Marxism and National Liberation

The war on Palestine and Lebanon has sharply posed a series of theoretical and strategic questions for Marxists. What is the relationship between the struggle for national independence and the broader struggle for human liberation? What social forces have the potential to defeat Israeli colonial settler rule and its imperialist backers? Does an alliance of the working class of Palestine and the broader Arab world with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, offer a way forward? What are the tasks of socialists in the imperialist heartlands? Should socialists adhere to a two-stage approach of limiting the struggle to a first stage of winning an independent capitalist nation state and then a later second stage of a struggle for socialism? Or alternatively should Marxists break with a stages approach and attempt to carry the struggle for national liberation over into a struggle for workers’ power?

Marxists standing in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky have long supported the right of national self-determination, including the right of an oppressed nation to secede from the state that dominates it.^[1] As Lenin put it in 1916: “This is an absolute demand, even where the chance of secession being possible and ‘practicable’ before the introduction of socialism is only one in a thousand”.^[2] Consequently the Bolsheviks backed the right of the oppressed nations of the tsarist empire – Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Latvia and various others – to break away from Russian rule and establish their own nation-state. The Bolsheviks also supported the right of the oppressed populations of the colonial world to revolt against imperialist rule. These were basic democratic rights that socialists needed to champion, while fighting to take them further to challenge the whole capitalist order. As Lenin wrote in The right of nations to self-determination, his polemic against Rosa Luxemburg and her supporters, who opposed the demand for national self-determination:

The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support. At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc.^[3]

Supporting national self-determination for oppressed nations was also seen by Marxists as important to combatting reactionary nationalist prejudices among workers of oppressor nations. As Marx noted in his writings on Ireland, workers in an oppressor nation like Britain would be incapable of achieving their own liberation if they backed their rulers oppressing another nation. In 1869 he wrote:

[I]t is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland … The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland … This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.^[4]

As well, Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued that revolts in the colonies and by oppressed national minorities in Europe could potentially destabilise capitalist rule in the imperialist heartlands. Of course, not every struggle for national independence has provoked a major crisis for the imperialist power. British capitalism was not ruptured by Kenyan, Ugandan, Cypriot or Iraqi independence, or US capitalism by Filipino independence, or Australian capitalism by Papua New Guinean independence. The world-wide radicalising impact of the American war in Vietnam was, however, a decisive confirmation of the destabilising potential of national liberation struggles. The validity of the Bolsheviks’ strategic insight was further demonstrated by the 1974 Portuguese revolution, sparked by Portugal’s defeat in its colonial wars in Africa.^[5]

However this principled Bolshevik approach of supporting the right of national self-determination does not tell you what specific political orientation socialists in the oppressed nation should adopt to win their national and social freedom. What demands should they raise? How should they relate to other class forces in the national movement – in particular, should they engage in cross-class alliances and politically support bourgeois/petty-bourgeois nationalist forces?

The Second International’s dubious record

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the level of development of capitalist industry was still very limited in most colonial countries. The social forces had not yet matured to open up the prospect of the emerging working class winning the leadership of the national independence movement and going on to seriously challenge capitalist rule. Moreover the Second Socialist International offered little useful advice or support to the small groups of socialists that developed in the colonial world prior to World War I. The right wing of the Second International was sympathetic to colonialism. Opposition to colonialism was only narrowly carried at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the International, by a vote of 127 to 108. Edward David, a leading right-wing revisionist in the German Social Democratic Party, argued that “Europe needs colonies. It does not have enough of them”.^[6] The left wing of the movement opposed colonialism but by and large downplayed the potential for building a socialist movement in the colonies. In the case of Ireland British socialists generally backed the bourgeois nationalists’ demand for Home Rule (self-government under the British Crown).

In this context it is understandable that the groups of socialists that first emerged in the colonial countries confined their approach to the undoubtedly necessary tasks of laying the basis for a working-class movement, helping to form trade unions and campaigning for greater democratic rights. When it came to the national question, reflecting the orientation of the Socialist International, they in many cases confined their demands to supporting the establishment of an independent bourgeois republic. That is the same demand as the various petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalists. But with economic development and the further growth of the working class in the colonies, in semi-colonies like Iran, Turkey and China and in the oppressed nations of the Russian Empire, the approach of socialists limiting themselves to supporting bourgeois nationalists and independent capitalist republics posed serious problems. It led to needless defeats for the emerging working-class movement.

By the early twentieth century it was clear that the wealthy classes in colonies like India and Egypt – the landlords, the merchants, the industrial capitalists and so on – were hesitant about challenging the colonial powers. They might like the idea of national independence and the expansion of the market for local industry. However to achieve independence meant mobilising the exploited mass of the population – the peasantry, the urban poor and the working class – to confront imperial power. That was a risky operation – an operation that could well threaten their wealth and power. So they prevaricated. When mass revolts broke out in countries like China they commonly went beyond the narrow limits of demands for national independence. Peasants seized the land from landlords. Workers struck, not just against imperialist-owned companies, but against the local bourgeoisie. This in turn posed the question: why should workers and the oppressed give their lives fighting to drive out the colonial power but then limit themselves to installing a capitalist government, under which they would continue to be exploited and oppressed, if this time by local capitalists?

Possibly the first group of socialists in a colonial country to seriously grapple with this question was the small Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) founded by James Connolly in 1896. Ireland, though still a predominantly agricultural society, was more economically advanced than most British colonies. Moreover it had a long history of revolts against English rule, in the course of which, as Irish Republican leader Wolfe Tone noted as early as the 1790s, the “men of property” – the petty capitalists, the landlords and other exploiting layers – when push came to shove temporised or backed England against the “men of no property”. From this bitter experience the ISRP declared in their 1896 program that British rule served “the interests of the exploiting classes of both nations” and consequently “the national and economic freedom of the Irish people must be sought” by “the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic, and the consequent conversion of the means of production, distribution and exchange into the common property of society, to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community”.^[7] More than just fighting British rule, workers had to raise their own class demands and challenge Irish bosses and landlords. The ISRP opposed limiting the national struggle to the demand for Home Rule advocated by mainstream bourgeois nationalists and counterposed the demand for a workers’ republic to the traditional demand of a capitalist republic championed by the Republican wing of the nationalists, who advocated armed struggle against British rule.

However the ISRP’s stance was an exception. Prior to the 1917 Russian revolution most parties in the Socialist International did not seriously address the question of what strategy colonial socialists should adopt in relation to bourgeois nationalists. Most Western socialists held to the view that the less advanced economies would essentially follow the trajectory of development traced previously by the industrially advanced capitalist states. According to this view the workers in the colonies would simply have to wait for their day to arrive. There were some partial exceptions to this pattern. In 1898 the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) declared: “The further east one goes in Europe, the more the bourgeoisie becomes in the political respect weaker, more cowardly, and meaner, and the larger are the cultural and political tasks which fall to the share of the proletariat”.^[8] Leon Trotsky took this approach further with his theory of permanent revolution, elaborated in his book Results and Prospects in the context of the 1905 Russian revolution.^[9] But at that stage Trotsky did not generalise permanent revolution to the colonial world. As for Lenin, he rather naively argued in 1912:

What has decayed is the Western bourgeoisie, which is already confronted by its grave digger, the proletariat. But in Asia there is still a bourgeoisie capable of championing sincere, militant, consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of France’s great men of the Enlightenment and great leaders of the close of the eighteenth century.^[10]

The impact of the Russian revolution

In the course of the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks had to come to grips with the concrete questions posed as the tsarist Empire was torn apart by social and national struggle. It was not sufficient for Marxists to just say they supported the right of national self-determination in Ukraine, Poland, Finland and the like. What about the class struggle in these oppressed nations? The issue was brought to a head in Ukraine, then an overwhelmingly peasant country much more economically backward than the Middle East today. In the aftermath of the February Revolution a petty-bourgeois nationalist government, the Rada, rose to power in Ukraine and began to demand independence. The Provisional government in Petrograd, backed by the Menshevik reformists, denounced any idea of Ukrainian independence. Only the Bolsheviks supported the rights of the Ukrainians.

