Reply to a statement of OKI (Russian Section of the IMT)
By Alexey Sedov, Denis Sokolov and Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 13 November 2023, www.thecommunists.net
The Central Committee of the Organisation of Communist-Internationalists (OKI), which is the Russian section of the Alan Woods’ IMT, has published a second statement about the Anti-Israel riots in Dagestan two weeks ago. [1] In this statement they reiterate their mistaken position that these protests were a simply reactionary and anti-semitic pogrom. “Based on the available facts, only one thing can be said: the events that took place in the North Caucasus were nothing more than a series of Anti-Jewish pogroms.”
Such a view is in stark contrast to the analysis of Socialist Tendency and the RCIT. As we explained in our statement: “We strongly oppose the pro-Israeli propaganda to denounce the protests in Northern Caucasus as primarily “anti-semitic”. It is probably true that such reactionary prejudices played a certain role. However, this was not the dominant element. The protests were provoked by the Israeli massacre in Gaza and the slogans chanted were in relation to this genocide. They were mainly directed against symbols resp. citizens of Israel. If these protests were primarily “anti-semitic” – i.e. directed against Jews because of their religion or their ethnicity – why were they not directed against the long-standing Jewish minority living in the region and why now and not before?! It is well-known that the supporters of the Zionist state cynically camouflage their war of terror as a “struggle against a new Holocaust”. It is an outrageous hypocrisy to exploit one of the worst crimes in history to justify an ongoing genocide!” [2]
As the comrades emphasize in the introduction of their statement, they are polemicising against those who, in their view, have “capitulated to anti-Semitic reactionaries and have refused to seriously criticize manifestations of national chauvinism under one pretext or another.” While they do not explicitly name our organisation, it is evident that this polemic is directed against us.
The OKI CC argues against us: “They may answer us: but there were no pogroms against Mountain Jews living in the North Caucasus, which means there was no anti-Semitism. This argument is completely hypocritical.” Well, we did not say that antisemitism does not exist in Northern Caucasus. But what we say is that antisemitism has not played a major role and there exists no tradition of antisemitic pogroms in the region.
The OKI comrades object that the reason why there has been no pogroms in the past was “that Mountain Jews make up about 20,000 people in the North Caucasus. This is a large (much larger than some of the main ethnic groups of Dagestan) compactly settled ethnic group. The only conceivable form of attack against it is a full-scale armed ethnic conflict, capable of leading to massacres according to the Yugoslav scenario. Don’t supporters of such an argument want to honestly and openly declare that they will consider any indication of the obvious anti-Semitism of the pogromists as “just pro-Israeli propaganda” until they are presented with hundreds of corpses of Mountain Jews and clear footage of inter-ethnic massacres?”
We shall ignore the hysterical tone of such an argument. Likewise, we shall not bother to point the comrades to the fact that, contrary to their claims, there are only 145 Mountain Jews scattered throughout the Northern Caucasus (most Jews in the region are Ashkenazi and not Mountain Jews). [3]
Irrespective of all this, the objection of the comrades does not make any sense. More than 10 million people live in Northern Caucasus. How on earth can the comrades believe that there have been no pogroms only because reactionary antisemites would not dare to attack a small minority of 20,000 Jews?! According to our knowledge, Russian Black Hundreds were never scared to attack a small Jewish minority!
Where is the dialectic, comrades?
However, the problem in OKI’s argumentation is not limited to the field of demography or mathematics. It is much more important: their failure to think dialectically and their inability to understand the national question.
Let us start with a remarkable feature of the OKI statement. Despite its considerable length (2,400 words) and despite the fact that the issue deals with an event in Northern Caucasus, the document does not mention a single time that the people in this region constitute a nationally oppressed minority in Russia. Neither do they mention the imperialist character of the Russian state.
Hence, the OKI leaders don’t even come up with the idea that the Muslim minorities in Northern Caucasus which face national oppression by Russia since one and a half centuries could feel a deep bond of solidarity with the (mostly Muslim) oppressed people in Palestine who are currently butchered by the Zionist settler state.
Such ignorance is unforgiveable since the Muslim peoples in Northern Caucasus are among the most oppressed peoples in Russia. It was in Dagestan and other places where important protests did take place last year against Putin’s mobilisation for his imperialist war against the Ukrainian people. It was in Chechnya where modern Russia faced the most ferocious and heroic resistance in two national liberation wars (in 1994-96 and in 1999-2009). [4]
Trotsky once noted: “The sectarian simply ignores the fact that the national struggle, one of the most labyrinthine and complex but at the same time extremely important forms of the class struggle, cannot be suspended by bare references to the future world revolution.” [5] Trotsky wrote these lines in 1939 in an article defending the slogan of independence of the Ukraine. Unfortunately, his polemic remains fully valid when it comes to some modern-day “Trotskyists”!
