The latest war in the Middle East serves to highlight how contemporary radical left discourse, with all its Marxist pretensions, dissolves upon examination into a patchwork of petty bourgeois democratic clichés. Historian Salar Mohandesi’s “Organizing in the Heart of Empire” at the Verso Blog is a typical and instructive example.
According to him:
The situation in Iran poses a political challenge for anyone who cares about emancipation.
Every Marxist should know that generally claims about “emancipation” as an abstraction floating above classes are not forgivable in this day and age. We are always duty bound to ask; Emancipation for whom? To do what? Emancipation of the concrete proletarian from the bondage of the capitalist mercantile regime in the tradition of Stuchka or emancipation of the abstract man (or woman...) to participate in this regime in the tradition of Sieyes. There is no third way and there can be no ambiguity.
But let us be unreasonably charitable and assume that by “emancipation” Mohandesi means the only form of emancipation which is historically possible now and not the con artistry of “radical” democracy. We are now informed that:
Everyone knows that the single greatest threat to that goal on a global level is the United States and its imperial allies.
Does “everyone” really know this? Do class conscious workers in the BRICS countries know that the “greatest threat” to their emancipation is not the capitalists who exploit them but the competitors of the same? Is this perhaps the same “everyone” who knew at the time of the Boer War that not imperialism in general but Anglo-Saxon capitalists in particular were the “greatest threat”? Regardless, Mohandesi is no one dimensional critic of the American global regime because he hurries to assure us that:
some other states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) [...]happen to oppose US imperialism, but are themselves repressive, capitalist, patriarchal, and inegalitarian.
Anyone who knows the ABCs of Marxism or is simply endowed with common sense is well aware that every state is repressive, that repression and indeed terror is the essence of the state. There is no logic to condemning a state as “repressive” unless you dream of the utopian “people’s state” which was the justified target of Marx’s mockery when it appeared in the Gotha Program. And further those of us who really seek the emancipation of the proletariat can’t afford to shed naive tears over “repression”. If against the odds, it was the representatives of the proletariat who had won in 1979 we can be confident there would have been nothing pacifist or vegetarian in the resulting regime.
We can also fairly wonder what is the logic in affixing the qualifier “inegalitarian” to “capitalist”? Is Mohandesi dreaming of egalitarian capitalism? What exactly would that be? But now the question is posed:
For those of us who live in North America and Europe, what is to be done?
We have to ask–what is the logic of posing the question in this loaded way as if it is a self explanatory choice? It is always in such unexplained choices that class ideology lurks and here is no exception. The proletariat is an international class defined by the universal reach of the world market. It must start by asking what to do, regardless of whether it is in Paris or Dhaka, Chicago or Kinshasa. That is where the economic structure demands that its strategic reflection begin. To reframe the question by starting not from the international class but from the “collective West”, is to ask it from the standpoint of post-colonialism, of Said and Dugin. Here, as is so often the case the answer is already given in the way the question is posed.
Most campists acknowledge that the Iranian state is repressive, and they know that offering critical support amounts to tolerating or even excusing a deeply inegalitarian state that has murdered tens of thousands dissidents
Class lines and property forms completely disappear in this discourse. This discourse is not the discourse of proletarian emancipation but that of the Helsinki Accords and Carter’s human rights offensive. The USSR of Lenin and Trotsky was a “deeply inegalitarian” state which “murdered” tens of thousands of “dissidents”. However, the construction of a regime of proletarian state property both opened the only hope of authentic emancipation and it established the only barrier to the unchecked capitalist barbarism and anarchy we now enjoy. Every class conscious worker should not simply “tolerate” or “excuse” it, but celebrate it. The IRI on the other hand is a regime characterized by flexible contracts, flowering of private enterprise and the proliferation of millionaires. Even if it was a regime of pure humanitarianism which abjured the death penalty and welcomed public criticism every communist could only dream of its destruction.
At this point it is worth noting that the dichotomy that Mohandesi builds, unfortunately very much on a real base, between “campists” and “anti-campists” amounts to an internal schism within the discourse established by Zhdanov at the conferences of the Cominform. The “campists” carry the banner of a geopolitical anti-imperialism in which imperialism is not a stage of capitalism, but the aspiration to world hegemony of the strongest capitalist power. The “anti-campists” on the other hand defend the anti-fascism which the Cominform inherited from the 7th Congress of the Comintern. For them the only horizon is struggle against “oppressive” regimes and for the rights of man and the citizen. In both cases the precondition is the reduction of the proletarian revolution and the Marxist criticism of capital to an insignificant rhetorical garnish.
Before the collapse of the USSR, anti-fascism and geopolitical anti-imperialism were the calling cards of a degenerated labor politics, reduced to static defense of the prior conquests of the working class within the bipolar confrontation with imperialism. Today, they are floating signifiers of petty bourgeois discontent, ever ready to do the ideological dirty work of actually existing multi-polarity.
We return to Mohandesi:
There are also those who try to gesture to some middle path by suggesting that we should “do both,” that is, support popular uprisings against the Iranian state while also remaining steadfastly anti-imperialist...But for a number of reasons – the most important of which is sustained repression – there is no mass, organized, anti-imperialist left there as yet, and only a very weak internationalist left abroad to help. The middle path does not really exist.
