From the spiral of incessant massacres that have accompanied the history of the Middle East for the last hundred years, the way out is not by nationalism, but by the struggle for proletarian and communist revolution
(«communist program»; Nr. 10; September 2024)
With the 1967 war, after the defeat of the Arab armies, Israel seized not only the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai, but also the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians were interned after waves of expropriations that had begun in 1948 with the creation of Israel as an independent state; throughout the period up to the Camp David Accords in 1978 (by which the Palestine Liberation Organization was forced to recognise Israel as a state entity), the Palestinian armed struggle waged by various formations within the PLO to establish a Palestinian state through the destruction of Israel ended in the worst possible way: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became virtual prisons into which Palestinians who did not flee to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt were de facto thrown, where they have been systematically oppressed, guarded by Israeli military forces and the PLO’s (later Palestinian National Authority’s) own repressive forces, and generally relegated to a no better than precarious survival. The guerrilla struggle of the various PLO formations since its establishment in 1964 soon proved to be completely ineffective and illusory in terms of the intended objective; not only because of the powerful Israeli military apparatus, but also because of the repressive actions of all the Arab states in which the Palestinians sought refuge (the “Black September” in Jordan and the massacre in the Tall-El-Zaatar camp in Lebanon are signs of the “final solution” by which the various Arab states sought to “resolve the Palestinian question”). The hypocritical Arab solidarity of the various Middle Eastern and North African states has not been limited to keeping the Palestinians as far away from their own territories as possible – while hypocritically nurturing the idea of first “Greater Palestine” and then “two peoples, two states” – but has tended to throw the Palestinians back in the jaws of their prime executioner in every possible way: Israel.
While the illusory “Arab unity” in the perpetually convulsing Middle East had completely collapsed and the long period of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia was coming to an end, the so-called “Islamic Revolution” in Iran in 1979 brought down the Shah – after Israel the number two gendarme in the service of Western imperialism in the vast Middle East region. The events in Iran appeared at the time as a shock that could weaken Western imperialisms, especially the American one, and reignite the Arab revolts throughout the Middle East on a wave of Islamic fundamentalism that in one way or another bound together all the peoples of the region. The blow suffered by the world’s leading imperialist power in its quest for complete control of a region that was rich in oil and represented a strategic point of paramount importance for any imperialism was undeniable. In these decades, US imperialism replaced traditional British and French colonialism in the region, put a stop to Russian imperialism’s efforts to establish itself there, and dictated the fate of the people of the Middle East and, naturally, the Palestinians, with its dollars and armaments to Israel, and subsequent agreements with Egypt and the oil powers, especially Saudi Arabia. However, all these negotiations and agreements, which have been initiated and terminated, have not prevented the regimes of the Middle Eastern countries from fighting each other to seize another piece of power in addition to that which they have already secured, not least through inter-Arab alliances, to prevent Israel from extending its territory beyond the Jordan Valley and into the Sinai Peninsula, but also through the – purposely financed – Palestinian independence struggle, on the one hand to keep Israel busy in an internal war, and on the other hand to prevent the struggle of the Palestinian proletariat from stepping off the democratic-bourgeois terrain onto the terrain of real and genuine class struggle. No state and no imperialist power wanted the Middle East to turn into a cradle of proletarian revolutionary struggle!
The Palestinian peasants, violently expropriated from their land, were thus forcibly transformed into proletarians, into workers who were at the disposal of any capitalist who wished to exploit them, whether that capitalist was Israeli, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian or Palestinian. Capitalism, this monstrous economic and social system of exploitation of human labour, although far behind in comparison with Europe and many other areas of the world, took root in the Arab countries with all the ruthless violence of which it proved capable; but as it developed, it also created a mass of wageworkers, proletarians, whom the historical events put in a situation where they had to fight against everything and everyone just to survive one day after another.
After decades of massacres by the so-called “brother countries” and direct oppression by the Israeli bourgeoisie, the fate of the Palestinian people and the struggle waged by its bourgeoisie for the “liberation of Palestine” has reached its worst ever outcome: the possibility of a Palestinian nation-state with the material characteristics of an independent state born out of – true – a bourgeois, but at least national-revolutionary struggle (territorial continuity, political rule in the form of a republic, independent agricultural and industrial resources, internal market, etc.) had definitely faded. The Palestinian masses, the real “strangers in their homeland”, the vast majority of whom have been transformed into proletarians, people without reserves, into wageworkers without rights, have been forced to migrate continuously from the territory that was once their land to the territory usurped by others. Their struggle, their resistance, subservient for decades to the intrigues of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, sold out to this or that regional or international power to preserve caste privileges, has been betrayed, sabotaged, trapped and diverted a thousand times over, which has decisively contributed to the realisation of the objective pursued by all the actors present in the Middle East (Zionists, Euro-American and Russian imperialists, Arab potentates), despite the contradictions in their relations: to avert the potential class struggle of the Palestinian proletariat, which alone could and hypothetically still can set in motion the entire Middle East with the prospect of the sole solution to all the problems that have developed in the region and which are intrinsically linked both to the still unresolved “national” issues (Palestinian, Yemeni, Kurdish, to mention the main ones), and the relations of dependence on the Western and Eastern imperialist powers : the proletarian revolution, the revolution that knows no boundaries and whose real driving force is not the national unification, but the class unification in the anti-bourgeois struggle of all proletarians in the region and throughout the world.
To the massacres that have marked the history of the Palestinian masses since the 1920s is now added yet another in a series of massacres carried out by Israel in Gaza after the deadly 7 October attack by Hamas combatants on Israeli kibbutzim near the Gaza border (killing more than 1 400 people, wounding 3 000 and taking 240 hostages who were then hidden in Gaza tunnels). At the time of writing, more than 11 000 people are dead in Gaza, besieged on all sides, with daily bombings and destruction of hospitals; for more than 20 days since the start of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the civilian population has been deprived of food, water, medicine and fuel, and electricity has been purposely cut off; for two weeks now, Israel and Egypt have been keeping humanitarian aid trucks waiting in a queue at the Rafah crossing, and the people of northern Gaza, systematically bombed, have been forced to move south, where they are crowded into a huge human anthill where it is impossible to live.
Hamas, like Arafat’s PLO, and like Abu Mazen’s PNA, is a bourgeois political and armed organisation that uses every means to wrest a share of power in a region where the law is enforced through guns and cannons (and nowadays rockets), cloaking itself in a worn-out nationalist ideology that no longer has any historical revolutionary value, but which unfortunately still functions as a justification for its power and its war. Furthermore it is hard to think that Hamas did not know that Israel would respond to its deadly incursion of 7 October as never before, and would massacre a civilian population that has no means of escape either northwards towards Lebanon, or southwards towards Egypt, or even to the open sea. Israel’s “cannibalism” thus goes hand in hand with Hamas’s “cannibalism”.
The counterpart to Palestinian nationalism is Jewish nationalism, the counterpart to Hamas terrorism is Israeli state terrorism, and thus the mere thought of a proletarian uprising in Gaza, as in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, is stifled. After 7 October, the Israeli government headed by Netanyahu launched a long-awaited threat: the total liquidation of Hamas!, knowing full well that to liquidate it – or at least render it harmless for a long time – it will have to raze Gaza to the ground, just as the Nazis did with the Warsaw ghetto; provided, of course, that the US allows to carry out such a plan. The fact is that “the Palestinian question” is far from being a problem that concerns only Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem, and it is not a problem that concerns only Israel. It has long since become an international problem, both on the side of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Indeed, it is precisely the events relating to the Palestinian revolts and their suppression, both in Israel and in every other Arab state, that demonstrate that, throughout the Middle East, the “Palestinian question” is no longer just a “Palestinian question” but an international question.
