Reprinted below are excerpts from the lead article in New International no. 7, "The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq," by Jack Barnes, who is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The issue was published a few months after the end of the 1990–91 Gulf war. The excerpt is copyright © 1991 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant. Footnotes are in original.
BY JACK BARNES
Communists have no trouble in recognizing the need for unconditional solidarity with an oppressed nation against imperialist attack, regardless of the class character of its government, as we’ve proven once again during the Gulf war. At the same time, communists and other vanguard fighters for true national independence and sovereignty--whether in Iraq or anywhere else in the region--must recognize and act on the fact that there are conflicting classes within these oppressed nations.
The Palestinians are among the biggest victims of the fakery of the bourgeois governments in the region, all of which falsely claim to speak and act in their interests. These blows were dealt to the Palestinians not just by the treacherous Egyptian, Syrian, and Saudi regimes--or by the desperate King Hussein of Jordan, who will turn his guns on the Palestinians again, if he finds it expedient, just as he did in September 1970.1 No less damage was done by the reactionary demagogy of Baghdad, which postured as the champion of the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim peoples, while in practice it sapped their capacity for anti-imperialist struggle. Baghdad cynically called for "linkage" of Iraq’s partial withdrawal from Kuwait with the Palestinians’ demands for national self-determination.
The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization also did great harm to the Palestinian struggle by endorsing this demagogic, after-the-fact linkage. This tailing after Baghdad left PLO leaders politically disarmed to explain the real linkage that does exist with the Palestinian struggle; the pressing need for action in solidarity with Iraq in the face of imperialist assault; the reactionary character of Baghdad’s brutal invasion of Kuwait; and the fight against imperialism throughout the region and the world.
The failure of the PLO to chart such a revolutionary course is a reflection of its growing bourgeoisification. This evolution was revealed more clearly by the U.S. aggression in the Gulf, but it was not caused by the war. The political retreat by the central PLO leadership has been under way for some time.
Fighters inside ‘Greater Israel’
A political toll has been taken over the past ten or fifteen years by the continued dispersion of the Palestinian people. A whole layer of Palestinian youth have grown up outside the historic lands of Palestine. A PLO apparatus has been built up throughout countries in the Middle East and North Africa hosted and financed by the bourgeois regimes in the region. A few factions of the PLO have become willing tools in the hands of these governments. The blows dealt to the PLO forces in Lebanon over the past decade by the Israeli regime, by the Syrian regime, and by the various Lebanese bourgeois political forces--these have had an additional disorienting and demoralizing impact on layers of the leadership, turning their eyes further away from the ranks of the Palestinian masses inside and outside Israel. The gap has grown between the PLO apparatus and the young Palestinian fighters inside the borders of "Greater Israel," where the liberation fight has been centered more and more.
But this is not a finished process. The PLO remains a revolutionary-nationalist movement with a predominantly petty-bourgeois leadership. The outcome of the PLO’s political evolution remains intertwined with the living struggle of the Palestinian people, who have not been cowed or defeated. More of the leadership of the Palestinian movement has shifted to the occupied West Bank, to Gaza, to Jerusalem, and to inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders--especially since the beginning of the intifada more than three years ago. More of the leadership is being taken by those who are pressing forward the fight for land, for equality, for national self-determination, for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, and who in doing so are helping to change the world....
The battle for national liberation has gone through a particular evolution and important changes as the twentieth century has unfolded. These cumulative developments have altered the class character and caliber of the leadership necessary to take the next steps in the struggle against imperialist domination, semifeudal oppression, and capitalist exploitation.
Only fifty years ago, with the outbreak of World War II, a great movement for decolonization began to sweep the world. At the opening of that war, the vast majority of what are today independent countries were colonies. When the United Nations was launched at the close of the war in late 1945, it initially had only 51 members; today there are 159.
This political independence was not granted by the imperialist colonizers out of the goodness of their hearts. Independence was conquered through struggle--by the peoples of India and Iraq to throw off British rule; by the Indochinese, Algerian, and Syrian peoples against French rule; by the Filipino people against U.S. colonial rule; by the Indonesian people against Dutch imperialism; by the Congolese people against Belgian colonialism; by the peoples of Angola and Mozambique against Portuguese rule; and many others.
If you don’t count Hong Kong as a colony--and I don’t anymore; its rapid integration into China is not only a foregone conclusion, but actually running ahead of the scheduled 1997 formalities--then the largest colony left in the world today is Puerto Rico. If anything, this fact increases the importance of the anticolonial struggles that remain to be settled, particularly of numerous islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and so on. But the scope of the post-World War II decolonization conquests is impressive.
