Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel /Occupied Palestine), 08.12.024
The prominent counterrevolutionary position of the faked “International” led by Woods, the “Revolutionary Communist International”(RCI), in the situation that the Arab revolution won in Syria and Assad, the butcher, ran away is the revolution was barbarism, a clear counter revolutionary position.
They wrote:
“Starting on 27 November, as a ceasefire was being implemented in neighboring Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel, the offensive launched by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) who control the northwestern governorate of Idlib, rapidly overran Aleppo – the country’s second-largest city – and as of yesterday, the strategic city of Hama. The city of Homs, yet another key city, is now under threat and could fall at any moment. This would leave the regime-controlled coastal areas of Latakia split from the capital, Damascus, with a total collapse of the Assad regime a direct possibility. Syria is staring down an abyss of barbarism.” [i]
“Whereas Hamas and Hezbollah are regularly described as ‘terrorists’, the term ‘rebel’ is deliberately deployed by the west to evoke a romantic image that serves to whitewash the origins and reactionary character of groups like HTS. After all, a rebel is someone who fights against oppression and injustice. In reality, however, these are nothing but jihadi cutthroats, set up by the precursor to the Islamic State and with origins in Al Qaeda.”[ii]
The Islamist leadership of the Syrian revolution is not revolutionary socialist, and they cannot solve the problems of Syria, but only politically blinds can’t understand that their victory will push for the Arab revolution in the entire Middle East and to many other uprisings of the working class and the oppressed.
Trotsky, the real Marxist, wrote:
“I want to stop to discuss in this letter only the Sino-Japanese War. In my declaration to the bourgeois press, I said that the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity. But that is “social patriotism!” the Eiffelites cry. It is a capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek! It is the abandonment of the principle of the class struggle! Bolshevism preached revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war. Now, the war in Spain and the Sino-Japanese War are both imperialist wars. “Our position on the war in China is the same. The only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is to struggle independently against the two armies, against the Chinese army in the same manner as against the Japanese army.” These four lines, taken from an Eiffelite document of September 10, 1937, suffice entirely for us to say: we are concerned here with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbecility, raised to this degree, is equal to treason.
We do not and never have put all wars on the same plane. Marx and Engels supported the revolutionary struggle of the Irish against Great Britain, of the Poles against the tsar, even though in these two nationalist wars the leaders were, for the most part, members of the bourgeoisie and even at times of the feudal aristocracy … at all events, Catholic reactionaries. When Abdel-Krim rose up against France, the democrats and Social Democrats spoke with hate of the struggle of a “savage tyrant” against the “democracy.” The party of Leon Blum supported this point of view. But we, Marxists and Bolsheviks, considered the struggle of the Riffians against imperialist domination as a progressive war. Lenin wrote hundreds of pages demonstrating the primary necessity of distinguishing between imperialist nations and the colonial and semicolonial nations which comprise the great majority of humanity. To speak of “revolutionary defeatism” in general, without distinguishing between exploiter and exploited countries, is to make a miserable caricature of Bolshevism and to put that caricature at the service of the imperialists.
In the Far East we have a classic example. China is a semicolonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive.
But Chiang Kai-shek? We need no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But today, he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of China’s independence. Tomorrow he may again betray. It is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse to participate in that struggle“.[iii]
“Let us use the example of a strike to clarify the question. We do not support all strikes. If, for example, a strike is called for the exclusion of Negro, Chinese, or Japanese workers from a factory, we are opposed to that strike. But if a strike aims at bettering— insofar as it can—the conditions of the workers, we are the first to participate in it, whatever the leadership. In most strikes, the leaders are reformists, traitors by profession, agents of capital. They oppose every strike. But occasionally, the pressure of the masses or the objective situation forces them into the path of struggle”.[iv]
Alan Woods, the leader of this tendency who claims to be a master of Dialectical Materialism, makes gross mistakes when he equates the leadership of an organization with the essence of the struggle. What can you say about a person who condemns a major strike of a working-class union because of the rotten leadership of the union’s bureaucracy?
Woods is a good student of Ted Grant, who claimed in WWII that the Eighth Army of British Imperialism was our army. This tendency in the Malvina war stood with British imperialism against Argentina, a semi-colony, because reactionary army officers led it. A tendency that also appeared when the Palestinian Authority, backed by Israel, attacked Hamas, it refused to defend Hamas.
We say to the comrades of this tendency, open your eyes. A political charlatan is leading you.
Endnotes:
[i] Hamid Alizadeh, In Defense of Marxism: The unraveling of Syria: a legacy of imperialist war and meddling 6.12.24
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Leon Trotsky On the Sino-Japanese War (September 1937)
[iv] Ibid