turned against his Soviet patrons. In the 1970s, his hand-picked successor, Anwar Sadat, brought Egypt fully into the fold of American imperialism.

Part Two

The most powerful working-class upsurge in the Near East in the years immediately following World War II came in Iran. Tudeh (Masses), the pro-Moscow Communist party, already had significant roots in the proletariat, developed over two decades of largely clandestine work, and grew spectacularly as the war came to a close. By 1944, Tudeh had 25,000 members. It established a Central Council of the United Trade Unions (CCUTU) of Iran, which by 1946 claimed 400,000 members. Tudeh’s strength was then concentrated in northern Iran since it consciously discouraged organization of the British-occupied south, especially the volatile Khuzistan oil fields, in line with Stalin’s opposition to social struggle in the “democratic” imperialist countries and their colonies.

Nonetheless, at the close of World War II Iran had clearly reached a prerevolutionary situation in which Tudeh could have taken power. The CCUTU was effectively a government in northern Iran—collecting taxes, providing police and judicial functions, etc. Further, the Soviet military presence in northern Iran provided an enormous impetus to social upheaval. But for Stalin, Tudeh and the Iranian proletariat were simply bargaining chips to be expended in his vain pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with Anglo-American imperialism.

The occupation of northern Iran by the Soviet Army in late 1945 led to the establishment of autonomous republics in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan where, in addition to establishing national rights, significant social reforms were carried out. But the Kremlin withdrew its forces in early 1946, sacrificing the republics in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in the hope of obtaining oil and gas concessions from the Shah. The deal Stalin proposed contained the implicit pledge that Tudeh would use its great authority in the proletariat to enforce class peace, and that pledge was soon fulfilled as Tudeh threw away a revolutionary opportunity.

In July 1946, in response to attempts by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to break the pro-Tudeh unions following a successful strike by refinery and oil field workers in predominantly Arab Khuzistan, the CCUTU called a general strike. After bloody street fighting erupted between Arab workers and non-Arab workers, fanned by the AIOC, Tudeh militias took over the key city of Abadan. But the Tudeh leadership, at the urging of the government, dispatched the party’s general secretary and the CCUTU’s first secretary to Abadan to call off the strike even though the workers’ demands had not been met. As a reward for this treachery, three Tudeh members were brought into the government. A scant two months later, the Tudeh ministers were purged and when the CCUTU responded with a one-day general strike, hundreds of its activists were arrested, its headquarters occupied and its paper banned.

Iran 1953: Proletarian Revolution Derailed

Having derailed one revolutionary opportunity, Tudeh again found itself in a position to overthrow the despised ruling oligarchy during the oil nationalization crisis under the regime of Mohammad Mossadeq. In 1949 Mossadeq, a wealthy aristocrat and landowner, led opposition in the Majlis (parliament) to a new agreement with the AIOC. By 1951, he was calling for outright nationalization of oil. Mossadeq’s National Front was an unstable alliance of Western-oriented bourgeois technocrats with a religious wing led by the Shi’ite clergy under Ayatollah Kashani, temporarily united by the demand for nationalization of the AIOC and opposition to the British and the Shah.

Tudeh initially did not rally to Mossadeq, as the Stalinists were apprehensive of his ties to Washington. But Tudeh was forced by its combative proletarian base to lead huge strikes and demonstrations demanding nationalization. In April 1951, Abadan was paralyzed by a general strike which involved bloody clashes with the army. Frightened by the wave of proletarian militancy, the Shah appointed Mossadeq prime minister and the AIOC was nationalized. As the world oil cartel responded by boycotting Iranian oil, gradually strangling the economy, Washington turned its back on Mossadeq.

When Britain announced a boycott of Mexican oil in 1938 following the nationalization of imperialist oil interests by the regime of General Lázaro Cárdenas, Trotsky wrote in defense of the Mexican action, “The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense,” while stressing that “the international proletariat has no reason to identify its program with the program of the Mexican government” (“Mexico and British Imperialism,” June 1938). Likewise, it was the duty of revolutionaries to defend the nationalization of the AIOC in Iran while refusing to grant an iota of political support to the bourgeois-nationalist Mossadeq regime. Communists would have sought to mobilize the working class in independent struggle against the yoke of imperialist subjugation by advancing demands like the expropriation of all imperialist holdings and moving to set up councils of workers and poor peasants to vie for state power. But as the wave of proletarian radicalism continued to mount, Tudeh led the toiling masses into political support for the bourgeois National Front. When Mossadeq resigned in protest against the Shah’s refusal to grant him increased powers, Tudeh led a July 1952 general strike in Teheran that forced the Shah to recall Mossadeq.

During 1953, Iran was in the throes of acute class polarization. The international oil boycott pushed the bourgeoisie and sections of the petty bourgeoisie into opposition to Mossadeq while deteriorating economic conditions drove the plebeian masses to desperation. Ayatollah Kashani and his followers split from the National Front and threw their support to the Shah. Thousands of workers flocked into Tudeh and its trade-union organizations in search of a revolutionary solution to the massive contradictions of Iranian society. Demonstrations called by Tudeh vastly outnumbered those called by the government.

When the Shah attempted to arrest Mossadeq in August, Tudeh brought tens of thousands of its supporters into the streets. Tudeh could manifestly have taken power, but the Stalinists looked to Mossadeq to carry through the “democratic revolution.” Instead, Mossadeq called on the army generals, who were working closely with American military advisers and the CIA to bring him down, to crack down on Tudeh. The military takeover was prepared by a mobilization organized by the ayatollahs, who filled the streets of Teheran with their clerical-fascist thugs.

The army generals cracked down on Tudeh, and then turned against the Mossadeq government. This marked the beginning of a savage police state that would systematically and ruthlessly crush Tudeh as a mass party, forcing it underground for nearly two decades. But Tudeh’s Stalinist leadership only deepened its criminal opportunism. As strikes by oil workers shook the Shah’s regime in late 1978, Tudeh lined up behind the drive for power by Khomeini and the Islamic clergy, helping pave the way for a massive bloodbath against leftists, trade unionists and Kurds. Against an array of fake leftists in Iran and internationally who cheered on the Khomeiniite mobilizations, we raised the call: “No support to the mullahs! Down with the Shah! Workers to power!”

The 1958-59 Revolution in Iraq

Only five years after the CIA-sponsored coup in Iran came the most powerful demonstration yet of the revolutionary capacity of the working class in the Near East, as the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 touched off a huge proletarian upsurge. Armed, highly organized and led by the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the working class literally had power within its grasp. Yet the opportunity was squandered by the ICP’s Stalinist leadership under direct orders from Moscow. Derailed by the class-collaborationist policies of the ICP leadership, which tied the workers to the nationalist officers in power, the Iraqi revolution was drowned in a wave of bloody repression.

