The history of Turkey, particularly its relatively recent history, is a complex one and we can't possibly cover all of it in one article. For example, we will produce a separate piece to look at the intimately-related "Kurdish Question", in which the demand for national self-determination was already an anachronism at the turn of last century. But in looking at some significant examples of the operations of the Turkish state from its inception, and particularly since the 1990's, we can clearly identify the global developments of economic crisis, repression, militarism and irrationality that have marked the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. We can ask the questions of what global components of the decadence of capitalism, and what specific elements of Turkey's past, affect and direct the present situation of a totalitarian, militarised and increasingly Islamicised state; and we can also ask to what extent this dire situation is the result of the unbridled ambition of one man and his "vision" or whether it represents the latest twists of Turkish imperialism in the increasing chaos in the Middle East imposed on it by a generalised capitalist decomposition.

The new Turkish "empire" resurrected from the past

But first let's start nearly a thousand years ago, with the Battle of Manzikert, 1071, where a Turkic tribe from Central Asia routed the Christians in Byzantium and started a chain of events which allowed the Seljuk Turks to capture the lands of modern Turkey and create an empire stretching across modern-day Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Syria, thus laying the ground for the construction of the mighty transcontinental Ottoman Empire. The rather obscure fact of the Manzikert battle is important for our investigation because it has been talked about a lot recently by Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. The fact that much of the story is lies, exaggeration and wishful thinking doesn't matter, just as it doesn't matter to any other scurrilous politician who wants to take us back to a mythical and rose-coloured "great past of the nation". It won't stop Bilal Erdogan for example, the son of Recip directing Turkey's education policy (who because of his - and his family’s - financial dealings with the 'Caliphate' earned the name of "oil minister to Isis"), drumming up the example of Manzikert in Turkey’s now heavily Islamicised schools. The religious schools, the Imam Hatip Lisesi (IHL), have grown from 23,000 to well over a million pupils in a year and, in most cases, evolution theory and physics have been dropped or downgraded, with many thousands of teachers intimidated, sacked or imprisoned so that the loaded concept of jihad can be taught to what President Erdogan now calls, the "Pious Generation" in schools under surveillance by the religious police. The Wall Street Journal recently called Turkey "the other Islamic State".

Apart from Erdogan's preparations for the millennial anniversary in 2071, he has also been laying out his vision for the challenges facing the "New Turkey" over the next two decades. At fiercely nationalist rallies, imbued with the trappings of the Ottoman Empire, including scimitar-wielding soldiers in traditional garb and soldiers playing Ottoman-style instruments, Erdogan has talked about the emergence and prospects of the "New Turkey" for the next twenty years, based on the Grand Vision he laid out in the 4th Congress of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2013. He has subsequently elaborated that Turkey would become the "Epicentre" of the Middle East, a New Middle East where Turkey holds a central and model role (New York Times, 24.9.17), "A great nation, a great power... where brother and sister Arabs with the same civilisation and common history... work together". Erdogan is prone to ranting, changing his mind and exaggeration, but there's no doubt that under his leadership Turkish imperialism is going to try to reassert itself over the region of the Middle East and beyond. Erdogan's praise for the past poses the vision for the new Turkish "empire". The hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish state in 2023, much vaunted by and campaigned around by Erdogan, carries the idea that his country will become as powerful and influential as the Ottoman Empire was during its heyday.  And today Turkey is indeed becoming the "Epicentre", but the epicentre of capitalist decomposition where centrifugal tendencies, corruption, the cynical use of refugees, debt and war predominate.

The geostrategic position of Turkey and its role in the birth of the country from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire

Turkey is both a barrier and a bridge between two continents at the very centre of imperialist rivalries that date back well before the existence of the country; and its geographical position and size gives it the ability to shape events around the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Its geographical position gave it the ability to hold back Russia from its passage via the Black Sea into the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and this made it of central importance in the 19th century for France and Britain in their rivalry with the Czarist state. This was a key issue during the Crimean War, ending in defeat for Russia, which was registered in the Treaty of Paris in March 1856. The war marked the ascendency of France as a major power, continued the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain wanted to maintain against Russia, thus giving it a brief lease of life. It also saw  the beginning of the end of Czarist rule. It was successful for Britain in reducing and confining the Russian fleet to the Black Sea, leaving Britain free to "rule the waves" for the next two or three decades. The war accelerated the decay of the Eurasian and African-wide Ottoman Empire, with nationalist ambitions arising in its various constituent parts, sponsored or influenced by Britain and France. The Empire had already been weakening since the 1820's with the internal decay of its ruling class, originating in fetters that were more akin to Asiatic despotism than a pre-capitalist feudalism. It was unable to staunch the tide of capitalism whose framework is the nation state, and the national movements which resulted in independence for Greece in 1832, Serbia in 1867 and Bulgaria in 1878 further accelerated its decline.  

There were tensions within the Ottoman state apparatus itself, with some elements welcoming capitalist relations; the same relations which when implemented gave rise to workers' struggles from the 1860's into the early 1900's, including Christian and Muslim shipyard workers striking together in Kasimpasha (in modern day Turkey) and larger strikes in Constantinople in various industries involving workers from different ethnicities and religions fighting side by side[i]. The subsequent break-up of the Empire, from Bulgaria to Arabia, would be exploited by the major powers during and after World War I where, in the image of its decadence, imperialism would draw up the new frontiers. The world war was in fact the final nail in its coffin. Turkey came into the war on the side of Germany after its resources had been greatly depleted in the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. There had already been growing German influence on the Ottomans before the war with the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and their attack on Russia as one the Central Powers brought Russia's now allies, Britain and France, to declare war on them in November 1914[ii].

The rise of Kurdish nationalism is entirely linked to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It first appeared in 1880 when the Ottoman rulers used mainly Kurdish forces to protect their borders against Russia. To this end they co-opted powerful Kurdish leaders to its government and the latter gave considerable support to the regime, including being involved in the massacres of Armenians at the end of the 19th century and fighting for them during the First World War. Attempts at Kurdish independence, promoted by the British for their own imperialist ends, were squashed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. A real Kurdish independence could not survive the shocks of World War One and its subsequent convulsions and many thousands of Kurds were displaced and perished, following a pattern that preceded the war. The Kurds were mainly against the secularisation policies of Kemal Ataturk and his new regime and a number of Kurdish revolts were violently repressed by the Turkish state through the 20's and 30's.  

The new Turkish state, born through violence and genocide

The residues of the decomposing Ottoman Empire were carved-up by the European colonial powers, particularly Britain and France. In 1916, the French and British, with the assent of Imperial Russia, drew up the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. This plan divided up zones of interest and imposed arbitrary borders, giving rise to Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Armenia, Lebanon and the formation of the modern Turkish state, the Turkish Republic founded by its first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in 1923. The terms of the Republic were codified by the major powers in the Treaty of Lausanne signed in July 1923. It brought an official end to the conflicts of the war and defined Turkey's borders and its relationship with its neighbours. Turkey was to cede all claims to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire[iii]. The break-up of the Empire and the character of the "nations" born from its ruins show the inescapable dynamics of capitalism's decadence and its descent into full-blown imperialism as outlined by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1915, Junius Pamphlet: "Imperialism is not the creation of one or of any group of states. It is a product of a particular stage in the ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognised only in all its relations and from which no nation can hold aloof".

Thus the new Turkish state was born out of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and plunged straight into the whirlpool of capitalism's decadence, a whirlpool of violence, war, state capitalism and ethnic cleansing. One of the first recorded incidents of capitalist genocide took place under the new regime, with one-and-a-half million Armenians dying as a result of forced marches, rape and murder in May 1915. Up to a similar number of Greeks were killed by the Turks and over a quarter-million Assyrians at the end of World War I. Pogroms were carried out in Turkey, including those against its substantial Alevi minority[iv]. Religion was frowned upon by the new ruling class, the nascent bourgeoisie, the leading cadres of which had fought against the old regime. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished along with Sharia courts. They abolished all the trappings of the Ulamas (Islamic religious leaders), purged them from the state apparatus and transferred their wealth and property to the treasury. Kemalism's fight against religion was also the struggle against the old regime. Kemal was from the very first determined to crush any attempt at Kurdish resistance: "There were no Kurdish representatives at the Lausanne Conference and the Kurds played no role in the presence of non-Muslim minorities - Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey"[v]. Kemal Ataturk's regime was further strengthened by support of the Bolsheviks in their disastrous foreign policy which was made official in 1921.

The secular republic was an early expression of state capitalism and this was an expression of the necessity for the Turkish "rump" of the old empire to survive and compete. The early concentration of power in the secular Turkish state explains why the army has always been central to Turkish politics.

The Kemalists had to create a secular Turkey that hardly existed in anyone's mind so it took time to take hold and its grip was far from solid. The religious fervour of the Menemen incident, an Islamist inspired revolt in 1930, and various Kurdish uprisings, are examples of these upheavals. The Kemalists allowed two official opposition parties (the Progressive Republican Party, 1924, and the Free Republican Party, 1930), but both had strong religious elements and were closed down by the state in a very short time[vi].

As far as the working class was concerned it followed and deepened the struggles that had taken place under the Ottoman ruling class. The appearance of a communist left, a left wing of the Turkish communist party (TKP) paralleled the development of these struggles and both took place in very dangerous and sometimes deadly situations for revolutionaries and workers. This was an expression of the revolutionary wave that was sweeping the world, and some of these left communists had been involved in the Spartacist uprisings in Germany and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The reality of the workers' situation meant that they clearly confronted the now reactionary nature of "national liberation" from the outset. From Mayday 1920 through most of the twenties, strikes and demonstrations broke out amongst workers in Turkey with frequent internationalist slogans and banners raised in solidarity with workers' struggle everywhere[vii].

Turkey remained a powerful component of imperialism up to and into the Second World War. Due to the historic conditions imperialist tensions had sharpened primarily in the Far East in the thirties and were just brewing in Europe. This is why in the 30's Kemal Ataturk's policy could still steer clear of foreign intervention, enabling him to focus on stabilising his internal power. This was apart from one exception in 1937-38, when he risked war with France by trying to annex the Alexandretta province of the then French-held Syria. There were also concerns about the position of Mosul, but his policy of “non-intervention” lasted after his death and into the 1939 world war. Prior to that there were factions in the Turkish bourgeoisie that wanted to align with Germany, and there was a "non-aggression" pact between the two countries but there were also secret agreements and pacts with the British. The Allies were generally satisfied with Turkish neutrality during the war and its position blocking German access to Middle Eastern oil. It also denied Germany access to its vast resources of chromium, which is vital for military production and which the Allies had plenty of access to elsewhere[viii].  In February 1945, Turkey declared war on the Axis forces.

1945 - 1990: Cold War, coups and continuity of sorts

Again, given the importance of Turkey's geostrategic position at the onset of capitalism's decadence, the same imperialist conditions applied even more so during the Cold War. Under US and British auspices, Turkey became one of the original members of the United Nations in 1945, fought for the West in Korea, and by 1952 was a member of NATO. Right after the war Russia was leaning heavily on Turkey for the establishment of military bases in Turkey and for free access for its navy through the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits (the so-called "Straits Crisis"). This move was countered by the Truman Doctrine of 1947, where America guaranteed the security of Greece and Turkey against Russia. It was followed by massive US economic and military aid to Turkey which was now a secure part of the western bloc. Turkey was one of the first countries to take part in Operation Gladio, a clandestine NATO-based structure with links to the secret services, bourgeois elites and organised crime[ix] .

The merchant and small producer class in Turkey became flush with capital from the war and their interests came up against the state capitalist imperatives of the Kemalists. Their ability to invest and accumulate was hobbled by the restrictions imposed on them by the centralised grip of Kemalism. Thus arose the legal opposition force of the Democratic Party, unseating the Kemalist Republican People's Party which had ruled during the "single party period" from 1923 to 1945. The former was made up of some elements of the latter, and while it facilitated the rise of Islam, it did nothing to endanger Turkey's membership of NATO and even encouraged moves towards the West; nor did it encourage any attempt of Kurdish nationalism. The hardships and shortages of the war, along with the government's emergency measures, badly affected large sections of the peasantry. The new electoral process gave the rural vote a great weight. The one element of difference (there wasn't much else) between the Republican Peoples’ Party and the Democratic Party was the latter's attitude to religion, demanding greater respect for it and less interference from the state. This mobilised large numbers of the rural population including many Islamist elements. The RPP was forced to go after the rural/religious vote and this led to a relaxation of interference with religion.

The tenure of the DP came to an end in the 1960 coup, the first of several such "adjustments" by the Turkish state between 1960 and 1997. The coup was led by military elements set up for Operation Gladio. One of the legacies of the DP was to see the strengthening and expansion of Islamism in Turkey which was also related to increased agricultural output and the prosperity of the merchants and petty-bourgeoisie along with the weight of the rural vote. These latter elements used Islam as a rallying cry against the regime and they eventually coalesced in the National Salvation Party founded in 1972.

As the global economic crisis hit at the end of the 60's and US aid tailed off, rapid industrialisation and rural migration in Turkey led to rising waves of workers' militancy, peasant occupations and demonstrations.  Unofficial Islam grew alongside “official” Islam, producing madrasas, youth clubs, associations and a number of publications. Various religious brotherhoods flourished and armed street confrontations took place between them, the security forces and fascist and leftist groups. Around this time the Muslim Brotherhood[x] made its first appearance in Turkey. It was significant that the working class stayed well off this poisonous terrain, taking up its own means of struggle, strikes, demonstrations, etc., even if more or less controlled by the unions.

An event in the 1970's presaged the coming period of decomposition where the cement of the bloc structures was to become less stable and centrifugal tendencies were to prevail. Turkey invaded the Republic of Cyprus in 1974, giving rise to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus - recognised only by Turkey to this day. This was significant in that it was a war between two NATO countries. It was an indication of how the tendencies to "each for themselves" would be imposed with the collapse of the Russian bloc a decade and a half later. Another portent of decomposition, one that didn't come directly from the imperialist ambitions of the Turkish state, was the "third way" (between the two blocs) advocated by Turkish Maoist groups. These forces fought a "people's war" in the 70's and 80's, influenced the Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and, not for the last time, brought together elements of the capitalist left and Islamic fundamentalism[xi].

The 1971 military coup was aimed at dealing with a state of chaos that included both workers' unrest and the rise of aggressive fascist and Islamist movements. The military high command took effective power with the support of the US and pursued the class war against workers and enacted anti-leftist and anti-Kurdish separatist policies. Turkey became all the more important for the US in the region following the overthrow of its major pawn in the region, the Shah of Iran, in the late seventies, but it was itself nearing chaos with workers' strikes and demonstrations, three-digit inflation, Maoist agitation, and the rise of the fascist 'Grey Wolves' openly working with the state. In Taksim Square on Mayday 1977, half-a-million demonstrated and dozens were killed, many injured and thousands arrested in the state's repression. The upheavals eventually resulted in the 1980 military coup backed by the US and Britain and involving the CIA, the US ITT corporation and forces of the Gladio counter-guerrilla. Military order was restored. By 1997 the Turkish army was the second largest in NATO with over 700,000 soldiers.

The rest of the 80's saw the Turkish bourgeoisie in relative control, even applying for full membership of the EEC (of which it had been an associate member since 1963). The main event in this period, which is covered by us elsewhere, was the full-scale insurgency of the 1978-founded Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose terror the Turkish state responded to in spades.

The 1989 implosion of the Soviet Union: consequences for Turkey and NATO

The collapse of the Russian-led bloc in 1989 also signalled the end of the two-bloc constellation and this had profound consequences for Turkey given its geostrategic history and weight. All the factors of decomposition enter the scene and worsen the situation: militaristic chaos; imperialist ambitions in the context of each for themselves; the irrationality of rising religious fundamentalism; strengthening totalitarian tendencies; outright repression against impossible-to-fulfil nationalist ambitions; up and down relations with other nations; and the arrival of millions of refugees and the displaced, a consequence of all these developments, one that has been used as a weapon of imperialism. The "new", strong Turkey emerging is thus an illustration of capitalist weakness and decomposition. Instead of the "victory" of capitalism and its dominant superpower, the USA, we see the weakening of the latter in the face of the economic and political instability, irrationality and unpredictability, of which the Middle East, with Turkey at the centre of it, is a prime example.

During the Cold War Turkey was a main bastion of the West against Russia. Once Russia collapsed, once the threat against Turkey was gone, Turkey didn't have the same need for NATO. Even the recent annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Russia hasn't seemed to threaten Turkey. In fact the growing relationship between Turkey and Russia is of some concern to the West. Turkey benefited from the Russian invasion of Crimea to the extent that it managed to obtain cheap energy sanctioned by the West. Russia continues to rely on Turkey for keeping its straits open, giving access for its navy to the warm water seas. With Russia no longer threatening its eastern flank, and accommodations between the two countries on its western, Syrian flank (though these are certainly not written in stone), Turkey's need for NATO has shrunk. On its eastern flank Turkey has deepened its relations with Azerbaijan whose oil and gas are exactly what Turkey is lacking, its "missing link". Since the collapse of Russia, Turkey has developed close cultural, economic and military ties with Azerbaijan and supported it in its 2016 war with Russian-backed Armenia, whose "independent republic of Nargono-Karabakh" Turkey still refuses to recognise. But, overall, just as Turkey's need of NATO has declined so NATO's need of Turkey has increased.

Through the pursuance of its own, independent ambitions, which means it no longer submits itself to any military alliance, discipline or agreements, Turkey has not only become unreliable but unpredictable.  Already in 2003, when the US was facing problems in Iraq, the Turkish parliament refused the stationing of US troops in Eastern Anatolia that the latter hoped would be used as springboard. To be committed to confronting Russia becomes an unnecessary and unwanted burden for Turkey and instead of this we see tendencies the other way, towards rapprochement with Russia, which makes Turkey a force in itself undermining and weakening NATO. If Russia manages to pull Turkey into its orbit, along with Iran, it will strengthen the former enormously. In this direction Turkey has just finalised the deal to buy Russia's S-400 missile system and has had talks with Russia over Syria in mid-November, with further talks to come in Sochi with both Putin and Iran.

Given the large and concentrated numbers of Turkish and Kurdish emigrant workers around the world, and particularly those in Germany and the rest of Europe, there is a clear danger of these elements being mobilised behind nationalist interests. Turkish imperialism has the means for the propagation of its perceived interests to its Diaspora in the form of the Milli Gorus (national/religious vision) organisation, formed in 1969[xii].

