– Leninism, neo-Leninism, and the German-Dutch communist left –
Introduction
We have defended the positions and theoretical developments on this question in various texts based on the German-Dutch communist left. In this text we focus on a neo-Leninist expression such as ‘Lotta Comunista,’ criticizing its positions and showing a coherent analysis framework in the face of the errors of those who follow Leninism.
1. Lotta Comunista’s interpretative bases on capitalist imperialism.
Arrigo Cervetto , of Lotta Comunista , summarized his positions as follows:
“In Marxist and Leninist terms, this means nothing more than “a young capitalism” struggling against more mature, i.e., imperialistic, capitalisms.”
“If a state’s expansive and, therefore, aggressive tendency were enough to qualify it as imperialist, all the states of the world would be imperialist, and if a state’s tendency of military aggression were enough to define it as imperialist, very few states of the world would escape that definition.
Every capitalist economy is expansionist, by its intimate nature and necessity, and every state merely reflects its objective tendencies. This explains why among the states of the so-called “socialist camp” there is well present, as the editors of “Rivoluzione Proletaria” should well know, a series of expansionist tendencies and a series of hotbeds of tension and conflict mature. We Marxists are careful, in the presence of such phenomena, not to call those states “imperialistic,” just as we do not call China “imperialistic,” but simply “capitalistic.”
Of those states, only the USSR should be called “imperialistic,” since it has now reached an economic maturity that forces it to export capital and fight for the sharing of the world market.
The “Third World” states, so dear to the editors of “Rivoluzione Proletariat,” upon attaining their independence at the very moment of their establishment, immediately unleashed a series of tendencies that sometimes led to armed clashes. The example of the Indo-Pakistani war suffices.
The general framework in which these conflicts manifest themselves is the imperialist phase, in which the major powers struggle to divide the world market. This means that the economic causes and legal forms (borders, etc.) of the “young capitalisms” conflicts have historically originated from imperialism. The Middle East is certainly no exception.
Ultimately, imperialism, as the spread of capitalist relations of production into pre-capitalist economies, is the root cause of the formation of “young capitalisms,” as Marx and Lenin saw so well.
“There is no war since the world entered the imperialist phase that does not see the presence of the various imperialist powers. But why does Marxism not call all such wars “imperialistic”? Because, while recording the inevitable presence of the various imperialist powers, these wars are characterized by the clash between bourgeois states that are not yet imperialist.
(L'”interventismo di sinistra” a fianco della borghesia araba. ‘Lotta Comunista’ no. 17-18, July-August 1967: https://www.marxists.org/italiano/cervetto/1950/imperialismounitario/12.htm#p6 ).
2. Criticism from the approaches of the German-Dutch Communist Left.
The theorization of Cervetto and Lotta Comunista remains in the field of Leninism.
Just a preliminary comment on using terms like ‘expansionist’, ‘military agressive’ etc. We don’t know if ‘Lotta Comunista’ uses these terms or if it just took them over from ‘Rivoluzione Proletaria.’ Anyway, we state that, in the era of imperialism (to be explained later), such terms are misleading and used to mislead in war propaganda. In the reality of inter-imperialist warfare, ‘attack is the best defense’ (Clausewitz.)
We agree with ‘Lotta Comunista’ that among the allegedly non-imperialist ‘young capitalisms’ there existed and exist expressions of direct military aggression, invasive, not only in the example of the war India – Pakistan it mentions. We will develop our argument by analyzing the conflict between Vietnam and Kampuchea ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Cambodia ). As in other examples, aggressions between States that acceded to their national liberation, Vietnam and Kampuchea engaged in regional wars. They did so with their initiative to throw their weight on Indochina’s regional scale. However, their engagement in a mutual war was part of a higher-level imperialist strategy, attending to interests marked by great powers – the USA and the USSR, that fought a war by proxy of South and North Vietnam -and powers that were of second international level – like at that time the Chinese Peoples Republic. All cases of regional wars are different, but the important thing is that they are all part of a movement of obligatory re-division of the imperialist spheres of influence at a world scale. The foreign activity of these ‘new capitalisms’ was not directed to pre-capitalist zones, but to zones with diverse levels of capitalist presence and activities, with a series of leading and dominant capitalist States that clashed in their needs and expansionist pretensions with other capitalist States. In this world-historical framework forged at the beginning of the 20th century, and in a necessarily competitive dynamic, the action of these ‘young capitalisms’ is inscribed from their birth as State entities.