Already in 1948, the Iraqi Communist Party had been the dominant force in a nationwide upsurge—including mass mobilizations and strikes such as the Communist-led strike of oil workers near Haditha—against the presence of British military bases. The upsurge was finally brought to an end by a government crackdown. Hundreds of Communists were arrested, and ICP leader Fahd and two other members of the Political Bureau were publicly hanged.

Not only was the Iraqi CP the most proletarian Communist party in the Near East but it also had a significant component of national, religious and ethnic minorities. From its creation in 1934, the ICP called for the Kurdish right to independence. The party sought to recruit Kurdish workers and published a press in Kurdish. By the early 1950s, fully one-third of the party’s Central Committee was composed of Kurds. But as Stalinists throughout the Near East sought to cement ties with Arab nationalists in opposition to the American-dominated Baghdad Pact alliance, the Iraqi CP “Arabized” its line. In an August 1955 declaration, the leadership criticized its previous stance “that there exist two main national groups in Iraq” and flatly declared that “the fraternal Kurdish people has no interests which are incompatible with the interests of any of the Arab countries” (quoted in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq [1978]).

The subservient Iraqi regime was the linchpin of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, which was deeply unpopular among all layers of Iraqi society. When Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 in response to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Iraqi CP launched a campaign against the government that triggered mass uprisings in the Communist strongholds of Najaf and Hayy. In the city of Najaf, a wave of CP-led protests in November 1956 culminated when demonstrators drove the police from the city’s streets. Troops were called in but fraternized with the demonstrators. The movement in Najaf provoked a wave of strikes and demonstrations which swept Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk and other cities. In Hayy the next month, the ICP led a virtual armed insurrection. Armed workers took over much of the city, firing on police from windows and rooftops, but were driven back when they tried to storm the seat of local government. Revolutionary committees and “people’s guards” organized resistance and erected barricades at key points in the city. Police reinforcements were brought in to crush the revolt in Hayy, and two Communists were hanged in the public square.

Two years later in July 1958, a revolutionary upsurge was touched off when the Iraqi Free Officers movement overthrew the British-installed monarchy. Upon hearing the news, hundreds of thousands of Baghdad’s dispossessed poured into the streets screaming their joy and their hatred of the royal family. From the outset, the ICP threw its support behind the government headed by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qassim, whom the Stalinists hailed as “Sole Leader.” Qassim sought to play off the well-organized ICP against the pan-Arab nationalists in the officer corps as well as the Ba’ath Party, who were clamoring for Iraq to merge into Nasser’s newly formed United Arab Republic. As in Syria, the drive for unity with Egypt was motivated by the desire of the Ba’ath and other Arab nationalists to use Nasser’s authority and Egypt’s anti-Communist laws to break the growing power of the Iraqi Communists.

The imperialist overlords in Washington and London viewed with alarm the 1958 revolution which swept away the Iraqi monarchy, removing a main pillar of the Anglo-American anti-Soviet alliance in the Near East and threatening capitalist rule itself. American Marines from the Sixth Fleet were landed in Lebanon, and British paratroops were flown into Jordan in a menacing move aimed at the Iraqi masses.

By late summer a peasant insurrection was sweeping across the agricultural plains of Iraq as peasants burned landlords’ estates, destroyed the account ledgers and seized the land. The Communists made spectacular gains. But the forces of reaction were frantically organizing to try to crush the revolutionary wave. In March 1959, nationalist officers and the Ba’ath, backed by the large landowners and tribal chiefs, prepared to launch a counterrevolutionary coup starting from the city of Mosul. The ICP wrecked this scheme by organizing a demonstration of a quarter million people, triggering a plebeian upsurge that swept the reactionaries from the streets of Mosul.

Workers revolution was on the order of the day. A statement by the Ba’ath in the spring of 1959 noted with alarm that Communists dominated the labor unions, the peasants’ organization, the union of students, the popular resistance forces and the committees for the defense of the republic. But the Stalinist leaders rejected any notion of leading a workers insurrection to overthrow the capitalist state apparatus, seeking rather to become part of it, as prominent members or sympathizers of the ICP gained appointment to administrative and military positions. With the question of proletarian state power posed, all the ICP demanded was representation in the capitalist government. Mammoth rallies, some drawing over a million participants, were staged in Baghdad to support the Communist Party’s demand. Army units loyal to the ICP broke open arsenals and distributed weapons.

For the Soviet bureaucracy, even the ICP’s reformist appeal for a handful of ministers in the capitalist government was too extreme. Following Moscow’s orders, the ICP meekly abandoned its call for a coalition government when Qassim turned thumbs down in late April 1959. Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher underlined at the time how Khrushchev sold out the Iraqi Communists to make his Camp David meeting with U.S. president Eisenhower more congenial:

“Most Western observers on the spot agreed that Kassem could hardly hold his ground against an all-out communist offensive. His own following was small, and he refused to try and rally the anti-communist forces which were intimidated and disorganized and for whose support Nasser made a bid when he attacked Kassem as a ‘communist stooge.’

“Then, in the summer, the communist offensive was suddenly called off—on urgent demands from Moscow. In Moscow reports about the rising revolutionary temperature of Iraq had caused alarm. Khrushchev refused to countenance a communist upheaval in Baghdad, afraid that this would provoke renewed Western intervention in the Eastern Mediterranean, set the Middle East aflame, and wreck his policy of peaceful coexistence. He was already reckoning with the prospect of his visit to Washington and was anxious to produce evidence of Soviet ‘goodwill’ in the Middle East.

“A bill of indictment against the Iraqi communist leaders was drawn up in Moscow and the Iraqi Party was ordered not merely to make its peace with Kassem, but to surrender to him unconditionally with only a minimum of face-saving.”

— reprinted in Deutscher, Russia, China and the West (1970)

Qassim and anti-Communist nationalists now took the offensive. In July, bloody encounters took place between Ba’athist gangs and Communists in Baghdad neighborhoods. ICP members were sacked from government posts and the military. Communist trade-union leaders were removed from their posts or rounded up by the police. In Kirkuk, in July 1959 the largely Kurdish CP organization turned an incipient revolt into a communalist massacre of Turkomans, prominent in the city’s commercial elite. The Kirkuk massacre was then used by Qassim as a pretext for suppressing the Communist Party. Yet the Stalinists maintained their prostration before Qassim, taking his blows without serious resistance. When a Kurdish separatist revolt broke out in the summer of 1961, the ICP denounced it as “serving imperialist designs.”