It took some time, as it did with many western politicians, for the consequences of the collapse of Russia to sink in. The Turkish economy was performing relatively well even though debt was racking up. In the late 90's Turkey joined the EU customs union and in 2005 started negotiations around access to the EU. During this period the secular/Kemalist army coup of 1997, finally occasioned by an anti-Israeli demonstration festooned with images of Hamas and Hezbollah, removed the Islamist leader Erbakan and forced the ban on religious expressions and institutions. The Turkish army thus made another of its "balanced adjustments". Coming up on the wing at this time was former footballer and ex-mayor of Istanbul, Recip Erdogan who, though still banned from politics because of his Islamist affectations, helped set up the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. He declared that the party would not have an Islamic axis.

The rise of Recip Tayyip Erdogan

The AKP came to power in Turkey in 2002 in a landslide victory after squabbling ruling class factions drove the country to near-bankruptcy, forcing an IMF bail-out in the previous year. Erdogan became prime minister in 2003 when emigration of Turkish workers, a powerful pressure-relief-valve for the Turkish economy, was slowing down and when, more generally in the Middle East, there was a weakening of the more secular powers and a rise of religious fundamentalism. Thanks to a network of mafia-type structures, corruption and clannism within the AKP, Erdogan became prime minister and immediately began putting forward strong nationalist ambitions and projects: modernising infrastructure, job creation (even if low-paid) through debt and foreign investment within a wider and more ambitious Islamic fundamentalism that was based on more backward elements. In order to weaken the grip of the military, which remained a threat to the AKP, Erdogan struck a tactical alliance with the powerful cleric Fethullah Gulen, the leader of a pragmatic, transnational Islamist Hizmet (service) movement that was strong in the Turkish police, education, journalism and the judiciary. Gulen served Erdogan well, weakening the military and its secularism through his grip on the courts and various other shady manoeuvres and intrigues. The two men, in a faction fight within the Turkish bourgeoisie, fell out over corruption charges made against Erdogan and issues over Turkish intelligence (MIT)[xiii]. The Turkish state under Erdogan has since designated Gulen and his organisation as "terrorist". Erdogan has demanded the extradition of Gulen from the United States for his supposed role in the 2016 coup attempt, but the Americans are unlikely to comply given the weight that the Gulen organisation has for US imperialism and the message it would send to any potential "exile" that was useful for the State Department.

Since the 1980s in particular, there has been a rise of Islamic influence and increasing Islamic fundamentalism throughout the whole Middle East. For example in the election campaign of 1987 the wearing of the headscarf by women in public places such as schools, hospitals and state buildings was a big issue. As one of many counter-actions the army in 1997 opposed the plans of Erbakan to give equal status to the Iman Hatip Lisesi (IHL) as state-run schools. As a result the number of students of IHL dropped from around 500,000 in 1996/7 to around 100,000 in 2004/5. In 1998 Erdogan was condemned to a prison sentence of ten months (released after four) for "inciting religious hatred" and barred from standing in elections and from holding political office. In March 2008 the General State Attorney with the backing of the army was planning to declare the AKP illegal because it was becoming a "point of crystallisation of anti-secular activities" following the ending of the ban on wearing the headscarf at universities. Shortly afterwards the Supreme Court rejected the plan of the State Attorney. Consequently, Erdogan's AKP became all the more determined to trim the power of the army. However, after the split between Gulen and Erdogan there are now even more divisions   between "white and black" Turks, the "Kemalites" and the "religious". In addition the Islamic groups are now divided into two wings. Since the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, all the attempts to "contain" the influence of Islamic forces and their penetration into the state structures have failed; in fact since the 1980's - as elsewhere (for example the rise of the Mujahedeen and Khomeini in Iran at the end of the 70's) - this rise of Islamic fundamentalism of different kinds reflects the more global flight towards an extremely reactionary religious militancy[xiv]. At the same time, with the army having exercised a decade-long iron fist against all oppositional groups (whether Islamic, Kurdish or other) this set up a false polarisation between an army presented as "undemocratic" and opposed to the true "democratic" forces, the AKP, who were no less authoritarian.

Today, the Erdogan clan is running the state as his own company with all the charges of corruption against them long since dropped and those involved in the judicial process around it purged. But behind the Erdogan clan lies a particular form of state totalitarianism, built on reactionary religious exclusion, rabid nationalist speeches and strong imperialist ambitions.

The refugee question manipulated by Turkish imperialism

Again, demonstrating the importance of its geostrategic position, Turkey is also a bridgehead for all the war-torn refugees from the Middle East. But the refugees are also used as a cynical exercise in blackmailing the EU. The EU has been paying large sums to Erdogan-AKP to hold the refugees back and Erdogan has often threatened to "let them go" and head towards Europe. To this end, Turkey has recently demanded another 3 billion euros from Europe by 2018 (Reuters, 16.11.17). The Turkish bourgeoisie has also been profiting from its people-smuggling organisation from Africa to Europe, which also throws a light on Turkey's imperialist aspirations towards the continent. Turkish embassies, consulates, companies and the like have spread across Africa, as have Turkish airlines.  Using cheap, subsidised flights, would-be emigrants can fly from northern and sub-Saharan Africa to Turkey from where they are taken to the borders of Europe with necessary advice[xv] from the organised crime networks that permeate the Turkish state. Several times Erdogan has proposed a visa-free zone for Muslim countries, a sort of "Islamic Schengen" that Europe would see as a serious threat.

Along with Milli Gorus mentioned above, Turkey has a number of "NGO's" that push its imperialist interests. Among these is the "International Humanitarian Organisation" (IHH) that has major health projects in many African countries and is now present in dozens more. Its strengthening has coincided with Erdogan's many trips to Africa and a general build-up of Turkey's "soft" power that goes beyond Africa. The IHH is structured along Muslim Brotherhood "charity work" lines and in fact it contains cadres of the Brotherhood. It was this organisation that, under Erdogan's direction, launched the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" in 2010 which included elements of the left wing of capital that had no problem in cosying-up to their fellow Islamic fundamentalist crew[xvi]. Most of the medicines that the flotilla was carrying in this imperialist charade had expired before running into the subsequent Israeli blockade.

Turkey's use of soft power extends into its ally Pakistan, where its NGO, Kizilay, has built Ottoman-style mosques close to the Indian border. Erdogan has given his support to Pakistan over Kashmir, and in return the Pakistan regime has facilitated his purge of "Gulenist" elements in the Pak-Turk school chain. Both these countries need each other to stand up for their own interests against the US.

Erdogan strengthens his position and authority

After posing as a "friend" and "peace-maker" to the Kurds, soon after he became head of state Erdogan could no longer keep up the facade due to the electoral success of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) which threatened the AKP's parliamentary majority. But his about-face was mainly due to the success of the Kurdish YPG in gaining swathes of territory along the Syrian/Turkish border. Just as the Israeli bourgeoisie would like to be rid of the Palestinians then so too would Turkey with the Kurds. In July 2015 the Turkish military launched a virtual blitzkrieg against Kurdish separatist positions in the south-east, wiping out the wider civilian areas that were sheltering the Kurdish armed fighters.

Following the landslide victory with 49.8% votes for the AKP in 2011, in the June 2014 election this dropped to 40.9%. In addition, for the first time the Kurdish HDP got 13.1% and thus admission to the Turkish parliament. The result meant that Erdogan had not achieved the necessary two-thirds majority needed for changing the constitution. Obsessed with his goal of becoming the "new Sultan" of the neo-Ottoman Empire, Erdogan's AKP ordered the judicial apparatus to begin outlawing the Kurdish HDP. Under the combined effect of state-provoked terror, terrorist attacks from Isis and the PKK, an intimidated population ran into the arms of Erdogan and in the November 2015 election the AKP achieved its necessary majority. Once again repression against the Kurds was reinforced as the party increased its power.

Erdogan strengthened his position by winning the 2017 referendum, changing the Turkish constitution and consolidating broad powers in the hands of his Presidency. Given the loaded nature of the election by the ruling AKP, Erdogan only won by a narrow majority of 51%. It was significant that Turkey's three biggest cities, including Istanbul, voted against him but, according to the Washington Post (17.4.17), he did better than expected among Kurdish voters (most probably terrified by the turn of events). It's not the first narrow escape that Erdogan has had: he also had one during the attempted coup of 2016[xvii]. Erdogan survived the coup stronger and after a Stalinist-type purge that continues to this day: waves of propaganda against "plotters" and "terrorists" have continually emanated from the state while all and any dissent is squashed. In its particular fundamentalist-tinged development of state capitalism, Turkey has moved further away from the European Union; its already shaky role in NATO has become even shakier, unreliable even, and while involved in various diplomatic spats with the US and NATO to the extent of pulling out of exercises with the latter (Times of Israel, 17.11.17), it has moved, tentatively, towards friendlier, almost tactical but very erratic relations with Russia.

Even though presented by the media as the "new Sultan" and Erdogan himself as the architect of the new modern "Islamic Turkey" after Ataturk's "modern (secular) Turkey", and one which differs from the Iranian "model" of a theocratic state, this project is in no way just the ambition of a megalomaniac leader. As mentioned above, it represents the revival of the imperialist ambitions of a Turkey in a fragmenting and increasingly chaotic imperialist nexus. In fact all parts of the ruling class under the AKP have been engaged in these aspirations.

What next for Turkey and the working class?

Erdogan is pressing ahead with his project with very openly defined ambitions to make Turkey a superpower in 20-30 years. That this appears a hare-brained scheme takes no account of the present irrationality of decomposing capitalism. For this new "Sultanate" to come about the "Kurdish question" needs settling once and for all and relations with Russia need to become closer. As his power has increased, Erdogan has moved away from NATO, distanced himself from the EU and Germany and sees the US as an unfriendly force. Turkey is not in a state of declared war but is engulfed in war operations outside of its own territory and is more and more the battleground with those groups which the Turkish army has attacked within or outside Turkey (PKK, Isis); the country itself now risks sliding into a spiral of militarist chaos while surrounded by millions of refugees and general imperialist instability.

There are some unpredictable factors in play though. Given the nature of present US foreign policy under Trump, the increasing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its backlash against Lebanon, the possibility of Israeli military strikes in the region, all these are factors that are likely to have an effect on areas of fundamental Turkish interests: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon[xviii], Gaza, etc.

The impressive economic performance of the last years in Turkey, which underpins Erdogan's "popularity", looks to be short-term and under threat from geo-political instability, which means that this advantage will be petering out at the same time as the emigration safety-valve is closing and debt is rising. No amount of religious intoxication and delusions about a new "empire" will make up for that. The weight of the war economy, which swallows up enormous sums, is also likely to have an effect on the living conditions of the working class. The Gezi Park demonstrations in 2013 followed a wave of anti-war and anti-government demonstrations in the south that brought together protesters across ethnic, gender and religious divides in places. The working class was present in these protests but not with a strong sense of class identity. Is the proletariat prepared to slave and die for Erdogan's projects? The working class in Turkey has shown historically that it has a sound tradition of struggle and has pursued it with militancy. It needs to stay on its own terrain and develop autonomous struggle, refusing to be drawn into nationalist and pro or anti-Erdogan campaigns.

Boxer, 25.11.17

 

 

ICC DAY OF DISCUSSION ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

LONDON

11 NOVEMBER 2017

The following account consists of the presentations given by the CWO and the ICC, and the summaries of the discussion produced by two close sympathisers of the ICC. We hope it gives a clear enough picture of what was a very stimulating and positive meeting. Copies of the audio recording are available on request (write to [email protected] [10])

MORNING SESSION

INTRODUCTION

ICC: Welcome to one of a series of ICC meetings being held on this topic. Meetings are to be held in Berlin, Zurich, Antwerp, Paris and other places. One difference in this meeting is that one presentation will be made by the Communist Workers’ Organisation. Both organisations defend the proletarian character of 1917. 20 years ago there was a similar meeting defending the proletarian nature of 1917. There will be plenty of time for open discussion, we expect agreement and disagreements, but in a comradely manner.

PRESENTATION BY THE CWO:

On the Working Class Character of the Russian Revolution

“On the evening of October 24th [6 November new style] the Provisional Government had at its disposal little more than 25,000 men. On the evening of October 25th, when preparations were underway for the storming of the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks assembled about 20,000 Red Guards, sailors and soldiers before that last refuge of the Provisional Government. But within the palace there were not more than 3000 defenders, and many of those left their posts during the night. Thanks to the Bolsheviks’ overwhelming superiority there were no serious battles in the capital from October 24th to October 26th, and the total number of those killed on both sides was no more than 15, with no more than 60 wounded.

During these critical hours, as all the main strategic points in the city passed under Bolshevik control (telephone and telegraph exchanges, bridges, railroad stations, the Winter Palace etc.), Petrograd continued on the whole to go about its normal business.  Most of the soldiers remained in the barracks, the plants and the factories continued to operate, and in the schools none of the classes were interrupted.  There were no strikes or mass demonstrations such had accompanied the February Revolution. The movie theatres (called cinematographias in those days) were filled, there were regular performances in all the theatres, and people strolled as usual on the Nevsky Prospect. The ordinary non-political person would not even have noticed the historic events taking place; even on the streetcar lines, the main form of public transportation in 1917, service remained normal. It was in one of those streetcars that Lenin, in disguise, and his bodyguard Eino Rahya travelled to Smolny late on the evening of the 24th.”

Such was the picture painted by the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev and you can find similar accounts in Trotsky and John Reed.  The lack of drama and the apparently merely military takeover have fed a bourgeois lie which has now endured for a century that the October Revolution was simply a coup d’état by a band of ruthless adventurers who stole a democratic revolution from the working class.  Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the capitalist class, not to mention modern-day Mensheviks and some anarchists all over the world, still feel they have to perpetuate this myth.  And of course the final coda years later in Stalinism is also be put down as the logical outcome of the actions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917.

Of course they all have their different ideological reasons for writing off the Russian Revolution.  For the defenders of the capitalist order, dismissing the only time the working class anywhere was in the saddle in any capitalist state for any length of time as a coup, is essential in order to maintain the idea that the working class can never successfully overthrow the capitalist system.

Before we go any further we need to state two premises on which the CWO and others in the Communist Left base their views.  The first is that socialism is not something that can be achieved by a minority but only by an active movement involving the mass of the people who alone can transform society by their own activity instead of being merely passive voters expecting someone else to rule them.  The second premise is that the Russian revolution cannot be explained only in Russian terms but as the first step in an international challenge to a capitalist system which had brought humanity to its knees in an imperialist war.  The Russian and other revolutionaries at the time like Rosa Luxemburg all saw that the problem of socialism could only be posed in Russia – it required revolutions everywhere else to answer the question.

As it is the tragedy of the Russian Revolution is that the force created by the working class in 1917 in the Bolshevik Party not only helped to bring it victory but that same force also later became the agent of the counter-revolution.  However, we will be looking at the errors of the Revolution and the mistakes of the Bolsheviks in this afternoon’s session.  We have been tasked in this session with looking at the facts of 1917 and establishing the proletarian nature of the Russia Revolution.

In this we will be addressing two basic lies:

1. That the October Revolution was just a coup; and
2. That the Bolsheviks were only in favour of the power of workers’ bodies like soviets and factory committees for their own ends and stifled them as soon as they came to power.

The first lie that bourgeois histories try to perpetuate about 1917 is that the February Revolution was good and democratic and the October Revolution was bad and dictatorial.  In fact we would argue that these were but two moments in the same process – the process of the Russian proletariat groping its way towards an entirely new political structure which they had discovered for themselves in their earlier revolution in 1905.  February was not a “democratic revolution” but a proletarian one which the bourgeoisie and their allies in the working class tried to steal from the workers.

February to April

The February Revolution arose out of the elemental struggle of the Russian working class.  It was as predicted as it was unexpected. 

The prediction was easily made since three years of war had revealed the complete inability of a reactionary monarchy to muster what resources the state had to even properly clothe and arm the millions they sent into battle.  The monarchy had been tottering under a crescendo of strikes from 1912 on.  The declaration of war brought a temporary halt to these for about a year but from July 1915 they were on the rise again.  Every workers’ anniversary brought more strikes and more and more strikes included political demands like “Down with the war”.  However it was the inability of the regime to feed the population that led to the patience of the working class finally snapping.

Then unexpected was that no-one thought that a women’s demonstration at that time would be the spark.  Women at first started bread riots and then on International Women’s Day came out on strike bringing hundreds of thousands of other workers out too in demonstrations attacked by the police with clubs.  No-one died the first day but as the movement continued political groups joined in and brought out more factories.  The regime suddenly realised the danger and now began firing on largely unarmed crowds.  For 36 hours the issue hung in the balance but as more and more were killed the workers (again most often women) began to talk to the troops and win over their neutrality to the point where several regiments mutinied and came over to the revolution.

After a week or so the Tsar abdicated but not before the landed aristocracy, the industrialists and the propertied in general had realised that they needed to try to cut this revolution off by announcing the formation of a Provisional Government.

Whilst they were deciding the fate of the revolution in gilded salons the workers were still fighting the “pharaohs” (police) on the streets.  In one demonstration the call went up for the formation of a soviet.  The takeover attempt of the bourgeoisie was about to be challenged by the workers’ memory of 1905.  However if one set of thieves is not enough Russia produced two in March 1917. The second were the left parties – the Mensheviks and SRs.  Because they had cooperated with the war effort they had more political influence at first and so it was they who set up the soviet in the same building as the PG and quickly called for delegates.  The most revolutionary workers were not even aware of it and in fact the first soviet was very unrepresentative as many more soldiers got in than workers.  In fact Shlyapnikov reckoned that there were no more than 50 workers in it when it was formed.

This is important.  In every proletarian revolution there is not just one enemy – the opposing class – but there is always within the working class itself anti-revolutionary elements who will insist that this is not the right time for the working class to take over.  They may even have a lot of influence inside the working class since their promise of reforms seems a practicable way to make life just a little better.  Unless there is an opposing voice inside the working class then the dominant ideas will be those for the preservation of the system. 

Inside the Russian working class there was already the makings of a real revolutionary opposition.  At the beginning it included anarchists, Inter-district committee (Mezhraionsty) members and even some radical SRs but the largest, best organised and most linked to the working class was the Bolsheviks.  Although a minority of about 8000 in March 1917 it was overwhelmingly working class.  Above all it was the one party which had a clear position on the war.

After February the class war intensified in the factories and in the villages. In the factories the class war intensified after February.  Unions were formed and demands for the eight hour day increased.   Organisationally though the unions were not the most significant new bodies.  The most striking feature was the increase in the number and self-confidence of the factory committees.  Many of these were based on an older tradition of stewards’ (starosty) committees and were mostly elected by the whole workforce with responsibility for “control” (which, except for the state’s war industry factories, meant supervision and inspection – at this point they did not aim to manage the factory).  S.A. Smith compares them to the shop stewards committees on Red Clydeside and Sheffield, the obleute (revolutionary shop stewards in Germany and the “internal commissions” in Italy.  (S.A. Smith Red Petrograd p.57-9). 

