Perspectives 2002
No 1118 January 8th 2002
PART 5.
Such is the 'left' retreat from Leninist revolutionary anti-imperialist science that genuine resistance to Western domination is being slandered as 'fascism'. Fascism a historic term only describing imperialism itself. Too much is made of the 'difference' between bourgeois dictatorship by 'democracy' tricks or by police-state tricks.
The complexities in the historical journey of class war and revolutionary nationalism towards the overthrow of the imperialist system, since the Revisionist self-destruction of the Soviet workers state and the Socialist Camp, have plunged fake-'lefts' into theoretical chaos.
Sept 11, Palestinian suicide-bombers, or anarchist street fighting in Genoa have all been declared "the wrong struggle" variously by every Trot and Stalinist sectarianism from the Socialist Alliance to the SLP, Lalkar, and beyond, — the 'swamp'.
But they are what is happening, — caused by imperialist world repression and its insoluble 'surplus capital' economic crisis which is increasingly pushing monopoly-bourgeois ideology towards big-power warmongering fascist aggression against any resistance to western (i.e. American) domination.
The fake-'lefts' in Britain who universally condemned the Sept 11 attempt by the imperialist-dominated middle East to fight back against the region's endless humiliation and persecution as a result of Western world-rule, have increasingly more to answer for as the fascist slaughter, which US imperialism has unleashed on the strength of gaining world opinion's approval that "something must be done gathers pace.
Universal warmongering barbarism is the imperialist system's long-term intention if the deepening economic crisis threatens, the West's international domination.
Support for Islamic voodoo is out of the question, but to condemn Sept 11 means, willy-nilly, to side with US blitzkrieg.
As Lenin explained in Guerilla War (1906), it is ludicrous for the socialist revolution to "condemn" episodic terrorist turmoil. Instead, it needs to spread its own influence so as to give a believable direction and leadership to anti-Ruling-Class hatred.
In their futility and frustration, confusion and self-conceit has dragged 'left' sects beyond the disgraceful attempt to set up Black Bloc anarchists for a beating as 'police provocateurs' to even nastier bourgeois class-collaboration, cheering on the slaughter of al-Quaeda as "no great loss", and even fingering Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism for "condemnation" too, effectively providing a 'left' cover for further imperialist blitzkrieg massacres.
This theoretical chaos needs to read Lenin, study history, and look objectively at exactly what is happening in the world to produce Sept 11 after a decade of increasing imperialist warmongering-fascist aggression.
It would be marvellous if there was a Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle against Zionist colonisation and tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism and Trotskyism which produced these armchair-revolutionary defeatists in Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too.
Hamas has a reactionary, religious ideology and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful national-liberation socialist revolution.
But that the Hamas guerilla war is leading the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring the whole Intifada.
The socialist revolution needs its own independent propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.
Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than pro-imperialist, class-collaborative defeatism.
As obvious as all this is from a Leninist point of view, unbelievably some theoretical confusion on the fake-'left' has actually accepted the 'logic' of the generally confused and cowardly, "condemnation" of Sept 11 and condemned Palestinian guerilla-war terrorism as well. This takes Revisionist degeneration into qualitatively new territory, and is already a widely-observed anti-communist phenomenon. This is 'New World Order' defeatism gone totally pro-imperialist. It is the historical equivalent of the Revisionist leaders of the Second International initially voting for war credits in their 'own' parliaments in 1914 "purely for the self-defence purposes of our 'own' country", but rapidly being transformed into open social chauvinists as World War I murderously and humiliatingly progressed, or into shamefaced ones (i.e. social pacifists, idiotically bleating 'No to war' as the Juggernauts of the imperialist economic-survival crisis clashed on).
All sorts of "justification" is put forward, now as then, as to why such class-collaboration is 'necessary', — invariably along the racist-chauvinist lines that the enemy fighting one's 'own' imperialist state is "even MORE reactionary" than the home team, and so the "lesser of two evils" has to be sided with.
Unbelievably, fake-'lefts like the CPGB and others in the Socialist Alliance, are spouting this degenerate opportunism right now, denouncing the pathetic Islamic naïveté of such insubstantial lightweight sects as al-Quaeda as "dangerous reactionary anti-imperialism whose religious feudalism would drag civilisation back historically", etc, even as the only truly dominant, direction setting force on earth, Western imperialism, was in the process of inflicting such atrocities as the two mass, acres of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sherif (see EPSRs 1114 & 1115), and continuing the merciless blitzkrieg brutality, bombing more than 3,000 innocent civilian casualties to death so far in Afghanistan.
