The treacherous support for Biden usually goes hand in hand with failure in the anti-imperialist struggle
By Yossi Schwartz, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 23 November 2020, www.thecommunists.net
The question of whether to vote for a capitalist party in elections is not a tactical question, it is a question of an Marxist principle. Capitalist parties represent the interests of the capitalist class, the enemy of the working class and the oppressed. Those socialists who call to vote for the enemy are traitors to the working class; those who call to vote for a party of the imperialist enemy take responsibility for the oppression of the people in the semi-colonies and for the oppression of the minorities like the Muslims in the imperialist states.
Eugene V. Debs was an American socialist who understood this basic question. He was imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for speaking out against the draft during the first imperialist World War 1914-18.
He said: “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords; the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.” [1]
He also said: “Turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the still more corrupt Democratic Party – the gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class counts for still more after you have stepped out of those popular and corrupt capitalist parties to join a minority party that has an ideal, that stands for a principle, and fights for a cause. This will be the most important change you have ever made and the time will come when you will thank me for having made the suggestion. It was the day of days for me. I remember it well. It was like passing from midnight darkness to the noontide light of day. It came almost like a flash and found me ready. It must have been in such a flash that great, seething, throbbing Russia, prepared by centuries of slavery and tears and martyrdom, was transformed from a dark continent to a land of living light.” [2]
Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket five times since 1900. In 1912 he’d won 901,551 votes — about six percent of the vote. Sanders claims that he follows his hero Debs, but Debs if he was alive would not recognize him as a comrade, for joining the party of the class enemy.
Opportunists Support Biden
In the presidential elections in the USA, while some of the left organizations correctly opposed the vote for both capitalist parties, others like the Stalinists and groups who share an origin in Shachtmanism, called for voting for Joe Biden.
The Stalinists in the USA – the CPUSA – is one of these parties. This of course should not surprise us as the Stalinists turned to the strategy of the class collaboration in the form of a popular front already in 1935 in France and Spain. During the presidential elections in 2016 they called to vote for Clinton and this time for Biden. They wrote:
“Biden is far from being a socialist; he is not even a “progressive Democrat,” but at this point the electoral priority has to be to defeat Trump and the Republican majority in the Senate, while we continue to stress mass mobilizations and active struggle at the working-class base…”It is not just that Trump is a repulsive individual, it is that I want socialism, and this country and the world need socialism, need it desperately. “Socialism requires the unity and empowerment of the working class, and Trump and his allies are the main obstacle to those things right now, and so must be defeated. Biden is no socialist, no anti-imperialist, no consistent friend of the working class, and we’ll have to fight him too if he wins, but Trump is more dangerous on all fronts and must be defeated on November.“ [3]
Solidarity, an organization originating from the now dissolved Shachtmanite International Socialists and which today is affiliated with the Mandelite “Fourth International”, wrote: “Just to be clear: everything said about Biden by those who argue against voting for him is true. These truths, however, at this moment, don’t carry the day, if you believe, as I do, that Trump has to be stopped in his tracks, repudiated, to decisively interrupt the downward spiral toward a white supremacist autocracy. And a strategic vote for Biden makes sense since his administration will be forced to bargain with “progressive” Democrats in the Congress, and it should be possible to win significant programs, call them non-reformist or revolutionary reforms.” [4]
The League for a Revolutionary Party on the eve of the presidential elections wrote: “Joe Biden is the embodiment of the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying its promises to all those facing injustice and inequality. As a senator, he was a principal architect of this country’s current nightmare of racist policing and mass incarceration, he supported harsh anti-immigrant laws, and he backed restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. Despite his carefully crafted “regular guy” image, Biden has always put capitalist profits ahead of working-class interests: he crafted legislation allowing banks to rip off their customers, backed free-trade deals that encouraged manufacturers to shift production to low-wage countries like China, and supported imperialist military adventures around the world, including George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq”.