In February 1963, the Ba’ath was able to broker a military coup that brought down Qassim and unleashed the counterrevolutionary furies. Using lists of Communists supplied by the CIA, the Ba’ath Party militia, the National Guard, launched a house-to-house search, rounding up and shooting suspected CPers. An estimated 5,000 were killed in the Ba’ath’s bloody terror and thousands more jailed, many of them hideously tortured. Only the overthrow of the Ba’athists in November 1963 by their erstwhile military allies put a halt to the horror. When the Ba’ath returned to power in 1969, it took up where it had left off—with trials of Jews, Communists and sundry oppositionists while laying waste to the Kurdish regions.

The evident opportunity for a proletarian revolution in Iraq in 1958-59 was addressed last year in a polemical article on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) reprinted from Spartakist, the press of the International Communist League’s German section. Noting that the ICP was “the most proletarian Communist Party in the Near East,” we wrote:

“In the midst of the great social turmoil that ensued after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1959, this powerful force for social revolution was betrayed by the Iraqi Stalinists and Moscow. Instead of mobilizing its working-class base to take state power in its own name, the ICP diverted the workers into supporting the bourgeois military officer Abd al-Karim Qassim.”

— “Trotskyism vs. PKK Nationalism,” WV No. 716, 9 July 1999

This utterly correct statement was denounced as “incredibly soft on the ICP” in a letter by K. Anderson published in the following issue (“On the Iraqi Communist Party,” WV No. 717, 6 August 1999). Anderson asserted: “There’s no way this party could have mobilized ‘its working-class base to take state power in its own name.’... The ICP was an obstacle to revolution, not its potential leadership.” The WV Editorial Board replied, “Anderson is quite right.”

In fact, this was very wrong, and was counterposed to the whole thrust of the article to which we referred readers in our reply, “Iraqi Rulers’ Bloody Road to Power” (WV No. 511, 5 October 1990). As we noted in an SL Central Committee motion adopted following an extensive internal discussion, “The statement in Anderson’s letter that there was no way that the Iraqi CP ‘could have mobilized “its working-class base to take state power in its own name”’ denies any contradiction between the proletarian base and Stalinist leadership. Thus any possibility for the intervention of a Trotskyist party to exploit this contradiction is eliminated and by extension any possibility of proletarian socialist revolution.”

As the events in Iraq demonstrated, a revolutionary situation can, and generally does, emerge while much of the working class is still under the sway of reformist leadership. This in itself does not determine that social revolution must end in defeat, as Anderson’s statement would logically imply. Rather the issue of proletarian victory or defeat hinges on whether the revolutionary vanguard can win leadership of the working masses from the reformist misleaders. During the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of the mid-1930s, Trotsky pointed out that the political consciousness of the Spanish proletariat in its mass was even higher than that of the Russian proletariat in 1917. What was lacking in Spain was a Bolshevik party, which Trotsky struggled unswervingly to create in the crucible of the revolution itself.

In the course of the internal discussion, one comrade emphasized the important difference between the Stalinist and social-democratic parties in terms of the nature of their appeal. He noted that the Moscow regime was seen “as the inheritor of the Russian Revolution, which people simply looked at and took without paying attention to the political counterrevolution that was consummated.” Hence the Stalinist parties:

“were never simply equal to the socialist parties. That went on for a long time. It’s only with the rise of ‘Euro-Communism’ and finally the elimination of the Soviet Union that the Stalinist parties became simply identical to the reformist parties. They always had an undifferentiated radicalism which set them apart, so that no black militant in his right mind would join the American Socialist Party but a lot of them joined the Communist Party.”

It is notable that mass social-democratic parties, based as they are on illusions in imperialist parliamentary “democracy,” never arose in the Near East or almost anywhere else in the colonial world.

In contrast, during the late 1930s and ’40s Trotskyist nuclei in colonial countries like Indochina and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) gained a mass base at the expense of the Stalinists, whose embrace of the popular front and the subsequent wartime alliance of the Soviet regime with the “democratic” imperialists led the Stalinist parties to reject the struggle for national independence. Intervening in the social turmoil which accompanied the defeat and disarming of the Japanese occupation forces in Vietnam at the end of World War II, the Trotskyists were able to lead a proletarian insurrection in Saigon against the entry of British and French troops, while Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinists collaborated with the “democratic” imperialists. Though bloodily suppressed by the imperialists (with the aid of the Stalinists), the Saigon insurrection provided a concrete example of how the intervention of a Trotskyist party in the proletarian upheaval in Iraq could have resulted in a socialist revolution smashing bourgeois rule there in 1958-59.

Anderson’s letter represented a political departure which, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to the view that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through,” i.e., that the Stalinist bureaucracy and Stalinist parties are purely and simply reactionary. This view has historically been embraced by reformists and centrists, for example the “International Committee” of Gerry Healy/David North, to jettison the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states (see “Anatomy of a Healyite Russia Hater—David North: Joseph Hansen’s Natural Son,” WV No. 456, 1 July 1988). Our small revolutionary vanguard is not immune from the powerful and pervasive alien political pressures of this post-Soviet period. What’s crucial is the party’s ability to correct mistakes, to clarify and resolve political differences through a thoughtful and thorough internal political debate according to our Leninist democratic-centralist norms. This particular discussion broadened and deepened our understanding of the development of the Communist movement in the Near East, examining a history of struggle to chart the course for fighters for new October Revolutions in the Near East today.

Marxists, Fake Leftists and Arab Nationalism

Amid the revolutionary turbulence in the Near East in the late 1940s and 1950s, the intervention of even a relatively small Trotskyist organization could have split the Communist parties, winning revolutionary-minded workers and intellectuals away from their Stalinist misleaders. This was the road to forging authentic Leninist vanguard parties in the region. But the perspective of forging a Leninist vanguard party is rejected by our opponents on the left, most of whom tailed the Arab nationalists.

Typical were the fake Trotskyists of the late Ernest Mandel’s United Secretariat (USec), who hailed a mythical “Arab Revolution” to justify tailing after “left”-talking Arab nationalists, from military despots like Nasser to the petty-bourgeois nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The USec, in its consistent support for Palestinian nationalism, went from enthusing over indiscriminate anti-Jewish terror in the early 1970s to supporting today’s “peace” deal between the PLO and Israel. The USec’s support to Palestinian nationalism was conditioned by and consistent with its support for bourgeois-nationalist regimes.

When the Algerian independence struggle brought to power the petty-bourgeois nationalists of the National Liberation Front (FLN), Mandel’s mentor, Michel Pablo, took a post in the capitalist government apparatus under FLN leader Ben Bella. The U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had just passed over from Trotskyism to centrism, hailed the Ben Bella regime as a “workers and peasants government,” suggesting that it was on the road to establishing a revolutionary workers government like the Bolsheviks in Russia. The Arab nationalist FLN pledged to preserve capitalist property, declared Islam the state religion and discriminated against the Berber minority. But the Pabloites maintained their political support even as Ben Bella bloodily suppressed a Berber revolt in 1963.