It is derisible fantasy to pretend that Osama Bin Laden, or sheikh Yassin, or even Saddam Hussein, can even remotely be considered a "serious fascist threat to the world" as these weird bedfellows Bush, Blair, and the CPGB like to make out.
None want to restore feudalism against capitalist-imperialist world progress; none of them are in the slightest position even to try.
And however 'barbaric', primitive', or 'reactionary' any of their actions or programmes can be labelled, it throws all reading of history into impossible confusion to see any of them as the "possible next fascist threat to civilisation".
Firstly, the description of the danger is itself phrased hopelessly misleadingly, causing people to look for fascism in entirely the wrong phenomena.
Secondly, even when correctly stated, there is no way that any regime headed by Saddam, Osama, or Yassin could play the slightest 'fascist' role in inter-imperialist warmongering, which is the arena which alone has given 'fascism' its dramatic historical resonance.
It was a specific world-imperialist crisis situation which created the fascist phenomenon (aggressive warmongering tyranny fuelled by manic ideological extremism of a racist/religious/mystical flavour). It was the crisis era which created the fascists, not the fascists who created the crisis era.
There have been plenty of would-be lunatic messiahs marching around the political scene for generations.
But there was only one fascist era — the 1930s when difficult economic world-crisis conditions particularly put the squeeze on some major, or would-be major, imperialist powers who felt they were being denied the chance of colonial expansionist lifelines out of the international slump conditions prevailing universally.
Germany, Japan, and Italy felt especially aggrieved against the colonial-exploitation stranglehold that Britain, France, and the USA in particular had already historically established.
Their 'fascist' ranting about a 'new world order' to keep their own slump-threatened populations bemused by aggressive preparations for expansionist warmongering, set the tone for a row of smaller-power imitators, but was crucially pandered to, up to a certain extent, by the established Big Three imperialist powers who all had a mature grasp of warmongering chauvinism's great potential for keeping state-unity intact during a severe economic crisis, but who also had a huge stake in trying to crease a particular imperialist-warmongering conspiracy which might strike at the Soviet workers state.
For a serious repeat of a 'fascist' threat as history knew it, Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin would not only need to be the partial inventions of imperialist foreign policy in the first place which then went wrong (as they all in fact are, encouraged as foils for perceived 'greater evils' at the time); but they would also need to be potential state-regimes which could in time become a worldwide military threat.
For the British fake-'left' to shout 'fascist danger' in unison with imperialism at Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin is a) just lunatic fantasy; and b) class-collaborating treachery anyway because any military defeats which ANYONE can inflict on world-dominant imperialism should be ecstatically welcomed by all who have a serious interest in the overthrow of the imperialist system, — defeat in war being the only route well -trodden in history so far for the revolutionary socialist overthrow of a ruling class, (after its defeat and humiliation in a failed inter-imperialist war).
When imperialist powers fought each other, the science of Leninism saw only the opportunity for each working class to topple its OWN ruling-class after defeat, setback, or humiliation. NEVER did Leninist science see the social-chauvinist route (of regarding the domineering warmongering aggression of the 'enemy' as "more fascist" than the home governments destructive murderous opportunism and jingoistic hysteria), — as anything but a ludicrous mistake and a catastrophic betrayal of the working class.
For the fake-'lefts' to abandon 100% concentration on looking for the next imperialist defeat, setback, or humiliation while they make utterly useless academic appraisals of how much 'fascist potential' they can see in the regimes targeted by their 'own' imperialist governments for fascist blitzkrieg, — is such reactionary treachery to everything that serious anti-capitalism has ever been about that all pretence to some kind of 'socialist, ideology by these sects is destroyed completely.
Not a scrap of imperialist foreign policy has ever been anything less than 100% 'fascist' in being willing to blitzkrieg and repress local resistance to whatever extent necessary whenever it could be got away with.
The colonising/domineering tyranny abroad by imperialist powers (Britain, France, USA, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, etc, all the same, exactly like Germany and Italy) for more than 100 years consisted of massacres, torture, concentration camps, starvation, cultural destruction, and total murderous genocide, etc, etc, etc, long before German imperialism gained its international brutality notoriety in the 1930s.
And the butchering, poisoning, torturing, defoliating slaughter in Vietnam by the USA in the 1960s took imperialist tyranny abroad to unprecedented new depths.
The merciless savagery against innocents in Afghanistan right now shows that nothing has changed, ever will change, or ever could change. It is 'fascist' (for whatever use the word is).