The absence of an independent Palestinian state, recognised by other states, in which social and political life is not conducted under constant persecution, torture, racism, repression and the absence of any civil rights, objectively falls like a heavy boulder on the uprooted Palestinian masses and the Palestinian proletariat; it is therefore quite understandable that the Palestinian people yearn, as in other civilised countries, not to live as refugees, not to live permanently on the margins of a society that rejects them. Moreover, the aspiration, wholly bourgeois and democratic, for an independent state is not plucked out of the air; it is part of the history of the bourgeois class, which, with the political revolution and the development of capitalism, has dismantled the social forms of feudalism and Asian despotism in a decidedly uneven manner in different regions of the world, however, so much so that today no country, not even the one most economically and socially backward, has a possibility of directing its own history without being strongly influenced by world capitalism and, especially after the Second World Imperialist War, by the imperialist powers that dominate the world.
Back to Lenin and the “question of the self-determination of nations”
This unquestionable reality leads some political formations that call themselves communist, revolutionary or even those having a link to the Italian Communist Left (or its heirs) to deny that there is still a “Palestinian national question”; they argue, that for the Palestinian proletarians, as for any other population oppressed by other nations, this problem is no longer an issue, and that they must therefore have an interest only in the international proletarian revolution to which all proletarians, of whatever nationality and from whatever country, are called. This is the old Proudhonian position, which Marx and later Lenin fought against. In practice, it is the same as saying that for the Palestinians there is no problem of struggle against the national oppression they suffer, and for the Israeli proletarians (Arab and Jewish) as if there were no task, above all, of struggling against that oppression exercised by their national bourgeoisie. There are dominant nations and oppressed nations, and this is for Lenin a central aspect for every communist because it “forms the essence of imperialism”; this division into nations “is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism. It is from this division that our definition of the ‘right of nations to self-determination’ must follow, a definition that is consistently democratic, revolutionary, and in accord with the general task of the immediate struggle for socialism. It is for that right, and in a struggle to achieve sincere recognition for it, that the Social-Democrats [a term from 1915 which would correspond to revolutionary communists today, ed.] of the oppressor nations must demand that the oppressed nations should have the right of secession, for otherwise recognition of equal rights for nations and of international working-class solidarity would, in fact, be merely empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy”. As for the “Social-Democrats”, i.e. the revolutionary communists, of the oppressed nations, they, Lenin continues, “must attach prime significance to the unity and the merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations; otherwise these Social-Democrats will involuntarily become the allies of their own national bourgeoisie, which always betrays the interests of the people and of democracy, and is always ready, in its turn, to annex territory and oppress other nations” (1).
Referring to Marx’s and Engels’ positions on the “Irish question”, Lenin declares that “the British proletariat’s internationalism would remain a hypocritical phrase if they did not demand the separation of Ireland”. Besides he was also referring to the 1896 resolution of the International Socialist Congress in London which recognised the self-determination of nations, a resolution which was supplemented by the tactical directives Lenin himself had pointed out in texts devoted to the question in 1914–1916.
Our innovators of Marxism will object: but a lot of time has passed since the era of Marx and Engels in 1860–1870 and the one of Lenin in 1915; we are now in the middle of the imperialist phase in which democratic bourgeois revolution is no longer on the agenda; therefore, what was valid then is now outdated, no longer valid. They should have the courage to say outright that neither Marx, Engels nor Lenin could have foreseen that capitalism, in its imperialist phase, would make every “national” question a completely obsolete, non-historical, outdated question, and that the proletariat of any nation, whether dominant or oppressed, must no longer be concerned with it… they “forget” that Marx always subordinated – but never obliterated – the “national question” to the “workers’” question, to the question of the “proletarian revolution”, as was always the case for Lenin and the Italian Communist Left.
In spite of the position denying the right to self-determination, according to which imperialism should have led the proletarians of any country more than in previous phases of capitalist development to direct struggle for socialism, Lenin, after stating that “the imperialism of our days [we are in the midst of a world imperialist war, ed.] has led to a situation in which the Great-Power oppression of nations has become general”, he asserts that “a socialist [today we say revolutionary communist, ed.] of an oppressor nation who does not conduct both peacetinue and wartime propaganda in favour of freedom of secession for oppressed nations, is no socialist and no internationalist, but a chauvinist!” (2). Lenin insists on the question of the freedom of the oppressed peoples to separate, and emphasizes it strongly: “we demand it, not independently of our revolutionary struggle for socialism, but because this struggle will remain a hollow phrase if it is not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all questions of democracy, including the national question”. And in order to avoid any misunderstanding, he repeats: “We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede”. Just as Marx in 1869 called for the separation of Ireland and England “in the interests of the revolutionary struggle of the British proletariat, we in the same way consider the refusal of Russian socialists to demand freedom of self-determination for nations, in the sense we have indicated above, to be a direct betrayal of democracy, internationalism and socialism” (3).
For Marx and Lenin, then, the interests of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat cannot, in the case of national oppression, but include the struggle for the freedom to separate the oppressed nation from the oppressor nation. That this is an immediate and democratic political demand is clear. But precisely because the proletarian struggle is directed against all capitalist oppression, all the more so in the imperialist epoch, and although in the imperialist epoch democratic demands can be “realised”, but in an incomplete (these are Lenin’s words) and sometimes “peaceful” way (such as separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905 or the separation of Slovakia from the Czech Republic in 1993), it by no means follows that revolutionary communism must renounce the immediate and determined struggle for these demands; the real problem is to formulate them “not in a reformist, but in a revolutionary way; not by keeping within the framework of bourgeois legality, but by breaking through it; not by confining oneself to parliamentary speeches and verbal protests, but by drawing the masses into real action, by widening and fomenting the struggle for every kind of fundamental, democratic demand [e.g. from the right to strike to the right to self-determination of oppressed peoples, ed.], right up to and including the direct onslaught of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, i.e., to the socialist revolution, which will expropriate the bourgeoisie”. In short, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination is merely “the logical expression of the struggle against national oppression in every form” (4).
Lest this attitude imprison the proletarians and communists in the logic of bourgeois nationalist politics and distance them from their historic revolutionary task, it is necessary to hold, as Lenin says, that “the aim of socialism is not only to end the division of mankind into tiny states and the isolation of nations in any form, it is not only to bring the nations closer together but to integrate them (…) In the same way as mankind can arrive at the abolition of classes only through a transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, it can arrive at the inevitable integration of nations only through a transition period of the complete emancipation of all oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede” (5). All those who disagree with these statements of Lenin are free to abandon Lenin, Marxism and the Italian Communist Left and throw themselves into the arms of petty-bourgeois “left” utopianism, which, while waving the banner of the future world revolution, which will “unite” (by what actions is unknown) the proletarians of all nations, oppressed and dominant, but at the same time leaves intact the division of todays’ proletarians into those who belong to the oppressed nations and those who belong to the dominant nations, thus effectively facilitating national oppression.
The petty-bourgeoisie believes in a “peaceful” capitalism, in a gradual equilibrium between all social classes on a democratic basis, and therefore in an ethereal equality between nations, without considering the reality of the class struggle and its intensification in any regime, even in a democratic regime. Under imperialism, the oppression of the smaller nations becomes a general phenomenon and increases with the development of inter-imperialist contrasts, while the factors of military confrontation and war between nations, between states, grow stronger. The peaceful unity between nations, for which the great imperialist powers founded the League of Nations in 1919, which failed miserably with the outbreak of the Second World Imperialist War, and which then became the United Nations inheriting the same deceptive objectives of world peace, was and remains a typical illusion of the petty bourgeoisie, but one that is useful to the bourgeois ideology that wishes to pass off capitalism as a fundamentally “peaceful” system. It is a petty-bourgeois utopia shared by all the forces of political and trade union opportunism that negatively influence the proletarian masses of the world, and against which revolutionary communists must counter, as Lenin says, the division of the world into dominant and oppressed nations.