The USec’s political support to bourgeois nationalists was “theorized” in a 1974 statement by its groups in the Arab region, published in English as “The Arab Revolution, Its Character, Present State, and Perspectives.” Despite allusions to “socialist revolution” and even the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the USec placed itself on the same terrain as the Arab nationalists, declaring that “Arab national unity is the central task of the Arab revolution” and enthusing over its “revolutionary potential.” The Pabloites’ stock in trade is the notion of an objectively revolutionary “dynamic” pushing the masses toward socialism, thus obviating the need to forge a revolutionary vanguard party. But in the “Arab Revolution,” the Pabloites saw a “dynamic” leading not to socialism but to the consolidation of a unified bourgeois state!

The Pabloites totally wrote off the possibility of winning the working-class base of the Stalinist parties in the Arab countries in opposition to their leaders’ selling out revolutionary struggles through class-collaborationist alliances with Arab nationalists. Rather, the USec criticized the Stalinist betrayers for not capitulating enough to Nasser:

“The sectarian failure to understand the national question disarmed the Arab Communist parties, and above all the Syrian Communist Party, in their opposition to the Syrian-Egyptian union of 1958, which was in part directed against them. Instead of waging its democratic struggle in the framework of the union, the Syrian CP opposed the union as such, which isolated it completely from the Syrian masses and facilitated the repression that fell on it. Likewise, in opposing the union for the sake of supporting General Kassem, the Iraqi Communist Party lost a considerable part of its influence to the nationalists. In all these positions, the Arab Stalinist movement placed itself at the opposite pole of the nationalist movement, denigrating the national aspirations of the Arab masses in the name of a so-called class attitude, totally overlooking the revolutionary potential of the question of Arab unity.”

— “The Arab Revolution, Its Character, Present State, and Perspectives”

The ostensible anti-Pabloites of Gerry Healy’s “International Committee” likewise enthused over the “Arab Revolution” beginning in 1967, carrying this to its logical extreme in the coming years by acting as paid press agents for one or another Arab bourgeois regime (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86).

In contrast, we have always insisted that the idea of some transcendent, trans-class “Arab Revolution” was a mystification which impeded the genuine national and social liberation of the toilers of the Arab East. As we wrote following the 1967 Arab-Israel war:

“Many so-called Marxists believe that the struggle for ‘national liberation’ of the Arab countries has merged with or even replaced the struggle for socialism in these countries. Accordingly they would replace the working class by petty-bourgeois cliques as the ‘revolutionary agent’ and view Nasser and other militarists as the liberators of the Arab masses. Such support of classless ‘national liberation’ prolongs the slavery of the Arab masses to their own ruling class.”

— Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968

The Communist Road to Social Liberation

In the course of little more than a decade, the USec went from tailing the “Arab Revolution” of Nasser & Co. to hailing the “Islamic revolution” of the Ayatollah Khomeini—joined by virtually every fake-left group internationally. Prominent among these is the international tendency founded by the recently deceased Tony Cliff and led by the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), represented in the U.S. by the International Socialist Organization (ISO). From the time of the 1950-53 Korean War, when Cliff broke with the Trotskyist movement over his opposition to unconditional military defense of the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states against imperialism, the calling card of Cliff’s social-democratic outfit has been frothing Stalinophobia.

Cold War anti-Sovietism and tailing the fundamentalists came together for the Cliffites over Afghanistan, where the imperialists used the mullah-led fight against the 1979 Soviet intervention to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Washington armed and supported the fundamentalists’ reactionary jihad (holy war)—which was also supported by virtually all the regimes of the Near East. We forthrightly hailed the intervention of the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan against the mullah-led forces, and we called for the extension to Afghanistan of the social gains of the October Revolution. The Soviet military intervention offered the possibility of opening the road to emancipation for the hideously oppressed people of Afghanistan, just as the Kremlin’s withdrawal in 1988-89 paved the way for the bloody onslaught which was to follow.

But the Cliffites were foursquare on the side of reaction. In the U.S., the ISO proclaimed all-out support for the mullahs: “Just as socialists welcomed the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam, we welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988). The Cliffites went on to enthusiastically embrace capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, which has led to massive immiseration of the working people and fratricidal slaughter.

The war in Afghanistan underscored the centrality of the woman question in the Islamic East, both as a motor force for social revolution and as a rallying point for imperialist-backed reaction. At the onset of the war, the New York Times (9 February 1980) reported, “It was the Kabul revolutionary Government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up the gun.” On the other side, it was Afghan women, armed and organized in militias, who were among the most ferocious fighters in defense of the modernizing nationalist regime against the U.S.-backed mujahedin.

Even in the most advanced capitalist “democracies” of West Europe and North America, women remain deeply oppressed despite legal and political equality, subject to discrimination in jobs and wages, assigned as their primary role in society that of housekeeper and procreator, with fundamental rights like abortion either denied or constantly under attack. Islam, largely because it is centered in semicolonial countries where social backwardness is reinforced by imperialist subjugation, has not had to adapt its repressive moral code and curb its secular power to the principle of formal political equality derived from the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in West Europe and North America.

While introducing the most advanced capitalist technique in such backward countries, imperialism bolstered the most reactionary and repressive aspects of semi-feudal society. Despite formal independence, the semicolonial bourgeoisies remain dependent on the imperialists and fearful of any challenge to their class rule by the proletariat standing at the head of the poor peasantry and all the oppressed. These bourgeois nationalists are hostile to women’s emancipation, which can only be achieved through a thoroughgoing socialist revolution which shatters capitalist property relations and all associated social institutions.

In turn, the fight against women’s oppression is a motor force for revolutionary struggle in such countries. Describing the newly won freedom of women in Soviet Central Asia in a 1924 speech to the Communist University for Toilers of the East, Leon Trotsky said:

“Even today we can still observe in the East the rule of Islam, of the old prejudices, beliefs and customs but these will more and more turn to dust and ashes.... And this, moreover, means that the Eastern woman who is the most paralysed in life, in her habits and in creativity, the slave of slaves, that she, having at the demand of the new economic relations taken off her cloak will at once feel herself lacking any sort of religious buttress; she will have a passionate thirst to gain new ideas, a new consciousness which will permit her to appreciate her new position in society. And there will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker.”