Nevertheless, this organization called to vote for Biden: “A victory for Biden and the Democrats will therefore deal a significant setback to the far right and its drive for authoritarian rule. It will allow everyone who is committed to saving the country’s relatively democratic rights more time to organize and fight to defend them. And with the deadly pandemic continuing to rage and the world economy on the verge of collapsing into another Great Depression, working-class and oppressed people will face an onslaught of attempts to make them pay for the crisis and will desperately need their democratic rights to defend themselves. Indeed, it is for this reason that the masses of working-class and oppressed people have always proven the most reliable defenders of democracy – it is a matter of survival…
“Towards that end, we as revolutionary socialists advocate voting to oust Trump, which means voting for Biden even though he belongs to our enemy class. This is an urgently necessary defensive tactic. Every four years, the working class gets to choose who will govern on behalf of the capitalists who profit from their exploitation and oppression. Especially when the result will effect the extent to which the masses will have rights to organize and defend their interests, as it does this year, we must take a side.” [5]
The Logic of the Class Struggle behind the Wrong Theory
The capitulation of the LRP to the party of the class enemy should not surprise us. This left-wing Shachtmanite group whose method is pragmatism, claims that the Soviet Union became a capitalist state already in the 1930s and became a state-ified capitalism because the counterrevolution culminated on the eve of World War II. According to them, a new ruling class came to power by transforming the state apparatus and destroying the Bolshevik party. This “theory” was contrary to Trotsky who stood for the position that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state and that to open the road to socialism, a working-class political revolution is necessary.
The LRP claims that the restoration of capitalism was completed by 1939. According to them by the end of the war, the Stalinist Soviet Union had become a world power dedicated to the survival of capitalism, an imperialist state. However, they have not been able to show that a capitalist class existed in the former Soviet Union and Marxism, which is a class-based theory, teaches us that without a ruling capitalist class there cannot be a capitalist state. Their theory put them in the “Third Camp”, together with the British SWP and the former ISO (which dissolved itself in 2019) in the US by refusing to defend the Soviet Union against the real imperialism. In line with their theory, they have also refused to side with anti-imperialist forces when led by Islamists. A clear example is Syria where the LRP took the position: ”Defend the Syrian Revolution against All its Enemies – Imperialism, Assad and Reactionary Islamists”. They wrote already in 2013: “The revolutionary struggle against Assad drew mass support from all sectors of Syrian society. It created local councils and numerous independent militias. Those who say there is no popular revolution defame this extraordinary revolutionary struggle. But the military character of the struggle has given Islamist and other bourgeois forces extra leverage, distorting and seeking to hijack the popular insurgency.” [6] Based on such an approach, they have refused to side with the Islamist-led popular struggle against Assad and the Russian occupation forces.
In Afghanistan and Mali, while they called for the defeat of the imperialists they never called for an anti-imperialist united front with the Islamists nor for a military victory of the popular resistance against the occupiers led by the Islamists. Revolutionary Marxists wish and struggle to replace the Islamists leadership with a revolutionary working class leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle. But until this is possible it is necessary to side with the movement even when led by reactionaries. Sectarian demagogues would say this is a stagiest theory and will confuse the position for a military victory of the anti-imperialist movement led by reactionaries with political support for the reactionaries, but as we will see this was Trotsky’s method of the Permanent Revolution.
In any case, like Shachtman who in 1958 joined the Socialist Party and was active in pressuring this party to work with the Democratic Party in order to push the Democrats to the left, the LRP ended with political support for the Democratic Party. Shachtman was pushed into this position by the dialectical logic of the class struggle and so are they.
They all use the old argument of the lesser evil that contradicts the first principle of Marxist politics – the independence of the working class from the class enemy. Trotsky answered the reformist argument of the lesser evil already in 1931 at a time a real fascist movement was growing fast in Germany. (We note in passing that while Trump is a Bonapartist, he is not a fascist).
“The social democracy supports Bruening, votes for him, assumes the responsibility for him before the masses – on the basis that the Bruening Government is the “lesser evil”. The Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me – on the basis that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself, in particular, demanded that the Communists vote for and support Bruening? We Marxists regard Bruening and Hitler, together with Braun, as component parts of one and the same system. The question, which one of them is the “lesser evil”, has no sense, for the system against which we are fighting needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution….”