That did not, however, lead the Bolsheviks to politically support the Rada. The Rada was neither a friend of the Ukrainian workers nor an opponent of imperialism. The Rada supported the German invasion of Ukraine and later carried out pogroms against Ukraine’s Jewish population. In opposition to the Rada the Bolsheviks and their working-class supporters backed the formation of a Ukrainian soviet government.^[11] This became the Bolsheviks’ approach in other oppressed nations of the tsarist Empire. They were for working-class rule with the support of the peasantry, not bourgeois republics. Summing up this experience Trotsky wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution:

[I]n the course of her three revolutions, you can find every variant of national and class struggle except one: that in which the bourgeoisie of any oppressed nation played a liberating role in relation to its own people. At every stage of its development every borderland bourgeoisie, no matter in what colours it might dance, was invariably dependent upon the central banks, trusts, and commercial institutions which were in essence the agents of all Russian capital… Taken as a whole, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation played the same role in relation to the ruling bourgeoisie that the latter played in relation to international finance capital. The complex hierarchy of antagonisms and dependencies did not remove for one single day the fundamental solidarity of the three in the struggle against the insurrectionary masses.

In the sum total the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations manifested no less hostility to the revolution than the Great Russian bourgeoisie.^[12]

The Bolsheviks, the early Comintern and the colonial revolution

In the first years after the Russian revolution the Bolsheviks’ views on the national question were in flux. Initially influential sections of the party generalised the approach adopted in the October Revolution to the colonies, effectively embracing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In this period Trotsky’s Results and Prospects was reprinted several times, including foreign language editions.^[13] This was the orientation Nikolai Bukharin (previously an opponent of national self-determination) and Evgenii Preobrazhensky advocated in their 1920 book, The ABC of Communism, which was for a period the textbook of Bolshevik politics. The ABC of Communism provided an elaboration of the recently revised party program. It emphasised that the new program explicitly abandoned the old 1903 RSDLP program that had not envisaged workers taking power. The new program called for “the establishment of working class rule” and called for world socialist revolution. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky wrote:

The demand for a soviet regime has in fact become the international watchword of the proletariat. In all [my emphasis] countries the workers sound this war-cry, in conjunction with the demand for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Life has confirmed the accuracy of our slogan, “All power to the soviets”, not in Russia alone, but in every [my emphasis] country where there is a proletariat.^[14]

At the First Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919, which, however, had a limited attendance, there was no detailed discussion of the national question. The Congress Manifesto did denounce “colonial slavery” and hail the revolts in the colonies. It pointed out:

The liberation of the colonies is possible only together with the liberation of the working class in the imperialist centres. The workers and peasants, not only of Annam, Algeria, and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain the possibility of an independent existence only when the workers of Britain and France have toppled Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands.

Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia: the hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your liberation!^[15]

Significantly it argued: “Already today, the struggle in the more developed colonies is waged not merely under the banner of national liberation but immediately acquires a clearly defined social character”.^[16]

However by the time of the Second Comintern Congress in July/August 1920 there had been a shift in the approach of some leading Bolsheviks. There was greater emphasis on fighting British imperialism, which was seen as the main threat to the survival of the Russian revolution, and a subsequent search for allies to oppose the British. The Second Congress held a substantial discussion of the national and colonial question. The Congress debates were a major step forward and contained a number of vital insights. However there were also certain confusions, and some important strategic issues were not fully addressed. This in part reflected the uneven level of economic and political development in the colonial and semi-colonial world and the as yet very limited experience of Communist activity in these countries. The theses adopted correctly noted that it was not necessary for colonies to go through a capitalist stage of development; that with assistance of workers’ revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries it would be possible for colonies to skip the capitalist stage and begin to build genuine socialist societies. The Theses on the Colonial Question argued:

A resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries which are not genuinely communist in communist colours. The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties – which will be truly communist and not only in name – in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic trend in their nation. The Communist International should collaborate provisionally with the revolutionary movement of the colonies and backward countries, and even form an alliance with it, but it must not amalgamate with it; it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is only in an embryonic stage.^[17]

The Commission on the Colonial Question amended Lenin’s draft thesis, which called for communists to support “bourgeois national” movements against imperialism. It was pointed out that many bourgeois nationalist forces collaborated with imperialism and were in no sense genuinely revolutionary. Instead the formula “national-revolutionary” was substituted for “bourgeois national”. This was a fudge that did not clarify the issue. Other than the exploited masses of the working class and peasantry, who undoubtedly were genuinely revolutionary, what other social class, if any, was to be included under the rubric “national-revolutionary”? In the imperialist era the reality was that none of the bourgeois forces in the colonial world, as was decisively demonstrated during the 1925–27 Chinese revolution, were consistently revolutionary. All of them flip-flopped around from a “revolutionary” position of support for armed struggle to end colonial rule to cutting a deal with the imperialist powers.

In his address to the Congress Lenin tried to get around this problem by arguing “that as communists we will only support the bourgeois freedom movements…if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a revolutionary way”.^[18] But which bourgeois figure with even half a brain was going to allow the Communists to do that?

In a few colonies a working-class movement had emerged. What was to be the approach there? The Indian socialist MN Roy argued at the Second Congress and in subsequent Comintern debates that in colonies like India the working class in alliance with the peasantry was the force that needed to lead the struggle against British rule and establish a soviet republic. Lenin had some sympathy for Roy’s views. However despite Roy’s supplementary theses being unanimously adopted they were subsequently ignored.

No clear guidelines were given at the Second Congress on a key strategic question that was soon to confront Communists in countries like China. When should revolutionaries and the working-class movement break decisively with the nationalists and rally the peasantry, the urban poor and other intermediary layers behind them and carry the struggle for independence over into a struggle for workers’ power? Given the limited experience of the colonial Communist parties, that question could not yet be fully settled. But it was a decisive question that the new Communist parties were to be confronted with head on. Getting it wrong had disastrous consequences.

