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The defeat of revolutionary communist and secular forces – the rollback of a serious international communist movement – in the post-Cold War world of market and religious fundamentalism has brought unwelcome complications when it comes to articulating a properly revolutionary anti-imperialism.
Things were simpler during the time of the so-called Vietnam War, that is, the United States’ imperial “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky). “In those days,” the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA leader Bob Avakian said in 2015:
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“[T]he National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam was a revolutionary organization of the people in South Vietnam who were waging the fight, along with the government of North Vietnam, against the U.S. imperialists. And the leader of that struggle, until he died in the late 1960s, was Ho Chi Minh, who called himself a communist but was actually more of revolutionary nationalist…Now, back in those days we used to go to demonstrations and people would march through the streets chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.’ It felt very good and it was right to do it. It was right to be on the side of the Vietnamese people …It wasn’t just that you wanted your government to lose the unjust war it was waging, you could actually be on the side of the people fighting against your government, because those people … represented a real struggle against imperialism. They weren’t going around attacking civilians. They were fighting against the military of U.S. imperialism that had invaded their country and was bombing it massively.”
Half a century later, Avakian noted, writing in the wake of US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and when the barbaric Islamic State was butchering people in Iraq and Syria, the character of those most clearly fighting US imperialism had changed, and not in good ways:
“Today, unfortunately, the situation is different and not as favorable in the short run. Nobody coming from a decent place should want to root for reactionary Islamic jihadists who are enforcers of brutally oppressive relations – particularly but not only, horrific patriarchal relations – and who, in the service of that, carry out all kinds of depraved slaughter of ordinary civilians. So you cannot, if you’re coming from the right place, identify in any way with these forces and support them. Now, there are some people around the world who call themselves leftists or even communists or Maoists, people like this guy [the ridiculous Indian Communist “theoretician’] Ajith, who try to put a pretty face on these Islamic fundamentalist jihadists and insist that they are anti-imperialists, that they were waging an anti-imperialist struggle. But the fact is that, while they may fight against the U.S., they do not represent a positive, progressive, let alone revolutionary force; and where they have succeeded in exercising power, their rule is brutally oppressive….you can try to make these people into something other than what they are but that can only do a great deal of harm, because in the real world they are not a positive force, even while, coming from where they’re coming from, they’re opposing U.S. imperialism to some degree… This makes for a difficult situation….It makes it easier for people to go along with what is and take the position: ‘I don’t really like these wars but look at those other people; we have to do something about groups like ISIS. Never mind…that Saudi Arabia, a big ally of the U.S. , beheads a lot more people than ISIS does, and embodies and enforces all kinds of horrendous oppression against women and others” (Bob Avakian, The New Communism (Chicago, Insight Press: 2016, pp. 265-67).
A difficult situation indeed. The problem, as Avakian explained, is that the reactionary and regressive nature of the Islamic fundamentalists has been used by successive US administrations to induce some Americans who might otherwise forthrightly oppose their government’s imperial policies to side with Washington as it wreaks bloody havoc in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Southwest Asia. This was a mistake, Avakian argued:
“these wars being waged by [the U.S. still] have to be actively opposed…even if you can’t, and shouldn’t support the other side…you still have to support the defeat of your own [imperialist] government. The defeat of [U.S.] imperialists should s[still] be welcomed because…their wars are unjust, even if the people opposing them are also unjust and …every such defeat weakens this system and its ruling class and [thereby] brings closer the time when people can actually bring it down and bring something liberating into being in its place” (Avakian, New Communism, 267).
What’s a serious U.S revolutionary who is an internationalist by definition supposed to do these days? Walk a proper “revolutionary defeatist” line that breaks with the childish notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Steadfastly oppose your imperial government’s wars, wars that are being fought mainly by US proxies or subordinates right now – Ukraine in Eastern Europe and Israel in Gaza and the broader Middle East. Maintain a posture of steadfast resistance to the immoral butchery your government is funding, equipping, and protecting in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Ukraine (and elsewhere). But do so without falling prey to the enemy of my enemy bullshit.
No, do NOT let your proper abhorrence for reactionary actors like Hamas, the Iranian and Syrian regimes, the Taliban and the Putin regime turn you into a de facto ally of US and Western imperialism, which is funding, equipping, and protecting genocide in Gaza while feeding a vicious war that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians and pushing the planet ever closer to potentially terminal global war. Of course not!