The Near East is a cockpit of imperialist rivalries, pursued with the aim of controlling the vital oil reserves of the region. It is also a region of deep, all-sided oppression—of women, of national, ethnic and religious minorities, as well as homosexuals and others. At the same time, the last half century has seen the considerable growth of a modern proletariat in urban centers throughout the Near East. This industrial working class has the social power to lead the oppressed masses in struggle to overturn the capitalist order and open the road to socialism. The key is forging a revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, on the model of Lenin’s Bolsheviks who led the 1917 Russian Revolution, based on the theory and program of Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

The revolutionary overturn of capitalism cannot be limited to a single country. It must necessarily sweep away the bloody bonapartists in Syria and Iraq, the medieval fundamentalists in Iran and Sudan, the reactionary monarchies of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states as well as the Zionist rulers of Israel. It must be an internationalist struggle linked to the fight for socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and North America. This requires forging Trotskyist parties, which will reappropriate the rich history of joint working-class struggle in the Near East in the fight to win the working class of the region—standing at the head of the peasantry and numerous oppressed nationalities—to the banner of Leninist internationalism. For a socialist federation of the Near East! For world socialist revolution!

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Prince Rivers -Ist South Carolina Volunteers (American Civil War)

Click on the headline to link to an entry for Prince Rivers.

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Major Martin Delany

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Major Martin Delany

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*****

*On The 8th Anniversary of The Iraq War (Really 20th) A March 19th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website.

Markin comment:

In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)

I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
********
December 1, 2010

A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”

Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”

That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-The Volunteers Of The Massachusetts 54th Regiment In The American Civil War

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February , and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- More Subpoenas Against Midwest Leftists-FBI Infiltration Exposed- Hands Off The Midwest Anti-War Activists

Markin comment on this article:

Part of the business of doing revolutionary, radical, hell, on some days just plain liberal politics (think of the late, unlamented Nixon's "hit" lists with nothing but run of the mill democrats on them )is knowing, knowing without knowing, that someone is watching you, or wants to. Either succumb to paranoia, walk away from such heavy-duty business, or just go about your political business as best you can, as long as you can. Still it is nice, every once in a while, to know they really are out to get us if for no other reason that to jerk back from that notion that we are dealing with rationale opponents. And, as here, to just flat out expose a fink, a living breathing fink before she (in this case) crawls back in her hole.
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Workers Vanguard No. 973
4 February 2011

More Subpoenas Against Midwest Leftists

FBI Infiltration Exposed

CHICAGO—In a further escalation of its war on civil liberties, in December the Obama administration issued federal grand jury subpoenas to nine leftists and Palestine solidarity activists in Chicago. The subpoenas follow raids last September 24 in Illinois and Minnesota in which scores of FBI agents descended on the homes of 14 activists, including well-known trade unionists, antiwar organizers and several supporters of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which publishes Fight Back! newspaper. The Feds seized cell phones and passports and carted away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks.

With its vendetta against these leftists, the Obama administration has one-upped the Bush regime in its war on civil liberties. Investigated for providing “material support to terrorism” on the basis of purported links to the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the leftists’ “crime” in the eyes of the U.S. rulers is their siding with victims of the Zionist butchers and Colombian death squads. Those who manage to avoid bogus charges of “support to terrorism” may still face years of imprisonment on charges of “criminal contempt” for the honorable act of refusing to name names before the grand jury inquisitors.

This witchhunt is a stark confirmation of how the shredding of civil liberties in the name of the “war on terror,” while at first mainly targeting Arab and Muslim immigrants, is ultimately aimed at the left and the entire labor movement. As the Spartacist League warned in a statement issued one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, both the Democrats and Republicans would seize on the event to reinforce capitalist class rule. As we wrote in “The World Trade Center Attack” (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001):

“It’s an opportunity for the exploiters to peddle ‘one nation indivisible’ patriotism to try to direct the burgeoning anger at the bottom of this society away from themselves and toward an indefinable foreign ‘enemy,’ as well as immigrants in the U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people.”

It is vitally necessary for the left, the labor movement and fighters for black and immigrant rights to defend those caught up in the government witchhunt. The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have participated in protests on the Midwest leftists’ behalf, demanding that all the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that materials seized by the Feds be returned. The vendetta against these leftists, a blatant attack on the rights of speech and association, is intended to intimidate into silence anyone who would protest government policies at home and wars and depredations abroad.

At a January 12 press conference in Minneapolis, FRSO supporters exposed how this whole “investigation” stems from police surveillance and disruption of protests against the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC). The Feds have now admitted that one government agent, using the name Karen Sullivan, infiltrated the Minneapolis Anti-War Committee (AWC) and later joined FRSO. “Sullivan” pushed herself into the forefront of local activism. She joined a vanload who traveled to the annual protest at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the U.S. military trains its Latin American counterparts in murder and torture, and gave a workshop on the counterinsurgency “Plan Colombia” at last year’s U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. This agent also insinuated herself into a three-person AWC Palestinian solidarity delegation to the Occupied Territories in 2009, which was stopped by Israeli immigration agents as soon as it arrived in Tel Aviv, presumably based on information “Sullivan” supplied.

“Sullivan” was only one of a host of undercover agents and informants who swarmed over the RNC protests. Many were paid thousands of dollars to spy on, disrupt and set up organizers for arrest. “The Policing of Political Speech,” a report issued by the National Lawyers Guild last September, exposed the central role of these agents in the prosecution of the RNC 8. These protest organizers were initially charged with “terrorism” based on acts of civil disobedience and disruption by a few anarchist youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct.”

Liberals and the reformist left, including the FRSO, promoted the illusion that Obama’s election would mark a sharp turn from the regime of George W. Bush. But as we pointed out at the time, Obama’s promises to clean up the worst “excesses” of the Bush gang were driven by his commitment to wage the “war on terror” more effectively. From the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo to National Security Agency domestic wiretapping, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton).

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Justice Department the authority, which it had long sought, to prosecute the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association as support to terrorism. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the court ruled that to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or the Kurdistan Workers Party on how to appeal to the United Nations in regard to their struggles against the genocidal wars waged by the Sri Lankan and Turkish governments would constitute “material support” to terrorism. We wrote in response that “by the Court’s light, any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to ‘terrorists’—from giving money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press—would be deemed ‘material support’” (“Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July 2010). Just three months later, the FBI launched its raids.

As reported by Fight Back!, “it seems that the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is focused on small donations to the day-care and women’s center projects of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.” Promoting education, day care and other relief for Palestinian refugee women and political prisoners, this group has had ties to the PFLP, which is designated as “terrorist” by the U.S. government.