There was no substantial discussion of the colonial question at the Third Comintern Congress in June 1921. However Trotsky, in his report “On the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International”, insisted that a colonial bourgeoisie’s

struggle against foreign imperialist domination cannot…be either consistent or energetic in as much as the native bourgeoisie itself is intimately bound up with foreign capital… Only the rise of a native proletariat strong enough numerically and capable of struggle can provide a real axis for the revolution. In comparison to the country’s entire population, the size of the Indian proletariat is, of course, numerically small, but those who have grasped the meaning of the revolution’s development in Russian will never fail to take into account that the proletariat’s revolutionary role in the Oriental countries will far exceed its actual numerical strength.^[19]

The Fourth Comintern Congress of November/December 1922 saw a further major discussion of the colonial question. The theses adopted re-emphasised a number of points, including the key role of the anti-colonial struggle and the importance of Communist parties in the imperialist powers backing revolts in the colonies, combatting racist prejudices and providing solidarity and support to the emerging colonial Communist parties. It also highlighted the fact that “native ruling classes tend to make compromises with foreign capitalism that are directed against the interests of the popular masses”.^[20] The theses declared:

[T]he Communist International supports every national-revolutionary movement against imperialism. However, it does not ignore the fact that the oppressed masses can be led to victory only by a consistent revolutionary line aimed at drawing the broadest masses into active struggle and an unconditional break with all those who seek conciliation with imperialism in order to maintain their own class-rule.

They went on to stress that:

only the agrarian revolution, which adopts the aim of expropriating large landholdings, can set the mighty peasant masses in motion… Bourgeois nationalists…fear agrarian slogans and seek every possibility to water them down. This reveals the close links of the native bourgeoisie with the feudal and feudal-bourgeois great landowners, on whom they are ideologically and politically dependent. All revolutionary forces must utilise this vacillation to reveal the irresolution of the bourgeois leaders of the nationalist movements.

Any refusal of Communists…to take part in the struggle against imperialist tyranny, on the excuse of supposed “defence” of independent class interests, is opportunism of the worst sort that can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the East. No less damaging is the attempt to remain aloof from the struggle for the immediate interests of the working class in order to pursue “national unity” or “civil peace” with the bourgeois democrats.

The Communist workers’ parties…have a double task: both to fight for the most radically possible resolution of the tasks of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, aimed at winning political independence, and also to organise the worker and peasant masses in struggle for their particular class interests, profiting from all the contradictions in the nationalist bourgeois-democratic camp.

The workers’ movement…must strive above all to achieve the role of an independent revolutionary force in the overall anti-imperialist front. Only when its autonomous weight is acknowledged and its political independence is thus safeguarded is it permissible and necessary to conclude temporary agreements with bourgeois democracy. The proletariat supports immediate demands…to the degree that the current relationship of forces does not permit it to implement its soviet programme as an immediate task.^[21]

Despite these fundamentally correct theses, major speeches by Karl Radek and GI Safarov highlighted the fact that leading Comintern officials still had considerable illusions in the supposed objective revolutionary potential of bourgeois nationalist forces and even of the “moribund feudal class”. Radek declared:

They will try a thousand times to sell themselves to this or that faction of world capitalism; they will try a thousand times to betray the revolutionary interests of their country, but the joke of history is that…they’ve got no choice. They must fight, because in the long run a compromise with imperialism is impossible.

…our task consists of…first, organising the young working class, and second, establishing a proper relationship between them and the objectively [my emphasis] revolutionary bourgeois forces.^[22]

Safarov stated that a “bourgeois-democratic government in the backward countries provides support and great reassurance for our proletarian movement”. Communists were to pay a heavy price for these illusions.

Radek also severely underestimated the revolutionary possibilities in China, arguing that “neither the victory of socialism nor the establishment of a soviet republic is on the agenda. Unfortunately, even the question of national unity has not yet been historically placed on the agenda in China”.^[23] This assessment did not help Chinese Communists prepare themselves politically for the revolution that was soon to sweep the country.

Turkey and Iran: two difficult early tests

Communists were quickly confronted with challenges when it came to applying a principled revolutionary approach to the national question. The Turkish case, in particular, was far from straightforward.^[24] The Ottoman Empire, ruling over much of the Middle East and North Africa, allied with Germany in World War I. With its defeat in the war Ottoman territories were carved up by Britain and France; even the Empire’s Turkish core came under threat with the British occupying Istanbul and supporting a Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1921.

There was no popular revolt against this imperialist-backed invasion. Workers were largely passive, as was the great bulk of the peasantry. The Turkish army was plagued by mass desertions. However the officer corps proved loyal to the nationalist military dictator Kemal Ataturk. These Kemalist officers had presided over the Armenian genocide at the start of World War I. They followed that up with massacres of the Empire’s Arab population and went on to persecute the substantial Greek minority. According to Turkish socialist Cem Uzun, “1,200,000 ‘Greeks’ (actually Orthodox Christians, some of whom spoke Turkish) were expelled… This decapitated the working class, and weakened virtually any form of potential opposition”.^[25] The Kemalists were supported by the small layer of nationalist intellectuals and bureaucrats and rich Turkish Muslims, who had benefited from the looting of the property of Christians.^[26]

The Greek army advanced rapidly into Anatolia. It seemed the Turkish forces were going to be decisively defeated. The tide was turned largely due to the financial and military support provided to the Kemalists by Soviet Russia and the emergence in Greece of a working class-based anti-war movement.^[27] The Bolsheviks were correct to defend Turkish national rights from imperialist invasion. The Bolsheviks also rightly feared that a successful invasion would increase the likelihood of a British attack on Soviet territory. This setback for imperialism was a good thing and Britain was forced to evacuate Istanbul. However the nationalist regime the Bolsheviks armed was in no sense a revolutionary anti-imperialist government or even a liberal democratic one. It was an anti-working class dictatorship that ethnically cleansed what had been an increasingly militant working class. Turkish Communists faced mass executions. In a notorious case the Kemalists drowned CP leader Mustafa Subhi and 16 other leading communists in the Sea of Trebizond in January 1921.^[28]

Having defeated the imperialist-backed invasion, the Turkish nationalists quickly began to distance themselves from their former Soviet allies, seeking a reproachment with British imperialism. In 1924 and 1925 sharpening British hostility to Turkish expansionist ambitions in Iraq pushed the Kemalists back towards the Bolsheviks, leading to the signing of a Soviet-Turkish treaty of neutrality. There was, however, no let-up in the persecution of Communists and of trade union organisation. As Cem Uzun summed up:

The result of the war was a defeat for imperialism, but it was far from a victory for the Turkish people. Ethnic cleansing had torn the heart out of society. It had also help smash the working-class movement. The forces in Turkish society capable of fighting from below for democracy and social change had been dramatically weakened.^[29]

Among the Bolsheviks, desperate for allies in the face of international isolation and fearful of a further imperialist invasion, symptoms of accommodation to bourgeois nationalist forces began to surface. A tendency to qualify political criticisms of the nationalists they supported militarily emerged. The Turkish regime’s anti-working class measures began to be played down because of the supposed “objectively revolutionary role” it was playing. At the 12th Russian Communist Party Congress in April 1923 Bukharin declared that Turkey, “in spite of all persecutions of communists, plays a revolutionary role, since she is a destructive implement in relation to the imperialist system as a whole”.^[30] This hardly accorded with the resolution of the Second Comintern Congress:

The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties – which will be truly communist and not only in name – in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic trend in their nation.^[31]

By 1924 the tendency to adapt to bourgeois nationalists was reflected in divisions among Turkish Communists. A right wing emerged that downplayed the importance of the workers’ movement. The right called for support for Kemal so long as he fought “against imperialism and the remnants of the feudal system”, implying he was actually doing both. In opposition to this approach the left argued to organise workers “against the bourgeoisie”.^[32] With the Stalinisation of the Comintern it was the right-wing opportunist line that won out. An alliance with the Turkish state was prioritised over workers’ interests. By 1925 Turkish Communists were denouncing Kurdish rebellions against the Kemalist regime.