While in each case there were landlords, merchant capitalists, and other indigenous exploiters who collaborated with the colonial powers to the bitter end, the decolonization movements nonetheless mobilized broad united fronts behind the fight for national independence. Representatives of different classes, with directly counterposed social interests, carried substantial weight in these battles.
Independence struggles were fought and led to victory under leaderships that were often bourgeois or petty bourgeois both in program and social composition. The workers and peasants were the most self-sacrificing fighters, the courageous battalions without whom the battle could not have been won. But the dominant political leaderships were not proletarian or communist in the vast majority of cases. Most of the regimes that came to power were bourgeois, not workers’ and peasants’ governments.
The victories of the decolonization movement gave an impulse to a second set of conquests in the struggle for national liberation--ones that were often intertwined with the anticolonial fight itself. This was the struggle to wrest back from direct ownership by imperialist interests the most basic resources and infrastructure--the national patrimony--of countries in the Third World. These struggles marked much of the 1950s and ‘60s, and continued even into the late 1970s with the Iranian revolution.
Workers and peasants press struggles
In 1956 the Egyptian government headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser took back the Suez Canal from British and French finance capital, for example. Regimes throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere nationalized oil fields and mineral rights. Class lines in these battles were drawn more sharply than in the decolonization battles themselves, since layers of native exploiters had economic interests that were directly tied to major imperialist-owned banks and monopolies. Workers and peasants often took advantage of these confrontations with imperialism to press demands on the neocolonial regimes for land reform and labor rights, and in the process won some greater space to organize and practice politics.
But in the big majority of cases these resources taken from the direct domination and exploitation of the imperialists were transferred to the domination of local, rising capitalist classes, either directly to private owners or indirectly through the neocolonial regimes they controlled. Once again, the conflicts that culminated in the nationalization of these former imperialist properties were carried through largely by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships and without the establishment of workers’ and peasants’ regimes.
The most pressing tasks that confront workers and peasants in most of the Third World today, however, require a different class character and caliber of leadership if they are to succeed. The tasks of national liberation, of carrying through to the end the liberation of the toilers from imperialist domination and superexploitation, cannot be advanced short of a struggle against the local capitalist and landlord classes, whose interests are completely intertwined with those of the imperialists. Thus, the political challenges before national liberation movements in tackling this next set of historic tasks require greater political clarity and working-class leadership.
That’s the road forward to lasting economic and social development. That’s how to rid these countries of social structures and institutions that ensure their permanent subjugation to imperialism. That’s the only way to prevent the gains from even limited economic and social development from ending up in the hands of a thin layer of capitalists, the government bureaucracy, and the military officer corps, while the vast majority of workers and peasants are driven into deeper impoverishment and brutally repressed when they resist. That’s the only way to carry through land reforms that are thoroughgoing and that don’t--through the mechanism of the capitalist rents and mortgages system, and domination over credit, marketing arrangements, and sources of agricultural equipment and supplies--simply end up reproducing massive landlessness and class differentiation in the countryside.
Crisis of the imperialist system
These pressing tasks confronting anti-imperialist fighters in most semicolonial countries today are the product of the crisis of the imperialist system itself, of the failure of capitalism. It is capitalism that has robbed workers and peasants the world over who fought courageously--and at great sacrifice--for their national independence, only to find themselves today the debt slaves of imperialist banks. Only to find themselves still subject to the dictates of the great oil cartels, the giant merchants of grain, and other imperialist interests.
The imperialist enemy can no longer be fought successfully in the same ways as in past decades. Colonial independence has been achieved in most countries. The national patrimony of land and other mineral resources has been nationalized in many cases.
In the most direct and immediate sense, the problem for the toilers is not that the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and organizations are ineffective as instruments in the struggle for socialism; that’s always true. But the social reality that above all poses the demand for working-class leadership is that the bourgeois ruling classes have become the main prop of imperialist domination of these countries at this point in history, even if in great conflict with this or that imperialist power for periods of time. So it is impossible to carry through to completion the struggle for national liberation under their leadership; they have to be fought against and replaced....
The kind of struggle necessary to take on the next tasks of national liberation requires the organization of the workers and peasants politically independent of the capitalists and landlords, who block the progress and development of the nation. It requires a strong worker-peasant alliance. It requires the fight for political space to organize and engage in struggles.
It requires an internationalist orientation toward the battles of other toilers, not only elsewhere in the Third World but in the imperialist countries and throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It requires an anticapitalist program and proletarian leadership. And it requires the fight to replace the current neocolonial bourgeois regimes with workers’ and peasants’ governments.
This is why we are convinced (1) that struggles to carry through national liberation to the end will be a stronger, not a weaker, force in world politics in coming years; and (2) that in the great majority of these countries, to be an effective revolutionist today and tomorrow is to be a communist. Over the past three decades we have seen how such leadership can and will develop in the course of revolutionary struggles against national oppression.