The recognition of this division from the proletarian and communist point of view implies different positions for the proletariat of the dominant nations and the proletariat of the oppressed nations: “The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly ‘unpleasant’ for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless (...) mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible”.
As far as the question we are dealing with here is concerned, this applies to the Israeli proletariat.
The revolutionary communists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, “must particularly fight for and maintain complete, absolute unity (also organizational) between the workers of the oppressed nation and the workers of the oppressing nation. Without such unity it will be impossible to maintain an independent proletarian policy and class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all the subterfuge, treachery and trickery of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations always converts the slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers; in internal politics it utilizes these slogans as a means for conduding reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the ruling nation (...); in the realm of foreign politics it strives to enter into pacts with one of the rival imperialist powers for the purpose of achieving its own predatory aims” (6).
The task of the proletarians of the oppressed nations is certainly not an easy one; but if they want their struggle against national oppression to be successful, they must follow the path outlined by Lenin, otherwise they will be constantly trapped in the reactionary clutches of their own bourgeoisie and in the clutches of the dominant bourgeoisie. The task of the proletarians of the oppressing nations is not easy either, as far as the question of the oppressed nations is concerned because they have to overcome the ideological, political and social obstacles by which the ruling bourgeoisie constantly flatter over them, relying on the economic privileges and civil rights which have been granted to them (but not to the population and proletarians of the oppressed nations) and which place them in a privileged position in relation to the proletarians of weaker countries. These are different tasks, since one is forced for a while to fight alongside the bourgeoisies of the same oppressed nations against the dominant bourgeoisies, only to later turn their struggle against their own national bourgeoisies; the others must fight against their own oppressing bourgeoisies for the self-determination of the nations oppressed by these bourgeoisies, knowing that they may lose the privileges which distinguish them from the proletarians of the oppressed nations; but precisely because they are proletarians they can rely on class unity in the perspective of the international proletarian revolution in the struggle against all bourgeois oppression. A people that oppresses another cannot itself be free, Marx and Engels would say, and Lenin reaffirmed it.
Can a proletariat be free which, by its passive attitude, allows its own bourgeoisie to oppress other nations? Of course not, since its own bourgeoisie does not limit itself to the oppression of other nations and other proletarians, but continues to oppress and exploit even its own domestic proletariat, even if it lets it have a few crumbs derived from the exploitation of other nations; crumbs which, moreover, it is ready to take back in the phases of recession of its own economy or more serious crises.
But Lenin does not stop at emphasizing the need to always consider the view between dominant and oppressed nations. He gives us a way of reading imperialist reality by drawing from it the necessary lessons for revolutionary struggle at all times. He writes that three principal types of countries must be distinguished (7):
“First, the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States of America. In these countries the bourgeois, progressive, national movements came to an end long ago. Every one of these ‘great’ nations oppresses other nations in the colonies and within its own country. The tasks of the proletariat of these ruling nations are the same as those of the proletariat in England in the nineteenth century in relation to Ireland”.
Given that imperialism has made the oppression of nations by the great powers a general phenomenon, this problem has not disappeared from the horizon of the proletarian struggle; on the contrary, it has become even greater. Even assuming that all the colonies have “liberated” themselves from national oppression by the old colonialist powers, and we do not suppose that, national oppression within the advanced capitalist countries persists (the Palestinians, the Kurds, etc. are proof of this). Thus, the tasks of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries regarding this problem have not changed.
“Secondly, Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and particularly Russia. Here it was the twentieth century that particularly developed the bourgeois-democratic national movements and intensified the national struggle. The tasks of the proletariat in these countries – in regard to the consummation of their bourgeois-democratic reformation, as well as in regard to assisting the socialist revolution in other countries – cannot be achieved unless it champions the right of nations to self-determination. In this connection the most difficult but most important task is to merge the class struggle of the workers in the oppressing nations with the class struggle of the workers in the oppressed nations”.
The end of the First World Imperialist War brought the collapse of Habsburg Austria and the troubled emergence of a number of independent nations in Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, while the various Slavic nations in the south united to form Yugoslavia and three regions – Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino Alto Adige – were annexed to Italy). In 1917, at the height of the First World War, the revolution of the proletariat in Russia gave rise to a European and world revolutionary movement in which, as Lenin summarized in this second point, two historical tasks were intertwined, i.e. bourgeois democratic and proletarian socialist, for which Lenin magnificently laid out the communist tactics (the pivotal objective of which was the fusion of the class struggle of the workers of the dominant countries and the workers of the oppressed countries), as is evident from the quotations we have given.
“Thirdly, the semi-colonial countries, like China, Persia, Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined population amounting to a billion [at that time there were about 2.5 billion inhabitants in the world, ed.]. In these countries the bourgeois-democratic movements have either hardly begun, or are far from having been completed. Socialists must not only demand the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation – and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing more nor less than the recognition of the right to self-determination – but must render determined support to the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-democratic movements for national liberation in these countries and assist their rebellion – and if need be, their revolutionary war – against the imperialist powers that oppress them” (emphasis is ours in bold). As a demonstration of the continuity in time (Italian: filotempismo) of our party’s positions, we also decisively reaffirmed this position during the thirty years after the Second World War regarding the colonial movements, so much so that it became one of the causes of the clash and split with the comrades who later followed Damen’s group (“battaglia comunista”) (8). It is evident that the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, the desire to end the war even at the cost of losing important territories (see Brest-Litovsk 1918), the founding of the Communist International (1919), the active support for the struggle of the so-called coloured peoples (see Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, 1920) and the civil war against the White Armies, which lasted until 1921, had a significant influence on the bourgeois democratic national liberation movements. Only the alliance of the imperialist forces that sought to stifle the Russian Revolution, and with it the revolution in the world, and the Stalinist counter-revolution, were able to put the brakes on the revolutionary proletarian movement in Europe, Asia, America and Africa to such an extent that even in the oppressor countries it was completely diverted to the terrain of nationalism and bourgeois imperialism. The massacre of Chinese proletarians and communists who rose up in Canton and Shanghai in 1927, facilitated by Stalin’s counter-revolutionary policies, dealt a definitive blow to the opportunities that the world revolutionary movement had in the historical development that opened up with the First World Imperialist War and the revolution in Russia. This does not mean, however, that Lenin’s politico-tactical instructions ceased to be valid.
If Marx’s objective regarding the Irish question was to educate British workers to proletarian internationalism, Lenin and the Italian Communist Left had the same objective. There is no historical reason why this tactic should be left out of the tasks that are primarily incumbent on revolutionary communists and, of course, the most advanced proletarians conscious of their class interests. Let us repeat: with imperialism, the oppression of the dominant countries on the dominated population has intensified, not weakened. The fact that many of the colonies that existed in 1920 no longer exist – or rather have gained political independence and created their own nation-states, but from the point of view of dependence on the world market dominated by the imperialist powers, this dependence has not diminished, but on the contrary has increased enormously – has shown, that in semi-colonial countries and colonies with bourgeois democratic movements, albeit revolutionary (compared to previous political, economic and social conditions), bourgeois progress and the development of national capitalism, the fundamental contradictions of capitalism have not disappeared: the ever more intense exploitation of wage labour, the systematic oppression of women, the systematic oppression of national minorities. From the historical point of view, the positive side of capitalist progress in many formerly backward regions of the world is the transformation of the broad masses of peasants into proletarians, thus accentuating the primary social contradiction in these countries as well: the class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which gives room for the much larger masses of proletarians to enter the future class struggle, and also for those less intoxicated by the opportunistic inter-class collaborationism which has fully corrupted and still corrupts the proletarians of the older but powerful imperialist countries.