“There are seven keys in the musical scale. The question which of these keys is “better”: Do, Re or Sol is a senseless question. But the musician must know when to strike and what keys to strike. The abstract question as to who is the lesser evil: Bruening or Hitler – is just as senseless. It is necessary to know which of these keys to strike. Is that clear? For the weak-minded let us cite another example. When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a “lesser evil” in comparison to the revolver. The misfortune consists precisely of the fact that the leaders of the German Communist Party have placed themselves on the same ground as the social democracy only with inverted prefixes: the Social democracy votes for Bruening, recognizing in him the lesser evil. The Communists on the other hand, who refuse to trust either Braun or Bruening in any way (and that is absolutely the correct way of acting), in the meantime go into the streets to support Hitler’s referendum, that is, the attempt of the Fascists to overthrow Bruening. But in this they themselves have recognized in Hitler the lesser evil, for the victory of the referendum would not have brought the proletariat into power but Hitler. To be sure, it is painful to have to argue such A.B.C. questions. It is sad, very sad indeed, when musicians like Remmele, instead of distinguishing between the keys, stamp with their boots on the key-board” [7]
The Refusal to Consistently Defend Oppressed Nations
The opportunists’ support for the lesser (imperialist) evil goes hand in hand with their refusal to support oppressed nations on the ground that the resistance to the imperialists is led by Islamists.
The CPUSA wrote: “Though the current government has used harsh methods to maintain its rule and to repress peaceful dissent, corporate-controlled media here and in other Western countries do a disservice when they gloss over or fail to mention that as well as legitimate peaceful protests, the panorama in Syria includes notable levels of violence by people whose agendas are far from those of democracy and personal liberty, and whose methods are very distant from those of the brave protesters who brought down the governments of Egypt and Tunisia. Which of the different factions in the Syrian opposition would come out on top of a “regime change” is far from clear.” [8]
To cover up for this rotten reformist position they added a pacifist line: “You might think that the United States and its allies would have learned from Iraq that intervening, under a “humanitarian” guise, in another country’s internal struggles is a recipe for disaster. The nature and leadership of the Syrian government should, rather, are matters to be decided by the Syrian people exclusively, without outside interference. Rather than channeling support to Syrian factions, the United States should be calling for a “hands-off” policy while the Syrian conflict is settled by peaceful negotiations. We call upon members and friends of our party to tell the Obama administration as well as their representatives in Congress: “Hands off Syria!” [9]
In a joint international statement, various centrists – including the British SWP and the French NPA – wrote: “We fight dictatorships, imperialist aggression, and Daesh. We reject the politics of “national security,” racism, and austerity. It’s time to mobilise! “Over recent months, people across the Middle East have been hit by an intensification of conflict in Syria and Iraq. That escalation has been sponsored both by global imperialist powers – chiefly the USA, Russia, and European countries – and regional imperialist actors including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran. These conflicts are the product of two distinct forms of counter-revolution: local dictatorships and counter-revolutionary regimes on one hand, and reactionary Islamic forces like Daesh” [10]
Thus they put on the same level the imperialists and the oppressed nations by calling semi-colonies “imperialist” and by putting the imperialists and Daesh on the same level.
Of course, Daesh is a thoroughly reactionary force but as we said when oppressed nations fight imperialism even under the leadership of reactionary forces revolutionary Marxists side with them without giving them political support.