Iran

A second difficult test for the Bolshevik approach to national and social struggle in the semi-colonial world came in Iran (Persia as it was then called). Before World War I, while not strictly a colony, Iran had been divided into two spheres of influence: Russia the north, Britain the south. British capital dominated the oil industry. During the war British and Russian troops occupied Iran to forestall any German/Turkish attempt to seize the oil industry. After the war Britain used Iran as a base to back the reactionary White Armies fighting Soviet Russia.

In a clear break with the imperialist policies of tsarism the Soviet government cancelled Iran’s debts, renounced all the exploitative tsarist concessions and handed over to the Iranian government former Russian property.^[33] This anti-imperialist approach, which sharply contrasted to Britain’s ongoing manoeuvrings, led to a surge of popular enthusiasm for Soviet Russia among virtually all sections of the population and prevented the Iranian regime endorsing a proposed Anglo-Persian treaty.

The situation was complicated, however, by the formation in the northern province of Gilan of a quasi-independent nationalist government headed by Mirza Kuchak Khan. Kuchak Khan, whom the historian EH Carr describes as “part adventurer and part fanatic”, was stridently anti-British and had probably received German subsidies.^[34] By 1920 he was painting himself in Bolshevik colours. In May 1920 a strong Soviet force under the command of Fyodor Raskolnikov landed at Iran’s Caspian Sea port of Enzeli to capture Russian ships abandoned by Denikin’s retreating White Army. The Soviet forces linked up with Kuchak Khan, declaring an independent Soviet Republic. But some in Moscow were cautious about backing Kuchak Khan, who was no communist. They were more interested in influencing the Tehran government.

Previously in 1918 Iranian immigrant workers, inspired by the Russian revolution, had formed a Communist organisation, Adalat. Initially nationalist in orientation Adalat was radicalised by its participation in the Russian civil war and participated in the First Comintern Congress.^[35] At its June 1920 Congress held in the Soviet Republic of Gilan the party was divided between a left “purely communist” faction, and a right “national revolutionary” faction. The right called for collaboration with Iranian capitalists and landlords, indeed that “no demonstrations should be tolerated against the landlords or the bourgeoisie”. They argued: “all the revolutionary forces must be directed against the British. There can be no other tactic for us. Persia is not mature for Communism”. The left, with initially a clear majority, called for the “sovietisation” of Persia along the lines followed by the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.^[36] But under Soviet pressure the Iranian Central Committee declared in October 1920 that revolution in Iran would be possible only when full bourgeois development had been completed. This paved the way for the possibility of an alliance with the rising Iranian bourgeoisie against Britain.^[37]

Russian courting of the Iranian government continued, despite a coup in February 1921 that brought the future Shah, Reza Khan, to power. By some accounts the Russian Consul, the former Menshevik Theodore Rothstein, who arrived in Tehran in April 1921, did not play a good role. He was criticised by Iranian Communists for being more interested in currying favour with the local elite than aiding the Communists.^[38] Reza Khan, a modernising nationalist dictator hostile to the old feudal-style regime, was an implacable opponent of the developing working-class movement and a relentless persecutor of communists. Nonetheless he received favourable coverage in the Soviet press as a “progressive”.^[39]

It was reasonable for the Soviet government to sign a treaty with Iran in February 1921. The withdrawal of support for the Gilan republic was also arguably justifiable. It is true that the Iranian working-class movement and the small Communist Party were in no position to challenge for power in the early 1920s. However from 1921 onwards Soviet policy in Iran was essentially emptied of revolutionary content. Strong national states on Russia’s borders came to be seen as being in Russia’s strategic interests. Consequently Reza Khan was courted and his government defended as a revolutionary nationalist opponent of imperialism. With the rise of Stalinism this opportunist bent became totally entrenched. As for the early Iranian Communist leaders, they were to suffer a terrible fate in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s – either shot outright or slowly dying in the concentration camps.^[40]

Ireland: the missing revolutionary nationalist bourgeoisie

The issue of socialists attempting to identify the supposedly revolutionary nationalist section of the colonial bourgeoisie was nowhere more problematic than in Ireland. The most advanced section of the Irish bourgeoisie, Belfast’s industrial capitalists, was tightly integrated into the British Empire. They bitterly opposed Irish nationalism and orchestrated the arming of Ulster’s Protestant population to fight the introduction of Irish Home Rule. As for the economically weaker Dublin capitalists, for decades their ambitions never extended beyond Home Rule within the Empire. They condemned the physical force nationalists of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Dublin capitalists were terrified of revolt by workers and the rural poor and relied on the British state to suppress the subversive threat. The Home Rule capitalists’ outlook was graphically demonstrated during the historic 1913 Dublin lock-out. Under the leadership of the notorious William Martin Murphy, Irish bosses worked hand in glove with the British authorities to brutally suppress an upsurge of working-class militancy spearheaded by the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union led by the revolutionary syndicalist James Larkin.

Yet by the end of World War I the Southern capitalists and their petty-bourgeois supporters seemingly had broken from their cautious stance. Abandoning support for the Home Rule party they threw their weight behind the Sinn Fein separatists and backed the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the War of Independence. But this seeming shift to “revolutionary nationalism” and armed struggle to establish a republic was soon abandoned. Ever willing to compromise, in December 1921 the Southern capitalists endorsed a Treaty that denied full independence. Britain was allowed to retain part of the North while the South was to remain within the Empire as a so-called Free State. Highlighting the reality that there is no necessary correlation between support for armed struggle against colonial rule and political or social radicalism, IRA leader Michael Collins was a key proponent of the Treaty. Collins, a ruthless exponent of terror tactics against the British, was a conservative pro-capitalist nationalist who viewed the 1916 Easter Rebellion’s proclamation of a Republic as “too socialistic”. Collins, now armed by the British imperialists, built a Free State Army that crushed the anti-Treaty IRA in the subsequent Irish Civil War.

In the course of the War of Independence the reformist leaders of the Irish labour movement subordinated themselves to the nationalists. They accepted the dictum that “Labour must wait” until the national question was resolved. The union leaders endorsed the Free State and in the Civil War aligned with the Free State nationalists. “A major consequence of their denial of independent proletarian politics”, as Mike Milotte writes, “was that most militant workers were absorbed into the republican melange”.^[41] This was a tragedy, as between 1917 and 1923 Ireland was rocked by working-class revolt, including three political general strikes. Aided by the breakdown of law and order during years of guerrilla warfare, there was an outburst of strikes and workplace occupations and the formation of local “soviets”. In 1922 alone there were 80 workplace occupations. Workers flooded into the unions, and in a pathbreaking development agricultural workers won significant gains in a surge of syndicalist militancy.^[42] It was precisely because of the revolt from below that that the bourgeoisie sought to terminate the War of Independence. Had it gone on for longer there was a heightened possibility of it breaking out of the bounds of bourgeois nationalism and becoming a social struggle against capitalist rule.