Lenin declared that for the revolutionary education of the masses, “it will be the duty of the Socialists [i.e. revolutionary communists, ed.] to explain to the masses that English Socialists who fail to demand the freedom of secession for the colonies and for Ireland; that German Socialists who fail to demand the freedom of secession for the colonies, for the Alsatians, for the Danes and for the Poles, and who fail to carry direct revolutionary propaganda and revolutionary mass action to the field of struggle against national oppression (...); that Russian Socialists who fail to demand freedom of secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc. – are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie” (9). The historical events that followed the First World Imperialist War, although they brought independence to many previously dominated colonies and countries, did not erase national oppression by the dominant nations. The former colonial powers, which were later transformed into imperialist powers, were joined by other countries which, like Israel, were created specifically to function as regional gendarmes on behalf of the ruling imperialists.
The oppression of weaker nations, which has generally increased with imperialism, has thus been taken up in some areas of the planet by a nation that has taken the place of the previous direct colonialism/imperialism, thus allowing the imperialist powers that really dominate the world to play a diplomatic game of negotiation between two nations on the same territory – such as the Palestinians and the Israelis – vying for mutual state sovereignty. As early as 1947, the United Nations adopted a resolution on the creation of two states for two nations in the territory called Palestine, and presented it as the solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict that involved two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan (which militarily occupied the territory inhabited by the Palestinians). In order for this resolution to be implemented, Egypt and Jordan would have had to make a decisive contribution to the creation of a Palestinian state; in fact, neither they nor Israel – which itself became a state in 1948, and an internationally recognised one – wanted the creation of such a state, and systematically sabotaged any initiative aimed at making it a reality. Over the decades, not only Israel, but also all the Arab states to which the Palestinians have fled in the face of persecution and massacres, have continued to sabotage the birth of that state, turning the Palestinian population into a mass of proletarians to be exploited and, if necessary, used as meat for slaughter. All of this clearly speaks of the declarations of the imperialist powers which, besides controlling the UN, directly and indirectly control the political (and military) forces involved in this perennial conflict in the Middle East. The objective of countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, i.e. the Arab countries most directly involved in the struggle of the Palestinians against national oppression, was never to contribute to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but to “destroy” Israel, to seize parts of the Palestinian territory and to subjugate to themselves the Palestinian population, which was transforming from peasant to proletarian.
Destroy Israel? In 25 years they have tried to do so four times (1948–1949, 1956, 1967 and 1973), both directly and through the PLO-led guerrilla warfare. They failed not only because they were confronted with a modern state, militarily well-organised and supported by the most powerful Western imperialisms, especially the USA, but because both the plans of imperialism and the plans of the Arab states created right after the first and especially after the second world imperialist war did not actually envisage the constitution of a Palestinian state. The “two nations, two states” narrative, which is being rehashed even these days, when Israel is razing a good part of Gaza under the pretext of eliminating terrorism personified by Hamas, has never been believed by them and is no longer believed by anyone at all. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, which organised itself into the PNA after the PLO with the approval of the imperialist powers, is waiting for the US – the real masters of Israel – and the Arab countries, which are still interested in financing it, to give it the opportunity to obtain one more privilege than the miserable “autonomy” it has been granted so far. The Palestinian proletarians can expect nothing from this corrupt bourgeoisie, which is now selling itself out to one or another “buyer” without any hesitation, other than what they have been given so far: the illusion of reconciliation with Israel through the intervention of the biggest imperialists, but above all the reality of oppression, which is being inflected in all the most horrible possible forms.
Therefore, the perspective that Palestinian proletarians must adopt if they do not want to continue to be systematically massacred by their own and foreign bourgeoisies, starting with the Israeli one, is not nationalist and guerrilla terrorism; it is not reliance on Israel’s temporary rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Iran, but class struggle, on whose terrain it is necessary to wrest the solidarity of the Arab proletarians of the other countries of the Middle East and to address the Israeli proletariat as class brothers and not as an enemy population. It is the Israeli proletariat, whether in its majority or in its decisive part – to which the revolutionary communists must turn, as Lenin indicated, to fight against their own bourgeoisie for recognition of the right of the Palestinians to self-determination – that will have to respond on the terrain of the proletarian class struggle. There are two possibilities: either the Israeli proletarians will break with their own bourgeoisie at some point in the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and fight alongside the Palestinian proletarians in the way Lenin indicated, or they will continue to be complicit in the bestial exploitation of the Palestinian proletarians and the national oppression of the Palestinian people perpetrated by their own bourgeoisie, thus declaring themselves enemies not only of the Palestinian proletarians but of the proletarian struggle in general, the proletarian and revolutionary struggle for the general emancipation of the world proletariat. Until the Israeli proletarians break with their bourgeoisie, they will continue to be slaves of the capitalist interests in peace and war, and will continue to be turned into cannon fodder, solely for the purpose of defending the interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie.
“two nations, two states”?
As noted above, the slogan “two nations, two states” has resonated whenever the oppression of the Palestinians, especially by Israel, has escalated tensions between the two nations into open warfare: this claim has appeared as a “solution” to the tensions caused by the never-resolved national question. Even today, in the face of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israeli kibbutzim, with the horror of its violence, the dead, wounded and hostages taken to Gaza, and Israel’s deadly response with the horror of its bombardment, the tenfold massacre of civilians, the elderly, women and children, it has become fashionable once again to trot out this slogan. Who is trotting it out? Of course, the pacifists, the opportunists of all political stripes, the same imperialist super-powers and regional powers that have been striving all these decades to ensure that this “political solution” is not implemented. All the bourgeoisies, whether directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict or not, are waiting for the intervention of the imperialist powers – the United States, Russia, China, the European Union – and for their sign to put an end to the massacres, for the Palestinian and Israeli populations to “finally”, after so much bloodshed, find common ground and each begin to live in peace in their own “state”. Israel should therefore allow the Palestinians the freedom to self-determine their own independence and draw the borders of their state on territory that has already been divided into separate territories (the West Bank and Gaza) by the United Nations in recent decades and which has so far been the subject of violent clashes, military occupation by the Israeli army and theft by Israeli settlers; the territories which lack continuity and which would, in fact, consist of two separate enclaves within the borders of the State of Israel. In practice, even if the hypothetical formal constitution of a Palestinian state were to come to fruition, which would be by the grace of the imperialist powers and Israel (though for how long is unknown), it would still be a state whose economy would continue to depend on permitting the passage of commodities across Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt; whose economy would be easily stifled by competition not only from Israel, but also from other Arab states in the region, which have hitherto become accustomed to treating the Palestinian proletariat – which constitutes the vast majority of the Palestinian people – as cheap work force and cannon fodder in their wars for survival, as demonstrated by Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, which are all rotten to the core states sustained by Euro-American and Russian imperialists who are fighting among themselves by all means for influence over the Middle East region that is too strategically important for each of them.
If the imperialist bourgeoisies have no interest in giving the Palestinians – directly or through local power – the freedom to form an independent republic (if they were willing to do so, they would have facilitated its formation, as they have done in the case of other states), the Israeli bourgeoisie and the Arab bourgeoisie, who, after decades of clashes and lost wars with Israel, have grown wiser and found it more advantageous to have good relations with Tel Aviv than to confront it militarily.