Food prices were doubling approximately every other month during 1917 and the fact that the Provisional Government was even worse at solving the transport question than Tsarism meant that bread rations were cut from 1lb a day to three quarters of a pound by April.  Worse was to come since only 230 rail wagons containing food reached St Petersburg/ Petrograd each day in April 1917, compared with a daily total of 351 a year earlier.  Only one third of coal needs were reaching the capital by May and works like Putilov were closed down for weeks on end in August and September. In addition to these temporary closures 568 factories went bankrupt leading to increased unemployment.  Not surprisingly this led to a massive increase in strikes as we saw in the previous chapter.  These radicalised the workers still further.  As the leading academic analyst of these strikes concluded:

“The strikes which swept Russia in the summer of 1917 had more than an economic significance.  They were a sign of political disillusionment – a reflection of the fact that workers felt cheated of the gains they had made as a result of the February Revolution”.  (S.A. Smith Red Petrograd p.119 – all figures here stem from this source or from M. Ferro The Bolshevik Revolution – A Social History p. 160ff)           

In addition the Provisional Government could not or would not solve the two other desperate problems of Russia – peace and land.

And this is what makes the Bolsheviks the class party in 1917. But it was not a given in March 1917.  Contrary to the myths of both Stalin and the capitalist historians the Bolsheviks were never a disciplined bunch who just blindly followed orders from on high.  They were always full of different factions who debated fiercely amongst themselves.  This was still true after February. At first Pravda (Truth) the Bolshevik paper under the control of the Petersburg committee campaigned against the war and was distinctly hostile to the Provisional Government as well as the Menshevik policy of cooperating with it. However when Stalin, Kameniev and Muranov returned from Siberian exile they took over the paper and suddenly it was talking like the Mensheviks in supporting the Provisional Government and even talking about carrying on the war.  But these Central Committee members were totally out of touch with the Petersburg Bolshevik Party members who were outraged and demanded their expulsion from the Party.

This was the background to Lenin’s famous return from Switzerland in April where he not only gave voice to the views of the Bolshevik workers but also put it in an internationalist framework by announcing that the Russian Revolution was the first step in an international revolution and that the first task of the workers was to establish soviet power in Russia.

It took several weeks for Lenin’s April Theses to win over the majority of the Party but it now was clear as to its perspectives for 1917.

The July Days

The number of strikes continued to increase despite the Provisional Government and the Menshevik/Essaire (SR) majority in the Soviet attempting to calm them.  However the political scene exploded once again when the leader of the bourgeois party the Kadets in the Provisional Government issued his Note to the Allied powers assuring them that Russia would stick to the imperialist bargain the Tsar had made with them and that the war would be fought to victory.  The uproar from the workers caused Milyukov to resign and it also emboldened the Bolsheviks to plan a demonstration against the Provisional Government in June.  The rest of the Soviet Executive protested at what they saw as a Bolshevik provocation and the Bolsheviks called the demonstration off. However the Mensheviks and SRs then thought to drive home their victory by calling their own demonstration in support of the Provisional Government and themselves.  It backfired magnificently.  The Menshevik Sukhanov tells us that of the banners carried in that demonstration 90% carried Bolshevik slogans like “Down with the Provisional Government” “All Power to the Soviets”.  The demonstration also coincided with the news that the offensive of General Brusilov after initial successes had collapsed into humiliating retreat.

These events led some in the First Machine Gun Regiment, amongst the anarchists, Kronstadt sailors and even in the Bosheviks’ Military Organisation to conclude that “All Power to the Soviets” was more than just a slogan of orientation but one whose time had come.

They decided that the time was now ripe for an armed demonstration in Petersburg which has gone down in history as the July Days.  This episode is often cited by reactionary historians like Pipes to show that the Bolsheviks were putschist and got it wrong; but in fact, it demonstrates that the Bolsheviks were neither putschists nor Blanquists because they refused to support a premature uprising which did not yet have the support of the majority.  Lenin was actually on holiday when the July Days started and hurried back to Petersburg – addressing the demonstrators from the Bolshevik HQ he basically told them not to be provoked and have a pleasant demonstration, but told the leader of the Bolshevik Military Organisation that he ought to be “thrashed” for not preventing the movement.   The demonstrators ignored Lenin and marched on the city centre only to be ambushed by soldiers loyal to the PG.  Hundreds died and the PG now spread the rumour that the Bolsheviks were in the pay of the Germans. The Bolsheviks were declared an illegal organisation.  It cost them at first because they accepted that those who demonstrated did so out of a mistaken reading of their policy (the Bolshevik press was smashed, some Bolsheviks were killed, others imprisoned and some fled to exile) but by remaining with the masses they held on to their base in the working class. Lenin justified it thus:

“Mistakes are inevitable when the masses are fighting but the communists remain with the masses, see these mistakes, explain them to the masses, try to get them rectified and strive perseveringly for the victory of class consciousness over spontaneity”. (Collected Works Volume 29, p. 396 emphasis in the original)

Remaining with the masses was to stand them in good stead a month later because by August society was splitting further and further into two class camps.  In July Kerensky, an SR, became Prime Minister, but after the outlawing of the Bolsheviks the bourgeois right were now becoming more confident and they looked for a strong man to not only wipe out the Bolsheviks but get rid of the Soviets as well.  They found this in General Lavr Kornilov who Kerensky appointed to be C-in-C after Brusilov.

August: the Kornilov Affair

“In previous crises, in April, June and July, the spontaneous initiatives of Bolshevik and anarchist soldiers had caused street demonstrations. The leading elements in the Bolshevik Party had been forced, in the end, to assume responsibility for a movement launched by the young men of the military organisation. As the cinema films show, there were considerably fewer workers than soldiers or sailors.

In the Kornilov affair, when the action was defensive, the reverse happened. The proletarian districts were the first to mobilise, recruiting 40,000 men and arming 25,000 from the factories through their committees or from weapons left by the Kronstadt sailors during the July Days ... Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Skorokhodov, this committee co-ordinated its actions with the other committees of the capital, planning for cars to go round to maintain communication, guarding factories, arranging information briefings at set times and the like ...  The people were mentally prepared, and the means for defence were made available, such that when the organisations appealed, every citizen, tree, house and stone was set to oppose the advance of Kornilov, whose telegrams failed to arrive and whose locomotives got no water. The ground crumbled under his feet.”

(Marc Ferro, The Bolshevik Revolution — A Social History (1980), p. 56)

What was clear was that the Kornilov Affair had led to an enormous leap forward in class consciousness:

“The soviets, now distinctly radical in outlook, emerged from the crisis with their popularity amongst the masses immensely enhanced. Revolutionary Russia was more widely saturated than ever before with competing grassroots political organisations and revolutionary committees. Workers had become more militant and better organized, and significant numbers of them had obtained weapons. At the same time, democratic committees in the army, by virtue of their leading role in organizing soldiers against the Kornilov movement, were rejuvenated. Within the Petrograd garrison, control of many regimental committees passed from more moderate elements into the hands of the Bolsheviks”. (A. Rabinowitch The Bolsheviks Come to Power p.166)

Far from taking advantage of this to assert the Bolsheviks right to power Lenin raised the possibility that there could still be a peaceful development of the revolution if the Mensheviks and SRs would lead the soviets in the process of taking power.  At the beginning of September he called for compromise.

“The Russian revolution is experiencing so abrupt and original a turn that we, as a party, may offer a voluntary compromise – true, not to our direct and main class enemy the bourgeoisie, but to our nearest adversaries, the ruling petty-bourgeois-democratic parties, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.

We may offer a compromise to these parties only by way of exception, and only by virtue of the particular situation, which obviously last only a very short time.  And I think we should do so.  The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of SRs and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.

Now, and only now, perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way.  In all probability it could secure the peaceful advance of the whole Russian revolution, and provide exceptionally good chances for great strides in the world movement towards peace and the victory of socialism”.  (On Compromises in Collected Works Vol. 25 p. 206 emphasis in the original)

This is hardly the picture of the power-mad vanguard partyist that bourgeois and anarchist histories paint.  Lenin does not demand Bolshevik party power but soviet power even if they are headed by the Mensheviks and SRs.  It was no isolated offer. He repeated the idea of a peaceful development of the revolution a fortnight later.

“Power to the Soviets – this is the only way to make further progress gradual, peaceful and smooth keeping perfect pace with the political awareness and resolve of the majority of the people and with their own experience.  Power to the Soviets means the complete transfer of the country’s administration and economic control into the hands of the workers and peasants, to whom nobody dare offer resistance, and who, through practice, through their own experience, would soon learn how to distribute the land, products and grain properly”. (One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution in Collected Works Vol 25 pp 373 emphases in the original)

But the Mensheviks and SRs not only rejected any compromise - they rejected the whole idea of soviet power and did all they could to undermine it after Kornilov.  They always regarded the soviets as temporary until the Constituent Assembly (which would then liquidate them). In fact they delayed the calling of the Second Soviet Congress (they were supposed to be called every 3 months) by nearly two months to avoid the Bolshevik majority replacing them as the EC.

By September the Bolsheviks are winning elections in most soviets and even in city dumas where other classes also can vote.  They were now some 350,000 spread across Russia.  Why were they so successful? They answered to the working class demand for soviet power and the promised that they would end the war.  They were the only organisation to coherently offer this. This wasn’t just fancy theory dreamed up by intellectuals but responded to the evolution of the class consciousness of the Russian working class. John Reed tells us that in a Obukhovsky factory a meeting was discussing the seizure of power and a soldier from the Rumanian front shouted out: “We will hold on with all our might until the peoples of the whole world rise to help us”. And Rosa Luxemburg from her prison cell could also write: “The fact that the Bolsheviks in their policy have steered their course entirely towards the world revolution of the proletariat is precisely the most brilliant testimony to their political far-sightedness, their principled firmness and the bold scope of their policy”. This internationalist perspective continued even after the October Revolution. Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin all said on numerous occasions that without a European or at least a German revolution the Soviet republic was doomed. The final accusation against the Bolsheviks is that they only pretended that they supported the working class but as soon as they got in power they began to build up party power at the expense of the workers.  This is a travesty of the facts.  Obviously in the end we all know that the Bolsheviks became the agents of the counter-revolution but this was neither premeditated nor inevitable and the process of degeneration really only began in the early summer of 1918. Let’s look at their record in that first “heroic period” (Kritsman) of the revolution before March 1918. The Second Soviet Congress overwhelmingly accepted the power presented to it by the Bolsheviks and the Executive Committee approved the setting up of a Council of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom), made up of Bolsheviks and Left SRs (although the latter did not take up their seats until December.  All other parties walked out of the Soviet and refused to accept anything other than a return to a coalition with the bourgeoisie. The new government announced Russia’s withdrawal from the war.  It legalised peasant land seizures and workers’ control in the factories.  Officials were paid only the average wage of a skilled industrial worker.  Laws brought in equal pay for women, divorce at the request of either partner, abortion and equal status for children of unmarried parents. Homosexuality was decriminalised.  Church and State were separated and freedom of religion was established (thus ending the legal oppression of Jews). Other social achievements were the introduction of free education (alongside a mass literacy campaign), free maternity homes and nurseries. And “Soviet Russia was the first nation in history to witness the birth across its land of thousands of communal organizations spontaneously engaging in collective life” (R, Stites Revolutionary Dreams) Nationalities of the old Russian empire were given the right to self-determination. Most of this took place in the first six months of the revolution.  During this time the soviet principle was extended.  400 or so more soviets were established across Russia, the principle of immediate recall of delegates was established and Congresses of Soviets were taking place every three months.  In this same period the Bolsheviks (soon to take the name Communists) understood that the party can lead but it cannot make a revolution.  This is the task of the working class itself.  Lenin told the Seventh Congress of the RCP(B) “… socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party.  It can be implemented only by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves”. (Collected Works Volume 27 p. 135)

At the time Lenin was equally adamant:

“Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life.  Let the workers’ control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain… Socialism cannot be decreed from above.  Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.” (Collected Works Vol. 26 p.288) To sum up, the Bolshevik Party of 1917 did not spring from the pages of What is to be Done?, a document forgotten by everyone including its author as belonging to a past period and no longer valid, but from the process of revolution itself starting with that in 1905. In the course of this revolutionary process the Bolsheviks were always the closest to the working class, both in Russia and internationally, and in the course of it, they alone of all the social democratic factions, abandoned dogma to become the authentic voice of the working class.  And this was not in just a Russian revolution but in the international working class revolution.  We know that this revolution will not be repeated in the same form again but October 1917 remains a great inspiration for anyone who can see that only world-wide workers’ revolution can save humanity from the even greater horrors which capitalism is preparing for us. Jock for the CWO

DISCUSSION

Was October a soviet revolution or a coup by the Bolsheviks?

This was posed by a comrade from the SPGB which defends the latter position.

In response, firstly the Russian Revolution is the entry of the masses onto the stage of history; revolutionaries had to run to catch up. The presentation showed clearly that the Russian revolution was not a coup d'etat. This simply doesn’t correspond to reality; there was a massive development of the movement from February to October, which is what enabled the seizure of power through the actions of a relative minority, but one organised by the soviets. 

All the bourgeois propaganda pushes the idea of a coup by Bolsheviks and we have to challenge this; there was a huge development of self-organisation, much more directed and focused than in February. The fact is the Bolsheviks were the most experienced militants – otherwise the leadership would have been taken by others like the Mensheviks, and the provisional government was already extremely unrepresentative.

It was emphasised that we’re not required to defend everything that happened in Russia, or everything the Bolsheviks did, but at least to begin with they were representative of the working class, the rank and file Bolsheviks being the most militant. The Bolsheviks took up slogans raised by the class as a whole. The ability of Lenin in particular to learn from the masses, and to learn from mistakes, was crucial.

We also have to challenge the idea that the Russian Revolution is in the past and has nothing to do with today. Today people don’t think a revolt is possible and we need to stress that the working class is capable of organising and envisaging a new world. Despite the treason of social democracy in 1914 which caused a temporary crisis in the workers’ movement, the fact is the war meant the working class had to react, just as it is forced to react by the crisis today.

There was some discussion about the extent of enthusiasm for war in1914; it was argued that many militant workers remained anti-war, like the French syndicalists, Rosa Luxemburg and the future Spartacists in Germany. Other comrades stressed the extent of the patriotic orgy, described vividly by Rosa Luxemburg in the Junius Pamphlet. But despite the defeat the working class quickly recovered, with strikes and opposition movements less than a year after war began.

So the events in Russia were the culmination of the growth of resistance to the war internationally, which the Bolsheviks were able to recognise as a first step towards a world revolution. The war itself was brought to an end by the working class.

In 1914 the effects of defeat were short-lived. Bourgeois propaganda was simplistic and workers still had a clear sense of their class identity, whereas World War 2 was only possible because the working class was already defeated and bourgeois ideology was more sophisticated.

Today the conditions are very difficult for the working class, with demoralisation and widespread ideas that the working class doesn’t exist anymore. There are widespread ideas that communism has already failed and only leads to the gulag and Stalinism. This is a very strong factor in today’s situation.

But for us Russia is still the only example in history when the working class seized political power on a national scale, only three years after workers were drowned in nationalism and war. For us today, and for the Third International at the time, the war and the revolutionary wave were proof that capitalism was obsolete and in decline. As Rosa Luxemburg warned, capitalism had become not only a fetter but a clear and present danger to the future of humanity. The Russian Revolution is proof the working class can respond to this.

How the bourgeoisie is covering the events

It is significant that the bourgeoisie is not making a big campaign today about the Russian Revolution. It shows despite the difficulties of today’s situation the bourgeoisie does not feel confident about the whole idea of revolution.

There is also clear attempt to portray the Russian Revolution as particular to Russia. We need to challenge this. Capitalism today is still a decadent system.

Most bourgeois histories abandon all objectivity when it comes to the events of October; it was a ‘coup’. Today many in the proletarian camp, who want a social change, also accept this bourgeois narrative of the ‘alien’ Bolsheviks. TV ‘reconstructions’ show key figures but with little or no mention of the masses. Everything is personalised, eg. the July Days is explained as Lenin ‘bottling it’. This is the level of understanding, whereas in fact Trotsky had a whole analysis of why the workers weren’t ready, which allowed the Bolsheviks to avoid bourgeois provocations – thus disproving the myth that they were simply ‘power hungry’, whereas in Germany the Spartacists fell into the trap and suffered a terrible defeat. The lesson for us is the necessity for a party that can speak truth to the workers.

The question of the war – defeat for the working class and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks

A Trotskyist sympathiser raised two questions: on the role of the peasantry, which the presentation had not dealt with, and on the role the Bolsheviks were able to play which supports the idea that there must be at least a nucleus of experienced militants before the revolution; the massive growth of the Bolsheviks during summer 1917 of inexperienced members and the later ‘Lenin levy’ helped to destroy the Party.

On the role of the peasantry; the peasants deserted the front and slowly took over the land, often collectively, and with Bolshevik support when the Socialist Revolutionaries still in government opposed it.

There was no disagreement with the need for a nucleus of the party in the class if the workers are to make the revolution. The Bolsheviks had a solid mass of workers in Petrograd able to survive arrests.

The Bolsheviks were able to play a leading role in 1917 partly because of position they took against the war; ‘turn imperialist war into civil war’…  Their loyalty to internationalism was key and ‘Socialism in one country’ was the death of this. The Bolshevik position was ‘Down with the war’; revolutionary defeatism was not active until 1917 when defencism was seen to be the key issue.

It was pointed out also that the bourgeois parties in Russia were pro-war because Russian capitalism was in hock to French and British capitalism. The factories in Russia were run under foreign contracts, while the factory committees were key to the political opposition to the factory owners, the Czar and the war.  

The February Revolution – bourgeois or proletarian?

Were the workers simply used as a battering ram to get rid of the Czar and put the bourgeoisie in power? This was the view of the comrade from the SPGB

In response, the reality was that the bourgeoisie had no power – it passed to the Petrograd soviet. The fiction of a bourgeois revolution was pushed by the Mensheviks and SRs. It was the workers who made the February revolution but it remained unfinished business. We have to see the Russian Revolution as a process rather than isolate events as the bourgeoisie does in its propaganda; the return of Lenin, April Theses, July Days, October.

The anarchist interpretation of events – the role of the Bolsheviks and the factory committees

A comrade from a class struggle anarchist background said he regretted the absence of more from this political current at the meeting to put up a robust argument against the Bolsheviks.

He personally agreed with the ICC manifesto and the CWO presentation and with the discussion. But while the Bolsheviks were the most popular organisation within the working class he also felt they were also inherently authoritarian and statist.

The factory committees were the most important and militant expressions of the revolution in Russia. Re: the book by Maurice Brinton (The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1975), isn’t he right when he says that the Bolsheviks tried to crush factory committees?