For Mohandesi, the “middle path” is a desirable end goal, but its relation with the present is indirect at best. We can see this in the recommendations which follow. After correctly observing that revolutionaries in the US and Europe can hardly exert direct influence on the course of events in Iran he states:
...the most important thing that people in North America and Europe can do is to pressure their respective states to lift the sanctions, scale back their ongoing efforts to sabotage Iran, restrain Israel’s incessant aggression, stop the current US-Israeli war, and prevent future imperialist interventions.
This all seems reasonable enough till one considers what is missing. None of these tasks individually, however effectively performed by the broadest united front, will bring us any further along the “middle path” history demands of us not just in Iran but throughout the world. As is so often today, here the movement is everything and the final goal is set aside for tomorrow. As communists our objective is the construction of a party internal to the movement of the class which is able to accumulate forces capable of seizing power. That is our contemporary objective in the US, Iran and everywhere. For us “the most important thing” is that every partial movement serves the construction of this political subject. This will likely involve decades of patient and seemingly unrewarding activity. But the sooner began, the sooner done. We have seen decades of succession of broad partial movements which have failed to result in the ideological and organizational consolidation of a new proletarian opposition.
This absence of political independence and complete subsumption of workers and peoples movements within the confines of bourgeois politics has, in turn, created a very low ceiling for the immediate impact of these movements. They remain incapable of articulating an alternative program for the governance of the social whole and have become fodder for any and every bourgeois opposition party. This will remain the case so long as we continue to accept the implicit and perverse logic of commentators like Mohandesi. The logic in which the construction of the broadest possible united front to meet this or that urgent crisis of the moment is primary and the construction of the class party able to lead such a front towards power is secondary, a pedantic luxury whose inevitable results we have all seen in The Life of Brian.
Prioritizing the construction of the broadest possible anti-war movement over the ideological and organizational consolidation of a proletarian opposition within the labor movement means building a paper tiger. Effective mass action to stop imperialist war means the constitution of a leadership core unafraid of frontal confrontation with the state and with a strategic vision for power. Anything less will fail the test and provide the illusion of opposition before fading into insignificance. The anti-war movement of the GWOT era is the best proof of this. Stopping imperialist war means class conscious workers shutting society down. We will never get there if we sideline ideological consolidation and implantation in the labor movement for dissolution in broad fronts characterized by shared opportunism and lack of social base. Concretely in the American situation this means being absorbed indefinitely on the willfully impotent left wing of the Democratic Party. After all, campists and anti-campists alike find a common home in the DSA, and like Chomsky and Parenti a common choice in the voting booth. We know this road and it leads nowhere.
But Mohandesi has an ace up his sleeve, one which despite his intentions confirms the complete bankruptcy of his arguments:
The situation in Palestine, too, is by no means straightforward, and the complexities there could have sparked enervating internecine battles. While there is general agreement on the left about Israel, there is disagreement about what to make of the Palestinian side. After all, the forces leading the anti-colonial movement are capitalist, nationalist, Islamist, patriarchal, and socially conservative. They are not fighting for universal emancipation. What does this mean for internationalism?
Although this question prompted many debates, and triggered some sectarian divisions, they have not become paralyzing, nor have they replaced organizing in North America and Europe. Most people have remained focused on building a meaningful internationalist movement.
In fact Palestine solidarity activism, precisely because it has prioritized the construction of a broad front without ideological and organizational consolidation around proletarian class politics, has built nothing. We can see this empirically. If Palestine solidarity activism had built an internationalist movement we would have an organic unity between the movement against Zionist policy and the movement against the joint NATO/Russia destruction of Ukraine. We see nothing of the kind. In fact many “internationalists” full of righteous outrage over Gaza support one side of the imperialist front in Ukraine. Just as many of them apologize for the blood baths of the IRGC.
Furthermore, many in the Palestine solidarity movement, far from being united around a class understanding of Israel, consider it an “illegitimate nation” in which the proletariat does not exist and celebrate the October 7th massacre. This is not internationalism by any reasonable standard. But it does indicate the backwardness to which Mohandesi’s weak tea appeals for lowest common denominator unity will consign us. He is right, we need meaningful internationalism. But his reversal of the order of priority between party construction and broad united front work will result only in the continued hegemony of social chauvinism and political disorientation. We know this because by his own proud admission we have seen it in action.
Finally it is necessary to note that Mohandesi in line with his general liquidation of class politics fatally conflates today’s conjuncture with that of the Vietnam war. In Indochina, US imperialism as the leader of the entire imperialist bloc on the one hand, confronted the proletarian state economies and the international trend of worker-peasant revolution towards socialism. Whatever the centrist character of the leadership of the struggle, the war was part of the global struggle between socialism and capitalism. Solidarity with Vietnam, however complex and nuanced its iterations had an inherent class content. In Iran, Palestine or Ukraine, the only aspect of the situation as yet inherent and actual is imperialist war. This is why without the immediate construction of the “middle path” which Mohandesi puts on the backburner, no internationalism is possible.