It has also been demonstrated that even before gaining national independence, they were engaged in the world war when they were aspiring states or national “liberation” movements. For example, Ghandi’s nationalist movement helped the British to send native soldiers to the trenches of World War I (1), Sukarno and his nationalist tendency helped the Japanese invader of Indonesia (2) and the CCP allied with the Kuomintang (3), with a disastrous and bloody result for the working class. Elsewhere, movements like the Angolan MPLA, allied with the USSR bloc, being helped by Cuba, against the opposing forces supported by the US, Britain, South Africa, Portugal (Roberto Holden’s FNLA) or by China, Saudi Arabia and others (Savimbi’s UNITA). In Algeria, the USSR and its bloc, together with the Arab League, supported the nationalist insurrection of the FLN against the French colonialist state. Then, the militarist government of the FLN attacked the population of Kabylia that demanded autonomy (general revolt in 1980). Previously the FLN had attacked the nationalists of the MNA of Messali Had (5). Pan-Arabist nationalisms allied themselves with whoever suited them to attack their enemies, invade the territories of others, and deny national rights claimed by others (Kurds, for example) (6). The list is long, and all of it shows what the German-Dutch communist left has defended, that all those movements were bourgeois or enemies of the proletariat and the communist revolution, while the tendencies in favor of the Bolshevik theses centered on Lenin dedicated themselves to support nationalist movements and bourgeois guerrillas.
Moreover, there is a link between these new states and the strategies of the imperialist blocs, formed or in formation, particularly in their immediate field of greater interventionist capacity and at the level of broader agreements with the closest regional and world powers. In competition, the necessary and obligatory form of the existence of capital, according to Marx, the field is not merely local or regional. It is international, and this requires meddling in this globalized area of action and dynamic capitalist expression, whether the new bourgeoisies that have managed to constitute new states want to do so or not. Capitalist imperialism is a necessity in a material, world-historical sense, an obligation for every state and force of capital.
A small force of imperialist capitalism cannot be “bourgeois”-only; its limitations of operative capacity on an economic, political, and military scale do not exempt it from having to compete in, by and for imperialism, the international struggle between capitals that has exacerbated the dynamism of the globalized development of capital. Lenin and his followers deformed this. And to compete in, by, and for imperialism necessarily makes these ‘young capitalisms’ active imperialist agents, not mere puppets in the hands of superior powers. In this framework of redefinition by force of the world capitalist milieu, trying to gain economic capacity, military power and political positions makes these ‘young nations’ imperialist capitalisms. Calling these new forces bourgeois-only and the old powers imperialist, as ‘Lotta Communist’ does, distorts the substance of the problem and what is at stake.
The position of the German-Dutch communist left starts from the completion of the division of the earth (at least of its main parts) among the capitalist powers at the beginning of the 20th century. This completion of world capitalism did not mean that the relations of production and the productive forces of capital in various regions of the planet all showed the same level of development. It only meant that any effort to compete between capitalist powers – small or big, young or mature – brought with it the re-division of spheres of influence and the aim of all the powers mentioned above to make the most of this re-division. A re-division was based on the force deployed between capitalist states, and the tensions of which, under certain conditions, exploded in imperialist war.
With Lenin, this is neither understood nor can it be understood, remaining trapped and reproducing totally or partially his limitations and errors, as ‘Lotta Comunista’ (7) does Lenin’s position on the right of nations is the theoretical basis of the opportunist and bourgeois practical development of Bolshevism and the CI (Communist International) in this and other fields.
In the case of ‘Lotta Comunista,’ trying to avoid taking sides with an imperialist capitalist camp, the most that is achieved is to say that right now, the Palestinian and Israeli bourgeois camps are just bourgeois. ‘Lotta Communista’ avoids considering imperialist the Palestinian nationalist movement, its mentors, and allied forces, as now notoriously are Iran, Qatar, or Turkey with the “Axis of Resistance.” Hence, the military and political conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is blurred, to present only Israel as imperialist, despite recognizing that Hamas and co. are bourgeois forces.
They do this in their text for the Milan Conference of July 2023. Then they frame the whole “military and geopolitical conflict” in the capitalist imperialism. But is the Palestinian camp imperialist bourgeois or not, are its alliances merely inter-bourgeois, perhaps? These questions deserve to be answered with clarity, but ‘Lotta Comunista’ avoids it. To tackle this question, it is necessary to dispense with Leninism and to gather the best approaches of the German-Dutch communist left, confronting them with the historical and social experience accumulated up to the present time.
Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, March 2024
Notes
(1) “When Britain declared war on Germany on August 3, 1914, all British dominions and colonies automatically joined the imperial war effort. The leaders of the Indian National Congress (Gandhi and Nehru) supported the British in the war in the hope of achieving greater political autonomy but without questioning the permanence of the British Empire. Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915 and campaigned to recruit Indian soldiers to serve in the British Army.”https://institutodeindologia.es/index.php/articulos/historia/518-india-durante-la-primera-guerra-mundial-carlos-a-font-gavira” In India, when the war broke out, political figures and leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, backed the British effort, believing that they would thus carry favor with London for their claims to self-rule…” The colonies and dominions of the British Empire were another key to the huge mobilization. The Indian subcontinent (consisting of the present India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) sent 1,500,000 soldiers; almost 500,000 came from Australia and New Zealand, the same number from Canada, and 74,000 from South Africa, according to British government figures.”