In response it was pointed out that the Bolsheviks were divided over the factory committees – in fact the factory committees themselves were divided about their role! Some wanted workers control or workers’ self-management while others said there is no point: we should wait for the world revolution. Lenin thought the factory committees should run the economy on the principle that that socialism cannot be controlled from above. But he later changed his mind.

With hindsight we know how the story ends but we can’t draw a straight line from What Is To Be Done to Stalin. The Bolsheviks and Lenin changed their views due to the events of 1905 and, most importantly, the First World War. The Bolsheviks were from October 1917 to June 1918 were about as good as the working class can get. They were made by the working class and not something imposed from above.  

END OF MORNING SESSION

AFTERNOON SESSION

PRESENTATION BY THE ICC

On the degeneration of the revolution

This presentation will be based mainly on the section in the Manifesto which deals with the degeneration of the revolution and the errors of the Bolsheviks. This section begins as a polemic with other currents in the revolutionary movement: internationalist anarchists and councilists, whose ancestors may have supported the revolution in the beginning, but who later decided that October 1917 had been no more than a bourgeois revolution – in which they are joined by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. For us it is necessary to face a reality of proletarian life under capitalism: the constant tendency towards degeneration and betrayal under the weight of the dominant ideas. Those who portray the Russian revolution as bourgeois evade this question. It is perhaps more ‘consistent’ on the part of the anarchists, some of whom have always rejected Marxism and trace their origins to the likes of Bakunin, but with marxist currents like the council communists or the ‘Impossibilists’ of the SPGB, it skirts round the obvious fact that they, like the Bolsheviks, have the same origins in international social democracy.  Our method is that of Rosa Luxemburg, and later of the Italian Communist left, who were able to make profound criticisms of the Bolshevik party from a position of total solidarity with the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks, and who understood that the errors of the latter could only be understood in the context of the isolation of the revolution. Situating the October revolution and its degeneration in the framework of isolation and the terrible siege mounted by the world bourgeoisie is not, as many anarchists claim, an ‘excuse’ for the errors of the Bolsheviks, but it does enable us to understand why a proletarian party could make such errors and why they were to prove so fatal.  The key thing for us is to draw the lessons of these mistakes so that they are not repeated, even if the conditions of any future revolution will be very far from a carbon copy of the Russian experience. These are lessons that could only be drawn in the light of the whole experience, and could not have been fully grasped beforehand. Thus, for example, in State and Revolution Lenin was able to overcome the ‘amnesia’ of the socialist movement regarding the lessons of the Commune – the necessity to dismantle the existing bourgeois state – but he could not yet clearly see why the new Commune state would itself present a danger to the progress of the revolution.  The Manifesto points to the following essential lessons:  

·         The absolute necessity for the extension of the revolution. This of course was understood already by the Bolsheviks who knew that without the world revolution they were doomed, but they couldn’t know entirely the manner in which this doom would take place. The Bolsheviks’ main fear was that they would be overthrown by invading (and homegrown) counter-revolutionary armies: they didn’t sufficiently grasp the danger of an internal counter-revolution. Furthermore, recognising the impossibility of ‘socialism in one country’ was necessary but not sufficient. Contrary to the later views of the Trotskyists, even when they were still a proletarian current, there could not be ‘workers’ states’, albeit degenerated, surviving in a capitalist world for decades. Isolation meant not only that you couldn’t construct socialism: it also meant that you could not sustain the political rule of the working class.

·          What was definitively clarified by the Russian experience was that the role of the party is not to take political power on behalf of the workers, and not to get entangled with the state apparatus. This idea of the party as a “government in waiting” was to a greater or lesser extent held by the Marxist movement in general, not just by the Bolsheviks: Luxemburg for example declared that the Spartacists would only take power on the basis of a clear majority will in the working class. But even this idea shows the weight of parliamentary ideas on the workers’ movement: the council system, with the possibility of instant recall of delegates, is incompatible with the idea of the party holding power for a given period since a majority one day could turn into a minority the next. The Bolsheviks were themselves ambiguous on this question: Trotsky, for example, saw why the October insurrection should be carried out in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, a soviet organ, and not the party, as Lenin had at one point suggested. But with the isolation of the revolution and the disintegration of any idea of a “coalition” with other revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks began to make a virtue out of a necessity and argue for the inevitability of the proletarian dictatorship being exerted by the communist party alone. These conceptions reinforced the gulf between the party and the class, while at the same time the attempt to run the machinery of state prohibited the party from playing its true role as the most radical fraction of the class movement and culminated in the bureaucratic death of the party.

·          This idea of the party dictatorship is closely linked to the question of violence, terror, and, in the end, the problem of morality: the revolution cannot be advanced by using methods that contradict its goals. For the working class, the end cannot justify the means. Socialism cannot be carried out by a minority – as Lenin constantly emphasised in the early phase of the revolution – and still less can it be imposed on the majority by force. We are with Luxemburg who argued that the idea of the Red Terror, understood as generalised state violence against all sectors of the population, was incompatible with the revolutionary project, and with Miasnikov who understood that the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 opened the door to “the abyss”. In the wake of Kronstadt, the rejection of the use of violence to settle disputes within the working class must be seen as a principle. The idea that the revolution can use any means at hand to further its ends is most often associated with counter-revolutionary Stalinism – for whom the methods of terror are perfectly compatible with its real aim: the consolidation of a brutal capitalist regime.  But the notion that the party must exert its dictatorship on behalf of and if necessary against the class as a whole lives on in the proletarian camp: it is defended by the Bordigists above all. But present day Bordigism has only arrived at this position by burying the real contribution of the Italian communist left from which it claims descent, since the latter’s investigations led it to recognise first that the party cannot use violence against the class and must not become enmeshed in the transitional state; and second, particularly through the work of its successors in the French communist left, to explicitly reject the identification between the proletarian dictatorship and the dictatorship of the party;

·          The work of these fractions has led the ICC to a position which is controversial even within those parts of the communist left which reject the Bordigist idea of the party’s role: that the transitional state, though a necessary evil, does not have a proletarian character and is most vulnerable to the pressures of the counter-revolution. The experience of Russia showed that it may be necessary to create instruments (such as a standing army) which have a definitely statist function and which contain an inherent threat to the autonomous organs of the working class. In Russia, the Red Army not only quickly began to reproduce the hierarchical norms of bourgeois armies, but even more crucially, was accompanied by the dissolution of the workers’ militias, which meant that the factory committees and workers’ councils no longer embodied the armament of the working class. At the same time, the Soviet state was not only made up of proletarian organs, but also by the representative bodies of other classes, which, although allied to the working class, nevertheless had their own interests to defend. These problems will not appear in exactly the same form in the future, given the changes that have come about in the composition of the global working class, but in essence they will continue to be posed in any revolutionary situation.

·          Regarding the economic and social measures to be carried out by the proletarian power, the Russian revolution has demonstrated that state capitalism is not a step towards socialism, as some of the Bolsheviks believed, but is always a means for strengthening the capitalist relationship. At the same time, the programme of self-management, the creation of a federation of ‘independent’ production units linked by commodity exchange, as advocated by the anarcho-syndicalists of the time and further theorised by the likes of Cornelius Castoriadis, also fails to transcend the horizon of capitalist relations and, like state capitalism, is seen as being achievable within the context of a single nation state. Again, the economic measures the proletariat takes in the first phases of the revolution must be compatible with the ultimate goal of communism, but at the same time they cannot be confused with the true communist transformation which can only be achieved when the revolution has triumphed on a world scale. For this reason our polemic is also directed against another current which is critical of both the state capitalist and self-management models: the “communisers”, who tend to revive old anarchist conceptions by arguing that you can by-pass the problem of political power and proceed to an immediate communisation of social life. This again tends to evade the problem of the international extension of the revolution. But above all, it inverses the real process of the communist transformation by insisting that the proletariat must immediately negate itself and merge into humanity, whereas the new human community starts with the self-affirmation of the proletariat and is completed when the whole of humanity has been integrated into the proletarian condition. This is the only abolition of the proletariat that communists can advocate.

In many ways, the problem of the self-affirmation of the proletariat is the central problem of the revolution, above all after a series of traumas and changes in the life of capital have undermined the old sense of class identity but not replaced it with a new one. This problem was in many ways posed during the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011,  a movement which was predominantly proletarian in composition, and proletarian in many of its methods (assemblies,  affirmation of internationalism, etc), but in which most of its protagonists saw themselves not as part of the working class but as “citizens” demanding a “real democracy”.   The class struggle of the future will only become explicitly revolutionary and communist by resolving this paradox.

Alf, for the ICC

DISCUSSION

The essential content of the discussion on the disintegration of the Russian Revolution (RR) is in fact embedded in the presentation on this issue: the isolation of the RR due to the defeat of attempts to extend it through revolutionary action in other countries (notably Germany) and the exhaustion of the workers, soldiers and revolutionary layers of the peasantry through invasion and civil war, leading to a real decimation of revolutionary forces and a political degeneration accelerated by errors and erroneous conceptions held by the class as a whole and the Bolshevik Party in particular. Similarly the present-day conceptions of the ‘communisers’, also raised in the discussion, are dealt with in the presentation (and continued in the discussion thread on this site https://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/mark/14433/working-class-identity [11]

Other issues raised included:

Was the very conception of a communist bastion or beacon a hangover from the bourgeois revolution? Absolutely not. ‘History will not forgive us if we don’t act’ said Lenin, in 1917 understanding (and even under-estimating) the international extent and depth of revolt against war, privation and the ruling classes held responsible. The revolution was indeed an inspiration to the subsequent uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Italy; the massive strikes in Britain, the US and elsewhere. It was the defeat of these revolts – the failure of the revolution to extend internationally – and the subsequent attempt by the party to ‘hold on at all costs’, to make virtues out of perceived necessities (the dictatorship of the party; the Red Terror; War Communism/requisitioning; the militarisation of labour, the Cheka, etc) – which wrecked the soviet project from within.

There was a desperate need to defend the revolution from invasion by the imperialist powers (armies from the US, GB, Canada, Germany, Poland, Estonia, China, Japan, France, etc) and from the White armies backed by these powers in the civil war that followed the October revolution. This was a life or death issue. And what the soviets and the Red Army achieved in militarily repulsing these hostile forces while awaiting the eruption of the world revolution was quite remarkable. But the political price - in terms of the dissolution of the workers’ own autonomous armed militias incorporated into the Red Army – coupled with the physical decimation of the urban working class and the wrecking of production in the cities and countryside, proved to be too high in the absence of revolution elsewhere.

The Red Army, the Red Terror, the banning of fractions in the Party, War Communism and the subservience of the Party and Soviets to the state remained while the working class itself retreated in Russia and internationally. Most comrades at the meeting agreed would have been better if the revolution had ‘gone down fighting’ with a clear defeat from ‘outside’, just as it would have been better for the health of the revolution if the Bolsheviks had acquiesced to the 1921 programme of the Kronstadt ‘rebels’ whose demands were similar to those raised by fractions within the Bolshevik Party at its 10th Congress the same year.

As it was and remains, the nature of the defeat of the RR was the worst possible outcome for the proletariat: the fact that it was a communist party that was ‘in charge’ as the revolution degenerated; that it was in the name of the international proletariat that the notion of ‘socialism in one country’ was developed in contradiction to Marxist internationalism – all this allowed for the dreadful legacy that equates Stalinism with communism.

Given criticisms raised of the Bolsheviks, a sympathiser of Trotskyism asked ‘What should they have done, then?”

There were various aspects given in response:

a)    The question is based on the incorrect idea that the revolution was for the Bolsheviks to save if only they made the right decisions, rather than understanding that it’s what the working class in its entirety could accomplish under the circumstances and given the international and historical balance of class forces;

b)    The Bolshevik Party was not some homogeneous bloc but had many political currents within it which ebbed and flowed, some of whom opposed specific policies and actions (such as the militarisation of labour or the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt), others of which put forward correct critiques but incorrect ‘solutions’. Such oppositions – in general appearing earlier and seeing clearer than Trotsky’s Left Opposition - exemplified the fact that the Bolshevik Party was still a living organism of the working class.

c)    It’s not a question of understanding of what they should have done rather than one of analysing what they did and did not do and learning from it. The conceptions they held – i.e. of the party taking power – were widespread within the entire working class at the time, a hangover from bourgeois parliamentarianism. It’s as a result of what actually happened – something which could not have been known in advance – that subsequent critiques can and must be made. However the rejection of ‘the ends justify the means’, of taking actions incompatible with the goals of communism, is certainly a notion which predates the event, even if it had not been posed concretely.

The dreadful legacy of the defeat would/could have been avoided if the class as a whole and the Bolshevik Party in particular had been able understand that the party does not take power and (for the ICC) that the state after the revolution is not simply an expression of the working class – more of which below. The same individual from Trotskyism criticised the absence of reference to the enemy Stalin as the main focal point of and for the counter-revolution. For the rest of the meeting, the counter-revolution was a process and Stalin – including the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ – was the result, not the cause. However: perhaps this is a wake-up call for the present revolutionary milieu not to take the standing of Stalin in the minds of the present generation for granted...

Two further elements in the discussion:

The Third Communist International was formed late (1919) and was overly-influenced by the Bolshevik Party and the needs of the Russian state. Indeed it evolved into a tool for the imperialist interests of that state. The lessons of this are the need for an international organisation of revolutionaries in advance of the revolution itself;
 For the SPGB, the degeneration of the RR proved Marx correct: the workers could not establish communism in a backward country. Lenin’s last articles were full of disillusionment – he realised he’d made a big mistake. Other comrades replied that a) The aim was never to establish communism in a single country but to provide a spark for the world revolution; b) Russia was relatively well-developed at the time with giant factories housing a concentrated working class – some of the biggest in the world - and extensive rail networks; c) That even if the revolution had broken out in the most advanced country like Germany, with the most educated working class, it would still have been defeated if it was isolated. There’s no sense in blaming Lenin nor looking for any Russian ‘particularism’. Finally, the meeting was marked by a high degree of homogeneity: between the CWO and the ICC, their sympathisers (and even a lone internationalist anarchist) on the main issues under debate and on the ICC Manifesto and the CWO presentation. The two currents agree that one of the main lessons of the RR is that the party of the working class does not seek to take power, which must be exercised by the masses themselves, but that without the influence of revolutionaries within the very bowels of the working class – and certainly within its self-organised expressions such as the factory committees and workers’ councils (or soviets) - the revolution will be robbed of vital historical, political and above all visionary elements of the goal of communism and cannot therefore progress.

However ... there was no fundamental agreement between the CWO and the ICC on the question of violence within the working class which in turn masked different attitudes to the state in the period of transition between capitalism and communism, of which our only ‘real-time’ experience is the Russian Revolution.

For the CWO, the question of violence within the working class, while something to be avoided, obviously, is not something that can be proscribed or wished away. There will be disagreements within the working class itself and some of these will be settled forcibly. It depends on the material circumstances.

For the ICC, it’s not a question of this or that disagreement on a picket line or struggle committee that’s at stake here but a generalised attitude that the means can’t be separated from the end – a society of freely associated producers can’t be achieved through coercion but only resolved consciously. Behind this unexplored disagreement lies a difference of appreciation on the crucial question of what is the state in general and the nature of the state in the period of transition in particular.

For the CWO, Lenin’s State and Revolution is clear enough: the workers’ councils wield statist functions including military power and having some kind of organs removed from this nexus of power is building castles in the air. For the ICC, the state is an unavoidable excrescence – symptom of the fact that different classes still exist – and will indeed have to form organs of coercion and violence to defend the revolution... Which is precisely why the working class can’t simply identify with the ‘workers’ state’ or such organs dealing with the ‘here and now’ but above all must wield political and armed control over them, armed with a consciousness of where the revolution is heading, of what it must become....

CONCLUSION

In the ‘common sense’ view (the bourgeois view – history is written by the victors) the Russian Revolution succeeded and the result was ‘communist rule’ by Stalin and the Gulag. For the majority at the ICC meeting, this was not the case.

The Russian Revolution failed. True, the working class, through its soviets, through its party, smashed the bourgeois state and established, for a short time, a dictatorship of the proletariat (only the Socialist Party of GB regarded this as a bourgeois revolution and a Bolshevik coup). However in the view of other participants at the meeting, an indisputably proletarian revolution – the first at the level of an entire nation state - degenerated. Relatively rapidly.

Thus it is that the real issues of the Russian Revolution are largely unknown within the populace at large and the working class in particular, a working class which has tended at the present moment to lose its sense of identity, its sense of history, its sense of itself as a historic class with a past and a future. This meeting was in truth a very small one even if it did provide a focus for a number of elements interested in the positions of the communist left, and even if it saw a high level of agreement amongst the majority of individuals and groups attending.

There was also agreement that revolutionaries were still finding an echo for their positions and that such meetings were valuable. The ICC was holding similar events in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and further afield, while the CWO was holding a meeting in the North of England. This was the first coordinated meeting of the ICC and CWO for 20 years – and the previous meeting was also on the subject of the Russian Revolution  And the real differences of historical appreciation, of theory about attitudes towards regroupment past, present and future – about how to build the party in practice - remain to be further developed beyond past, bitter polemics.

In order to understand the significance of the escalation of events following the September 2017 referendum about Kurdish independence on the territory of the present Iraqi State and the reactions of the governments in the region and worldwide, we have to go back to historical developments that took place more than a century ago. This article is published at the same time as "Erdogan’s ‘New Turkey’: a prime illustration of capitalism’s senility" and we recommend reading the two articles together[1].