For the blood-drenched U.S. imperialists, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. It has included such organizations as Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. The Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda top the U.S. hit list today, but in the 1980s their forebears were hailed—and bankrolled—by the U.S. as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. In “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984) we wrote: “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”

America’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent—from the legal lynching of the Haymarket Martyrs for organizing for the eight-hour day, to the Palmer Raids that led to the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals after World War I, and the Smith Act prosecution of leaders of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party on the eve of World War II. The postwar purges that drove the Stalinists and other leftists out of the unions, coming on the heels of the largest strike wave in U.S. history, were the domestic reflection of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, those who protested against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants were painted as traitors, while the government unleashed its secret police against fighters for black rights at home, assassinating 38 Black Panther Party members and railroading hundreds more to prison.

Ominously, one of the Chicago activists subpoenaed in December is Maureen Murphy, managing editor of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who had helped spearhead the defense of those targeted in the September raids. As a January 24 protest letter to Attorney General Eric Holder by the PDC stated: “The clear implication is that anyone who defends the civil liberties of those smeared as ‘terrorists’ will themselves in turn be targeted as ‘terrorists’.”

Ultimately, what the racist capitalist rulers can get away with will be determined by the level of class and social struggle. As Marxists, we understand that there will be no justice served until the imperialist exploiters, war criminals and witchhunters are swept from power through a socialist revolution that overturns capitalist class rule and establishes a workers government.

* * *

Funds are urgently needed for the legal defense of the subpoenaed Midwest activists. Donations can be sent to Committee to Stop FBI Repression, PO Box 14183, Minneapolis, MN 55414. Letters of protest can be sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001.

From The Partisan Defense Committee-South Korea-Free The Socialist Workers League Members Sentenced for Political Activity-Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Workers Vanguard No. 973
4 February 2011

South Korea

Socialist Workers League Members Sentenced for Political Activity

Free All Class-War Prisoners!

JANUARY 25—Eight supporters of the Socialist Workers League of Korea (SWLK) face serious prison sentences for the “crime” of supporting workers struggles and advocating socialist revolution. Charged in early December under the notorious National Security Law, they are due to be sentenced on January 27.

The National Security Law, enacted in 1948, has long been used to repress leftist and labor struggles in South Korea. Its sweeping provisions include a ban on forming or sympathizing with “anti-state” groups as well as the death penalty for activities in support of North Korea. Since right-wing president Lee Myung-bak came to power in 2008, his government has repeatedly tried to railroad SWLK activists to prison. It has also ramped up its suppression of labor struggles, including smashing a strike by workers at Ssangyong Motor Company in 2009.

These repressive moves come in the context of stepped-up U.S./South Korean provocations against North Korea and China, including last month’s joint military exercises in the Yellow Sea near the North Korean coast. Like a number of other South Korean left groups, the SWLK falsely characterizes North Korea and China as “state capitalist,” a characterization repeated by their spokesman Oh Sei-chull in his address to the court in December. In reality, these are bureaucratically deformed workers states, products of the revolutionary upheavals in Asia that followed the Second World War. The International Communist League stands for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea against imperialism and counterrevolution, including supporting their possession of nuclear weapons to deter imperialist attack. At the same time, we oppose the privileged Stalinist bureaucracies in Beijing and Pyongyang, whose futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism undermines defense of the revolutionary gains.

It is necessary to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party based on proletarian internationalism to lead a struggle for the revolutionary reunification of Korea: for socialist revolution against the brutally repressive capitalist regime in the South and for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats in the North. Linked to the fight for workers political revolution in China, this struggle must ultimately extend to the victory of proletarian rule in the imperialist heartlands of Japan and the U.S.

The persecution of the SWLK militants purely for their political beliefs gives the lie to the “democratic” pretensions of South Korean capitalism. Leftist and labor militants internationally must come to the defense of these activists. We print below a January 22 protest letter to the South Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C., by the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the ICL.

* * *

The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges against members of the Socialist Workers League of Korea (SWLK) be dropped and that they immediately be released. For their defense of several strikes and their participation in demonstrations these members face five to seven years in prison for “anti-state” activities.

Oh Sei-chull, Yang Hyo-seok, Yang Joon-seok, Choi Young-ik, Park Joon-seon, Jeong Won-hyun, Oh Min-gyu and Nam-goon Won were convicted under the draconian National Security Law. This law was enacted in 1948 to suppress any support for North Korea and has been used to criminalize all political opposition to successive reactionary South Korean regimes. This is no less true of the Lee Myung-bak government which has imprisoned striking workers, launched a campaign against migrant workers and cracked down on demonstrations his administration deems to be illegal, the definition of which has expanded greatly under his administration. The prosecution of these activists is part of the continued crackdown on those who, in the face of the brutal South Korean government, stand up for basic democratic rights and is a continuation of the brutal repression against the working class and its allies.

We demand: Free the SWLK 8! Drop the charges!

Don't "No-Fly" Libya- A Guest Commentary- Hands Of Libya- Down With Qaddafi

Don't "No-Fly" Libya
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Tue, 03/08/2011 - 5:29pm.

by Phyllis Bennis

Institute for Policy Studies - March 4, 2011

Today in Libya, civilians are being killed by a besieged and isolated dictator. Libyan warplanes have been used to attack civilians, although the vast majority of the violence has come from ground attacks. The Libyan opposition’s provisional national council, meeting in Benghazi, is debating whether they should request military support from the international community, maybe the UN or NATO, starting with a no-fly zone. The Arab League announced that it was also considering establishing a no-fly zone, perhaps with the African Union.

It is unclear what casualties the airstrikes may have caused. The anti-regime forces have some access to anti-aircraft weapons, and Qaddafi has already lost planes and pilots alike to the opposition — but it is far from clear where the military balance lies.

Powerful U.S. voices — including neo-conservative warmongers and liberal interventionists in and out of the administration, as well as important anti-war forces in and out of Congress — are calling on the Obama administration to establish a no-fly zone inLibya to protect civilians.

A Libyan activist writes in The Guardian, “we welcome a no-fly zone, but the blood of Libya's dead will be wasted if the west curses our uprising with failed intervention.” He says that his hopes for a happy ending are “marred by a fear shared by all Libyans; that of a possible western military intervention to end the crisis.” He seems to believe that a U.S. or NATO no-fly zone would mean something other than a Western military intervention.

Ironically it was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who warned that establishing a no-fly zone “begins with an attack on Libya.” It would be an act of war. And the Middle East doesn’t need another U.S. war.

What would a no-fly zone in Libya mean? A bit of history may provide some perspective.

Bombing Tripoli
The year was 1986. People had been killed, this time in a terrorist attack in Europe. The Libyan government, led by Muammar Qaddafi, was deemed responsible. The U.S. announced air strikesdirected at “key military sites” in Tripoli and Benghazi. Exactly the kind of targeted air strikes that would precede a no-fly zone. But according to the BBC, the missiles hit a densely populated Tripoli suburb, Bin Ashur. At least 100 people were killed, including Qaddafi’s three-year-old daughter. Qaddafi himself was fine.