Marx supported the independence of Poland even when the national movement was led by reactionary aristocrats. Even right-wing centrists know this … when it is a question of the remote past: “…in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, Marx advocated not just the right of self-determination for Poland, but outright independence. This was in spite of the fact that the independence movement in Poland at the time was led by the reactionary Polish aristocrats.” [11]
Likewise, Marx supported the Irish national movement against Britain even when led by reactionary priests: “What is distinctive of Fenianism? Actually, it originates from the Irish Americans. They are the initiators and leaders. But in Ireland, the movement took root (and is still really rooted) only in the mass of the people, the lower orders. That is what characterizes it. In all earlier Irish movements, the people followed the aristocracy or middle-class men, and always the Catholic churchmen. The Anglo-Irish chiefs and the priests during the rising against Cromwell; even James II, King of England, in the war against William III; the Protestant Republicans of Ulster (Wolfe Tone, Lord Fitzgerald) in the 1798 revolution and, finally, in this century the bourgeois O’Connell supported by the Catholic clergy, which also played a leading role in all earlier movements except 1798. The Catholic clergy decreed a ban on Fenianism, which it did not lift until it realized that its attitude would deprive it of all influence on the Irish masses.” [12]
The Communist International, at the time when it was still revolutionary, supported the Rif Islamic republic against Spanish and French imperialism. On September 11th 1924, l’Humanité (the newspaper of the French Communist party) published a telegram sent the day previous by Pierre Sémard, General Secretary of the Parti communiste français (PCF) and Jacques Doriot, leader of the Federation des jeunesses communistes, to the leader of the Republic, Muhammad bin ‘abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, a Salafi Islamist. It read: “‘We hope that after the definitive victory over Spanish imperialism, it [the Republic] will continue, with the French and European proletariat, the struggle against all imperialists, including the French [français y compris], until the complete liberation of Morocco’s soil.”
Trotsky emphasized the importance of the anti-imperialist struggle. On the 2nd December 1922, days before the end the fourth World Congress, Trotsky wrote: “Congress invites the French party and its Central Committee to pay far more attention and allot far greater forces and resources than it has up till now to the colonial question and to propaganda in the colonies.” [13]
As a result of these efforts, the French communists and their supporters waged an impressive struggle against the colonialist policy of their government: “Working with the Confederation générale du Travail unitary (CGTU), the PCF organized a 15,000-strong protest against the war on May 16th in Paris, and over the spring and early summer of 1925 encouraged the crews of half a dozen cruisers to mutiny (100 sailors were court-martialed in late July). Between May and October, there were over 250 meetings against the war across France, all building towards the 12th October 24-hour strike, involving 500,000 workers.” [14]
Later, Trotsky supported the Kuomintang, led by the butcher Chiang Kai-Shek, against the attacks of imperialist Japan: “In order to arrive at a real national liberation, it is necessary to overthrow the Kuomintang. But this does not mean that we postpone the struggle until the time when the Kuomintang is overthrown. The more the struggle against foreign oppression spreads the more difficulties the Kuomintang will have. The more we line up the masses against the Kuomintang the more the struggle against imperialism will develop…”At the acute moment of Japanese intervention, the workers and the students called for arms. From whom? Again from the Kuomintang. It would be a sectarian absurdity to abandon this demand under the pretext that we wish to overthrow the Kuomintang. We wish to overthrow it but we have not yet reached that point. The more energetically we demand the arming of the workers the sooner we shall reach.” [15]
Trotsky has explicitly expressed this position in an interview with Mateo Fossa in 1938: “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 wills 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 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!” [16]
Needless to say, the same refusal to be on the side of Islamists who fight imperialism is also reflected in the right-wing centrists in Europe. Thus the IMT led by Allan Woods wrote on their website on Syria: “The question is: who is getting this aid? Is it being distributed to all the fighting militias? This is far from being the case. In fact, many FSA fighters have often complained about the lack of resources and arms and expressed their frustration at other fighting groups who refuse to share resources with them. Who are these groups that are getting foreign aid and what is their agenda? It is very important to be clear on this: these groups are rabid reactionary forces, no different from the Assad forces. They advocate a fundamentalist ideology and defend the interests of those who fund them, i.e. of those that have interests directly opposite to those of the Syrian masses. They are the forces of the counter-revolution, that while fighting the regime, are working to undermine what is left of the genuine revolution.” [17]
The ISA (former CWI), the twin sister of the IMT, has a similar position on Syria. “Various reactionary forces — from western imperialist powers to Jihadist militias — managed to regain the initiative in a whole number of countries after the initial revolutionary upsurge. The revolutionary process was derailed, the masses became preoccupied with daily survival and demoralization took root.”…” [18]