Combine your opposition to US-led Western imperialism with a steadfast insistence that Islamic fundamentalism and Russian imperial white nationalism are NOT forces for liberation from the capitalist-imperialist system that is actively cancelling all prospects for a decent human future. Do not confuse Hamas or Hezbollah or Syria or Iran (or Russia or China or North Korea) with the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist radical movement the times require. Don’t give into “pragmatic” “left” arguments that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, as if we should embrace the fascist imperialist Trump because he opposes the Democratic imperialist Biden or embrace the authoritarian capitalist regimes in Russian and China because they conflict with the American Empire. No!
How best to help the people dealing with the mutually reinforcing oppressions of Western imperialism and domestic authoritarianism in the Middle East, Russia, and across the world? The answer is clear as day: help foster “the emergence of a really powerful movement aiming toward revolution in this country…Think,” Avakian said in 2015:
“of the effect of that throughout the world. ‘What? A revolution in the United States? People actually going for the overthrow of this imperialism?’ That would change, almost overnight, the way a lot of people would think about what is possible and desirable. It would have a major impact in the world, contributing very greatly to the positive repolarization that is needed….”(Avakian, New Communism, 275)
We need a “positive repolarization” (Avakian) of the masses against oppressors within their own countries, allied with a movement to overthrow our own imperialist ruling class. And we should remember that many of the reactionary forces that many “leftists” are trying to make look “pretty” abroad are themselves the product of US-led Western imperialism while other such forces are "just" supported by imperialism to suppress more dangerous opposition.
Avakian’s 2015 words on behalf of actual revolution in the belly of the imperialist beast and against those US “leftists” who try to “put a pretty face” on revanchists abroad are relevant today. It has been depressing to see certain and considerable parts of what passes for a left within and beyond US (including the ridiculous pretend Maoist “comrade Ajith”) identify with deeply reactionary and fundamentalist forces like Hamas and the arch-patriarchal theocrats atop Iran, whose “morality police” kill, rape, and torture Iranian women with impunity and viciously suppressed society-wide support for those women’s recent uprising. I have gladly lost friendships with “left” identified people – including a woman who describes herself as a militant feminist and pacifist-Christian (!) – who defended the October 7th terror attacks as "revolutionary resistance" and who have told actual revolutionaries to keep our mouths shut about the reactionary and deeply anti-feminist nature of Hamas, which was sponsored for years by Israel’s genocidal fascist prime minister Bibi Netanyahu.
A recent gathering of left activists to plan for a march against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer is a case in point. Its opening speaker, a compelling young Black man, properly identified the “enemy” as “the system of US imperialism,” but then called not for revolution against US capitalism-imperialism, not for the overthrow of that system, but rather for “mass pressure” to make it work more fairly. The “system has no conscience,” he said, saying nothing about replacing “US [capitalism-]imperialism” with a revolutionary socialist system.
The next speaker, a local Palestinian justice leader, said nothing about the need for a socialist revolution in the US or anywhere else (how about in Israel-Palestine?) and claimed that “Palestine will win…by any means necessary” – a veiled embrace of Hamas and its October 7th attack on Israeli civilians.
Then up came Frank Chapman, the “legendary” old head of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, who often identifies himself as a member of the risibly anti-revolutionary Communist Party[1] and the arch-revisionist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which identifies with the North Korean regime and upholds state capitalist China as a great socialist nation.
Chapman exulted over how “the actual perpetration of genocide” in Gaza “had not destroyed the resistance." The only possible meaning of “the resistance” in his talk was Hamas.
According to Chapman: “This is the most important moment in history. What makes it that is that it is a revolution, I call it a revolution that’s going on in Gaza. This is an Earth-shaking event like we have never seen in the history of the world.”
How the partial survival of a long Netanyahu-backed Islamic fundamentalist group through a genocidal attack constitutes a “revolution” is a fascinating question!
Besides the odd notion that there is something to celebrate about a genocidal ethnic cleansing that has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, displaced 80 percent or more of the Gazan people, and put Gaza at risk of mass famine, the old CPUSA activist Chapman seems to have confused fundamentalist haters of women and girls who want to restore Medieval social relations with the Third World Marxist and revolutionary nationalist radicals of the 1950s-1970s – radicals to whom the anti-revolutionary Communist Party, USA (whose ridiculous slogan was “communism is 20th Century Americanism!”) never offered real support.
After attributing US funding of Israel’s genocidal military to little more than the profit interests of US arms makers, Chapman concluded by saying “All power to the people…down with Israel,” not “all power to the people, down with US capitalist-imperialist order and its bloody outpost the genocidal Judeo-fascist regime atop Israel!”