In this context of immense challenges for socialists, Roddy Connolly, the son of British-executed socialist leader James Connolly, pushed to establish a Communist Party. Even for a party of many thousands with a crystal-clear approach to the national question it would not have been easy going. But this tiny group of never more than a hundred or so in its early years, which was far from clear politically, was set to be buffeted all over the place by mass forces. The young Communists’ initial inclination was to concentrate on industrial militancy. Their 1920 report to the Second Comintern Congress downplayed the importance of the national question. “Taking a purely tactical view of nationalism, it described the IRA, as both ‘potentially white guards’ and fertile grounds for red propaganda”.^[43] Connolly fancifully argued that it would be easier to build a Communist Party among the Protestant workers of the North as they were less impacted by Irish nationalism. Consequently Ulster “may become one of the chief centres of the proletarian struggle against an Irish bourgeois state”.^[44]

Under the impact of the Second Comintern Congress discussion of the national question, Connolly and the other Irish delegate, Eadhmonn MacAlpine, ditched their previous approach and emphasised the national struggle. They declared: “Any force that tends to hinder the free play of the imperialist states against the developing world revolution must be encouraged and actively supported”.^[45] With Connolly reliant on Moscow for ideas, further flip-flops followed. In line with the Third Comintern Congress’s slogan “To the Masses”, Connolly next concentrated on trade union matters and the formation of Communist nuclei in unions and factories. The first issue of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) paper, Workers’ Republic, did not mention the national struggle.

However with the signing of the Treaty in December 1921 the Workers’ Republic editorial declared: “the people and fighters of Ireland must stand resolutely for de Valera and Brugha [anti-Treaty Republicans] – and this despite however reactionary either may be as regards the workers’ aims”.^[46] Connolly believed the CPI was too small to influence the industrial revolt, but could make a breakthrough via an alliance with Republicans. During the Civil War the CPI operated as advisers to the Republicans, calling for them to orient to workers; advice the militarist IRA leaders happily ignored. The CPI abandoned the call for a workers’ republic. But as Mike Milotte notes, “while urging support for the bourgeois republic the CPI did not attempt, even in a modest way, to prepare itself or the working class for an advance beyond that stage through the struggle for workers’ power”.^[47] By mid-1922 the Comintern was moving towards a two-stage revolution approach, declaring: “It is only after the yoke of the English imperialists has been shaken off that the struggle against the Irish exploiters will have any chance of success!”^[48] By 1923 Connolly and other leading CPI members had accepted jobs as Sinn Fein organisers. The initial CPI was wound up on 26 January 1924.

Yet for all the confusions of the early Communists they were not simply Stalin’s creatures. They had their own independent minds and by the late 1920s they had been driven out of the movement. From then on the leaders of Irish Communism were Moscow-trained hacks. These Stalinist leaders backed all the twists and turns coming out of Russia. By the popular front years of the mid-1930s, Irish Communists had fully embraced the two-stage theory, leaving the struggle for socialism to a distant future. They voted down the call from the left wing of the Republican Congress for a workers’ republic. This class-collaborationist approach led them to support Fianna Fail, the dominant party of Irish capitalism, for the next 60 years.

China 1925–27: a decisive test

By 1925 China was in ferment. Workers were on the move in the big cities and in the countryside peasants were seizing the land.^[49] The young Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was growing rapidly, but could it make the most of the revolutionary opportunities? The First Congress in July 1921 of the then very small CCP outlined the following program:

1. With the revolutionary army of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalistic classes, to reconstruct the nation from the labour class, until class distinctions are eliminated.

2. To adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to complete the end of class struggle – abolishing the classes.

3. To overthrow the private ownership of capital, to confiscate all the productive means…and to entrust them to social ownership.

4. To unite with the Third International.^[50]

However under concerted pressure from the Comintern this approach of fighting for working-class rule was gradually abandoned. Instead the Communists submitted themselves to the authority of the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang (GMD[51]). By 1925 the CCP stood for limiting the revolution to achieving a bourgeois republic. This left the CCP theoretically and politically compromised. Lacking a clear perspective of fighting for a soviet government, the whole logic of the situation meant that the Communists were pushed in the direction of tailing along behind the GMD. The CCP ended up playing a similar role to that of the Mensheviks in Russia in 1917, which blocked with the bourgeois Kadets and opposed workers taking power. Consequently the revolutionary wave that swept China went down to a crushing defeat. The Communists were massacred and driven from the cities.

It was not a question of misguided but well-meaning advice coming from Moscow. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian revolution and the cynical opportunist policies pursued by the Comintern from 1924 onwards, first under Zinoviev’s leadership and then under Bukharin/Stalin, made the situation for the Chinese Communists far worse. The CCP’s original entry into the GMD, though imposed rather bureaucratically by the Comintern, was possibly justifiable. Indeed Trotsky continued to defend that decision:

The participation of the CCP in the Guomindang was perfectly correct in the period when the CCP was a propaganda society that was only preparing itself for future independent political activity but which, at the same time, sought to take part in the ongoing national liberation struggles.^[52]

There is, however, a sharp distinction between working inside the GMD to build up the revolutionary forces and subordinating Communists to bourgeois nationalists. By 1926 subordination to the nationalists was precisely the line from Moscow, even though the GMD was cracking down on the working-class movement. In the face of desperate pleas from the CCP leadership to break with the nationalists and be given Russian arms to defend themselves, the CCP was forbidden from fomenting seizures of land by the peasantry and from campaigning against the Chinese bourgeoisie, as this “would weaken the fighting capacity of the Guomindang”.^[53] Stalin’s chief emissary in China, Borodin, put it bluntly: “The present period is one in which the Communists should do coolie service for the Kuomintang”.^[54]

Previously, in January 1926, the Russian party greeted the GMD’s Congress with the message: “To our Party has fallen the proud and historic role of leading the first victorious proletarian revolution of the world… We are convinced that the Kuomintang will succeed in playing the same role in the East”.^[55] Soon afterwards the GMD was admitted to the Communist International as a sympathising party! In October 1926 Trotsky summed up the fatal weakness of the Stalinist policy:

The Chinese bourgeoisie is sufficiently realistic and acquainted intimately enough with the nature of world imperialism to understand that a really serious struggle against the latter requires such an upheaval of the revolutionary masses as would primarily become a menace to the bourgeoisie itself… And if we taught the workers of Russia from the very beginning not to believe in the readiness of liberalism and the ability of petit-bourgeois democracy to crush tsarism and to destroy feudalism, we should no less energetically imbue the Chinese workers from the outset with the same spirit of distrust. The new and absolutely false theory promulgated by Stalin-Bukharin about the “immanent” revolutionary spirit of the colonial bourgeoisie is, in substance the translation of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics.^[56]

The Chinese Communists were undoubtedly heroic fighters. On numerous occasions they argued against the directives coming from an increasingly Stalinist-dominated Comintern. But the Chinese Communists did not have an alternative theoretical perspective of maintaining working-class independence from bourgeois nationalist forces in order to carry the struggle against imperialism beyond the bourgeois stage into a struggle for soviet power. They were not helped by the fact that Trotsky did not generalise his theory of permanent revolution to China until some years into the revolutionary process. Consequently the CCP equivocated. And if you are not politically prepared to push the struggle all the way, to break decisively with the nationalists and challenge for power, you are bound to be defeated. In the Chinese case it proved to be at an enormous cost.