For accuracy's sake and for strategy's sake, a distinction only has to be drawn about the organisational nature of imperialist domination at home.
The dictatorship of the capitalist bourgeoisie is permanent until overthrown by socialist revolution, whether the proletarian masses are hoodwinked, swindled, and repressed by 'democratic legal' means or by open dictatorship.
Anti-imperialist tactics, ideology, and means of struggle must adapt to whether the working class is being screwed by a parliament, fronting a police-state; or by the police-state directly.
The great danger is in making too much of this difference whereby the catastrophic historic phenomenon of 'reformism' (plus the fake-'left') is able to prevail for ages, limiting the anti-imperialist struggle effectively to just "defending this democratic gain" or "winning that human-rights extension", etc, etc, but all the time solely determined to limit the fight just to that single issue.
Such delusions of "socialist struggle" are not just utterly useless because capitalist states have for more than a century realised that it is far better to rule the working class by conning them with 'parliamentary democracy' than by direct police-state methods, if economic prosperity allows such a 'democratic' luxury.
Such delusions are also totally treacherous, gagging and binding the working class hand and foot to be dominated by bourgeois propaganda and 'representative' betrayals ad infinitum.
The socialist revolution never comes by such means, nor could it ever come by such 'democracy' means.
Such understanding, however, does not rule out the need for mass mobilisation to defend any 'democratic right' whenever appropriate. Such struggles can educate and revolutionise wider sections of workers and middle class who might not yet have seen through the fraud of capitalism and its 'democracy' yet, but might learn this in some 'rights' battle or other, (provided that the revolutionary purpose of all such 'reformist protest mobilisations has been well argued.
Proof of the pricelessness of Marxist science over the imbecile blathering of SLP demagogy is already at hand anyway, over Ireland. The analogy is not to imply anything positive at all about Bin Ladenism but to show how lessons for the working class about the imperialist world crisis must start from the conflict of class and national forces as it unfolds in reality, and not as how it 'ought to' unfold.
Any disgrace for the Northern Ireland office of dying British colonial-imperialism in Ireland and its police chief Flanagan flowing from the Ombudsman report on the Omagh bomb fiasco, springs out of the massive significance of the Good Friday Agreement defeat for imperialism which the EPSR has alone ever fully explained.
This Ombudsman office has a huge budget and a large powerful staff reflecting the dramatic historical nature of the GFA which effectively dismantles one of the oldest, best-entrenched, most viciously-minded, and most difficult-to-dislodge colonies of all, — the 'separate state' effectively, of 'Northern Ireland'.
It was brought down by Sinn Féin and the IRA via, eventually, the snails-pace nationalist compromise of the GFA, which less-than-clear-cut 'socialist' victory had the likes of the SLP and Socialist Alliance constantly sneering at the 'failed peace process' and 'Sinn Féin capitulation to a US-imposed settlement', etc, etc.
From the start, what every variety of fake-'left' ideology misled itself with was in automatically sneering at the more obviously backward Catholic nationalism of the Provisionals after they split from the more apparently 'communist' Officials in the Sinn Féin/IRA movement. The raw terror of the IRA frightened off these British labour movement traditionalists too (all hopelessly corrupted by Trot and Revisionist brainrot).
These opportunists who now form the 'swamp' failed to observe the basic Marxist scientific requirement to actually look at what is happening (see Lenin "Guerilla War" (1906) [in part 6]).
What was clearly being built from the start was an effective national-liberation struggle which was obviously going to LEAD the anti-imperialist fight in circumstances where a 'pure socialist revolution' as such (as advocated by all the conceited swamp as "the easiest way forward" despite not only being incapable of doing the same in Britain, but of not even daring to try), — was historically. not yet on the cards for a whole variety of obvious reasons.
More Marxist-Leninist understanding was required to then see what a crucial anti-imperialist victory it would be to eventually achieve the dismantling of the 'Northern Ireland' independent statelet colony as it used to be, with its own sectarian army and police.
Not a single sect in the 'left'-swamp could even see it, — let alone recognise it — when it arrived, deliberately concealed for additional obvious reasons within the Good Friday Agreement, which the entire fake-'left' voted "useless compromise, which will solve nothing".
The cowardly SLP will, cautiously, continue to opportunistically boast of its 'big party' relationship with Sinn Fein, which, the non-Marxist Sinn Fein will naturally humour, as it does all bourgeois-liberal British politics.
But the sick philistine hollowness at the heart of such SLP-opportunist posturing remains doomed to contempt and hatred from Revolutionary working-class understanding as it relentlessly grows.
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