Considering that the Palestinian proletariat has exhausted itself in the fruitless bourgeois resistance struggle, that the Israeli proletariat is united in the defence of Israel’s existence, and that the proletarians in the Arab countries are strongly marked by Islamic struggles, it is indeed difficult to imagine that a revolutionary proletarian movement could arise in this troubled area which would be able to push for democratic gains which the bourgeoisie alone has not been capable of realising. It therefore seems as if the watchword of the freedom of the peoples to self-determination has historically passed away forever because the proletarian struggle which would have had the strength to carry it out and use it is lacking, and which would have used it in such a way that it would have been able to step out of the way of its historic revolutionary objectives, with the proof that for the future in the confrontation with the bourgeoisie the most important and fruitful is internationalist and not nationalist struggle.
Certainly, if we take it for granted that the social and political marasmus through which the proletariat of the dominant countries of the world has been passing for more than eighty years is unlikely to be overcome, and that the defeats of the proletariat in the dominated countries have tripped up the revolutionary movements which have arisen in the colonies and oppressed countries, thereby making these proletarians even more enslaved to capital and their own bourgeoisies than before, then it is necessary to shelve the revolutionary preparation of the international proletariat envisaged by Marxism and to rely on the small steps theorised by classical reformism which spread the illusion that step by step, it is possible… to change the world. If, on the contrary, we look at the historical course of the development of capitalism throughout the world and focus on the strengths and weaknesses of its imperialist phase – which can only be done by using Marxism as a theory of the evolution of human society, as a theory of class struggle, which has a historical outcome predetermined by its entire previous course – then the faith that revolutionary communists have in the future advent of socialism is not based on the hope that a great leader will be born by a particular astral combination who will win over the broad proletarian masses of the world and lead them towards a “bright future”; nor is it based on the idea that the broad proletarian masses of the world are waiting for nothing but a “party” which will enlighten their consciences and convince them that their path is not the path indicated to them by the bourgeoisie and opportunist forces, but the path indicated by revolutionary communists; and that the proletarian masses in particular must think only of their revolution and not waste energies, forces and time in dealing with immediate political questions – such as the “national” question, which, coincidentally, no longer directly concerns the white peoples of the countries where capitalism has developed, but the non-white peoples, colonised and oppressed by white peoples – because these questions will automatically be solved by the international revolution itself…
We, in the party meetings beginning with 1951–1952, have systematically dealt with this great national and colonial question in connection with the theses of the II Congress of the Communist International – theses which we have never considered to be outdated – and which, moreover, were the outcome of the theoretical work in which Lenin, in many of his texts, dealt precisely with the self-determination of the nations and how the proletarians in the colonising countries and the proletarians in the countries colonised by white peoples should behave. Their central point was, and is, that the “national” question, and therefore the self-determination of nations, cannot be regarded as an anachronism, even though it is raised in one case in a thousand by the struggle against national oppression. This is why, in dealing with the “Palestinian question” (but also the “Kurdish question” and others), we, as consistent revolutionary communists, do not intend to cut it out of our propaganda and must necessarily frame it within the general struggle against the division of nations, but for their unification.
For unity between the proletarians of the dominant nations and the proletarians of the oppressed nations
That the proletarian revolution, if led by the revolutionary communist party – as it was led in Russia by Lenin’s Bolshevik party – will open the way to the solution of all the contradictions and problems which bourgeois society has not solved – but which, on the contrary, has aggravated them in the course of time – is a great and impressive affirmation because through it and through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to which the revolution must lead, it will be possible to realise the historical task which rests exclusively on the world proletarian class, that is, to overcome all the contradictions of bourgeois society and capitalism, to put an end to all exploitation of Man by Man, to all oppression, and to lead mankind to community of species, to full communism.
But what are the real political problems of the proletarians who, in addition to wage oppression, suffer national and racial oppression from people of the oppressor countries? How do they arrive at a revolution against their own bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie of the dominant country? What class relations should they establish with the proletariat of the oppressor nations? How can the proletariat of the oppressor nations show to the proletariat of the oppressed nations that it is their ally in whom they can trust and with whom they can engage in the same struggle for freedom?
Given that all political activity of the social classes is situated in the existing economic and social reality, and that the political activity of the subordinate classes is inevitably influenced and conditioned by the politics of the ruling classes, it is equally inevitable that the political activity of the dominated classes – if it is to be effective and correspond to their interests – must be materially antagonistic to the interests of the ruling classes. In a world in which the bourgeois class dominates, its specific interests clash on the one hand with the specific interests of foreign bourgeoisies (the competitive struggle and wars between them are constant proof of this) and on the other hand, push each bourgeoisie to fight against its own subordinate classes. But the struggle which the poor peasants, the proletarians, the dispossessed masses wage against the established order to escape the cruel domination which daily threatens their lives has no chance of success, not even partial, unless it is waged on the terrain of violent confrontation, i.e., on the terrain of class struggle. As Marxism has always affirmed, the class struggle is a political struggle, it draws the antagonistic classes to fight on the terrain where the fate of political power is decided. And on this terrain, the bourgeoisie of a given country – as the history of class struggles, revolutions and counter-revolutions has demonstrated – in its struggle against the uprising of the dispossessed masses, and still more against the proletarian insurrection, not only uses all the economic, social, religious, political and military means at its disposal, but it can count on alliances with the bourgeoisies of other countries whenever the social explosion that has erupted in “its” country has the potential to spread to other countries. For the proletariat, in a sense, the same applies: the struggle it wages in one country against its national bourgeoisie has a chance of success provided that it has at its side the proletarian struggle in other countries, particularly in the most powerful capitalist countries using this their strength to help the bourgeoisie (or bourgeoisies) that finds itself (or find themselves) under proletarian attack.
A practical example. How should the Palestinian proletariat – assuming that local and international objective factors will cause the accumulated contradictions in Israel and the Middle East to explode and that from this eruption class sparks will arise in its movement of struggle that will lead even a small minority of proletarian forces to form the revolutionary communist party – proceed so that its struggle will follow the path of revolution? How should it deal with the Israeli proletariat, which is part of the nation that has oppressed it for decades and which, thanks to this oppression, receives privileged treatment in return compared to the Palestinian proletariat and even the Arab proletarians who have Israeli citizenship? It is evident that until the proletarians of countries that systematically oppress the Palestinians, as Palestinians and as proletarians, starting with the proletarians of Israel, demonstrate by deeds that they too are fighting against the national oppression, the Palestinian proletarians will never be able to consider them as their allies; they will always see them as accomplices of the enemies, in fact, as equal enemies as the rulers of Israel and the other dominant countries. The Israeli people, since Israel constituted itself into an independent state, has founded its “freedom”, its “democracy” and its “independence” on the oppression of the Palestinian people; it has developed its economy on this oppression, it has played and plays the role of a gendarme on behalf of US imperialism and its allies throughout the Middle East region, and it proves that it is capable of oppressing and suppressing any force that opposes this role: it is, in fact, one of the main bastions of bourgeois reaction. But as Marx said, a people that oppresses other peoples cannot be free; it is a people enslaved by capitalism, enslaved by a mode of production that conditions every economic, political and social activity to the point of making it an instrument of capitalist oppression. The only “freedom” that the ruling classes of oppressive peoples understand is the freedom to exploit the subjugated classes, to crush and suppress them whenever they rebel against the existing order, and is precisely the freedom to oppress weaker peoples. What “freedom” do the subjugated classes, the dominated classes, the oppressed peoples have? None, except that which is won primarily by the struggle of the proletarian class insofar as it forces the ruling bourgeois classes to yield to certain democratic demands, of which the right to self-determination is also a part. The revolutionary communists are perfectly aware that such political demands are not an absolute, but – as Lenin says – “a small part of the general-democratic (...) world movement”, and he specifies: “now: general-socialist (...) world movement”. A small part, i.e. something which, in given situations, may also contradict the whole “general-socialist (...) world movement” and therefore must be rejected (10). The point is to evaluate these “given situations”, and here only the Marxist method, which examines all the economic, social, political, power relations and historical aspects of the situations in question, can help us.