Drawing the lessons

In 1920 or 1924 principled revolutionaries could have a genuine debate about whether the social forces existed for socialist revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial world. There were vast differences in economic development between India and China at one extreme and Saudi Arabia and Laos at the other. This is simply not the reality of world capitalism today. In the case of the Middle East the working class currently forms a much greater percentage of the population than in Russia in 1917, and the level of economic development is far higher. The Arab Spring of 2011 confirmed that there is enormous potential for social revolt.

Leon Trotsky drew important lessons from the defeat of the Chinese revolution, arguing for the application of the theory of permanent revolution more generally to the colonial world. In 1932 he wrote in the chapter “The Problem of Nationalities”, in his seminal History of the Russian Revolution:

This appraisal of national wars and revolutions does not by any means imply, however, that the bourgeoisie of the colonial and semi-colonial nations have a revolutionary mission. On the contrary, this bourgeoisie of backward countries from the days of its milk teeth grows up as an agentry of foreign capital, and notwithstanding its envious hatred of foreign capital, always does and always will in every decisive situation turn up in the same camp with it. Chinese compradorism is the classic form of the colonial bourgeoisie, and the Kuomintang is the classic party of compradorism. The upper circles of the petty bourgeoisie, including the intelligentsia, may take an active and occasionally a very noisy part in the national struggles, but they are totally incapable of playing an independent role. Only the working class standing at the head of the nation can carry either a national or an agrarian revolution clear through.^[57]

Tragically it was too late to change the Communist parties’ political orientation. By the early 1930s they were thoroughly Stalinised and were no longer a revolutionary factor. For the Comintern, workers’ revolutions in colonial countries were now totally off the agenda. Indeed they were to be sabotaged. The Comintern turned support for bourgeois nationalist forces in countries like China, which they hoped would ally with Russia, into a reactionary dogma. The Stalinists covered up this counter-revolutionary policy with the pathetic gloss of a supposed second socialist stage of the colonial revolt at some point in the distant future. Hand in hand with fighting to limit revolts in the colonies to just setting up a bourgeois state came the policy of class alliances with so-called progressive sections of the capitalist class, petty-bourgeois nationalists and even at times landlords. Defeat after defeat for the working-class movement followed, from Iraq to Iran to Indonesia and Palestine.

Deflected permanent revolution

In the decades after World War II the great bulk of former colonies and semi-colonies achieved their formal independence. In some cases, such as Algeria, Indonesia, Mozambique and Vietnam, the colonial power was defeated and driven out, but in a number of other cases, including Nigeria, Jordan, Papua New Guinea, Botswana and Fiji, the colonial power withdrew, despite facing only limited popular rebellion. In no case did the working class win the leadership of the national movement and carry the struggle for national independence over into a struggle for socialism.

How can we explain this major shift? In part it reflected a radically changed balance of imperial power. The United States had cemented itself economically and militarily as the overwhelmingly dominant imperialist power. The colonial rule of the old imperialist powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands over vast swathes of Africa and Asia was an obstacle to the economic penetration and profit-making possibilities of US companies. The US did not feel the need to replace the old colonial regime with a direct US colonial administration. In most cases US economic power, backed up by the occasional military intervention or CIA-backed coup to put the “right” people in power, was considered sufficient and a far cheaper way to rule the world.

Where major anti-colonial struggles did occur it was neither the local bourgeoisie nor the working class that led the national liberation movement to victory. Instead sections of the intelligentsia and the middle class linked to the old colonial state apparatus and the military played the decisive leading role. The working class was unable to play a decisive revolutionary role in a swathe of countries because of the counter-revolutionary politics of the Stalinist Communist parties. National independence was obtained but the working class and the peasant masses in no sense achieved their social freedom. Instead, in a process British Marxist Tony Cliff dubbed “deflected permanent revolution”, authoritarian statified regimes were established either by nationalist parties in Algeria, Syria, Egypt and Iraq or by Stalinist Communist parties in China, North Korea and Vietnam.^[58] Trotsky’s previously quoted 1932 statement that the “upper circles of the petty bourgeoisie, including the intelligentsia…are totally incapable of playing an independent role” was proved wrong.^[59]

These developments in the colonial world underline the fact that nothing is inevitable in human history. There is not some automatic process that propels the working class into the leadership of the struggle for national independence. As Trotsky himself had previously noted in 1927, “the bourgeois tasks can be resolved in various ways”.^[60] Revolutionaries can’t rely on “great social forces” to do the job for them. Human intervention is necessary and that means the construction of a mass revolutionary working-class party that determinedly fights to win the leadership of the movement for national and social liberation.

The appalling story of Stalinism in the Middle East

The role of the Communist parties in the Middle East was particularly egregious. Prior to the 1930s the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy – the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power. The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and Co. the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia. From the mid-1930s onwards Moscow directed Communists to embrace a popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. In 1943 Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash emphasised that the party’s goal was not socialism but simply independence and cross class national unity. Bakdash assured

the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth… We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property… All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.^[61]

The popular front’s precise form varied over time. The section of the bourgeoisie that was lauded as progressive could change dramatically overnight. During World War II Moscow told Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British ally. Consequently Communists opposed strikes. Bourgeois forces that continued to campaign against British colonialism went, in the eyes of the Stalinists, from being progressive allies to outright fascists. Later the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:

At the head of the majority of new national states…stand bourgeois political leaders… this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place… the central task…remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia…with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.^[62]

Popular front politics had an incredibly damaging impact on the working-class movement. In Iraq, following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built up powerful working-class support, led the student movement, established its own security force and won influence in the army. On a series of occasions the Communists mobilised hundreds of thousands onto the streets of Baghdad, Basra and other cities. By 1959 the CP was in a position to challenge for power. But under pressure from Moscow the Iraqi CP leadership refused to break with the nationalist government of General Qasim, the supposed representative of the national bourgeoisie.^[63] Despite intensified repression of the workers’ movement, and in defiance of pressure from their rank and file for a determined stance, the Communists continued to hail Qasim as the “sole leader” and a “true son of the people”. Party activity in the army was frozen. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat. As the Iraqi CP admitted some years later:

We let slip through our fingers a historic opportunity and allowed a squandering of a unique revolutionary situation… after the defeat of the Mosul conspiracy Qasim had found himself in a tight spot… Our party became, in effect, the master of the situation…and should have gone on to conquer power… To say the masses, loving Qasim, would have stood against us is untrue… Had we seized the helm and without delay armed the people, carried out a radical agrarian reform, granted to the Kurds their autonomy and, by revolutionary measures, transformed the army into a democratic force, our regime would have with extraordinary speed attained to the widest popularity and would have released great mass initiatives, enabling the millions to make their own history.^[64]

By the time Qasim himself was overthrown by the Ba’ath party in a CIA-backed coup the Communists were in a far weakened position. At least five thousand Communists were murdered and thousands more rounded up from their jobs and carried off to prison by the lorry load.^[65] The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s the Iraqi CP took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.