It is because the OKI comrades ignore the national oppression of the people in Caucasus that they identify the anti-Israel riots in Dagestan with … the reactionary antisemitic pogroms of the Black Hundreds in the times of Tsarism before 1917!
In fact, for them chauvinism is chauvinism and nationalism is nationalism – independent of whether it comes from an oppressed or an oppressor nation. They ignore the context and the class character of the subjects involved. This is evident not only in OKI’s absurd association of the recent anti-Israel riots in Dagestan with the anti-semitic pogroms of Russian Black Hundreds.
V. I. Lenin repeatedly emphasized that “an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.” [6]
It is also reflected in bizarre statements like: “Both Islamists and Zionists do not hesitate to claim that they allegedly stand for “anti-imperialism.” Really, since when do Zionists claim to be “anti-imperialist”? And anyway, Zionists in Israel are certainly not involved in any “anti-imperialist” struggle – contrary to, for example, the Islamists in Palestine organised in Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Or take this statement: “Anti-Semitic rhetoric united figures as far apart as Dmitry Vasiliev from the Russian-nationalist society “Pamyat” and the Chechen separatist and propagandist of Wahhabism Movladi Udugov. Clerics, nationalists, local and federal groups of the bourgeoisie did not disdain anti-Semitic rhetoric as a convenient tool of manipulation, spreading this ideology among the dispossessed and confused masses, cynically playing on people’s grief.” How can the comrades identify a leading figure of Pamyat – an ultra-chauvinist movement advocating Russian imperialism – with a leading figure of the (Islamist) Chechen resistance, i.e. a (petty-bourgeois) representative of a national liberation struggle against Russian imperialism?! Sure, Udugov and like-minded people hold many reactionary views which communists must combat. But to put representatives of oppression and those of liberation struggles on the same level is nothing but adaption to Russian imperialism.
The IMT comrades have repeatedly emphasised in the past years that it is important for communists to study Marxist philosophy. This is of course correct. But they are not heeding their own advise as they ignore a basic law of materialist dialectic which Engels explained in his “Anti-Dühring”: „Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concate nation, motion, origin, and ending.“ [7] Unfortunately, the comrades are incapable to recognise the connection between the national oppression of the Caucasian peoples, the national oppression of the Palestinians and the resulting solidarity of the former with the latter. It seems that Engels’ classic work on philosophy is a book of seven seals for the OKI leaders!
However, the OKI leaders are unable to comprehend not only the basics of the laws of dialectics, they are unable even to understand the laws of formal logic. By not understanding that in one essence there can be a struggle of opposites (progressive anti-Israeli sentiments mixed with reactionary anti-Semitic sentiments among the Dagestani protesters), and by refusing to identify the dominant quality in such a struggle, the comrades also violate the rules of analogy. Comparing anti-Jewish pogroms by the Black Hundreds with pro-Palestinian protests in the North Caucasus, comrades ignore the most essential features of both phenomena (see above) and identifying them by secondary external signs.
The heavy burden of Grant’s and Woods tradition
OKI’s adaptation to social-chauvinism does not come out of the blue. The whole tradition of their international tendency – associated with the names of Ted Grant and Alan Woods – is characterized by such a policy of failing to take the side of the oppressed peoples. As we explained in a special pamphlet, it is rooted in their refusal of the Marxist understanding of imperialism and the program to fight national and imperialist oppression. [8]
This is why the IMT respectively its predecessor organisation has repeatedly denounced equally the nationalism of the oppressed and of the oppressor and used this as justification for not supporting the national struggle of the oppressed peoples. Hence, they did not support semi-colonial Argentina during the Malvinas War against Britain in 1982: nor did they support Iraq in the two wars 1991 and 2003 (and the subsequent occupation) against U.S. imperialism and its allies; the Taliban-led resistance in Afghanistan against the imperialist occupiers in 2001-21; the Irish resistance, led by Sinn Fein / IRA, against the British occupiers; or the resistance of the Ukrainian people, led by the pro-Western Zelensky government, against the Russian invasion.
While we welcome that the IMT has now joined the solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, we can not fail to point out that they failed to do so during the past four Gaza Wars. Our comrades in Israel / Occupied Palestine – a group around the long-time Jewish Anti-Zionist Yossi Schwartz – were at one point part of the IMT. They were expelled by Woods & Co. in 2007 because they sided with Hamas in the conflict with the collaborationist Fatah Administration in Gaza and because they advocated to side with Iran in case of a conflict with Israel.
