Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 05.12.2024
The ISA, the right-centrist organization, put on the same level the revolutionary struggle against the Assad regime and the Assad regime supported by Iran and Russian imperialism.
In an article with the title: Fall of Aleppo Aggravates Military and Geopolitical Crisis they say:
“The Islamist HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) militia’s lightning attack and conquest of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, in just two days, has further aggravated the military and geopolitical crisis in the Middle East. The region’s workers, the poor, and the oppressed are paying the price in terms of death and suffering in the military power struggle fuelled by regimes, great powers, and right-wing militias”[i].
They express their Islamophobia. Just because the leadership of the revolutionary struggle is Islamist, they equate the revolutionary struggle with the regime of Assad, the butcher. They can reach this position because they use impressionism rather than dialectics. Impressionists in politics do not see the contradiction between the heroic fighters and the existing leadership.
The same method they are using in Palestine, and they write:
“In the fighting since the reactionary attack by Hamas on 7 October last year and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza since then.[ii]”
As a result, instead of giving the rebels in Syria and Hamas in Gaza support for their war without giving them political support, they take counter-revolutionary positions.
The ISA claims they are Trotskyists but is this method they use the same one Trotsky used?
Trotsky wrote:
“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 and 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.” Leon Blum’s party 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 semi-colonial 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.”[iii]
But Syria is not an imperialist country. That is very true, but Russia actively supports Assad and is an imperialist country; Imperialist Russia does not only deliver weapons but bombs the rebels and the civilians.
But Hamas and the rebels are reactionaries. It is very accurate for the leadership, but the wars they fight are progressive.
On this, Trotsky wrote:
“I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semi fascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to the national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!”[iv]
For the victory of Hamas and the rebels without giving them political support!
Endnotes:
[i] https://internationalsocialist.net/en/2024/12/middle-east
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Leon Trotsky On the Sino-Japanese War (September 1937) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/10/sino.htm
[iv] Leon Trotsky Anti-Imperialist Struggle Is Key to Liberation An Interview with Mateo Fossa (September 1938 ) .https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/09/liberation.htm