The point of departure of Kurdish nationalism

As we have developed in the above-mentioned article and in an article on imperialist conflict in the Middle East in International Review 117[2], at the end of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire had entered a long process of decline and fragmentation. Already before World War 1, in the Balkan wars, Bulgaria, Albania, Western Thracia (and Salonika) split from the Ottoman Empire. The second phase of fragmentation occurred after the Ottoman Empire joined the German side in WW1: the European powers France, Britain and Russia worked out a plan of dividing up the remaining components of the Ottoman empire amongst themselves. In 1916, on the basis of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty, France was to receive what later became Lebanon and Syria, Britain was to gain control over Iraq (except Mosul), Jordan, Palestine and Egypt – as well as the Arab peninsula (today's Saudi Arabia). Czarist Russia was to lay its hands on most parts of northern Kurdistan and the Czar was also hoping to use the Armenians for his ambitions. However, following the Russian revolution in 1917 the Soviet power renounced any imperialist ambitions. In 1920, in the peace treaty of Sevres (Paris), the remaining Turkish heartland was to be divided amongst the colonial powers France and Britain. Large areas of Turkey were to be handed over to Greece, an independent state of Armenia was planned for Eastern Turkey, and the Kurds were to receive an autonomous status in the south-east. Only a small part of the heartland of Turkey was to remain Turkish. The army general Mustafa Kemal refused to recognize the treaty and began to organise military resistance. The Armenians and Greeks were quickly defeated, the sultanate abolished, and Kemal became the leader of the new Turkish “rump” state. After the division of the booty of the former Ottoman Empire and the setting up of new “national” units – Syria, Jordan, Iraq - by the colonial powers, the Kurdish population which had been living in one Ottoman Kurdistan for several centuries was then divided into the territory of 5 states (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Armenia/Russia). Today, almost one century later, the Kurdish population still lives on around a third of Turkish territory, in the northern part of Iraq (Mosul, Kirkuk, Erbil, etc.), in the Iranian Western part, in Syria's north-east and a smaller number in Armenia. [3]  The way the residues of the former Ottoman empire were partitioned by the two co-winners of WW1, France and Britain, meant that no space was left for the formation of a Kurdish state proper. At the same time the seeds for the ambitions of Kurdish nationalism were laid by these “partitioning” powers themselves. At the same time Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran have always feared and combated Kurdish aspirations for the formation of a separate Kurdish state. This spectre has haunted Turkish and Iraqi governments in particular, because any separate Kurdish state would have meant a large secession of territory from these countries (in the case of Turkey 30%). During the past century every Turkish government has warned they would never tolerate the formation of a Kurdish state outside of Turkish territory. 

Historically, the Kurdish populated areas have been more backward in comparison to the rest of the region. Large parts of the population live in mountain areas, where economic development has been much slower. The social structure has been dominated by tribal leaders and clans. Apart from oil, which was discovered in the early 1920s, there are hardly any raw materials, and for more than a century there has not been any real industrialisation. As a consequence large parts of the population either survive through agriculture or by migrating within the larger area or looking for jobs in Europe or elsewhere. While the four Kurdish populated countries Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran all have one common interest - preventing the formation of an autonomous separate Kurdish state - the situation of the Kurds and the intensity of conflicts between the Kurds and these countries has never been the same. And within each Kurdish populated zone, the factions of the Kurdish bourgeoisie fighting for Kurdish interests have constantly been strongly divided, either due to their social dominance by some clan/tribe or because of different social and economic interests. In particular, the land-owning factions have shown no sympathy for the poorer populations and their economic and social demands. During this whole period Kurdish nationalist forces have repeatedly resorted to violence – against other Kurdish groups or against Armenians[4] And Kurdish nationalist groups have repeatedly tried to impose Kurdish identity on minorities living in Kurdish dominated areas. The entire Kurdish area is "surrounded" by other countries and it has no access to ports, making the Kurds entirely dependent on “good will” and negotiations with other countries. These can in turn blackmail the Kurds and extort high taxes for letting Kurdish oil transit through pipelines or trucks through Turkish territory. On an economic level a separate Kurdish state could never be viable.

First aspirations for Kurdish independence

The first aspirations for Kurdish independence, which were voiced when the Ottoman Empire began to show its first cracks, were those of Ubeydullah in 1880, who demanded political autonomy or outright independence for Kurds and the recognition of a Kurdistan state. This was quickly and easily crushed by the Ottoman rulers. Before the Turkish Republic was proclaimed in 1923, in the wake of WW1, the British and French colonial powers pretended to offer the Kurds help in their striving for independence, while in reality they had divided the region in such a way that there was no place for a Kurdish state. In 1925, barely two years after the formation of the Turkish Republic, the first significant Kurdish rising was organised by Sheik Said; it had a strong religious tinge. The Turkish state, which had gained experience in expelling and deporting Armenians and Greek populations, launched a severe repression and massive deportations of Kurds. Between 1927-1930 there were again repeated Kurdish risings in Ararat. The Kemal regime denounced these risings mainly because of their religious cloak in order to justify its “secularist” policy. In 1930 Iran and Turkey signed a deal in which Iran agreed to close its borders, preventing the exodus of refugees and armed Kurdish fighters. After the risings in the province of Dersim between 1936 -38 – all of which were crushed with many massacres – for more than 20 years there were almost no Kurdish armed attemps to achieve more independence from Turkey.  Yet in 1960 when the army staged a coup d'état in Turkey, one of the justifications for the coup was the danger posed by Kurdish secessionist attempts. Once again the use of the Kurdish language, dress, folklore, and names was prohibited. The continued repression led to the reemergence of Kurdish nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s Kurdish nationalist ambitions were propagated by a new group – the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK), or Kurdistan Workers Party founded in 1978. The PKK claimed to oppose the local authorities and landlords who were mostly dominated by clans and chieftains. The PKK has been financing its activities through voluntary payments, donations and, despite its leftist verbiage, through blackmail, extortion, income through drugs and arms trafficking and more recently through human trafficking of refugees. In 1984 the PKK started a guerrilla insurgency until the ceasefire of 1999[5]. In 1999 its leader Öcalan was arrested and sentenced to death[6]. Following Öcalan's appeal to the PKK to stop its military fight in Turkey, the PKK ceased its military activities until 2004. This in turn led to repeated military attacks by the Turkish army against PKK hold-outs in Northern Iraq until 2011. As we shall see, it was only in 2012 that a short spell of relative calm began in the Kurdish areas in Turkey because of strategic moves by Erdogan! Looking back, we can see that the Turkish governments practiced a policy of alternating between very limited concessions and, more often, heavy repression – with waves of increasing military resistance by armed Kurdish militias, namely the PKK.

The Kurds in Iraq – 100 years of displacement and massacres

In the territory of Iraq the conditions for the Kurdish population were different.

Following their experience in India and in other colonies, the Britsh conceded the northern Kurdish region in Iraq some autonomy and recognized their nationalist claims in the hope of pre-empting Kurdish nationalist strivings on Iraqi soil. As an adjunct to their "divide and rule" policy and their backing of reactionary Kurdish elements, the British, in the face of large-scale resistance also developed terror bombing from the air with Churchill sanctioning the use of poison gas. In the meantime the Provisional Iraqi Constitution of 1921 even granted two ethnic groups (Arabs and Kurds) equal rights, and towards the Kurds the British applied a similar “divide and rule” policy: Kurdish tribes in the countryside received special legal jurisdiction and tax benefits. They were informally guaranteed seats in parliament and were outside the jurisdiction of the national courts. The Kurdish landlords in turn had to collect taxes for the British rulers.

In 1932 Iraq became an independent state. All through the 1950s Baghdad repressed Kurdish political rights, banned nationalist political parties, destroyed Kurdish villages, forcibly militarised the area  and imposed resettlement (especially in petroleum-rich areas. In 1961 Iraqi Kurds began an insurgency against Baghdad. The Ba'ath party which came to power in 1963 launched a severe repression. In 1970 the Iraqi government and Kurdish leaders signed a Peace Agreement. None of the promises – Kurdish self-rule, recognition of the bi-national character of Iraq, political representation in the central government, extensive official language rights, the freedom of association and organisation - were ever implemented. During the 1970s, Iraqi Kurds pursued the goal of greater autonomy and even outright independence against the Ba'ath Party regime; but at the same time the two main Iraqi Kurdish groups around Talabani and Barzani repeatedly fought against each other. The two groups were part of the same ruling class and never divided by any class frontiers. Both could one day fight each other – with the support from one of the governments in Baghdad or Teheran – and the next day they could be allies against the governments they had been supported by. Already in the 1960s Iran had become an important force in the Kurdish autonomy movements in Iraq. Teheran and Baghdad were at odds over a border conflict in the Shat al-Arab. Iran supplied the Iraqi Kurdish group around Barzani with weapons and money. Following a rapprochement between Baghdad and Moscow in 1972 and the nationalisation of the oil industry, the USA tried to use the Iraqi Kurds to destabilise Iraq. In the next military clash in 1974-1975 in northern Iraq, between Barzani-led Kurdish troops and the Iraqi army, Iranian aviation destroyed Iraqi aircraft. Following a deal over the border question between Iran and Iraq, Iran ceased its military support to the Kurds. Again, a wave of repression and displacement began – Peshmergas withdrew to Iran, scores of Kurdish villages were destroyed. Between 1979-1982 the clashes amongst the Kurdish organisations reached a peak.

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) Iran tried to instigate Iraqi Kurds against Baghdad. The latter retaliated in 1988: in the struggle against Kurdish combattants of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and Iranian troops in March 1988, Baghdad ordered a massacre of Kurds in the city of Halabja, where chemical weapons were used indiscriminately. Between 1986 and 1989, Iraqi troops and militias killed between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds, many of them civilians. About 1.5 million people were displaced.

After the first Gulf War 1991 and the rapid victory of the US-led troops against Saddam Hussein, the Kurds hoped for more independence. It was in this process, entirely dominated by imperialism, that certain groups, most notably the International Communist Group (GCI) saw a "revolutionary" and proletarian uprising. Like Rojava today, these were completely non-existent and rather showed the GCI's weakness for supporting nationalist movements and imperialist pawns[7].

During this time, NATO-enforced no-fly zones were established over the Kurdish areas, which gave them some protection against Baghdad and compelled Saddam to accept some level of self-government. The Kurdish Kurdish Regional Government was founded in 1992. Yet again between 1994-98, Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq clashed repeatedly, while Baghdad and Ankara intervened militarily as well. 

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the area was declared autonomous with some levels of self-governance.  This limited autonomy (bigger than in comparison to Turkey or Iran however) would have been unthinkable without the US-led invasion of 2003. These Kurdish-controlled state structures have continued until today.

100 years of the Kurdish population's history shows that the Kurds in Iraq have been the most subjected to massacre and displacement, the most caught up in fights between rival bourgeois factions, who took sides with or were used by Baghdad or Teheran. And Turkey also used Iraqi Kurdish influence in Turkey to undermine the position of PKK. 

The constellation in Iran

Although in 1920 Britain “snatched” a mandate for Iran from the League of Nations, Iran unlike Iraq or Syria was not a “new” unit set up in the area. Following the convulsions after WW1, a Kurdish tribal leader, Ismail Agas (called Simko), managed to rally Kurdish nationalists from the Turkey-Iraq-Iran  triangle around him. He received the support of Kemal from Turkey, and in 1920 he fought under the Turkish flag with Kemal's support against Teheran's troops[8]. Until the 1930s Teheran had managed to tie the Kurdish population with its still persisting tribal structures to the Iranian state. Despite  combined attempts by Iraq, Turkey and Iran to quell Kurdish nationalist activities in the region, Kurdish nationalists began to mobilise in the small town of Mahabad. As in the other countries, the nationalist aspirations were carried above all by tribal leaders, who had no interest in “social reforms”. In 1942 Russia tried to infiltrate the Kurdish milieu in Iran. In December 1945 the Azeri Peoples' Republic of Tabriz was proclaimed with Russian support. In Mahabad in Jan. 1946 a “Kurdish Republic”,was proclaimed, which was crushed by Teheran in December 1946, after Russia had dropped its support in exchange for concessions in oil drilling. Unlike other countries the Kurds were free to publish cultural and historical information in their own language.However, in the 1960s the Iranian regime began to clamp down on many civil rights. As showed earlier, Iran has repeatedly intervened in Iraq either to stir up or to “contain” the Iraqi Kurds according to its own interests. After the proclamation of the Islamic Republic on 1 April 1979 Kurdish and Shia militia (Pasdaran) clashed. The emphasis on Shia religion in the Iranian constitution is seen as a bone of contention for the Sunni Kurdish population. The Iranian government has been facing a low-level guerrilla warfare against the ethnic secessionist Kurdish guerrilla group Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) since 2004. PJAK is closely affiliated with the PKK operating against Turkey. Faced with the existence of several ethnic groups within Iran, Tehran is no less determined to prevent any Kurdish move towards autonomy.

These nationalist movements and imperialist maneuvers are often wolves dressed up in the sheep's clothing of workers' or "revolutionary" interests. This radical imagery adopted by Iranian/Kurdish elements was in fact based on a convergence of Iranian Stalinism and Kurdish nationalism, both subservient to the needs of the bourgeoisie. The guerilla group Komala, linked to the Communist Party if Iran, appeared sufficiently "radical" to fool the revolutionary group the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party for a while[9]. On the background of almost a century of failed attempts to gain more autonomy or to set up an independent Kurdish state the recently held referendum in Iraq was organised in a context of intensifying and increasingly complex and intertwined imperialist rivalries in the region.

We will look closer at three factors which sparked the renewed claims of Kurdish independence in the region – the development in Iraq, Syria and Turkey itself.

Iraq sinks into the abyss

We have shown in other articles how the whole spiral of imperialist chaos was already triggered in the 1980s following the collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, which until then together with Turkey had been a strong outpost for the Western bloc against Russia. The US reacted amongst others by fostering the war between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988), which in turn led to rising tensions between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. In the Middle East, during the 1980s the conflicts were no longer marked by the confrontation between the two blocs, but increasingly expressed a plunge into an imperialist “every man for himself”. From Lebanon in the 1980s to Afghanistan, several zones of conflict emerged, where local guerrilla and terrorist forces fought against Russian imperialism (with US backing) or against the US with Iranian backing. And conflicts and fronts emerged in which regional rivals and terrorists became active with the backing of some other state. The initial attempt of US policy to “fight the flames of war with war” did not extinguish the fire, but only poured more oil onto it.

At the time of the 1st Gulf War in 1991 the US wanted and managed to avoid a fragmentation of Iraq – even at the price of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. In the 2nd Gulf War in 2003 the US claimed Saddam Hussein had acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. Following the quick US victory and the elimination of Saddam, a far- reaching reshuffle of power unfolded.

After the occupation of Iraq the US imposed a direct administration and they disarmed most of Saddam Hussein's supporters. Many of them belonged to the military and police forces and played a key role in setting up ISIS). Instead of integrating them into the US-led repressive apparatus, they excluded them and thus nurtured the seeds of ISIS.

The Sunni-dominated clan around Saddam Hussein was ousted and replaced by Shia-dominated governments, which in turn helped to increase Iranian influence in Iraq. In addition, a repressive policy against the Sunni population sharpened the division amongst the Iraqi population, an additional factor which drove some people into the arms of ISIS.

At the same time the Kurds in Northern Iraq were granted some sort of special relationship with Baghdad while terrorist violence spread throughout other parts of Iraq.

When ISIS conquered large areas of Iraq in July 2014, in particular the second biggest city, Mosul, the Kurdish peshmergas, who had been acting more or less like a state army force within Northern Iraq, were the first to mobilise against ISIS, while large parts of the Iraqi army had run away. The US and other western countries increased their military support both towards Baghdad and the Kurdish peshmergas[10]. In short, the US (and other western countries) supplied arms and training. Above all US planes bombed ISIS positions, and Peshmergas were used as cannon fodder.[11] Neither the US nor the other western countries wanted to have large numbers of boots on the ground because of their previous fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq and the general unpopularity of war.

The global failure of the US to stabilise the situation in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) had allowed Kurdish nationalist ambitions to revive in Iraq. And it was the need for the US-led coalition to support and arm the Kurdish peshmergas which drove them into conflict with all the governments in the region.

War in Syria – another factor compelling Turkey to attack the Kurds

The war in Syria which began in 2011 became another factor nurturing Kurdish nationalist ambitions in Syria. The Turkish strategy of increasing Turkish influence in the region required stronger ties with Syria. Up until 2011 Syria and Turkey had managed to improve their relationship. But soon after the beginning of the war in Syria, Assad, more and more under siege, responded by making a cunning strategic move. The Syrian army “abandoned” the Kurdish territory in Syria in 2012 to the Kurds, knowing that this would put Turkey under pressure to thwart any Kurdish advances. At the same time Turkey had been tolerating the forerunners of ISIS running recruitment agencies in Turkey, and Erdogan wanted to capitalise on the struggle of ISIS against the Kurds in Syria.  Because of Western pressure, and following the release of footage by journalists showing the secret Turkish toleration of the smuggling of weapons, or Turkish state agencies directly delivering them and accepting the passage of terrorists from Turkey to Syria, Erdogan was forced to proclaim his opposition to Assad and promise to engage in a determined struggle against ISIS. As a consequence, ISIS began hitting targets in Turkey itself where previously ISIS had enjoyed “freedom of movement”.

At the same time the more ISIS conquered territory in Iraq and Syria, the more the Kurds began to gain importance as a tool serving the interests of the Western countries intervening in some way or other in Iraq and Syria.  Towards the end of 2013 the Syrian Kurds had managed to establish a “free zone” (free of Assad's control and free of ISIS as well) named the autonomous area of Rojava. When ISIS forces began to lay siege to the Kurdish dominated border town Kobane on 15 September 2014, Turkey’s determination to block moves towards Kurdish autonomy left no doubts about Turkish priorities. Although the Turkish army was heavily present along the Turkish border within reach of Kobane, the Turkish army did not intervene to protect the Kurds against ISIS. It was only following heavy US bombardment and massive losses of Kurdish lives (civilian and militias) that ISIS was defeated at Kobane in February 2015 by YPG, PKK, other militias and Northern Iraqi Kurdish peshmergas. This episode illustrated the fate of the Kurds: their town Kobane in Kurdish hands, but in ruins, and Kurdish forces entirely dependent on US support against a ruthlessly determined Turkey. For the Kurds in Syria the question will be how the US will position themselves towards them, because without any military assistance for the Kurds in the area, they will not be able to hold out. Kobane and the idea of a "Rojava revolution" is causing big problems for the anarchist milieu today linked to PKK's "libertarian" turn. We have already written about this in some depth[12].

In order to “contain” and attack Kurdish enclaves on Syrian territory, Turkey began occupying parts of Western Syrian territory between August 2016 and March 2017(Operation Euphrates Shield [16]). These Turkish military operations work against the interests of Assad, Russia and Iran. In response, despite the improvement of ties between Russia and Turkey, Russia has been offering some kind of “protection” to the Kurds, in order to prevent them being smashed by the Turkish army and to defend Assad's interests.

In Western Syria, Russian troops [17] have moved into another area along the Syrian-Turkish border, acting as a barrier to Turkish and American forces in the area. In August 2017, the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, struck a deal with Russian forces [18], aimed at provide a buffer between them and Turkish troops in and around the north-western city of Afrin. The fact that the Turkish army, in their fervor to eliminate Kurdish enclaves, “goes it alone” against the interests of all other sharks in the region, means that zones of friction between the US and Turkey have also grown stronger[13]. Some Kurdish groups in Syria have become suspicious about the US-led coalition's plans.

The next round of conflicts has begun – that of staking the claims now that the ISIS “Caliphate” has finally broken down in the region and will only be able to launch terrorist attacks here and there without any control over territory. While the US still need the Kurds as cannon fodder to fight against whatever is left of ISIS in the region, after the expulsion of ISIS from Iraq, the Kurds in Iraq felt the moment had come to claim full independence.