In contrast to the IMT, we stand for a consistent anti-imperialist strategy in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky. Hence, in all the above-mentioned conflicts, we sided with the oppressed peoples in the national liberation struggles against the imperialist and reactionary oppressors. Naturally, we support only the objectively progressive struggle but lend no political support to (petty)-bourgeois nationalist or Islamist forces. This is a tradition which the RCIT resp. its predecessor organisation has implemented in words and deeds in the past decades, and we take pride in this. [9]
It is based on such a Marxist program that we unconditionally support the struggle of the resistance forces of the oppressed (currently led by Hamas) without lending political support to the leadership of these forces. [10]
We combine such a position with the perspective of “a socialist revolution of the working class and the oppressed masses in the Middle East, resulting in the destruction of the Zionist state, the unconditional right to return of the Palestinian refugees and the establishment of a single Palestinian state from the River to the Sea which shall be a democratic and secular workers and poor peasant republic as part of a socialist federation of the whole region. In such a state, Jews will be a minority with full religious and cultural rights. Likewise, such a strategy aims at the overthrow of the Arab and Persian rulers by the popular masses.” [11]
If the OKI/IMT comrades want to make sure that their current support for Gaza is not a flash in the pan, they need to rethink their decades-long tradition of adopting to social-chauvinism.
Considering the inability or unwillingness of Russian Grantites to consistently use the dialectical method of research and use formal logic, as well as their actual departure from the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky in approaching the national question, the deciphering of the name of their organization should sound like “Organization of Communist Idealists.” We express our sincere hopes that the comrades will be able to analyze their mistakes and take the correct, Marxist-Leninist position on the issue under discussion.
[1] Организации коммунистов-интернационалистов: Против сионизма! Против антисемитизма! За скорейшее освобождение Палестины, 11.11.2023 г. https://teletype.in/@okintern/against-zionism-and-anti-semitism-free-palestine
[2] Gaza War: On the Anti-Israel Riots in Northern Caucasus. Statement of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (jointly adopted by the International Bureau and the Sections in Russia and Occupied Palestine), 31 October 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/gaza-war-on-the-anti-israel-riots-in-northern-caucasus/
[3] See: Wikipedia: History of the Jews in Russia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia#Modern-day_Russia
[4] See e.g. RCIT: Solidarity with the Liberation Struggle of the Chechen People! Open Letter to the Oppressed Chechen People, February 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/solidarity-with-the-liberation-struggle-of-the-chechen-people/; Where does the RCIT Stand on Russia’s Occupation of Chechnya? https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/russia-and-chechnya/
[5] Leon Trotsky: Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads (July 1939), in: Writings 1939-40, p. 50, online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/07/ukraine.htm
[6] V. I. Lenin: The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”, in: LCW Vol. 36, p. 607
[7] Friedrich Engels: Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, in: MECW Vol. 25, p. 23
[8] See on this e.g. the pamphlet by Michael Pröbsting: The Poverty of Neo-Imperialist Economism. Imperialism and the national question – a critique of Ted Grant and his school (CWI, ISA, IMT), January 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/grantism-imperialism-and-national-question/; see also by the same author: Gaza War: Shamefully, some on the Left Support “Israel’s Right of Self-Determination”, 25 October 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/gaza-war-some-on-the-left-support-israels-right-of-self-determination/
[9] For an overview about our history of support for anti-imperialist struggles in the past four decades (with links to documents, pictures and videos) see e.g. an essay by Michael Pröbsting: The Struggle of Revolutionaries in Imperialist Heartlands against Wars of their “Own” Ruling Class. Examples from the history of the RCIT and its predecessor organisation in the last four decades, 2 September 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-struggle-of-revolutionaries-in-imperialist-heartlands-against-wars-of-their-own-ruling-class/
[10] We refer readers to a special page on our website where the RCIT documents on the 2023 Gaza War are compiled: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/compilation-of-articles-on-the-gaza-uprising-2023/. In particular we refer to the first RCIT statement which has been published in 11 languages: “This is the Time to Expel the Occupiers!”, 7 October 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/fifth-gaza-war-support-the-heroic-palestinian-resistance/
[11] Michael Pröbsting: Gaza Uprising: Another Turning Point in the World Situation. Thoughts on Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and its possible regional and global consequences, 11 October 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/gaza-war-and-consequences-for-world-situation/