Lebanon and Palestine

There are stark lessons from the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 1980s for the Palestinian cause and the broader Arab world today.^[66] Communists played a prominent role during the radical wave of struggle by workers, students and peasants that led up to the civil war and during the armed struggle. They had a following that cut across Lebanon’s entrenched communal and sectarian lines. The Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) and the Organisation of Communist Action both had Christian leaders yet won a Shiite following. The Organisation of Communist Action in particular grew rapidly, gaining strong support among Shiites in the South and in Beirut’s suburbs. Communist leaders belonged to the inner decision-making circle of the left and nationalist alliance. They were close to the central leader of the movement – Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist Party Kamil Jumblatt. But their approach was not to push the struggle forward to challenge the foundations of Lebanese capitalism. Instead the LCP’s fourth congress called for the creation of a broad alliance of all the forces that wanted to maintain Lebanon as a “united, independent, sovereign, free, Arab democratic country, regardless of their class origins, ideological differences, religious or sectarian affiliations, positions inside or outside authority, and differences of political views”.^[67]

The Communists did not advance a program of substantial reforms to improve workers’ living standards. They limited themselves to measures to modernise the superstructure of Lebanese capitalism.^[68] Despite the Communists militarily controlling some of Beirut’s largest suburbs, the left did not organise democratic control of these areas. This approach was self-defeating. It served to undermine the masses’ sense of ownership over the struggle and weaken their fighting capacity. The left conducted the civil war as a military battle, not a social revolt that could galvanise all the popular masses, including the large numbers of Maronite Christian workers and poor peasants, to fight for their liberation. The almost exclusive emphasis on nationalist resistance to the Israelis and their fascist Lebanese allies opened the left and the Palestinian resistance up to isolation. This was graphically demonstrated in the aftermath the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The communalist Amal organisation, with the backing of the Syrian regime, mobilised sections of the Shiite population against the Palestinians and the left, whom they blamed for the devastation wreaked by Israeli attacks. Amal aped the Lebanese fascists of the Phalange with its own massacres of Palestinians.

The radical potential of this great social upheaval was squashed. The vicious sectarian social order that was Lebanese capitalism was preserved. Sectarianism became more pronounced. The defeat of the left-wing challenge shattered hopes for change. Growing economic difficulties and immense corruption led to widespread emigration and increased dependence on the patronage of sectarian political bosses who gained power and wealth by dispensing largesse and political favours.

The defeat of the left was not simply due to the US-backed invasion of Lebanon by Assad’s Syrian regime in 1976. To understand why this tremendous social explosion during the 1960s and 1970s did not end in a successful socialist revolution you need to critically examine the politics of the key radical currents. The main military force, the Yasser Arafat-led Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), adhered to a nationalist program that sought to win a capitalist Palestinian state. It advocated a combination of guerrilla struggle and alliances with Arab regimes. The PLO leadership opposed a strategy of mass social mobilisations as that would threaten not just the Zionist state but the Arab ruling classes. So while the PLO defended itself when attacked by the right, it was always looking for a compromise.

To the left of the PLO were the Communists and groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which called itself Marxist-Leninist. A Communist Party of Lebanon and Syria was founded in Beirut in 1924 by a group of workers and intellectuals inspired by the workers’ revolution in Russia. In July 1925 an uprising against colonial rule swept Syria and Lebanon. The French responded with ruthless repression. Police opened fire on a Communist-organised demonstration in Beirut, killing 10 and wounding 40. The CP leadership was arrested and the party broken. In the early 1930s the CP revived and, working underground, built strong support among tobacco workers, electricity workers, waterfront workers and tram workers.

But in the mid-1930s, rather than mobilise workers against French rule, the Communists were told by Moscow to soft-pedal their opposition to imperialism and establish a popular front of middle-class and bourgeois forces. Then in 1947 they were instructed to back the setting up of the Israeli state, which Moscow saw as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world. The joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built up substantial support during a postwar strike wave, saw its membership collapse from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed the pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine.^[69] Despite repeated failures, popular front-style class-collaborationist politics, rather than clear-cut class politics, remained hegemonic in one form or another on the Arab left for decades.

In Palestine the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936–39 the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords, clerics and bourgeois forces. And because the PCP effectively abandoned class politics for nationalism it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionist nationalism among its Jewish worker members (a majority of members in the 1930s). The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British Mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.

Russia’s support for setting up the Israeli state in 1948 discredited Communists for many years, especially among Palestinians driven from their land. Consequently the new Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP. The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within Israel, but it was a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.

The tragedy was that when new forces emerging out of the 1960s radical wave groped towards Marxism the predominant ideas on offer on the international left, and even more so in the Middle East, were still those of Stalinism. The PFLP and DFLP ended up embracing a popular front-style approach, as reflected in the names of the organisations. The new Palestinian left developed within the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of which were George Habash and Wadie Haddad. The ANM had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. They saw their armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war on Israel. In its early years the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting their leaders’ upper middle-class social backgrounds, hostile to working-class politics, which they saw as disrupting Arab national unity.

The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited the nationalist regimes and the ANM began to look to the Vietnamese model of a “protracted people’s war”. In December 1967 George Habash established the PFLP, based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969 the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. Initially the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined.

The Democratic Front rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969/1970 engaged in plane hijackings. The Democratic Front called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities” as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen.^[70] In 1970 during the mass upheavals in Jordan both the DFLP and the PFLP called for all power to the resistance and a socialist state.^[71] But after the Jordanian state crushed the resistance the DFLP moved to the right, purging its left wing and adopting a pro-Moscow orientation. During the Lebanese civil war the DFLP, which had previously been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far right, dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always sacrificed. The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream PLO leadership, to which from the late 1970s they gave substantial funding and arms. Consequently a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.

The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. Much of the Fatah leadership supported a mini-state but faced opposition within their ranks so were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse. The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP, with less of a base in the refugee camps, but it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles. In the early 1970s it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals.

The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism – the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. It was less critical of supposedly radical regimes – Algeria, South Yemen, Syria, Libya and at times Iraq. Indeed George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism” because of its harsh criticisms of the nationalist regimes. But the nationalist governments were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing a left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria. So while the PFLP talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces. In 1970 Habash went to China to win support and China began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. This came at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes with which China was trying to curry favour.

Despite all sorts of tensions the PFLP refused to break with the Fatah-dominated PLO. The PFLP called for national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, it consistently put nation before class. The PFLP did not want to disrupt national unity and sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of workers and peasants. Eventually the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution, and when the Palestinian Authority was established chose to operate within its framework. The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. This opened up space for the Islamists, who cohered a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and just like Fatah led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.

A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and across the Arab world. A left that bases itself on a clear rejection of alliances with, let alone subordination to, capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. A left that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the Palestinian refugees behind the working class and recognises that ultimately freedom for the Palestinian people can only be won by a socialist revolution that sweeps away the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

The limitations of the democratic secular state demand

Talk of a two-state solution for the Palestinian people has long been a fraud promoted by the US and other Western governments, including Australia, to cover up Israel’s ongoing colonial expansionism. The Israelis are determined to establish facts on the ground to prevent any possibility of a Palestinian state being established alongside Israel. They won’t even tolerate a pathetic mini-state on the West Bank and Gaza.