Fanning the flames of war in Turkey

As for the development in Turkey itself we can see some important changes, which we have explained in more detail in the above-mentioned article. Erdogan’s efforts to scale down the conflict with the Kurds by making minimum concessions, which he began in 2004-2005 following a deal with the PKK, helped him to keep the country “free” from any military confrontations with the Kurds for several years. This tactical step by Erdogan was in stark contrast to decades of a very determined policy of the Kemalist regimes in Turkey which had practiced zero tolerance towards Kurdish nationalism. And despite regular intervals of minor concessions to the Kurds, all the Turkish parties distinguished themselves by their strong anti-Kurdish position, by their agreement on the need for ferocious repression against Kurdish aspirations. Erdogan's calculation of limited concessions was successful for some time. In 2012, following negotiations with the PKK, the latter gave up claims for an autonomous Kurdistan. But the war in Syria and Erdogan’s own ambitions for a “greater Turkey” with a new emperor at its head, thwarted his plans. The fact that the Kurdish HDP scored more than 10% (13%) and for the first time had a presence in parliament strengthened the credibility of parliamentarianism in Turkey. At the same time, Erdogan's project of handing over more power to the president was blocked by the Kurdish HDP in parliament after the June 2015 elections. Erdogan's thirst for revenge and his determination to brush aside Kurdish resistance both within Turkey as well as in Syria and Iraq meant that he began declaring many HDP MPs and leaders of the Kurdish party to be terrorists. And a new military offensive against PKK began in the south-eastern part of Turkey with the occupation, bombing and deportation of Kurdish populations from the area. Thus, the war in Syria and Iraq has spilled over into a two-front war within Turkey- with ISIS terrorist attacks and with the intensification of combats between the Turkish army and PKK.

The history of the past century shows that in their obsession to contain Kurdish demands for independence all Turkish regimes, irrespective of the differences between them, whether secular or more Islamist, whether headed by the army or a civilian government, have attacked and displaced the Kurds – both within Turkey as well as in Syria and Iraq. And all Turkish regimes have been ready to come into conflict with any other country, no matter how close they have been to them in the past.

The “unwanted” Kurdish state

When the defeat and expulsion of ISIS in northern and western parts of Iraq became clear, the Kurdish nationalists announced a new referendum on independence in September 2017 – leading to the formation of something like a common front of all states against this project[14].

The reaction of Baghdad was immediate: it sent troops to seal off the area, snatched Kurdish-held oil fields and reconquered Kirkus.

Tehran's response was to offer support to Baghdad - political, economic and military. Because Kurdish territory both in Iraq and in Syria constitutes a “lifeline” for Iranian logistics supplying weapons, troops and anything else to Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is a crucial “overland connection” for Iran and its capacity to defend the vital strategic positions of its allies on the Mediterranean shores. The more Iran expands its influence into the West the more important Kurdish territory has become for Iran. Given the intensifying tensions around Lebanon between Saudi Arabia and Iran the Kurdish transit route is all the more strategically important for Tehran. And being threatened by the Trump administration over the Nuke deal, it is all the more willing to gain advantages out of the weakened position of Baghdad.

In reaction, the US have declared their opposition to a separate Kurdish state, knowing that such a state would accelerate the fragmentation of Iraq, the country they “liberated” in 2003, and that the Peshmerga fighters are still needed (even if less than before) as cannon fodder for the US. But the Baghdad counter-offensive against the Kurds has also strengthened the position of Iran, the USA’s main enemy, vis a vis Baghdad. The Peshmergas were useful for the US-led coalition in their readiness to push back ISIS – but the Peshmergas are in contradiction to the US interest if they claim a state of their own[15]. The Kurdish factions in power in Northern Iraq cannot survive without US help, but if Washington weakened or dropped its support this would make the US (even more) unreliable and unpredictable.

For the US and other Western countries, the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have become more or less “superfluous” after their bloody but voluntary efforts to help weaken ISIS. However, since Russia and Turkey have been strengthening ties, the US and other western powers may want to keep the Kurdish card up their sleeve to be able to put pressure on Erdogan's rather unpredictable regime[16].

Turkey has already threatened a full-blown occupation of Northern Iraq if the Kurds go ahead with their proclamation of independence. And it has threatened to block the pipelines and oil transports by trucks from the oil fields in Northern Iraq via Turkey, cutting off any financial resources for the Kurdish areas. Moscow, which has gained considerable weight in Baghdad at the expense of the US, has also declared its opposition.

Following the strong reactions by Baghdad and other countries, the Kurdish nationalists at the moment seem to have backtracked – and the divisions within their ranks have once again become bigger as well.

As experience from history has shown, the present common front by all neighbouring countries and the “big guns” (US, Russia) will not last long. No sooner the Kurdish forces are weakened (or even massacred as in the past) will the divisions amongst the anti-Kurdish front become sharper. The unity of the ruling regimes in neighbouring countries does not originate in some genetic hatred of the Kurds as people, but expresses the impossibility of the system to allow for more states. It expresses the impasse of a whole system and this can only lead to more conflicts.

The history of the Kurds during the past century shows that they have been used as pawns on the imperialist chessboard by all the regional and global regimes against their respective rivals. And more than 100 years of Kurdish nationalist ambitions shows that all different factions within the Kurdish nationalist camp have been ready to act as tools in the interests of these regimes. Without the consequences of the failed US policy to try to contain chaos in the Middle East, the Kurds would not have been able to claim their independence so strongly in the recent period.

The fragmentation of the former Ottoman Empire into different units and the prevention of a separate Kurdish state has now reached a new phase, where two countries – Iraq and Syria – are faced with separatist tendencies and even break-up. Iraq has been torn by war since 1980, i.e. almost four decades. Iran has been engaged in military confrontations since 1980 with all its neighbours, in particular Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Israel at a longer distance.  Having become a regional shark, the expansion of Iranian influence has driven it into stronger cooperation with Russia in their common defence of the Assad regime in Syria[17]. And of course, Afghanistan has been engulfed in a chain of wars since 1979.

In the midst of all this the Kurdish nationalists are now claiming once again a new piece of territory in the midst of all these battlefields and graveyards.

However, this is not just an ordinary repetition of the previous conflicts. The number of sharks – smaller and bigger – has risen sharply. The weakened US are faced with a more direct presence of Russian troops in the area; US troops are active on the ground in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – even if the US have had to admit that their intervention in these countries has ended in fiasco, and every presidential candidate in the election campaigns promised a withdrawal of troops, in reality they hide the scope of their real engagement and have had to increase their presence. Particularly significant is the presence of Turkey on different fronts – its direct presence in Syria, Iraq, Qatar – with clashes of interests with the Russians and the Americans on Syrian territory.

Now that it is becoming apparent that ISIS is no longer the force which mobilised some kind of temporary united front, as with all previous spirals of war, once the common enemy becomes weakened or is decimated, the tendency towards each for himself, the war of each against all, will take on new proportions. 

In the same way as the formation of new states such as Israel was only possible through the displacement of the local Palestinian population, leading to the formation of gigantic refugee camps and repeated military conflict, the formation of a separate Kurdish state could not have any other destiny. The way out for a displaced, massacred, repressed Kurdish population can only be through the abolition of all frontiers and states.

The Middle East was once the cradle of human civilisation. Today it highlights the drive towards its collapse. It is not by fighting for new nations that humanity will be liberated from this threat, but by fighting for a world where the nation state has become a thing of the past.

No faction of Kurdish nationalism has ever been progressive; none of them have ever deserved the support of the workers or the poor peasants, or of genuine communists. And yet the Kurdish national struggle continues to be presented as something that is compatible with the proletarian revolution. The image of bold, egalitarian Kurdish fighters depicted in parts of the media has even attracted significant numbers of anarchists into directly supporting imperialist war. Kurdish national liberation was reactionary in the 1920s, as was that of Turkey and everyone else. The times of a progressive bourgeoisie have long passed and imperialism, particularly the major imperialisms, dominate the globe, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. It was one of the great mistakes and regressions that led the Bolsheviks to support national liberation struggles which were then and now inimical to working class interests.

This means the exploited parts of the Kurdish population, workers and poor peasants, have nothing to gain from mobilising behind the nationalists. For them more than ever the workers have no fatherland.

Enver, 23.11.2017

This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC in the US, is a further contribution to our effort to follow the evolution of the situation in the US after the election of Trump. It follows on from an article written by the same comrade in April[1]

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One year after the shocking election of Donald Trump as President, the US bourgeoisie continues to struggle with a new constellation of political forces that threatens to undermine both major political parties and the traditional left-right division of ideological labor between them. The political tremors unleashed during the Presidential campaign of 2016 continue to reverberate under the Trump administration with the US political “establishment” now forced to deal with a rogue outsider occupying the highest office in the land, entrusted with the nuclear codes.[2]

In previous articles, we have argued that Trump’s election—along with similar political events in other countries, such as the 2016 Brexit Referendum in the UK—marks a qualitative step forward in the process of social decomposition, in which the historic crisis of global capitalism is exerting a centrifugal effect on the political apparatus of the bourgeois state—especially its “democratic” apparatus in those states that employ them. The evolution of the political situation in the year since Trump’s election has in our view confirmed this analysis and revealed a deepening crisis of bourgeois governance that the establishment, or main factions of the bourgeoisie, have yet to bring under control. The crisis is particularly pronounced in the US, where Trump was able to win the White House due to a complex set of circumstances including the effects of the antiquated Electoral College and the inability of an already compromised Republican Party to contain its more extreme factions, but also the degradation of the Democratic Party itself, which in an apparent act of hubris nominated a particularly ill-suited establishment candidate with ethical, legal and political challenges (Clinton) to face Trump, against the more popular Bernie Sanders or other more electable candidates.

Therefore, Trump’s victory, while an “accident” in the sense of occurring against the wishes of the main factions of the bourgeoisie, did not come from nowhere. It was prepared by a process of political degeneration that has its origin at least as far back as the contested election of 2000, when George W. Bush won the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, but only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. While the eight years of the ensuing Obama Presidency initially did much to repair the “democratic” image of the US state, underneath the glowing approval of the bourgeois media the Obama years were marked by political and social fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. The  working class would pay heavily for this in the form of layoffs, protracted unemployed, evictions and the repossession of their homes, exploding student debt and the expansion of various forms of “precarious” employment, while the Wall Street “Banksters”—who most saw as responsible for the disaster—escaped any serious repercussions. The period 2008-2016 witnessed a growing anger in the population about the overall state of the economy, the lack of stable jobs and the declining life opportunities for the younger generations. At the same time, in certain sectors of the populace—especially the so-called “white working class”[3]—there was increasing concern about the pace of social and cultural change brought about by the forces of so-called “neo-liberalism” or “globalization,” which many saw Obama’s Presidency symbolizing. Consequently, the growing anger in the population took multiple and diverse forms and was influenced by both left and right bourgeois ideology.

While Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party appeared to share few ideological features, they nevertheless each manifested a growing “grassroots” frustration with the establishment parties and even the institutions of the state itself. On the left, there was a growing realization that establishment Democratic politicians like Obama—whatever their progressive image—would never adequately address the deepening economic troubles of the younger generations, while on the right elements associated with the Tea Party began to turn their anger against establishment Republican politicians, who they felt would always sell them out on issues like immigration, global trade deals, etc. While emanating from different ideological places and reflecting different social constituencies, there was nevertheless a broader “populist” fervor bubbling up during the Obama years that exploded in unpredictable ways during the 2016 Presidential campaign, fueling the candidacies of both Bernie Sanders and Trump.

Now that Trump is President, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie have had a very difficult time figuring out how to respond to the reality that the social and political upheaval unleashed by their favoured approach to managing capitalism’s historic crisis (neo-liberal globalization) has led to the election of a rogue element to the Presidency whose commitment to this consensus, as well as to the imperialist strategy of the main factions of the bourgeois class, is still not entirely clear.

The Democrats’ dilemma and the problems of the “Resistance.”

The Democrats, the faction of the bourgeoisie that one would expect to lead a political campaign of opposition to Trump and Trumpism, have in fact launched a fierce “resistance” effort, unleashing an intense political and media barrage around the President’s ties to Russia, and the possibility that his campaign colluded with the Russian state to manipulate the election results. They have also vigorously denounced the President’s flirtation with extreme right-wing and racist elements, especially in the aftermath of the turmoil in Charlottesville around the “alt-right”/neo-Nazi march that resulted in the killing of an anti-fascist counter-protestor[4].

However, despite the fervor of these campaigns, the Democrats are not in a particularly strong institutional or ideological position to oppose Trump at this juncture. Despite holding the Presidency for eight years under Obama, and Clinton actually having won the popular vote against Trump, the Democrats are at their lowest point in terms of number of elected offices nationwide since 1928, i.e. the last Presidential election before Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 would usher in the  “New Deal.” They control no part of the federal government (save for perhaps elements of the “permanent bureaucracy” and the so-called “deep state”) and most state governments are under Republican control. With the Republicans’ blocking of Obama’s appointment of the moderate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and Trump’s subsequent successful insertion of the conservative Neil Gorsuch to the high court, the Democrats cannot confidently rely on the judiciary’s court of final say to back them up, should they take the legal route to obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Moreover, the Democrats are themselves experiencing a profound inner turmoil in the aftermath of the Bernie Sanders insurgency, which nearly upended the establishment’s choice for President even before the general election. The establishment neo-liberal factions in the Democratic Party are thus having to fight a two-front battle: on the one hand to oppose Trump and the other to not give up too much ground to the leftist insurgent forces in their own party, who openly call the neo-liberal consensus into question. Many establishment Democrats (including Hillary herself) continue to blame Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign against Clinton for Trump’s subsequent victory. They often disparage Sanders’ supporters as juvenile idealists on the one hand, while at the same time they imply that many of his white working-class supporters are really Trumpian racists and xenophobes at heart.

The reality of the division of the Democratic Party between establishment neo-liberals—heavily backed by Wall Street—who are committed to a version of the status quo—and the “Sandernistas” who eschew corporate funding and increasingly adopt a kind of populist intransigence in their political rhetoric, complicates the ability of the Democratic Party to operate as an effective opposition to Trump. The massive levels of distrust between the establishment Democrats—who see the Sanders faction as irresponsible populists not much different from the Trumpists—and the “progressive” wing of the party who accuse their establishment foes of having “sold out the working class” to court Wall Street money, have rendered the Democrats a divided force, with an incoherent message and competing loyalties to different social constituencies. Where the establishment Democrats have their electoral base in the so-called “professional managerial class” and (older) minority voters, the progressives around Sanders court the younger generations and elements of the white working class who have not succumbed to Trumpism. While Obama, with his rock star like demographic appeal, was able to cement these diverse constituencies into a winning electoral coalition, Clinton was not—hemorrhaging white working class voters by seemingly referring to them as “deplorables” and alienating younger voters with a political track record that stunk of entitlement, opportunism and broken promises.

In the months since Trump’s election, the Democratic Party’s institutions—including the newly reconstituted Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the party’s elected officials on Capitol Hill—have mostly avoided going in a populist direction and have instead decided to focus their opposition to Trump on his supposed collusion with Russia and the threat the President poses for US national security. At times, the rhetoric around Trump’s Russian connections have reached such a level of intensity that the Democrats have themselves fallen into a kind of anti-Russian xenophobic mania, seeing Vladimir Putin as a puppet master manipulating the US democratic apparatus for his own ends. The meme of Trump as a Kremlin puppet—whatever his actual connections to Russian interests—represents an ideological attack on the legitimacy of President (and the Presidency itself) many times more severe than the so-called “birther” conspiracy theories that some Republicans floated against Obama.

In their zeal to push the Russia narrative and to paint themselves as the party of American sovereignty and the national (imperialist) interest, the Democrats increasingly abandon their traditional ideological position as the party of liberal internationalism, rational diplomacy and respect for the US’s democratic institutions. While much of their campaign about Russian interference in the election is carried out in the name of restoring the integrity of American democracy, the result of this exercise is to call into question the intelligence of the American voters, many of whom they suggest can’t tell the difference between real campaign information and Russian propagated “fake news.” For the Democrats, it is not far from this conclusion to flirtation with the idea of censoring the internet. For the defeated Democrats, who purport to speak in the name of democracy itself, voters’ choices only appears to count when they make the right choice and ratify the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s preferred candidates (in  2016, Clinton), not when they choose an outsider who questions the prevailing consensus in Washington. In their eyes, Trump’s election must therefore be illegitimate and should possibly be overturned. It is in this sense that the Russia narrative undercuts the very democratic ideology the Democratic Party purportedly seeks to defend.

In choosing to focus their opposition to Trump around the theme of Russian interference, the Democrats have themselves called into question the US’s democratic image. The very meaning of democracy itself becomes unclear for large swathes of the population, not limited to Trump’s base voters. Part of this attack is actually aimed not at Trump, but at Sanders’ supporters, many of whom were supposedly duped into foolishly not voting for Clinton by an aggressive left-themed Russian backed propaganda campaign on social media and the Russia Today (RT) network that painted Clinton as a neo-liberal hag no better than Trump. For the establishment Democrats, it is not just Trumpian “deplorables” who cannot be trusted with the democratic franchise, but also the so-called “Bernie bros” and like-minded fellow-travelers whose juvenile purity ethic led many to irresponsibly risk a Trump victory by abstaining from the vote or supporting some destined- to- lose third party candidate.

Whether they realize it or not, the Democrats’ seemingly incessant campaigns about Russian interference in the election paint a picture of “democracy” as something like a technical process, whereby voters merely ratify the rational consensus choice of the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Any other outcome is by its very nature flawed and therefore illegitimate. This attitude only fuels the populist suspicion of the establishment elites who purport to know what is in the voters’ real interests, even more so than the voters themselves!

While the Russia campaigns may have stoked a certain fervor among constituencies already loyal to the Democratic Party, they likely haven’t helped the party mitigate the appeal of populism, whether from the left or the right. To many of Trump’s voters the campaigns look like an undemocratic attempt to overturn a legitimate election result. They fuel speculation about so-called “deep state” conspiracies against Trump and reinforce the image of the Democrats—and the political establishment as a whole—as dismissive and judgmental, as out of touch with the values and ethics of the “common man.”

For many of Sanders’ supporters, the Russia campaigns have only increased their alienation from the Democratic Party’s institutions. They view these campaigns as a sleight of hand to distract from the Democrats’ (and the Clinton campaign in particular) failure to connect with the working class and the economically distressed younger generations by offering real policy alternatives to the neo-liberal status quo. They are also seen as a dangerous rhetoric which threatens to escalate the US’s very real tensions with Russia to the brink of war—by proxy or otherwise. In this sense, the Democrats’ Russia campaigns, while somewhat effective in constraining Trump’s ability to maneuver on the terrain of foreign policy and preventing whatever rapprochement the Trumpists had planned with Putin from taking full shape, have nevertheless only served to deepen a certain populist contempt for the Democrats among wide swaths of the electorate.

