War in the Middle East. To entangle or disentangle oneself from Leninism?

By Aníbal and Fredo Corvo

Italian, Spanish

Prospettiva Marxista – Círculo Internacionalista “coalizione operaia”  published the 180 pages pamphlet “Palestina 2023 – una battaglia per la chiarezza internazionalista” (Palestine 2023 – A Battle for Internationalist Clarity), December 2023. In the pamphlet, we found the article: Different political logics on the war in the Middle East.
This article contains a nucleus of outstanding class internationalist positions, in which it is clearly stated:

• “The rebirth of internationalism does not pass through any tactical support to any bourgeois front committed, at the price of terrible massacres of proletarians, in confrontations fully inserted in the dynamics of imperialism”

And it also qualifies, within the Palestinian camp, Hamas as a bourgeois force, as it also does with the PNA.

At the same time, it maintains a conception of imperialist capitalism with Leninist influences, which hinders the historical materialist analysis and the necessary concrete interpretation. We see this in paragraphs such as:

• “That the weak and rickety Palestinian bourgeoisie did not have the resources, the forces, the weight, and therefore had no possibility of fulfilling the tasks of an anti-imperialist struggle other than a vague appeal objectively accompanied by the less solemn coagulation of more immediate and concrete political interests; that it could not even assume a leading role or with significant margins of autonomy in the revival of a national liberation struggle today fully subsumed in the imperialist dynamics and of the regional powers was a fact that had already obtained important and decisive attestations along a long historical trajectory.”
• “Hamas makes policy within the limits and spaces objectively allowed by the imperialist game and regional power relations. It makes policy through the interlocking influences, constraints, and projections of vastly economically stronger, more politically structured actors who have reached autonomous statehood in time to pursue their interests in the international confrontation between states and escape the stark subordination of stateless national realities in the age of imperialism.”

Of Hamas, the article says that it is

• “a bourgeois, Islamist and nationalist formation, immersed, as a subordinate and dependent subject, in the imperialist game.”

In this kind of formulation, the article is still searching for a candidate for “fulfilling the tasks of an anti-imperialist struggle other than a vague appeal…” where anti-imperialist struggle means national liberation struggle of national war in the Leninist sense, a task for which Hamas is considered too “weak,” not having the “resources, the forces, the weight.” In reality, it is not because Hamas is weak, it cannot play the role of national liberation. It is that Hamas is a bourgeois force that cannot escape the dynamics of inter-imperialist forces because it is an imperialist force of capitalism itself. If Hamas had greater capabilities, it would be more offensive and belligerent against the State of Israel and, if it could, against Egypt. Let us not forget how the Egyptian military, with Al Sisi at the head, purged the Muslim Brotherhood, which was close to Hamas, and overthrew its government.

No state or capitalist force can develop and act outside capitalist imperialism. Such was perfectly understood by the German-Dutch communist left, basing itself on the opposition of Rosa Luxemburg within Russian Social Democracy against Lenin’s ideas on the national question, on Pannekoek’s opposition against the same ideas in Austrian Social Democracy, which had to function in a similar multi-peoples state as their Russian comrades. It was the same German-Dutch communist left (KAPD, KAPN) that, after having kicked out resolutely the Hamburg-based National Bolshevism from its ranks, opposed the EKKI and the Comintern when it started applying Lenin’s and Trotsky’s ideas on the national question to Germany, repeating National Bolshevism. We will not extensively explain here these positions of the German-Dutch communist left. We refer to our recent article that applies equally to Prospettiva Marxista – Círculo Internacionalista, “What struggle against the war? Current and historical differences with Leninism / Trotskyism” and we ask Prospettiva Marxista – Círculo Internacionalista to reply our critique.

The problem with these lengthy texts is that they repeatedly seek ways to apply the position of Lenin on the national question, a position that he didn’t apply in WW1. The Bolsheviks did so only after they took power, and with results that were disastrous for the working class, as Luxemburg explained before she was murdered by the counterrevolutionaries with whom Radek, followed by Trotsky and Lenin, traded dirty deals.

Sticking to the Leninist theses means that even publications that took an internationalist position against the war in Ukraine by siding with the proletarian class struggle against every bourgeoisie, and the fewer numbers that did so in the following war in the Middle East, brings with it that their texts contain elements of left bourgeois positions. This is also true for Lotta Comunista or the Bordigist groups, who affirm that at a date after World War II, there is no longer “anti-imperialist” progressivism in the national struggles, but that they are part of world capitalism and its frictions of redistribution of spheres of influence. But still …

The article describes Hamas as a subaltern bourgeois force “in the era of imperialism,” which means that it is oppressed by imperialism. In other fragments, Hamas is a force of limited imperialist capitalist capacity but imperialist in the end. Which of both is it? One interpretation is not the same as the other.

Hamas has not hesitated to enlist in the Axis of Resistance, under the influence of the Iranian government, while admitting to being financed by Qatar, as well as sometimes to a lesser extent by Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. This Axis is part of the strategy and structures of the imperialist capitalist bloc around China and Russia, Iran on the one hand and Syria on the other being the essential state poles of influence in that region of the planet. In this sense, Hamas’s action on October 7 is part of the attempt to confront the dynamics of the Abraham Accords and its new economic and political concretizations, with India and its economic flows as background.

It is not true that Hamas had to do so because they could be displaced and delegitimized by continuing to govern Gaza under those limiting conditions. Hamas understood that its action would be the starting signal for a great force of deconstruction of the imperialist balances of power in the region, counting on the Axis of Resistance, supported by Iran, Syria, and their bloc colleagues.

Hamas had some moments when parts of its population criticized it, but its social support in the Gaza Strip before October 7 was far superior to that of the PNA in the West Bank. Hamas has means at its level, and above all, young people who support it, and since October 7 and the Israeli bombings, its popularity has been growing in the West Bank and other Arab and Muslim areas. It was not because its political leadership would not be able to maintain the government in Gaza that it let its military wing provoke the tremendous reaction of the Tsahal – IDF. The only reason was the services it provided to the China-Russia-Iran imperialist alliance in its efforts to disrupt the construction of the U.S. imperialist bloc in the region and worldwide. And why? Hamas, like any would-be state, wants to gain as much advantage as possible from the redistribution of the world through imperialist war. This aim depends as a small imperialism on larger imperialisms of established states and blocs of states. How could it be otherwise? No other politics is possible for bourgeois powers since the earth has been divided into capitalist spheres of influence, that is, since WW1. There are no more non-capitalist areas of significance to conquer. Every conquest comes at the expense of other imperialist powers.

Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, 25-1-2024