So what is the solution for the Palestinian people? Many on the left, who rightly reject the nonsense of a two-state solution, have called for a democratic secular state across the whole of historic Palestine. This was the position that Socialist Alternative long supported. However the democratic secular state demand is in reality a call for a bourgeois national state. That was the standpoint of Fatah, the key force that originally popularised it in the 1970s. It was a demand tailored to serve the interests of the Palestinian capitalist class, which wanted to establish a state that they ruled over. There was nothing ambiguous about it. Many of us on the left believed that fighting for a democratic secular state would challenge capitalism. We were mistaken. There was nothing transitional about the demand for a democratic secular state. It did not go beyond the framework of capitalism. Limiting the Palestinian struggle for freedom to simply a capitalist state led to setback after setback, from Black September in Jordan in 1970 to Lebanon during its wave of revolt across the 1970s. When Fatah’s strategy of guerrilla struggle proved incapable of defeating Israel they settled for ruling over a mini-state that policed the Palestinian population on behalf of US imperialism and the Zionists. If the movement for Palestinian freedom does not break with the ruling classes of the Arab states and with the Palestinian capitalist class and the various petty-bourgeois nationalists there is no way out.

Socialist Alternative has long recognised that the Palestinian working class, divided between those workers within the confines of the Israeli state, those on the West Bank and Gaza and the refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, does not have the power on its own to overthrow the Zionist state. The Palestinian masses desperately need allies. Those potential allies do exist among the workers of the region. Socialist revolutions that overthrow the capitalist Arab regimes would have the capacity to go on to challenge imperialism and the Zionist state. But why call for socialist revolutions in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and Iraq but not in Palestine?

Advocating a socialist revolution to liberate Palestine does not mean that Marxists entirely rule out the possibility of some sort of Palestinian state being established short of socialism. Though anything more than some prettified version of the current West Bank mini-state is highly unlikely under capitalism. Yet plenty of unexpected things have happened in history. Both World War I and World War II tore up old empires and saw numerous new states carved out. It is impossible to predict the international ramifications of a major imperialist war between the US and China. But socialists need to champion the best possible outcome for workers and the oppressed, not leave it to the machinations of the imperialist powers or petty-bourgeois nationalist forces.

Nor does calling for a socialist revolution to liberate Palestine mean abandoning more immediate demands. Socialists need to champion a range of specific demands, such as ending the siege on Gaza, ending Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the release of political prisoners and the right of return of Palestinian refugees. In the West today socialists’ campaigning should focus on the right of the Palestinian people to fight for their national freedom. Socialists also campaign to expose the role of their own governments and US imperialism and attempt to build a solidarity movement. However, more than that we fight to build a socialist movement to challenge the imperialist system in its heartlands. To do that most effectively socialists need to have an overall strategic view of how Palestinian national and social liberation can be achieved. Socialists can’t afford to tail along behind the various nationalist currents.

An overall strategic view of advocating socialist revolution in the Arab world, and in particular Palestine, is even more important for socialists in the Middle East. If there is to be any hope of victory for the Palestinian people, a powerful revolutionary movement that challenges the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists as well as the Islamists needs to be built in Egypt and the other Arab states, and very importantly in Palestine itself. Otherwise the heroic struggles of the Palestinian people will continue to face defeat after defeat.

Conclusion

How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have so far been able to hold it in check popular mobilisations. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action. The Arab Spring revolutions that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the class-collaborationist Stalinist politics that long dominated the socialist movement. The mass of workers and urban poor have the capacity to overthrow the hold of imperialism, the Zionist state and their local rulers. But to achieve that objective demands the construction of a new revolutionary left which breaks with the nationalist and Stalinist tradition that has so blighted the Arab left and instead sets its sights on workers’ self-emancipation.

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[1] See for example Lenin 1914 and Trotsky 1997, pp.889–913.

[2] Lenin 1916, p.346.

[3] Lenin 1914, p.412.

[4] Marx and Engels 1989, p.398.

[5] Geier 2024.

[6] Riddell 1984, pp.6, 15.

[7] Lynch 2005, p.40.

[8] Quoted in Hallas 2003, p.25.

[9] Trotsky 1969.

[10] Lenin 1912, p.165.

[11] See Armstrong 2016.

[12] Trotsky 1997, pp.909–10.

[13] Pantsov 2000, p.15.

[14] Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 1920.

[15] Riddell 1987, pp.227–28.

[16] Riddell 1987, p.227.

[17] Degras 1971, pp.143–44.

[18] Second Congress of the Communist International, p.111.

[19] Quoted in Pantsov 2000, p.101.

[20] Riddell 2012, p.1187.

[21] Riddell 2012, pp.1182–87.

[22] Riddell 2012, pp.732–33.

[23] Riddell 2012, p.733.

[24] See Harris 1992, Carr 1966 and 1972 and Uzun 2004.

[25] Uzun 2004, p.187.

[26] Uzun 2004, pp.140–47.

[27] On the Marxist attitude to military support see Draper 1969.

[28] Harris 1992, p.118.

[29] Uzun 2004, p.197.

[30] Carr 1966, p.479

[31] Degras 1971, pp.143–44.

[32] Carr 1972, p.656.

[33] Carr 1966, p.243.

[34] Carr 1966, pp.244–45.

[35] Chaqueri 2010, p.33.

[36] Chaqueri 2010, pp.34–36.

[37] Carr 1966, pp.292–93.

[38] Chaqueri 2010, pp.192–93.

[39] Carr 1972, pp.660–61.

[40] Chaqueri 2010, pp.54–55.

[41] Milotte 1984, p.35.

[42] For an overview of the working-class rebellion see O’Connor 1988 and Kostick 1996.

[43] O’Connor 2004, p.43.

[44] Milotte 1984, p.53.

[45] O’Connor 2004, p.44.

[46] O’Connor 2004, p.57.

[47] Milotte 1984, p.56.

[48] O’Connor 2004, p.64.

[49] For the 1925–27 Chinese revolution see Isaacs 2009, Bramble and Armstrong 2021, chapter 7 and Pantsov 2000.

[50] Pantsov 2000, p.36.

[51] Known at the time as the Kuomintang.

[52] Trotsky 1976, p.114.

[53] Pantsov 2000, p.94.

[54] Hallas 1985, p.120.

[55] Harris 1978, p.9.

[56] Trotsky 1976, p.297.

[57] Trotsky 1997, p.908.

[58] Cliff 1963.

[59] Trotsky 1997, p.908.

[60] Trotsky 1976, p.163.

[61] Ismael and Ismael 1998, pp.32–33.

[62] Birchall 1974, pp.99–100.

[63] Batatu 1978, p.903.

[64] Batatu 1978, p.904.

[65] Birchall 1974, pp.101–3.

[66] For an overview of the Lebanese civil war see Petran 1987.

[67] Ismael and Ismael 1998, p.110.

[68] Traboulsi 2007, pp.189 and 203.

[69] Ismael and Ismael 1998, pp.38–39.

[70] Fiedler 2022, pp.224–25.

[71] Marshall 1989, pp.124–26.