Libyans remember.

Fast-forward half a decade. The 1991 Gulf War in Iraq was over. A besieged and defeated Arab dictator was posturing, threatening force, and the victorious U.S. decided to intervene again, officially for humanitarian reasons. The U.S. and Britain established unilateral “no-fly zones” in northern and southern Iraq. (U.S. and British officials consistently lied, claiming they were enforcing “United Nations no-fly zones,” but in fact no UN resolution ever even mentioned one.) During the twelve years of the no-fly zone, hundreds were killed by U.S. and British bombs.

Iraqis remember. So do Libyans.

Assume the “attack on Libya” preceding a no-fly zone succeeds in its very specific purpose: to eliminate the anti-aircraft weapons that could threaten U.S. planes enforcing the zone. But does that mean it also eliminates all anti-aircraft weapons in the hands of the opposition, the defectors from Qaddafi’s air force? What would the consequences be of that?

And then there are the “what if” factors. What if they made a mistake? The 1986 U.S. airstrikes inLibya were supposed to be aimed at military targets — yet more than 100 people, many of them civilians, were killed; why do we assume it will be any different this time? What if a U.S. warplane was shot down and pilots or bombers were captured by Qaddafi’s military? Wouldn’t U.S. Special Forces immediately be deployed to rescue them? Then what?

And that’s just the military part. That’s just the beginning.

Consequences
No-fly zones, like any other act of war, have consequences. In Libya, though it is impossible to precisely gauge public opinion, a significant majority of people appears opposed to the regime and prepared to mobilize and fight to bring it down. That is not surprising. While the Libyan revolt is playing out in vastly different ways, and with far greater bloodshed, it is part and parcel of the democratic revolutionary process rising across the Arab world and beyond. And just as in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere, there is no evidence that the Libyan population supports foreign military involvement.

To the contrary, although at least part of the anti-Qaddafi leadership is indeed calling for some kind of military intervention, there appears to be widespread public opposition to such a call. Certainly there is fear that such foreign involvement will give credibility to Qaddafi’s currently false claims that foreigners are responsible for the uprising. But beyond that, there is a powerful appeal in the recognition that the democracy movements sweeping the Middle East and North Africa areindigenous, authentic, independent mobilizations against decades-long U.S.- and Western-backed dictatorship and oppression.

There have been broadly popular calls for international assistance to the anti-Qaddafi forces, including support for a UN-imposed assets freeze and referral to the International Criminal Court for top regime officials. And despite the breathtaking hypocrisy of the U.S., which embraces the ICC as a tool against Washington’s current opponents but rejects it for war criminals among its Israeli and other allies and refuses its jurisdiction for itself, the use of the Court for this purpose is very appropriate.

But there is no popular call for military intervention. Human rights lawyer and opposition spokesman Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga was crystal clear: “We are against any foreign intervention... This revolution will be completed by our people.” And Libyan General Ahmad Gatroni, who defected to lead the opposition forces, urged the U.S. to “take care of its own people, we can look after ourselves.”

Indeed, if the U.S. is so worried about the bombing raids against civilians, perhaps the Obama administration should take another look at Afghanistan, where nine Afghan children, ages seven to fourteen, were killed by U.S. attack helicopters in Kunar province on March 1st. If the Congress is so eager to follow the wishes of Libya’s opposition, perhaps General Gatroni’s call for the U.S. to “take care of its own people” could mean challenging another stark reality: the people of Wisconsin, facing a $1.8 billion budget deficit, will pay $1.7 billion in taxes this year just for their share of an already-existing war, the one in Afghanistan.

Global Opposition
Internationally, there is widespread public and governmental opposition in influential countries, such as India, to establishing a no-fly zone. In the United Nations, many governments are reluctant to order an act of war that would significantly escalate the military conflict underway in Libya. The Security Council resolution that passed unanimously on February 27 condemned the violence and imposed a set of targeted sanctions on the Qaddafi regime, but did not reference Article 42 of the UN Charter, the prerequisite for endorsing the use of force.

Instead, the Council relied on Article 41, which authorizes only “measures not involving the use of armed force.” Passage, let alone unanimity, would have been impossible otherwise. Russia’s ambassador specifically opposed what he called “counterproductive interventions,” and other key Council members, including veto-wielding China as well as rising powers India, South Africa, and Brazil, have all expressed various levels of caution and outright opposition to further militarizing the situation in Libya.

So far, the Obama administration and the Pentagon appear to be vacillating on support for a no-fly zone. An anonymous administration official told the New York Times“there’s a great temptation to stand up and say, ‘We’ll help you rid the country of a dictator’… But the president has been clear that what’s sweeping across the Middle East is organic to the region, and as soon as we become a military player, we’re at risk of falling into the old trap that Americans are stage-managing events for their own benefit.”

In fact that “old trap,” seizing control of international events for Washington’s own benefit, remains central to U.S. foreign policy. It’s becoming harder these days, as U.S. influence wanes. But key U.S. political forces are upping the pressure on Obama to send the troops — at least the Air Force. Those rooting for war include right-wing Republican warmongers eager to attack Obama as war-averse (despite all evidence to the contrary), as well, unfortunately, as some of the strongest anti-war voices in Congress (including Jim McDermott, Mike Honda, Keith Ellison, and others), who presumably believe that the humanitarian necessity of a no-fly zone still outweighs the dangers.

It doesn’t. Humanitarian crises simply do not shape U.S. policy. If they did, we might have heard a bit more last week when the Baghdad government — armed, financed, trained, and supported by the United States — killed 29 Iraqi civilians demonstrating against corruption. We might have seen humanitarian involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions of civilians have been killed in Africa’s longest and perhaps most brutal war. And we might have seen, if not direct U.S. intervention, at least an end to the U.S. enabling of the Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 900 civilians, 313 of them children.

Rather, “humanitarian” concerns become a tool of powerful circles to build popular support for what would otherwise bring massive public outrage — “really, while the costs of existing wars have already brought the U.S. economy to its knees, you want to launch another U.S. war in the Middle East??”

Whose Humanitarianism?
It’s not that there are no real humanitarian concerns; Libyan civilians are paying a huge price in challenging their dictator. But powerful U.S. interests are at stake, and few of them have anything to do with protecting Libyan civilians. Certainly oil is key; not so much about access to Libyan oil (the international oil market is pretty fungible), but about which oil companies will gain privileged positions? Will it be BP and Chevron who win the lucrative contracts to develop Libya’s enormous oil fields, or will Chinese and Russian oil companies take their place? What pipelines will a new government in Libya choose, and which countries and corporations will benefit?