Their political program for the Palestinians’ struggle against oppression exposes their bias in favor of the Zionists. Their program put on the same level the oppressor settler colonialist Zionists and the oppressed Palestinians, by recognizing the right of self-determination for the Zionists, instead of calling for one Palestinian socialist state with civil rights for the Jews living in occupied Palestine in the frameworks of a socialist federation of the Middle East. Like Trotsky’s position on South Africa [19] while correctly they reject the two states’ solution in the framework of the existing imperialist order, but shamelessly they support two states in the framework of “a socialist order”. They write in a recently adopted congress resolution:
“The tensions around the Israeli-Iranian conflict, the acute Gaza crisis and the “threat of a bi-national state” in the context of the Israeli-Jewish population losing a clear majority between the river and the sea (historic Palestine) are all serious causes of concern for the Israeli ruling class. In the current circumstances in the Middle East and the aftermath of the rise of Hamas rule in Gaza in the previous decade, they’re more resistant to territorial concessions today. But in a post-Trump, post-Netanyahu, and most likely a post-Abbas context, the Israeli ruling class may attempt to stabilize the national conflict with a new deal with the PLO and Palestinian Authority, which may include some new concessions and recognition of the Palestinian Authority as a formal state, of course without the content of any independent national state. In the context of a capitalist Middle East, a “two-state” solution in reality means constructing a puppet enslaved statelet in the shadow of a major regional power, one of the strongest military forces globally. This would guarantee immense material and political inequality and no solution to the national aspirations of the mass of the Palestinian refugees as well. This is a non-starter”…“ This does not mean that a “one-state” program may offer a “better” contemporary solution, as in fact it disregards the deepened national schism, suspicions and strong national consciousness among the two national groups. While standing emphatically against the brutal oppression and expropriation of the Palestinians, a program that guarantees the right for existence, self-determination and equality for both nations is required as a starting point.” [20]
Marxists support the right of self-determination only of oppressed nations. On this question Lenin wrote: “Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations. They must, therefore, unequivocally demand that the Social-Democratic parties of the oppressor countries (especially of the so-called “Great” Powers) should recognise and champion the oppressed nation’s right to self-determination, in the specifically political sense of the term, i.e., the right to political secession. The socialist of a ruling or a colonial nation who does not stand for that right is a chauvinist.” [21]
Islamophobia
Related to the question of supporting the right of self-determination of the oppressed nation is the struggle against racism, whether it is against black people in the USA or Muslims in Europe or against real Anti-Semitism (unlike the idiotic false propaganda that Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism).
Historically the left in France have joined the Islamophobia campaign: “Just after the November 2015 attacks, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 2017 presidential candidate and popular figurehead of the left-nationalist La France Insoumise party, said that he disputed the very term “Islamophobia.” Mélenchon, who has consistently called for the prohibition of public displays of religion like Muslim street prayers, gave an explanation widespread across the political spectrum: “For my part,” he said, “I defend the idea that we have the right not to like Islam, we have the right not to like the Catholic religion, and that is one of our freedoms.” [22]
Today the French left is divided on this burning issue. On 10th November 2019 at least 13,000 people participated in a demonstration against Islamophobia in Paris. The demonstration included Muslim organizations and activists, and some left-wing forces. The French newspaper Libération on November 1st printed a call signed by members of La France Insoumise and the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), following the attack on a mosque in the city of Bayona on October 28th. A member of the far-right party National Rally shot two people after trying to burn the mosque. The demonstration had a very mild slogan: “Yes to the criticism of religion, no to the hate against believers”.
“Nevertheless, some left-wing parties and movements did not join the demonstration, among them of course the Socialist Party, and some leading members of La France Insoumise. Although MPs from the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI) had originally committed themselves to the march, as the event drew closer, several senior figures distanced themselves from it, including Francois Ruffin who explained that he was going to play football instead. Some signatories, such as the Green (EELV) MEP Yannick Jadot also pulled out, while the Socialist Party (PS) argued that it could not support a text that denounced secular laws. In the end, the only nationally-recognizable politician to attend the November 10 march was LFI’s leader Jean-Luc Melenchon” [23]
Today the question of fighting against Islamophobia is one litmus paper that separates the left from the fake left. It brings to mind the famous case of Alfred Dreyfus. While the truly social democrat leader, Jean Jaurès, defended Dreyfus because he realized that Dreyfus was a victim of Anti-Semitism. Jules Guesde, on the other hand, a radical socialist who established the revolutionary Socialist Party, took an ultra-left position and refused to defend Dreyfus. Yet not by chance – as it happens many times with the ultra-leftists – he turned to the right, united his party with the Party of Jaurès in 1905 to form the French Socialist Party under the leadership of Jean Jaurés. Ironically, while Jaurès opposed WWI before he was murdered, Jules Guesde served as minister of the portfolio during the first imperialist world war.