In concert with Marx and Engels, Lenin took up the question of the self-determination of the nations and gave the Bolshevik Party and the communists of all other countries a political-tactical directive, which, as we have already reiterated, has not lost its value, for with the development of imperialism the national oppression by the more powerful countries against the weaker peoples and countries has not disappeared, but on the contrary has become even more intensified. During the years of the First World War and the proletarian revolution that achieved victory in Russia, the “national” question was still very much alive and historically decisive in most areas of the world dominated by European colonialism. This was also the case during and after the years of the Second World Imperialist War, as demonstrated by the “liberation” struggles against the European colonial powers, especially in Asia and Africa. The grand revolutionary design of Lenin and the Communist International, which saw an extremely positive linkage between the proletarian revolution in Europe and America – that is, in the most developed imperialist countries – and the struggle of the colonial peoples for political independence from the same imperialist countries that were also the main colonialist powers, presaged the dawn of the world revolution led by the proletariat on all continents.
That the counter-revolution defeated the revolutionary proletarian movement and the communist party that led it, is an indisputable fact; however, this does not mean that in drawing lessons from the counter-revolution it is possible to erase the existence of national oppression suffered by many nations and therefore by many proletarian classes under the iron heel of the imperialist powers and their regional offshoots.
It is undeniable to us that today, with the development of capitalism in many areas of the world that were completely undeveloped eighty years ago, and with the emergence of many states that were at least formally “independent”, the “workers’”, “proletarian” question takes precedence over all other social questions. And it is indisputable that precisely because the development of capitalism has brought with it the formation of much more numerous proletarian masses than in the past, the question of the “proletarian revolution” has become more urgent in many countries which, from a historical point of view, still had the problem of implementing the bourgeois revolution, that is, its bourgeois economic and political aspects. However, the contrasts between bourgeoisies and between imperialisms have been increasing and involving more countries numerically, even in terms of military power, as indeed the local, regional and territorial wars of the last eighty years demonstrate. The conflicts between the various bourgeoisies inevitably affect different methods of oppression, aggravating all kinds of oppression, including national and racial oppression. It is therefore absurd when those who claim to be communists, and revolutionaries at that, claim that the “national question” is not an issue of concern to communists today, when it is obvious even to a blind man that Palestinians, Kurds, Yemenis, Uighurs and hundreds of other populations are systematically crushed by national oppression.
The Palestinian, Kurdish, Yemeni, Uighur and other oppressed proletarians also have the historical task of fighting for the proletarian communist revolution, since they suffer the same conditions as wageworkers under capitalist exploitation in the same way, even more than the proletarians in the oppressor countries, and because the struggle between the classes which has developed in the last two centuries in the most capitalistically advanced countries is the same as that which has developed and develops in those countries. But the specifically national oppression they suffer inevitably dominates their daily life and conditions their struggle of resistance, since this oppression also materially affects all the other strata of their nationality, i.e., the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, urban and rural; it is this specific commonality which, in the immediate horizon, objectively unites the proletarians and the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation.
The struggle of the Palestinian proletarians or proletarians of other nationalities against national oppression could have had (and might have) a more historically beneficial and decisive perspective if it had been fought, yes, on immediately national-revolutionary terrain, but set in the perspective of the proletarian revolution, a perspective that has always required a political and practical organization completely independent of any other social force, since, as Lenin argued, its task does not end with the struggle against the foreign bourgeoisie for national independence; it continues with the struggle against its own bourgeoisie, which – after finally coming to power in the new independent state thanks to the victory of the national-revolutionary struggle – will immediately exploit and oppress the poor proletarian and peasant masses and take the place of the foreign bourgeoisie forced out of the country. The revolution in Russia in 1917 proved this beyond all doubt, as did later revolutions in China, Algeria, Cuba, the Congo, etc. The alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nationality had its raison d’être when such a bourgeoisie was fighting on the national-revolutionary terrain against the oppression exercised by the foreign bourgeoisie; it no longer had any reason to continue when the events of this struggle demonstrated with facts that the primary task of this bourgeoisie is to suppress the proletariat and the poor peasantry under conditions of exploitation that are perhaps even worse than those of the previous ones. And there is no doubt that the struggles waged by the bourgeoisie in Palestine, Kurdistan or any other oppressed nation have for some time no longer had the characteristics of national-revolutionary struggles, such as those in Algeria or Vietnam; this does not detract from the fact that the national oppression exercised by the bourgeoisies of the dominant countries continues even on them, and that in a future situation of a general crisis of imperialism, in some areas where national oppression has beset the population for many decades and which continues to rebel against it, social conditions could reappear in which not only the proletariat but also certain bourgeois fractions would be thrown onto the terrain of national-revolutionary struggle.
The situation experienced by Germany in 1850, Russia in 1917, China in 1927 and then again in 1949, and the colonial countries in the 1950s–1970s, could occur again, certainly with different specific aspects, but confronting revolutionary communists and proletarians with essentially the same basic problems: if the world is divided into dominant and dominated nations – and with the development of imperialism this division has intensified, making all kinds of social oppression, including “national” oppression, increasingly intolerable – what are the tasks of the proletariat of the dominant countries, and what are the tasks of the proletariat of the dominated countries? How will the proletariat of the dominant countries be able to show to the proletariat of the dominated countries that it is not complicit in the national oppression exercised by its own imperialist bourgeoisie, if not by fighting against it to recognise the right of the oppressed nation to separation in the first place? Take again the case of the struggle for the increase in wages and the abolition of wage labour: there have been and are communists who are convinced that proletarians should not fight for an immediate demand such as the increase in wages because that would be to confirm the capitalist regime of wage oppression, whereas they should fight directly and only for the ultimate demand, i.e. abolition of wage labour, which means fighting directly and only for socialism. These “communists” forget one of the fundamental teachings of Marxism about the proletarian struggle for the immediate defence of living conditions: that the most important fruit of this struggle is not the increase in wages themselves or any other immediate demands which the bourgeoisie can always take back, but the class solidarity which is generated in this struggle when it is waged by classist means and methods, hence the consciousness that the workers do belong to a class which has the potential and the strength to set itself higher goals in the face of a ruling class which imposes social domination by violence, by repression in defence of its interests which are antagonistic to those of the proletariat: it is this consciousness of class antagonism that is the lever of the class party to educate the proletariat to fight not only for immediate demands, not only against the competition between the proletarians themselves, but for higher political goals up to the revolutionary conquest of central political power. Without these materialistically compulsory steps, dictated by the existing balance of power between the ruling bourgeois class and the proletarian class, the proletariat will forever be a prisoner not only of bourgeois ideology but also of political and social methods and means, which the bourgeoisie adopts and allows to be adopted, to make the proletarians abandon the class and revolutionary perspective, or even come close to considering it, and adopt the democratic and reformist perspective, since the latter is wholly a component of the class domination of the ruling bourgeoisie.