Of course, it is also the case that the concerns over Russian interference in the election are not entirely motivated by an ideological need to delegitimize Trump. The main factions of the bourgeoisie from both major parties are understandably infuriated by what does appear to be some very real attempts by the Russian state to engage in an “active measures” campaign to either increase support for Trump or drive down Clinton’s vote (probably mostly the latter). From the point of view of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie, this interference by a foreign state in its “democratic” apparatus is wholly unacceptable. It is for this reason that many establishment Republicans have joined the Democrats in pushing the Russia narrative and calling for retaliation against Putin. John McCain, Marco Rubio and Lindsay Graham have all called out the Russian interference, while McCain has often been more vociferous in his denunciations of Trump than even the Democrats.

In any event, the unanimity among the main factions of the bourgeoisie on the question of Russian interference in the election underscores the near universal contempt for Trump and what he represents among key figures from both parties, even if the Republicans are more politically constrained in their ability to connect Trump personally to the interference. While the claims by some of the more radical Democratic back-benchers that Trump is a “Russian hoax” or “Putin’s Puppet” may be irresponsible from the point of view of maintaining the democratic façade and the legitimacy of the existing institutions, there is nevertheless a consensus among the main factions of the bourgeoisie that Trump represents a dangerous and unpredictable element whose loyalty to the consensus goals of US imperialist policy cannot be assumed.

Ideological disintegration and the fight to control the media

But more than this general concern about Russian interference in the election, the entire controversy about “fake news”—which is not limited to Russian planted stories online, but has as many American authors as foreign ones—reveals a growing panic in the bourgeoisie that it is increasingly losing its ability to control the political media narrative and therefore manipulate the outcome of its electoral process to ensure its consensus candidates win elections. The growth of the Internet in recent decades, the deregulation of the media and the spread of new social media technologies have in retrospect not been positive on these accounts. More and more, the populace is separated from any common media driven political narrative—getting their news and information from a variety of online sources, the veracity and responsibility of which cannot be guaranteed or easily vetted.

For the bourgeoisie, it was already a problem when the sources of these competing narrative “bubbles” were mostly domestic (Fox News, right-wing radio, conspiracy websites, leftist alternative media, etc.), but it has become a full-blown national security crisis now that foreign intelligence agencies are able to penetrate the online space and exert some level of influence on US public opinion. While it is likely that the actual import of the Russian “active measures” campaign in the 2016 US election has been grossly exaggerated (the toxic effects of home grown media buffoonery, probably put Russian fake news to shame), it is clear that from the point of view of the US bourgeoisie any foreign influence is simply unacceptable. The problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie is that the technological development of various Internet and social media technologies have reached such a point that any attempt to rein in the forces of ideological disintegration they foster would likely require some kind of state censorship—something which would further put into question the American “democratic” façade.

While the state appears to have won some cooperation from entities like Facebook and Twitter in cracking down on suspected Russian backed or other fake news sites, this has already been denounced by civil liberties and free speech advocates as counter to the spirit of US democratic values—and tough questions are beginning to be posed about the relationship of the Internet (still dominated by private companies) and the integrity of the free exchange of ideas in the public sphere that democratic societies are supposedly based upon. For now, the US bourgeoisie appears to prefer not to open the Pandora’s Box on this subject, instead attempting to override the ideological splintering of society with a new patriotic campaign against Russian interference, carried out primarily through the mechanisms of the Democratic Party. However, the dangers that such a campaign will itself get out of control and further discredit the US democratic apparatus remain real and it is in the end unlikely to prevent further questioning about the reality of American “democracy” from emerging. In fact, it may only accelerate this process.

Trump’s flirtations with the alt-right and the perils of “identity politics”

The second prong of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Trump focuses around a campaign to denounce his flirtations with some of the more extreme right-wing and racist forces in US society. This campaign reached a certain apex in the aftermath of the Charlottesville demonstrations when Trump rather ham-fistedly blamed the violence on “both sides,” drawing a moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and “alt-right” elements that marched in defense of Confederate statues and the anti-fascist and anti-racist protestors who opposed them.

While the Democrats are on stronger ground in terms of public opinion with this line of attack against Trump, the fervor with which the Democrats have in recent times become the “party of minorities and immigrants” nevertheless now functions as a double-edged sword in electoral politics. While much of the population and nearly the entire bourgeoisie was incensed by Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville (including many prominent Republicans—even some associated with the Tea Party) and loudly denounced the President’s bumbling false equivalencies around the responsibility for the violence, the same level of unanimity does not exist in regards to the ideologically intransigent position of most Democrats about removing the Confederate statues, with most polls showing a majority of the population against removing these symbols of “southern pride.”

But beyond the specific issues of the Confederate statutes, this episode highlights another key dilemma facing the Democratic Party going forward. Buoyed by Obama’s successful campaigns, the Democrats have increasingly relied on the so-called “demographic strategy” to win elections, banking on assembling a coalition of professionals with progressive social values, younger voters, minorities and immigrants to defeat a Republican party whose demographic base among downscale whites was supposedly doomed to shrink with the increasing “browning of America.” On one level, this strategy only recognizes the reality of powerful historical, social and demographic trends resulting from the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism, but when the Democrats take the next step and are seen openly “cheerleading” this process (with even one Washington Post columnist recently seeming to root for white working class communities to die)[5], they run afoul of a white working-class “backlash.”

While this backlash was not yet powerful enough to pose problems for Obama’s re-election in 2012, it has nevertheless had disastrous effects for Democrats in congressional, state and local elections, where during Obama’s Presidency the Democrats racked up loss after loss in election after election. While some of this is clearly due to the incompetent management of the party under the reign of disgraced former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, it is also the case that the so-called demographic strategy is much less effective in lower turnout elections, which are usually dominated by demographics less favorable to the Democrats’ increasingly open attempts to court minority and immigrant voters. Losing elections in off years might be acceptable as long as Democrats could retain control of the Presidency by assembling the “Obama coalition” once every four years.  However, it apparently never occurred to anyone of strategic import in the Democratic Party that in the absence of a rock-star candidate on the ticket the demographic strategy could fail in a Presidential election as well.[6] The triumph of the Obama campaigns, in which the Democrats were constructed as the political vehicle of the dawning of a new age of historical progress and social/racial justice, crashed down to earth in the disaster of the Clinton campaign, where speaking for the interests of minorities and immigrants often came off more like opportunist pandering than genuine concern for their condition.[7]

Having sworn off the white working class to appeal to minorities and immigrants, the Democrats have now given themselves very little room for political maneuvering. In the absence of demographic change delivering them a permanent electoral majority in the near future, the Democratic Party appears to have no real political strategy other than to point out that  they are not Trump. While it is possible they may be able to ride popular disgust with Trump to victory in the 2018 midterms and/or 2020 Presidential election, it seems likely that the problems associated with pursuing minorities and immigrants as an electoral base will not attenuate anytime soon and will continue to complicate the Democratic Party’s ability to function as an effective party of either opposition or future governance.[8]

Of course, all of these problems facing the establishment Democrats would only seem to open the door for some kind of “progressive” make-over of the party under the forces associated with Bernie Sanders. If the establishment Democrats are now too closely tied with Wall Street donors, too compromised by their support for the neo-liberal consensus than it seems only logical that the main factions of the bourgeoisie would see the necessity to give the supposed “left” party in their political apparatus a new appearance by legitimating the Sanders’ wing and refashioning the Democrats’ message around the economic plight of the working class and the younger generations. Nevertheless, several barriers appear to stand in the way of this happening at this juncture.

First, although the Bernie Sanders campaign captured the imagination of much of the younger generation and Sanders’ own social democratic vision, which includes such ambitious projects as establishing a universal single payer healthcare system and tuition-free college, is popular with the public, Sanders himself is an aging political figure who would be 78 years old at the next Presidential election. Moreover, although his campaign appeared to find a successful new model of financing that eschewed corporate donors in favor of Internet based small donations, this has not translated well into institutional politics in the post-electoral period. Sanders’ own pick to head the DNC, Keith Ellison, was defeated in an internal party election by a more centrist figure, Tom Perez, who was essentially parachuted into the campaign late in the season by Obama and his loyalists to make sure the controversial Ellison did not win. While Perez initially promised unity with Ellison, there are recent reports of an internal party purge that saw several Sanders’ supporters lose their seats at the DNC table. [9]

While Sanders remains a very popular political figure nationwide, a reality that has prevented establishment Democrats from completely snubbing him, his supporters have not yet figured out how to unseat entrenched establishment figures from internal party positions. Moreover, as an “outsider” figure, Sanders has won few friends in the Washington based consultant-pundit-media complex, who remain more or less openly hostile to him and his supporters, seeking to discredit them as part of the same populist forces represented by Trump. Simply put, the Democratic establishment does not want to relinquish control of the party to the Sanders forces, who may put the neo-liberal consensus into question and whose commitment to consensus imperialist goals is as questionable as Trump’s. They would rather lose elections than give over the party to these “populists.”

Nevertheless, the Sanders movement faces other problems based on its own internal political contradictions. On the one hand, Sanders’ political base is clearly in the younger generations, who are attracted to his unabashed critique of neo-liberalism and Wall Street and are generally sympathetic to his old-school social democratic policy commitments. But to the extent to which the Sanders movement has to construct itself as a political as opposed to a demographic movement, it must seek support outside of this base. In the 2016 campaign, this took the form of appealing to those downscale whites still registered as Democrats and thus able to vote in Democratic primaries (or registered as independents in states with open primaries) in rustbelt and otherwise predominantly white states. It was no secret that Sanders performed rather poorly among minority voters, whose votes mostly went to Hillary Clinton. The electoral coalition that would be necessary to transform the Sanders movement from an opposition campaign to a real contender for power would be very difficult to assemble in a stable fashion. Any attempt to appeal to white working class voters by compromising on issues of race and immigration would alienate many of Sanders’ younger supporters, while conversely placating his millennial base on identity issues risks driving white working class voters further into the Trumpist orbit.

Already, Sanders has come in for attack on just this point from the Democratic establishment who have always suspected that deep down the left-wing populist has harbored anti-immigrant sentiment and never really understood issues of racial oppression. Sanders’ past flirtations with a kind of nationalist-protectionism (he even appeared on the Lou Dobbs show once to denounce an immigration reform proposal, because in his words it would create a class of “slave laborers”) has already been used by establishment Democrats to drive down his credibility among minority voters. Moreover, Sanders’ post-election criticism of “identity politics” and his endorsement of a red-state “progressive” politician with a questionable history on abortion rights have all given ammunition to the establishment Democrats’ suspicions that he is not really a social progressive and will sell out minorities and immigrants to court the white working class. In other words, for establishment Democrats, Sanders is really just Trump in disguise.

While such accusations are certainly overstated, they nevertheless highlight the problems facing the Democratic Party in the current period. On the one hand, it has increasingly been discredited as a party of the working class at precisely the time when the interests of the national capital call for an effective opposition party to keep Trump in check. However, any attempt to change the image of the Democrats from a party of monied elites who cow tow to minorities for electoral purposes to a more traditional party of the working class would seem likely to flounder on the rocks of American racial and identity politics in the era of neo-liberal globalization.[10]

If Jeremy Corbyn has momentarily rescued the UK Labour Party from a similar dilemma[11], the chances of a “Sandersization” of the Democratic Party in the US seem more remote. Nevertheless, this only fuels the instability in the political system as a whole and furthers the possibility that the Democrats will eventually split (against the counsel of Sanders himself perhaps) at some point in the future, as it will prove incapable of containing the increasingly anti-neo-liberal (when not outright anti-capitalist) sentiments of the millennial generations within its ranks.[12] In this sense, it is possible that the “demographic strategy” the establishment Democrats are banking on will backfire on them, as the divisions of race, ethnicity and immigrant status are not as strong among the younger generations and they are not as easily manipulated by racist ideology and are more and more able to recognize identity politics as a distraction from underlying structural-economic problems with the capitalist economy as a whole. [13]

The Republican Party unravels under the pressure of decomposition

If the Democratic Party is racked by what appear to be some rather insoluble contradictions, the Republican Party has for all intents and purposes already come apart. This may sound ironic given that Republicans control nearly the entire federal government and a majority of the states, but in reality this apparent strength mask an underlying disintegration that prevents the Republicans from serving as an effective party of national governance.

In previous articles, we have already done much to analyze the origins of the Republican Party’s degeneration from a party of governance under Regan and the first Bush to an increasingly ideologically driven force more and more incapable of acting in the overall interest of the national capital.  While the origins of the Republicans’ transition from a rational business-friendly party and capable defender of the US imperialist interests in the Cold War to the extremist right-wing force it is today go back at least to the Civil Rights movement and Nixon’s adoption of the so-called “Southern Strategy,” the current trend appeared to start during the first Clinton administration. Having ended 12 years of Republican hegemony under Regan-Bush1, mostly by moving the Democratic Party to the right on social issues and endorsing the neo-liberal economic consensus, Clinton effectively pushed the Republicans even further to the right, as they sought to outdo the “Great Triangulator” by “drowning the government baby in the bathtub.”

Clinton’s Presidency infuriated many Republicans, who were incensed that the cool and affable Southern good old boy was able to build what was increasingly looking like an unassailable electoral coalition of minorities and many downscale whites (The media often referred to Clinton as the first “Black President,” at the same time he was affectionately known by many downscale whites as “Bubba.”) Still, the Republicans were able to gain control of Congress in 1994 by exploiting the failure of the Clinton administration’s overreach on healthcare reform (“Hillarycare”) and general concern about the growth of federal government power. Under the direction of increasingly hostile and belligerent elements like Newt Gingrich, they quickly went to work irresponsibly shutting down the government—a political disaster for them they compounded with the bizarre decision to impeach Clinton ostensibly for lying to a grand jury about his sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky.

At the end of the Clinton Presidency, the Republicans looked a spent force, with Al Gore predicted to succeed to the Presidency over the intellectually inferior Republican nominee George W. Bush.  Nevertheless, public disgust with Clinton’s personal antics and a rather poor campaign by Gore allowed Bush to get within striking distance. A contested outcome in Florida threw the election to the Supreme Court, which decided in Bush’s favor, at which time Gore—in the interests of the national capital to avoid any further threats of a “constitutional crisis”—conceded.

The ensuing eight years of the Bush Presidency were nothing short of a total disaster for the US national capital. While his administration exploited the 9/11 terrorist attacks to launch a major imperialist offensive in the Middle East, his decision to invade Iraq a second time, turned global opinion against the United States squandering the international political capital it had gained out of sympathy for the victims on 9/11. Domestically, the Bush administration’s embrace of the so-called “Casino economy” (which had actually begun under Clinton) to prop up growth led to a major economic catastrophe at the end of his Presidency in 2007, when the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market nearly tanked the entire global economy. Forced by circumstances to adopt a positively Keynesian trajectory, Bush acquiesced to a giant bailout of Wall Street on the taxpayers’ dime—earning the ire of many of the free market ideologues and libertarians in his own party, as well as much of the populace disgusted that the “Banksters” were going to get bailed out while their homes values plummeted, credit ratings were ruined and mortgage default and eviction loomed. In the years ahead, many of the right wing ideologues under the Republican Party banner would blame Bush’s penchant for “crony capitalism” (symbolized by his bailing out of the Wall Street financiers) as much for the problems facing the country as his successor’s supposed “socialism.”

Nevertheless, while the Republican Party had been going through a process of ideological degeneration for some time prior to Obama’s election in 2008, it was really under his Presidency that the GOP took a turn towards the abyss. Whatever the media’s triumphalism about the election of the first African-American President, something that would supposedly usher in a new “post-racial” society where meritocracy was perfected, a dark reaction was taking shape within the bosom of the Republican Party. The emergence of the Tea Party in the first two years of Obama’s Presidency signaled a qualitative step forward in the unraveling of the GOP. Partly an “Astroturf” phenomenon funded by vulgar corporate interests like the Koch Brothers to further their deregulatory agenda, but also in part a grassroots backlash reaction to the first African-American President, changing demographics and mass immigration, the Tea Party phenomenon grouped together a diverse—often incoherent—set of grievances against establishment Washington.

In the 2010 mid-term elections, a new crop of right-wing extremist Republican candidates rode the backlash fervor to control of the House Representatives, where they set about not only obstructing Obama’s agenda, but also making life incredibly miserable for establishment Republicans like Speaker of the Houser John Boehner. A vicious cycle emerged, in which fear of a primary challenge from a Tea Party opponent, pushed the Republican party ever further to the right, as more responsible members of the GOP struggled to maintain control of their caucus. The process reached something of a climax in the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, in which Tea Party back-benchers came close to provoking another major economic catastrophe by threatening to refuse service on the ever-increasing national debt.[14]

Although Obama easily won re-election in 2012, mostly by successfully painting his Republican opponent Mitt Romney as a greedy agent of the one-percent, the Republicans would maintain control of Congress for the rest of his Presidency, winning control of the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections. Nevertheless, now trusted with a “share in governance”, the Republican Party fell flat on its face. In an effort to demonstrate that their party could act like adults and actually help solve pressing national issues, several establishment Republicans in the Senate attempted to craft a comprehensive immigration reform package with Democrats. However, this effort was stymied in the House of Representatives as Tea Party Republicans, together with their allies in conservative media, led a vicious campaign to block any attempt at granting “amnesty” to illegal aliens. Eventually, the turmoil within the Republican caucus would force House Speaker John Boehner to resign, replaced by Romney’s 2012 running mate and intellectual heavyweight of the conservative movement Paul Ryan. Nevertheless, even Ryan himself was regarded with suspicion by many Tea Party activists as too close to the establishment with soft views on immigration.

Such was the state of the Republican Party at the opening of the 2016 Presidential campaign. It had long since ceased to be a unified conservative movement, split into several competing, but still somewhat loosely defined ideological currents: business-friendly establishment Republicans looking to rehabilitate the image of the party as a contender for national governance, Christian fundamentalists, free market libertarian-extremists and a somewhat new and still not fully politically articulated “nation-state populist” wing that was becoming increasingly energized around opposition to immigration and the establishment wing of the Republican Party’s seeming willingness to compromise on this issue.

If for much of the Obama years, this latter faction was subsumed under a broader anti-establishment Tea Party movement, it would become clear in the context of the 2016 presidential election that it was not quite the same thing. In storming the Republican primaries to win the GOP’s nomination for Presidency in 2016, the insurgent outsider Donald Trump exploited this difference to build an electoral juggernaut that saw him take down all the establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio, as well as vanquish Tea Party stalwart Ted Cruz, all in convincing fashion.

Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 Republican primary revealed that grassroots electoral support for the Tea Party in prior elections was somewhat of a proxy for a deeper populist revulsion at establishment Washington. Trump did not run a campaign based on conservative economic principles. While he exploited popular resentment at mass immigration, demographic change and shifting cultural values, he also defended Social Security and Medicare, denounced crony capitalism (the fact that Trump himself was a master crony capitalist notwithstanding), signaled his support for socialized medicine and denounced the Iraq War. While there was space for Trump to make common cause with some Republican factions on cultural issues, his economic policies and views on foreign affairs were wholly outside the Republican fold—indeed outside the purview of the main factions of the bourgeoisie itself.

The fact that the main factions of the bourgeoisie—including many establishment Republicans—viewed Trump as a clear and present danger to the interests of the national capital, spawning a last-ditch ”Never Trump” movement in advance of the Republican convention, did not stop him from winning the Republican nomination. Republicans realized the bind they now found themselves in: having stoked popular anger over immigration and disdain for establishment Washington in pursuing their short-term electoral interests, they now found themselves the target of the very forces they had encouraged. They could not deny Trump the nomination, without angering his millions of supporters, openly splitting the Republican Party and shattering the democratic illusion by overturning the will of the Republican voters with backroom party machinations.[15] It wasn’t worth completely dooming one of the nation’s major political parties, when everyone expected Trump to lose to Clinton in the general election anyway.

In effect, Trump had executed a kind of coup in the Republican Party, elevating the nascent “nation-state” populist currents in the Republican base into a distinct and now dominant faction separate from the “movement-conservatism’ to which it was previously subsumed. Under Trump, the Republican Party had been transformed from a peculiarly American form of conservatism to something more akin to a European populist party preaching something resembling their “welfare chauvinism,” symbolized when he elevated the incisive Steve Bannon— the populist editor of Breitbart News—to his chief campaign strategist and then special advisor once arriving in the White House. 

On the eve of the 2016 Presidential Election, the Republican Party was an entity in complete chaos. Nobody expected Trump to win and one got the sense that most establishment Republicans were actually rooting for him to lose. Nobody had any idea how the Republican Party would reconstitute itself in the wake of the crushing defeat it was expected to suffer. Even in defeat, “Trumpism” would have emerged as a distinct and powerful current in its own right that all Republicans would have to respect and fear, even if many of its precepts went against their principles and instincts. When Trump shocked the world by winning the Presidency against the odds, some Republicans shouted triumphantly about an era of “united Republican government” ahead, but underneath these public pronouncements fears mounted about what a Trump presidency would mean for the party and the national interest itself.

In the year since Trump’s victory, it is clear that while the Republican Party survives as an institutional edifice, it has for all intents of purposes ceased to function as a coherent political expression. While the Trumpists find themselves sitting in the oval office and they possess a powerful electoral base with which to threaten establishment Republican candidates (a base Trump continues to stoke with campaign like rallies on something like a monthly basis), they have not been able to consolidate institutional power in Washington. In addition to facing intense push back from the structures of the so-called “deep state” in the intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies who are mostly aligned with centrist Democrats, the Trumpists face dissensions within their own party over their alleged ties to Russia and the overall tone and trajectory of public discourse and policy under Trump. Establishment Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker have all at one time or another loudly denounced the President, with John McCain even casting the decisive vote in derailing Trump’s attempts to claim a legislative victory in his quest to acquiesce to Republican talking points about “repealing and replacing” Obamacare.

Moreover, the Trumpists face opposition within their own party not only from establishment Republicans concerned about Trump’s erosion of “democratic norms,” but also from movement-conservatives and the rump of the Tea Party now organized as the so-called “Freedom Caucus” in the House of Representatives[16] that held up the Republican healthcare repeal proposal because the austerity it imposed was not dramatic enough! While the Republican party seems more united on the issue of pending tax reform legislation, similar complications could emerge either from establishment Republicans who worry about the political optics of its disproportionate benefits for the rich or from Freedom Caucus members concerned about the possible expansion of the national deficit (or some combination thereof).

It has been said that the worst thing that can happen for a populist movement is to actually win power, as it is then subject to the necessities of governing. We can already see the effects of this paradox on the Trump administration. Having run an unabashedly populist campaign, almost one year into his Presidency Trump has been unable to deliver on any of his major campaign promises. Forced to deal with the realities of institutional Washington, Trump has had to toe a more traditional Republican line focusing on repealing Obamacare (a near total failure) and cutting taxes. There has been no massive remaking of the institutional environment or the culture of Washington. Having run on “draining the swamp” in DC, each day that passes reveals Trump and his cronies to be themselves immersed in it.

Similarly, Trump has failed to deliver on most of his ethno-nationalist promises: While there has been some uptick in deportations of “non-criminal aliens” from the interior of the country and Trump has tried time and again to fashion some kind of travel ban against citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries that passes court muster, there have been no mass deportations of millions of immigrants in cattle cars as some feared and others hoped for. Moreover, the architect of much of Trump’s nation-state populist ideology, Steve Bannon, has already been forced to resign and Trump appears to be relying on his entourage of retired generals to formulate most of his foreign policy agenda, while domestically he has been forced by political reality to stay rather close to the Republican Party.[17] Whatever his ties to Russian interests and his kind words for Putin, there has as yet been no open rapprochement with the Russian state (often portrayed by Trumpists as a strong state committed to the defense of Western-Christian civilization from Islamic radicalism). Trump has even attempted to make a deal with Democrats on immigration by signaling he would agree to allow childhood arrivals (the so-called “Dreamers”) to stay in the country in exchange for tougher border security (if not the actual wall he promised his base). Revelations of this deal moved Bannon’s Breitbart News to label Trump “Amnesty Don,” signaling that his populist base will not take any attempt to sell them out on amnesty for illegal immigrants lightly.

While for the moment Trump retains the support of his fervent base, there are signs that even that is beginning to slip away. Trump now enjoys the lowest approval ratings of any modern President after his first year in office.[18] While the Republican Party may enjoy the advantage of gerrymandered districts in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, there is nevertheless growing concern that Trump will hopelessly compromise the Republican brand going forward and that a “wave election” similar to 2006 when the public was fed-up with Bush’s war follies in Iraq, might just sweep the Republicans from power in Congress regardless—something which would open the door for the Democrats to possibly impeach the President.[19]

At this stage, it is not possible to say what the future direction of the Republican Party will take, but it is clearly unfavorable for the erstwhile establishment factions to retain control of the party’s political direction. Even if they maintain a hold on certain Republican Party institutions (or regain them once Trump is swept from power) Trumpism has nevertheless emerged as a powerful force that must be acknowledged and either conceded to or managed politically. The specter of a “Trump minus the baggage” type figure emerging in the future remains a constant concern for the entire political establishment of both parties. [20]

In any event, the Republicans—like the Democrats—remain a house divided, racked by internal contradictions, reflecting the centrifugal forces of social decomposition resulting from the bourgeoisie’s inability to solve the historic crisis of capitalism and the increasing difficulty of a two-party political system to contain the ideological and political fall-out. The perspective ahead then is not for the return of some kind of stable two-party normalcy, but increasing political turbulence as the bourgeois political apparatus attempts to adapt (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to the new social, political and ideological landscape created by social decomposition and their own neo-liberal mode of regulating capitalism’s historic crisis.

The ideological campaigns around the defense of democracy

Today, bourgeois officialdom is quite concerned about Trump’s ascendancy to the Presidency and the social and political forces this represents. There are many facets to the Trump phenomenon for them to be concerned about: his lack of a commitment to the consensus goals of US imperialism, his putting into question consensus neo-liberal policies, his vulgar and offensive rhetoric and personality that compromises US prestige around the world. There are even possibly legitimate concerns about his mental health. However, perhaps the most threatening aspect of Trump’s Presidency for the main factions of the bourgeoisie is his attacks on so-called “democratic norms”—his aggressive rhetoric flouting the courts, his attacks on the press, his lack of a commitment to the basic and fundamental rights of democratic citizenship, etc. It is therefore not a coincidence that the main theme of the so-called resistance to Trump has not been a traditional “left in opposition” campaign around economic issues, but has instead focused around the defense of democratic norms and democratic institutions in the face of the neo-barbarian assault on them launched by the forces of Trumpism.

From the point of view of revolutionaries, we have to reject any call to join in such campaigns as a gross diversion from the goal of intervening in the class struggle of the proletariat on its own class terrain to defend its living and working conditions under threat from capitalism’s crisis and the politicians of all political parties. We do not subscribe to the view that bourgeois democracy has always been “fake” or “staged” as some leftist and conspiracy-obsessed groups do. On the contrary, the development of democratic institutions in the period of capitalism’s ascendance was something the working class could take advantage of in that period:  by putting pressure on these institutions  the workers’ parties of the period won important structural reforms from the capitalists allowing the proletariat to consolidate itself as a class.

Nevertheless, in our view bourgeois democracy experienced a qualitative change with the entry of capitalism into its period of historical decadence early in the last century. Since then, with no truly durable reforms possible to win from a decadent capitalism, the entry of the working class into the parliamentary terrain could only lead to distraction, diversion and political defeat on the terrain of the enemy class. Moreover, in the period of decadence—marked by the progressive statification of society and the decline of the public sphere—bourgeois elections themselves progressively changed from real campaign contests to affairs of state managed by the state’s media apparatus to ensure the victory of a consensus favorite candidate. While electoral mistakes were still possible, it was generally the case over the course of the 20th century that elections were structured such that even the less preferred candidate/party would still pursue the consensus policies of the main factions of the bourgeoisie if they won.

If the forces unleashed in the last several decades by social decomposition have made this process of political management less effective and have returned some level of reality to electoral contests as open campaigns where the winner is uncertain before the votes are actually counted, we do not think that this means we are back in a period when the working class can advance its interests through the electoral arena. On the contrary, the putrefaction of the entire bourgeois political apparatus renders elections an even greater trap for the proletariat today. This is true even when there are “New Left” candidates on offer, such as Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, who—whatever their sincerity—are nevertheless bourgeois politicians like any other. As the experience of Syriza in Greece (and even to some extent Trump in the US) show, should they ever win power (by accident or design) the necessities of bourgeois governance will tend to override their policy commitments very quickly.

Therefore, revolutionaries and the working class more broadly should reject the call to join in the grand coalition to defend “democratic norms” and values against Trump’s transgressions and instead work to locate their specific class interests and develop their own independent struggles against capitalism’s attacks on their working and living conditions. If the concept of “democratic norms” retains some value for certain factions of the bourgeoisie today as a set of principles for regulating that class’s own internal conflicts, we must be clear that the working class—a class that depends on developing a unity of consciousness regarding its distinct class interests—has no position to take in internal bourgeois conflicts today.

Taking the road of searching for the working class’ own autonomous organs will, in our view, necessitate identifying forms of struggle outside of the bourgeoisie’s electoral arena. In pursuing this path, we can look back in history at the struggles of the period of 1917-1927 when the working class developed its own class organs—the workers’ councils—that embodied a spirit of class-consciousness and collective action truly distinct from that of the isolated monad who pulls the lever in the booth on Election Day. We can also look back more recently to the struggles of the period of 2010-2012, when the working class began to take steps to recover this more distant past, albeit imperfectly, during the mobilizations in Wisconsin and the Occupy Movement in the US and the Indignados protests in Spain. It is in taking these examples to their logical conclusion in a proletarian revolution that a future beyond the deprivations and injuries of capitalism in all its forms lies.

--Henk

11/7/2017

 

"Even by the standards of the Middle East, its irrationality, the wanton destruction, the constant, intensifying imperialist machinations and wars, then the Saudi-led attack on Yemen earlier this week reaches new levels of surrealist absurdity: the Saudis are leading a Sunni Muslim coalition of ten nations including non-Arab, nuclear-armed Pakistan in an attack on Yemen. Local gangsters like the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are involved but also the Egyptian dictator al-Sisi and the genocidal clique of Sudan’s al-Bashir. All these despots are backed by the USA and Britain, which has offered the coalition ‘logistical and intelligence’ support". This is what we wrote in April 2015 in an article called 'Militarism and decomposition in the Middle East' just after the launch of what the Saudis optimistically called "Operation Decisive Storm". The war in Yemen has since become much worse, much more dangerous and, after Syria, possibly pivotal for imperialist developments in the Middle East, not least the stakes in the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, their respective "allies" and the major powers.

In one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of some 23 million, the Saudi "coalition" (which Pakistan has quietly ducked out of) has poured US and British-made bombs into what is essentially a confrontation with Iran for regional power. A glance at the map of the Middle East shows the general geostrategic importance of Yemen and the factor that it now plays in local and global rivalries. Ten thousand have been killed by the shelling and air-strikes during which hospitals, schools, residential areas and mosques have been hit. Three million homes have been destroyed and ancient buildings reduced to dust, in what the Romans called "Blessed Arabia". In addition to the bombing the Saudis have imposed a blockade on both emergency aid and commercial imports, which the Red Cross has called a "medieval siege", causing tens of thousands more deaths. Fourteen million people have no access to sanitation and clean water, and cholera cases have reached a million. The spread of famine and malnutrition is also accompanied by the spread of the easily-preventable ancient disease of diphtheria as well as increases in Dengue fever and malaria. In thirty long months since its declaration of war the Saudi coalition, with the assistance of the US and Britain, has pummelled the life out of an ever-greater number of civilians, reducing them to living like animals and surely feeding the next wave of refugees fleeing from this hell across the Arab Peninsula or via the African route towards Europe.

Iran increases its spread and influence in Yemen and beyond

What the Saudis and their backers are most fearful of, and what, in the "logic" of imperialism they have contributed to bringing about, is an increase of Iranian influence, not only in Yemen, but via a "pincer" movement around Saudi territory through the land connection between Iran-Syria-Iraq-Lebanon, along the Turkish border and the Gulf of Aden into Yemen and, ominously, building up its interests and forces in Africai. Iranian regional influence has never been more widespread and powerful than it is today, and this is despite the recent US attempts to thwart it at every turn. Iran now effectively controls a land corridor that runs from Tehran to Tartus in Syria on the Mediterranean coast "giving it access to a sea-port a long way to its west, and far from the heavily patrolled waters of the Persian Gulf" (Guardian, 8.10.16). The more the US has weakened and is weakening in the Middle East the more Iran has strengthened. The position of Russia has also strengthened on the back of it, but Iran is no simple pawn of Russiaii.

The Yemeni Houti forces currently fighting the Saudi-backed militias in Yemen took over and dominated the wave of anti-government and anti-corruption demonstrations that emerged in Yemen as part of the "Arab Spring" of 2011. It started as an obscure revivalist Shia movement in the 1990s called "Believing Youth", was radicalised by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has wider support among many Sunnis showing that, though the irrationality of religion plays a role, this is no simple Sunni/Shia division (there's been no serious history of ethnic or religious divides in Yemen except what the major powers, including Britain, have stirred up). The Iranians call it the "Ansarullah" movement and despite its links with Iran its history is again not one of a simple pawn. By late 2014 large parts of the country were taken by the Houtis and as the war has gone on so the Houti-Iranian-Hezbollah links, forged in the conflict, have strengthened. In December, when the Yemeni leader and warlord Saleh turned away from the Iran/Houtis and towards Saudi, he was killed with a ruthlessness that was reminiscent of the CIA assassinations of the 60s, which is something Hezbollah is also familiar with.

There are recent reports of Iran sending advanced weapons and military advisers to the Houtis, including its battle-hardened Afghan mercenaries (New York Times, 18.9.17). These are probably overestimated by the west but the Iranians think in the long-term as they did with their build-up of Hezbollah, which has now become Iran's arrowhead against Israel and part of its general strengthening and build-up throughout the Middle East. The ballistic missiles aimed at Saudi targets do suggest a Hezbollah involvement. These are perfect weapons for the Houtis aimed at high value Saudi targets and only one has to get through eventually; in the meantime they sow terror and uncertainty among the Saudis in the same way as the Nazi V2's did for London. At any rate, the Houti leader, Abdul Malik Badreddine al Houti, addressing Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrullah in the summer, said: "Your bet on the Yemenis is proper" and he went on to talk about joint forces against Israel bringing in the Palestinian questioniii. These moves will only be bolstered by the foreign policy of Trump and his Saudi-Israeli embrace.

It's worth stepping back a bit to see how things have changed regarding the Middle Eastern imperialist snake-pit: just a short while ago US and Iranian forces were acting together in Iraq at high military levels up to and including coordinated and joint military actions against Isis, but it was clear to everyone that once the latter was defeated new tensions would break out. Again, even in Yemen, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) preferred to work with the Houtis in the fight against al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and Isis; and US generals said Saudi action in Yemen was "a bad idea" (al-Jazeera, 15.4.17) given the involvement of the Saudi-supported Yemeni secret service (PSO) being deeply connected to the terrorists. While Washington showered the Yemeni government with political and financial support, former president Saleh, an ally of the Saudis, was manipulating the terrorists’ activity in order to get Washington's supportiv courtesy of the "War on Terror".

Washington finds it difficult to cope with the quagmire of the Middle East and its attempts to do so can only make the situation worse

Trump's National Security Adviser, H. R. McMaster, said in October: "What is most important for all nations is to confront the scourge of Hezbollah, the Iranians and the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards)" (Patrick Cockburn in the Independent, 9.12.17). How the Americans plan to do this without further inflaming and destabilising the Middle East is anyone's guess. The US de-certification of the Iranian nuclear deal has, amongst other things, caused a serious rift with Europe (and won't encourage the North Koreans "to come to the table"), in particular the three major countries active in the region - France, Britain and Germany. Trump's incendiary recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel - a totally stupid and unnecessary move which will mainly please his evangelical base - can only rebound on US imperialist interests. It will fan the flames of Palestinian/Arab nationalism and, despite the theatrics of the UN, particularly from Turkey's Erdogan, arouse more global protests against the US from both Shia and Sunni wings of Islam. It also gives the jihadis of Isis and al-Nusra a life-line (one of Bin Laden's strongest recruiting drives was the oppression of the Palestinians) and makes it harder for Saudi Arabia and its allies to work with Israel and the US, while furthering the interests of Tehran.

The situation of the Saudi regime is more fragile, from its embrace of Trump which was followed by a major falling out with Qatar, gangster-like purges of its enemies, including those hostile to Trump, and bizarre summonses of Lebanon's President Hariri and Palestinian leader Abbas to Riyadh. The Saudi prince, the effective ruler of the country said in April last, that he "wanted out" of the war in Yemen and had no objections to the American interceding with Iran to this endv. Whatever his wishes, or those of any individuals involved, imperialism, decomposition and irrationality are the driving forces behind the Yemeni disaster and, with Iran, these forces are only going to strengthen.

Boxer, 22.12.17