(2) “Sukarno and his fellow nationalists collaborated to enlist public support for the Japanese war effort in exchange for Japanese help in spreading their nationalist ideas. After the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence on August 17, 1945, and Sukarno was appointed president. He led Indonesians in resisting Dutch recolonization efforts by diplomatic and military means until Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence in 1949.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukarno“The Empire of Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) during World War II from March 1942 until the war’s end in September 1945. It was one of modern Indonesian history’s most crucial and important periods.
In May 1940, Germany occupied the Netherlands and martial law was declared in the Dutch East Indies. After negotiations between the Dutch and Japanese authorities failed, Japanese assets in the archipelago were frozen. The Dutch declared war on Japan after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies began on January 10, 1942, and the Imperial Japanese Army overran the entire colony in less than three months. The Dutch surrendered on March 8. Initially, most Indonesians welcomed the Japanese as liberators from their Dutch colonial masters. However, sentiment changed, as between 4 and 10 million Indonesians were conscripted as forced laborers (romusha) in defense and economic development projects in Java. Between 200,000 and half a million were sent from Java to the outer islands and as far as Burma and Siam. Of those taken from Java, no more than 70,000 survived the war. Four million people died in the Dutch East Indies as a result of starvation and forced labor during the Japanese occupation, including 30,000 deaths of European civilian internees.”
…” In 1929, during Indonesia’s National Awakening, Indonesian nationalist leaders Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta (later founding president and vice president), foresaw a Pacific War and that a Japanese advance into the Dutch East Indies could be advantageous to the cause of independence.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocupaci%C3%B3n_japonesa_de_las_Indias_Orientales_Neerlandesas
(3) “The First United Front, also known as the KMT-PCCh Alliance, of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC), was formed in 1924 as an alliance to end warlordism in China. Together they formed the National Revolutionary Army and left in 1926 for the Northern Expedition. The CCP joined the KMT as individuals, using the KMT’s superiority in numbers to help spread communism. The KMT, on the other hand, wanted to control the communists from within. Both sides had their objectives, and the Front was untenable. In 1927, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists from the Front while the Northern Expedition was still half completed. This started a civil war between the two parties that lasted until the Second United Front was formed in 1936 to prepare for the coming Second Sino-Japanese War.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_Frente_Unido
Shanghai, Canton, and other parts of China.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanza_de_Shangh%C3%A1i_de_1927
(4) See: Angolan War of Independence
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerra_de_la_independencia_de_Angola
UNITA.
“When in 1965, after a coup d’état with direct participation of the United States, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in the Democratic Republic of Congo, his brother-in-law Roberto began to receive financial support from Mobutu and his allies, mainly from the American CIA to oppose the new leftist government formed after the independence of Angola. The domination by foreign powers of the Bakongos, which Roberto represented, and the fact that he controlled the organization from exile in Leopoldville bothered Savimbi. But what he feared most was the great development of the MPLA, a rival group that had the support of the USSR.
Foreign support
UNITA received support from several governments in Africa and worldwide, including the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Israel, Morocco, the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Zaire, and Zambia.”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni%C3%B3n_Nacional_para_la_Independencia_Total_de_Angola
(5) See:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerra_de_Independencia_de_Argelia
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messali_Hadj
https://rojoynegro.info/articulo/represion-de-la-manifestacion-del-10-de-marzo-en-kabilia-argelia
(6) See:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarabismo
https://www.politicaexterior.com/que-fue-del-panarabismo
(7) To elaborate on “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, Lenin was inspired by Hobson and Hilferding, who contributed data and a bibliography on the subject. But their analyses, besides containing errors and biases (liberal-democratic and social-democratic respectively), were inspired in a concrete zone of the planet and a determined number of years, so they cannot allow us to understand the imperialist dynamic of capitalism.
This is evidenced in detail in the book by Anibal and materia, Theories of the collapse of capitalism. Illusions of collapse and collapse of illusions:
On the same subject, see one overview and seven historical texts
- Fredo Corvo, The inter-imperialist war in Ukraine – From Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, and Lenin to “Council-Communism”
- L’Ouvrier Communiste, Imperialism and the National Question (1929)
- Paul Mattick, Luxemburg versus Lenin (1935)
- Internationalisme (GCF), On the National and Colonial Question (1945/1946)
- Anton Pannekoek, Class Struggle and Nation (1912)
- Herman Gorter, Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy (1914)
- Anton Pannekoek, The economic necessity of imperialism (1916)
- Rosa Luxemburg, fragmentos sobre la guerra, la cuestión nacional y la revolución
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