For proletarian internationalism
The development of capitalism after the First World Imperialist War and especially after the Second World Imperialist War has passed in many once very backward countries the phase when bourgeois revolution was on the agenda from the economic and political point of view and when the respective bourgeoisies had the role of leading proletarian and peasant masses in this revolution. In numerous instances, however, the bourgeoisies of the small nations, of oppressed nationalities, were bought off by the bourgeoisies of the large dominant nations or put themselves at their service, becoming de facto another oppressive and repressive force against their own proletariat, thus confirming Lenin’s perspective, according to which the proletariat had to have its own class organisation and its own class political perspective, completely independent of any other social force, internal or external, and to pursue it exclusively alongside the proletarians of all other countries in the same emancipatory struggle. A perspective for which the Communist International was born, which was later destroyed by the Stalinist counter-revolution.
As revolutionary communists, we stand for proletarian internationalism, we propagate proletarian internationalism, and we must show by our program, our policy and our tactics that we give the proletarian internationalism a practical demonstration, especially regarding the proletarians of the dominated nations, the oppressed nations. As revolutionary communists, we are against the oppression of the small nations exercised by the big imperialist bourgeoisies, and at the same time against the narrowed perspectives of the smaller nations, their isolation, their particularism; we struggle for the subordination of every particular interest, including the national interest, to the general interests of the world proletarian movement, to which the proletarians of the imperialist countries are obliged to contribute to the greatest extent precisely because they belong to the nations that dominate the world.
Such a conception was clearly expressed by Lenin, who did not fail to point out that: “The important thing is not whether one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of the small nations are liberated before the socialist revolution, but the fact that in the epoch of imperialism, owing to objective causes, the proletariat has been split into two international camps, one of which has been corrupted by the crumbs that fall from the table of the dominant-nation bourgeoisie – obtained, among other things, from the double or triple exploitation of small nations – while the other cannot liberate itself without liberating the small nations. without educating the masses in an anti-chauvinist, i.e., anti-annexationist, i.e., ‘self-determinationist’, spirit”. And there comes his lashing at the communists, who are internationalist revolutionaries in words and in deeds, accomplices of imperialism and its policy of oppressing the smaller nations:
“In the internationalist education of the workers of the oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily he laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat [every communist, ed.] of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. 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.” (11). And we emphasize three times: this is an absolute demand, even if the secession would be possible and “practicable” only one in a thousand until the introduction of socialism!!! Lenin speaks of the introduction of socialism, which, as we well know, concerns the international proletarian movement, the world revolution, the countries of the world, and a goal that has not yet been achieved anywhere; he speaks of the freedom of the secession of the oppressed countries as an absolute demand, a demand that must be supported, even if it were practicable only one in a thousand! It is obvious, and Lenin goes on to warn every communist, that support for the slogan of freedom of secession, self-determination of the oppressed nation, must always be subordinated to the general struggle of the proletariat for socialism, and must in every case be correctly weighed against an evaluation of the historical situation, of the concrete conditions of the oppressed country or countries in which independence, freedom of secession, is demanded, and whether or not this goal is practicable through wars or revolutions. Therefore, beyond the particularities of one such smaller nation, what must guide the position of the revolutionary communists, the class party, on this question is precisely internationalism, that is, the struggle for the unity of the proletarians of the oppressor and oppressed nations, a struggle – as already said – by which the proletariat of the oppressor nation must prove in facts that it is neither an active part of national oppression nor indifferent to the national oppression which its own bourgeoisie exerts on the weaker nations.
The tasks of the proletarians of the imperialist countries
Although the important phase of the anti-colonial struggles in the first thirty years after the Second World War has come to an end, the “national” question in many parts of the world is still very much alive and certainly poses a complication in the pursuit of the proletarian class perspective. The ideological and political power of the bourgeoisie, condensed in the demand for national independence and democracy, through which all classes of people are deceived into believing that they have the possibility of expressing their needs and satisfying them through the support of various democratic institutions, is based on the economic power of national and international capitalism. However, under capitalist imperialism, liberal democracy has completely lost its political value; nevertheless, drawing on the economic and military strength of the world imperialist powers, it still maintains its ideological influence by deluding the proletarian masses not only of the imperialist countries but also of the oppressed countries that it can eliminate or substantially alleviate the various forms of social oppression precisely through negotiation, bargaining, civilised and peaceful “dialogue”, by which, according to the bourgeois, the most sharp disputes can be overcome and wars brought to an end. For a hundred years and more, the history of contradictions between the bourgeoisies has been unfolded through trade wars, sharp political contradictions and open wars, which have weighed heavily above all on the living conditions of the proletarian masses tending to worsen all the time, thereby proving that no dialogue between classes “resolves” social contradictions and no dialogue between states eliminates or substantially reduces the frictions and contrasts that the very development of capitalism itself constantly generates.
This is yet one more reason, and not less, why the proletarians of imperialist countries – who, willingly or unwillingly, enjoy, even if only in crumbs, the ever more widespread and more violent oppression exercised by their own imperialist bourgeoisie on weaker countries – must demonstrate to the proletarians of the weaker countries and of the oppressed nationalities, that they are on the side of the oppressed, to fight for an end to the forms of oppression of their own imperialist bourgeoisies, starting with the most intolerable ones, such as national oppression, which, together with religious oppression and the oppression exercised on women, are among the most deeply rooted in the long history of class-divided societies.
To argue, then, that the working class today should no longer occupy itself with the “national” question – that is, with immediate politics – is, as Marx said in 1870 in a letter to Paul and Laura Lafargue (12), the same as rejecting that it should be concerned with the question of wages in the manner of the old socialists, with the objection that “you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system!”. Here it is not understood that “every class movement as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement”. To deal with politics for communists, for Marxists, is to consider the dialectical reality in every question concerning society, which is a contradictory reality that develops, as Lenin reminds us, in leaps, dramatically, revolutionarily, that is, not linearly, not gradually, not in a straightforward way. Just as from the immediate defensive economic struggle, the proletariat does not develop its movement gradually, linearly, into the struggle on the general class political plane, but does so to such an extent, in so far as, in the clash with the bourgeoisie and through the intervention and decisive influence of the class party in its movement, it acquires the perspective of social and revolutionary rupture as its only perspective of historical development, so in the struggle on the immediate political plane for political demands which are absolutely incompatible with the bourgeois political system – from the right to organise in unions, political parties, the right to assemble and demonstrate, the right to strike, the right to the press, to the right of self-determination of nations and their secession into independent states (rights that can be won in certain historical exceptional situations without violent class conflict), the proletariat has every interest in removing from the terrain of its classist struggle all ideological and political obstacles that the bourgeoisie purposely puts up to divert, weaken, paralyse and liquidate its class movement. And there is no doubt that the “national” question, precisely because of the specific oppression that continues to be exercised by the most powerful bourgeoisies, constitutes even today an enormous obstacle to the resumption and development of the classist struggle of the proletariat, both in the weaker capitalist countries and in the imperialist ones.
The leap from the immediate economic and political struggle at the enterprise and national level to the class political struggle, i.e. to the general struggle and the struggle at the supranational and world level, will not take place unless there is a profound social rupture, towards which it is possible to make steps not only through an economic defensive struggle waged by the means and methods of the class struggle (i.e. incompatible with social peace and inter-class collaboration), but also through the development of the political struggle aimed at the unification of the proletarian class beyond not only categories, sectors, sex and age, but also nationalities and borders, within which every bourgeois state tries with all its might to confine its proletarians. To struggle against the national oppression of the dominant countries is also to struggle with the perspective of the proletarians of all countries united against the domination of each individual bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisies united in the struggle against the proletarians of the whole world.
The historical revolutionary objective of the proletariat is not, after the overthrow of the bourgeois state, to replace it with another class state, but to sweep away from the face of the earth every social division into classes, and thus every state, every armed force set up to defend the ruling class, every class privilege, every oppression. But for this to happen, not only in one country, which is historically impossible, but internationally, the proletariat must wage the revolutionary struggle allied to the proletarians of other countries – dominant and oppressed – for a not so short period of time, with whose help it will establish its class domination, its class dictatorship, to be able to intervene with a whole series of political, economic and social measures aimed at economic and social transformation of the whole of human society in a decisive struggle against the resistance which the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes will inevitably and violently put up to their end.