Down With the Imperialist Islamophobia!
Mobilize the Working Class and the Oppressed to Smash the Reactionary Attack on Muslims!
Other Articles of the RCIT:
RCIT: U.S. Election: Neither Trump Nor Biden! Workers and oppressed need to organize and to fight independently! 15 October 2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/north-america/u-s-election-neither-trump-nor-biden/
RCIT: Boycott Imperialist and Islamophobic France! Solidarity with the Muslim migrants! Drive out the French occupiers from Mali and other countries! 26.10.2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/boycott-imperialist-and-islamophobic-france/
Yossi Schwartz: Down with the Islamophobia in France: “We Are Not Samuel!”, 20 October 2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/down-with-the-islamophobia-in-france/
Michael Pröbsting speaks on Arab TV Channels on Islamophobic Racism in Austria, https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/michael-probsting-speaks-on-tv-channel-arabi21-on-islamophobic-racism-in-austria/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/michael-probsting-speaks-on-al-jazeera-on-islamophic-racism-in-austria-12-11-2020/
Michael Pröbsting: France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left, 2 November 2020, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/social-chauvinism-and-capitulation-to-islamophobia-by-the-french-left/
Bibliography:
[1]E. V. Debs: The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918), https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm
[2] Ibid
[3] Emile Schepers: How I See The November 2020 National Election, August 31, 2020, https://www.cpusa.org/party_voices/how-i-see-the-november-2020-national-election/
[4] Bill Resnick: Dump Trump, Fight and Force Biden: An Electoral Strategy for the Left, October 2, 2020 https://solidarity-us.org/dump_trump_fight_biden/
[5] LRP: Defeat Trump’s White-Supremacist Assault on Democracy! October 15, 2020, http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/election2020.html
[6] LRP: Defend the Syrian Revolution Against All its Enemies – Imperialism, Assad and Reactionary Islamists! Bulletin of the League for the Revolutionary Party, August 31.2013, http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/syria_83113.html
[7] Leon Trotsky: The Impending Danger of Fascism in Germany. A Letter to a German Communist Worker on the United Front Against Hitler (December 1931), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/12/danger.htm
[8] CPUSA: Communist Party says “Hands Off Syria”, March 2, 2012, https://www.cpusa.org/article/communist-party-says-hands-off-syria/
[9] Ibid
[10] Solidarity: International Statement on Syria and Iraq, December 17, 2015, https://socialism.com/statement/we-fight-dictatorships-imperialist-aggression-and-daesh-we-reject-the-politics-of-national-security-racism-and-austerity-its-time-to-mobilise/
[11] Alan Woods and Ted Grant: Marxism and the National Question, 25 February 2000, https://www.marxist.com/marxism-national-question250200/part-two-marx-and-engels-and-the-national-question.htm
[12] Karl Marx: Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London, December 16, 1867, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867/12/16.htm
[13] Both quotes are taken from: https://avalancheofdust.wordpress.com/2017/09/10/the-republic-of-the-rif-and-the-french-communist-party-part-i/
[14] Ibid
[15] Leon Trotsky: The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning, 1937, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm
[16] 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
[17] Mousa Ladqani: Syria: Reaction on both sides of the divide! 15 August 2012, www.marxist.com/syria-reaction-on-both-sides-of-the-divide.htm
[18] ISA: 12th World Congress 2020 Resolution on the Middle East, https://internationalsocialist.net/en/2020/02/12th-world-congress-2020-7
[19] Leon Trotsky: Letter to South African Revolutionaries (April 1933), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/04/safrica.html
[20] 12th World Congress 2020 Resolution on the Middle East
[21] V.I. Lenin – Socialism and War (1915); in: LCW 21, pp.316-17
[23] Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/11/17/why-the-french-left-has-a-problem-with-islamophobia