And it’s not only about oil. The Libyan uprising is one of many potentially revolutionary transformations across the Arab world and in parts of Africa, where long-standing U.S.-backed dictatorships are collapsing — what kind of credibility can the U.S. expect in post-Qaddafi Libya? Washington may be betting that it can win credibility with the opposition by jumping out in front with an aggressive anti-Qaddafi “military assistance” campaign, perhaps starting with a no-fly zone. But in fact Washington risks antagonizing those opposition supporters, apparently the vast majority, determined to protect the independence of their democratic revolution.

The future of Libya and much of the success of the democratic revolutions now underway across the region, stand in the balance. If the Obama administration, the Pentagon, war profiteers and the rest of the U.S. policymaking establishment continue to define U.S. “national interests” as continuing U.S. domination of oil-rich and strategically-located countries and regions, Washington faces a likely future of isolation, antagonism, rising terrorism and hatred.

The democratic revolutionary processes sweeping North Africa and the Middle East have already transformed that long-stalemated region. The peoples of the region are looking for less, not greater militarization of their countries. It is time for U.S. policy to recognize that reality. Saying no to a no-fly zone in Libya will be the best thing the Obama administration can do to begin the process of crafting a new, demilitarized 21st century policy for the U.S. in the newly democratizing Middle East.

*Victory To The Egyptian Workers' Strikes-Fight For A Revolutionary Constituent Assembly Now-Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For Workers And Peasants Government For The Future!

Markin comment:

As noted in the comment reposted below the events in Egypt are moving very swiftly with Mubarak apparently being pushed out on the plank. Nevertheless with Egyptian workers going on massive, although apparently unco-ordinated strikes, now is the time to go full throttle and fight for a revolutionary constituent assembly on the road to a socialist future. I have posted that demand as presented in the the Leon Trotsky-led  Fourth International's Transitional Program of 1938 for consideration. Clearly the masses in Egypt are in revolutionary motion. Which way they go and how far depends on better organization, and political direction. Army rule under any guise (remember that is where Mubarak came from) is not what people have fought and died for in the streets of Egypt's cities. More later.
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Reposted From Wednesday February 9, 2011

Markin comment:

The fast moving events in Egypt (and across the Middle East) cry out, cry out desperately, for the formation of a revolutionary workers party basing itself on democratic and socialist demands (the Transitional Program demands outlined by Leon Trotsky in the late 1930s, yes 1930s, as applicable to belated developed countries-the key immediate demand being the fight for a revolutionary constituent assembly) to gather around it workers, peasants and other allies to fight to the finish for a workers and peasants government. Can anything less be on the order of the day? I think not. Such situations, as the 30 plus years survival of the Mubarak regime testify to, show how rare such opportunities are and one better take maximum advantage, if not for the immediate struggle for power, then for the ability to fight later with the masses readily behind you.
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From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International (1938)- For the Complete Program Google The Leon Trotsky Internet Archives click on Written Archives and then click on 1938.

Backward Countries and the
Program of Transitional Demands

Colonial and semi-colonial countries are backward countries by their very essence. But backward countries are part of a world dominated by imperialism. Their development, therefore, has a combined character: the most primitive economic forms are combined with the last word in capitalist technique and culture. In like manner are defined the political strivings of the proletariat of backward countries: the struggle for the most elementary achievements of national independence and bourgeois democracy is combined with the socialist struggle against world imperialism. Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another. The Chinese proletariat had barely begun to organize trade unions before it had to provide for soviets. In this sense, the present program is completely applicable to colonial and semi-colonial countries, at least to those where the proletariat has become capable of carrying on independent politics.

The central task of the colonial and semi-colonial countries is the agrarian revolution, i.e., liquidation of feudal heritages, and national independence, i.e., the overthrow of the imperialist yoke. Both tasks are closely linked with each other.

It is impossible merely to reject the democratic program; it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it. The slogan for a National (or Constituent) Assembly preserves its full force for such countries as China or India. This slogan must be indissolubly tied up with the problem of national liberation and agrarian reform. As a primary step, the workers must be armed with this democratic program. Only they will be able to summon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the “national” bourgeoisie. Then, at a certain stage in the mobilization of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, soviets can and should arise. Their historical role in each given period, particularly their relation to the National Assembly, will be determined by the political level of the proletariat, the bond between them and the peasantry, and the character of the proletarian party policies. Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois democracy. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion and likewise opening an era of socialist revolution.

The relative weight of the individual democratic and transitional demands in the proletariat’s struggle, their mutual ties and their order of presentation, is determined by the peculiarities and specific conditions of each backward country and to a considerable extent by the degree of its backwardness. Nevertheless, the general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by the three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917).

The Comintern has provided backward countries with a classic example of how it is possible to ruin a powerful and promising revolution. During the stormy mass upsurge in China in 1925-27, the Comintern failed to advance the slogan for a National Assembly, and at the same time forbade the creation of soviets. (The bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, was to replace, according to Stalin’s plan, both the National Assembly and soviets.) After the masses had been smashed by the Kuomintang, the Comintern organized a caricature of a soviet in Canton. Following the inevitable collapse of the Canton uprising, the Comintern took the road of guerrilla warfare a peasant soviets with complete passivity on the part of the industrial proletariat. Landing thus in a blind alley, the Comintern took advantage of the Sino-Japanese War to liquidate “Soviet China” with a stroke of the pen, subordinating not only the peasant “Red Army” but also the so-called “Communist” Party to the identical Kuomintang, i.e., the bourgeoisie.

Having betrayed the international proletarian revolution for the sake of friendship with the “democratic” slavemasters, the Comintern could not help betraying simultaneously also the struggle for liberation of the colonial masses, and, indeed, with even greater cynicism than did the Second International before it. One of the tasks of People’s Front and “national defense” politics is to turn hundreds of millions of the colonial population into cannon fodder for “democratic” imperialism. The banner on which is emblazoned the struggle for the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples, i.e., a good half of mankind, has definitely passed into the hands of the Fourth International.

Obama, FBI- Hands Off The "Anonymous" Group

Click on the headline to link to an NPR online report, dated February 10, 2011, on the "Anonymous" Group (Hey that is what they are  called and if you listen to the story you will know why.) that has been acting as a cyberspace thorn in the side of the American government and assorted businesses

Markin comment:

I have run into some supporters of this group and they are interesting, kind of soft anarchist techie-types. Not Bolsheviks by any means but, seemingly, their hearts are in the right place. Hands Off "Anonymous" Group. And while we are at- Hands Off Wikileaks!- Hands Off The Chicago and Minneapolis Anti-war and Anti-Imperialist activists!- Free Private Bradley Manning! See, they all goes together, right?