According to the theses of Marxism, the revolutionary preparation, the leadership of the revolution and the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat must take place under the leadership of the class party, the revolutionary communist party, the supreme revolutionary organ historically charged with these tasks. And part of this revolutionary preparation is the application of a political tactic which considers the social questions unresolved by the bourgeoisie – such as the national question of the oppressed peoples – as questions which are within the competence of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat with orientations which promote the unity of the proletarians of the dominant and oppressed nations.
The class party – and the history of class struggles, revolutions and counter-revolutions proves that – is not endowed with a magic wand with which it can rouse the proletariat of a particular country or of all countries in a single worldwide revolutionary movement; the class party of the proletariat is not a sorcerer like the bourgeoisie was in terms of the uncontrolled development of the productive forces within its economic system. It will have to wage the anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois struggle in every sphere and on every social question that bourgeois society has not resolved, could not resolve and will not be able to resolve because of the congenital contradictions of its economic and social system.
And if, for the sake of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will be victorious in a given country, it will be necessary – as it was in Russia during the years of the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin – to prove to the proletarians of the oppressed nations, who are still under the influence of their own bourgeoisie, that the self-determination of the nations was not a false promise, but a promise which the dictatorship of the proletariat (unlike the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) will concretely fulfil, then the secession of the nations will not be resisted. The fact remains, however, that along with this promise, the revolutionary communists belonging to these nations never cease to propagate among the proletarian masses the necessity of their political preparation and organisation independent of any other social force; that they will continue to fight alongside the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the same end as the proletarians in other countries: i.e., to overthrow the bourgeois power, even if it has just been established with their own contribution, and to establish their own class dictatorship alongside the proletarian dictatorships that may already exist in other countries. The “double revolution” in Russia is an example for us: on the one side, the Kerensky government and its supporters (the Russian, European bourgeoisies, the White Guards and the opportunists) and, on the other side, the soviets of workers, soldiers and poor peasants led by the Bolshevik Party fought for victory over tsarism; the Kerensky bourgeois government naturally stopped at that national-bourgeois stage and intended to continue the imperialist war begun by tsarism; the proletariat led by the Bolsheviks was prepared to go much further in the revolution and fought against the bourgeois government to establish its own class dictatorship, to put an end to the imperialist war and to work for the international proletarian revolution. What is important even today, although the question of the “double revolution” is no longer on the agenda in the same terms as it was after the first and second imperialist wars, is not to conceal the fact that the proletarians of the oppressed nations are still very much ideologically and politically conditioned by their own bourgeois classes and tend also to look upon the proletarians of the oppressor countries as their enemies. Until this situation is set right, until the proletarians of the oppressor countries radically break with their own bourgeoisie by becoming organisationally and politically independent of it, it will be almost impossible for the proletarians of the oppressed nations to succeed on the field where the proletarians of the oppressor countries have been failing.
And here is the enormous responsibility of the proletarians of the imperialist countries, the oppressor countries. Until they make a clear break with class collaboration with their own bourgeoisies, they will continue to appear as accomplices of the oppression, and therefore of the massacres, which these bourgeoisies order for the sole purpose of imposing their domination over both the masses of the oppressed nations and the domestic proletarian masses. Therefore, for the Israeli bourgeoisie and the Arab bourgeoisies who share with it the fear of the outbreak of class struggle, of which the Palestinian proletariat could be the primary protagonist, the Palestinian proletarians are the preferred target of all oppression, of all massacres.
It is not Hamas that the Israeli bourgeoisie, in Netanyahu’s words, really wants to liquidate: it has used Hamas against the Palestinian National Authority in previous years and may do so in the future, even if its official name is changed because the objective is to divide the Palestinian proletarians, to set them against each other, to pit the Palestinian proletarians against the other Arab proletarians and, above all, to prevent them from the possibility – which today, in truth, seems remote – of infecting the Israeli proletariat, especially the Arab-Israeli proletariat, with their struggle, and thus intensifying the potential of the class struggle in which they could also draw the proletarians of the other Arab states.
Today, we cannot know in which country or countries the objective and subjective conditions will be so ripe that proletarian revolution will not only break out there, but will reach a victorious end. But revolutionary communists, in the vital reconstitution of the class party, without which no revolutionary proletarian movement has a future, cannot and must not evade any political question which bourgeois society poses in the social arena of capitalist relations of production and power. And as the wars and armed conflicts which have marked the period of the last hundred years, in which the great imperialist countries have stood against the multitude of small oppressed countries of this capitalist world, show, the “national” question remains a political question to which there can be an answer of this kind: imperialism has triumphed, and therefore we must no longer concern ourselves with immediate political questions such as these; let us deal with the great political question of the world proletarian revolution...
The class party is the historical consciousness of the class struggle of the international proletariat, it is the guiding organ which dialectically unites class consciousness and the revolutionary will, without which the proletariat of any country in the world, even if it struggles strenuously against the ruling classes which oppress it, both at the immediate economic level and at the broader political-military level, can never transform itself from being class for capital into class for itself, into revolutionary class. On the tortuous and rough path to the world proletarian revolution, the immediate economic, social and political problems do not disappear, but come more and more insistently and forcefully to the fore, and tend to paralyse and break down the proletarian struggle at its very material base: in the struggle of resistance against the pressures of the capitalists, in the struggle of immediate economic defence, which, when it is waged by classist means and methods, constitutes the very basis of the general possibility of revolutionary political struggle. It is precisely on the terrain of the immediate economic and political struggle of defence that the proletariat tests its strength, its class solidarity, and organises itself independently of the bourgeoisie and any other forces of social conservation (above all the opportunist forces); on the one hand, the proletariat tests on it its capacity to persevere in the conflict with the ruling bourgeoisie despite the lost battles, and on the other hand, it has on it the opportunity to get to know the class party, its instructions, its programme, its will to develop the classist struggle on the immediate terrain and to unify the proletarians by fighting against their mutual competition, its dedication to the historical cause of the proletarian class, without any deviation from the final objectives of the proletarian struggle, and even in the daily struggle alongside the proletarians in resisting the attacks of the capitalists. Woe betide the class party which would embrace the idea of facilitating its revolutionary task by skipping the long phase of the battles on the immediate terrain, which are not only of economic and union character, but also political, as in the question of national oppression and internationalism, which, if it is not to remain an empty slogan, must be concretely manifested in actions and instructions, for which no new policy, no new tactics can be invented: it is enough to follow in the footsteps of Marx, Engels, Lenin and, we would like to add, Bordiga, as examples of theoretical intransigence, from which political and tactical instructions derive, which are an affirmation of Marxism and which fight against every update, every innovation, every adaptation to specific situations...
(Il comunista, Nr. 179, September-November 2023).
(1) Cf. Lenin V. I., The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 409, Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Lenin V. I., The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 22, Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) See p. 18
(8) There are many party texts devoted to the national and colonial question, but here we would like to point in particular to Fattori di razza e nazione nella teoria marxista, 1953 (in “il programma comunista”, no. 16–20, 1953) and Le lotte di classe e di Strati nel mondo dei popoli non bianchi, storico campo vitale per la critica rivoluzionaria marxista, 1958 (in “il programma comunista”, no. 3–6, 1958).
(9) Cf. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 22, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974.
(10) Cf. Lenin, The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 22, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Cf. Marx to Paul Lafargue – 19 April 1870, in Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 43, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.
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