The opening session wound up with the FRSO honcho Joe Iosbaker, who said he campaigned for Chicago’s Democratic mayor Brandon Johnson and called Johnson “my union brother.” Joe threatened the Democratic Party with “a 1968 kind of welcome,” as if the protests at the infamous ’68 Chicago Democratic Convention – the one where the Chicago Police Department beat the shit out of antiwar demonstrators (and others) chanting “The Whole World is Watching” in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel in the South Loop – had helped usher in a workers’ state instead of being a prelude to the election of the proto-fascistic Cambodia bomber Richard Nixon. Joe advanced a curious slogan: “Protest is a right, not just for the rich and white,” oddly juxtaposed against recent news about affluent and significantly white students being arrested for protesting on behalf of Palestine at Columbia University.
Again and again activists were led to repeat the same tired old chants, including, “we believe that we will win,” a faith-based statement that leaves open the definition of victory to include just about anything, and “the people united will never be defeated.” Popular unity is essential of course but victory is not certain until the people form and back a revolutionary vanguard party that takes state power away from capitalism-imperialism state and effectively wields that power to defeat counterrevolutionary forces, inspire revolution around the world, and put society on the path beyond class rule and towards the abolition of all exploitation and oppression.
As a person who attended the Chicago rally said:
“the organizers of this gathering do sometimes celebrate the ‘axis of resistance,’ which is basically the armed Islamic fundamentalists that attack Israel. Which is wrong because, no, our enemy’s enemy is not our fucking friend, unless all you can imagine is revenge…Pressure the Dems was the most widespread strategy [related at the conference] which puts a major cramp on your vision of what’s possible. There was very little mention of US imperialism. They were and are all into decolonizaton, the ‘new abolition,’ about 75 years behind the times.”
Besides “their lack of any vision beyond [the] revenge that is such a foundation for their ‘vision,’” the critical attendee added, the main things that stood out from the FRSO-led gathering were “the [intertwined] identitarian and ‘experience trumps everything’ narratives: ‘It's up to the Palestinian people [or Iranian, etc.] to determine their leadership,’ they say, so ‘who are you [as a white American] to say that Hamas is not a force for liberation?’ Meanwhile, they’re essentially promoting Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran as the real leaders of ‘their’ people.”
There’s no small irony there: bourgeois liberal identitarian “standpoint epistemology” and “woke lunacy” defending darkly reactionary Islamist fundamentalism as a “force of liberation.” American “left” wokesters would not last long trying to march on behalf of intersectional liberation in the streets of Teheran, Kabul, or a Palestine under the rule of Hamas.
What’s really required in Israel-Palestine is a multi-ethnic people’s revolution to establish a single secular and revolutionary socialist state that prohibits exploitation, oppression, and inequality based on religion and race.
Behind the times indeed, in more ways than one, is the lame left.
So come to Chicago this summer to protest and resist the Democratic National Warmonger Biden Coronation - and to Milwaukee to protest and resist the Republican National Fascist Trump Coronation[2]. Do so NOT in the veiled or open name of Hamas and the Ayatollah of Iran but in the name of a long overdue socialist revolution right here in the belly of the beast of the fundamentalism-generating American capitalist empire.
Notes
1. An actual communist party shouldn't have to put the word revolutionary before communist in its name but thanks to the pathetic parties of Browder, Gus Hall, Maurice Thorez, and Waldeck Rochet (the French Communist Party deputy secretary-general who refused to support and undertake an insurrection during an actual revolutionary situation in May 1968) etc. it is required.
2. The Republi-fascist Christian white nationalist party of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is of course even more sickeningly committed than the dismal Dems to Judeo-fascist genocide in Palestine. Israel’s genocidal-fascist prime minister Netanyahu is praying that his friend, the Hitler-channeling monster Trump, returns to power next year – a distinct possibility, if not likelihood, thanks in no small part to “Genocide Joe” Biden’s brazen backing of Israel’s crimes. I’m not arguing here for lesser evil voting; Biden’s horrific actions as president preclude such counsel from this quarter. I mean rather to suggest yet another way in which the whole damn US capitalist-imperialist system is rotten to the core and needs to be replaced with a new socialist order, something that requires something much more radical than anything advanced at the FRSO-lead DNC protest planning event in Chicago – an actual revolution, not to be confused with pressuring and “speaking truth to” the US ruling class or helping advance militantly anti-socialist Islamic fundamentalism in other nations.
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