One of the biggest problems in today’s socialist politics is crude economism, as advanced by Greece’s KKE and its affiliated orgs. This is the problem that’s led the KKE to not just oppose the bigger anti-imperialist states, but also reinforce dangerous pro-normalization talking points on Palestine. Identifying these wrongful actions isn’t just about opposing the KKE; it lets us gain clarity on which actions to take at this moment.
When the USSR ended, the only direction that the class struggle could go in was one where the world’s workers forged unprecedented new paths. Paths like struggling for military resistance against NATO’s schemes for a renewed fascist offensive, as the Russian workers did when they pressured their government into launching the Ukraine operation. Or like taking control of the government on the basis of Bolivarianism, as Venezuela’s workers have done. These are early steps in the recovery process that the global proletarian movement would undergo after its great defeats in the 20th century. To defend these gains, and to expand upon them, we must understand how the revolutionary struggle has changed compared to what it was in the Soviet era.
Escaping stagnation
With the USSR’s dissolution, the crude economism that corrupted the Soviet Union from within was thereby discredited by history. This event proved that any socialist leadership which disregards Stalin and Lenin, or pursues “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world, is a leadership that will bring their projects to ruin. When a communist party leadership that isn’t in power embraces such crude economism, and fails to keep up with the conditions they’re navigating, the outcome is that their organizations will stagnate.
This is what’s happening with Greece’s KKE, and with the many parties under the KKE’s influence: due to their antagonism against anti-imperialist states, their rejections of practical alliances, and their anti-democratic gatekeeping against those who oppose their dogmas, they are failing to seize this moment’s opportunities for building new workers power. This is why I describe these political actors as having discarded Lenin and Stalin: it’s one thing to rhetorically uphold these figures, as the KKE does, but it’s another thing to apply their practice of scientifically investigating what the conditions demand from revolutionaries. When the KKE has opposed Russia’s anti-fascist operation, or sided with the anti-Maduro Trotskyist wreckers in Venezuela, this has shown its opposition to any practice which truly advances the class struggle in the 21st century.
Within the socialist movement, the KKE’s camp represents the impulse to cling to the past, and reject anything which deviates from the rigid economistic rules. Because this mentality prevents progress for the workers movement, it leaves the movement open to being overshadowed or co-opted by the outright pro-capitalist liberal elements. And in the absence of a serious or dynamic leadership for the workers, the workers will seek out alternatives. This is what the workers did after the Second International sided with imperialism in World War I, as Lenin described in 1915:
The proletarian masses—probably about nine-tenths of whose former leaders have gone over to the bourgeoisie—have found themselves disunited and helpless amid a spate of chauvinism and under the pressure of martial law and the war censorship. But the objective war-created revolutionary situation, which is extending and developing, is inevitably engendering revolutionary sentiments; it is tempering and enlightening all the finest and most class-conscious proletarians. A sudden change in the mood of the masses is not only possible, but is becoming more and more probable, a change similar to that which was to be seen in Russia early in 1905 in connection with the “Gaponade”, when, in the course of several months and sometimes of several weeks, there emerged from the backward proletarian masses an army of millions, which followed the proletariat’s revolutionary vanguard. We cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will develop immediately after this war, or during it, etc., but at all events, it is only work in this direction that deserves the name of socialist work.
It was when Russia began the Ukraine operation in February 2022 that the socialist movement re-experienced this kind of upswing, where a new phase of crises forced the workers movement to take on new forms following previous defeats for it. Between 1991 and 2022, socialism outside the remaining workers states had been in many ways dormant. In places like the United States, socialism during that era was just talk. Only when the world’s communist parties were confronted with a truly challenging question—in this case, whether you’re committed to supporting the forces which are fighting U.S. imperialism—could these parts of the movement gain a dynamic role. This was the moment when forces such as the KKE revealed their opportunistic character to an unprecedented extent, while other forces got an opportunity to demonstrate their principles.
The new test that Palestine has presented
The litmus test of supporting the Russian anti-fascist resistance still applies, and is still a central aspect of working-class politics. But as the Ukraine war has continued, and has helped catalyze equally important events like Palestine’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the revolutionary struggle’s participants have needed to keep rapidly adapting. To remain on the side of progress in a time when our conflicts are accelerating on all fronts, one has had to support the Palestinian resistance amid intense Zionist pressure; to keep centering the Gaza genocide even when this isn’t the trendy thing to cover; to emphasize and advance class struggle when this isn’t a major priority in “alt media” or “multipolarist” spaces.
These are the duties we’ve found ourselves tasked with during the Trump 2.0 era, where even as the globe’s anti-imperialist forces have been making great progress, there have also emerged powerful opportunistic forces that threaten to pull anti-imperialists in self-defeating directions. The notion that we need to side with the second Trump administration against the liberal wing of our ruling class has been very heavily pushed within our spaces, taking scrutiny on Palestine away from the White House at the most critical moments in this extermination.
The present moment may be the most important one yet. This is when the U.S. empire has activated its plan to portray Gaza as having reached “peace,” while using this as a cover to accelerate Palestine’s destruction. This doesn’t mean the empire has full control over the situation; it’s had to respond to the indomitable strength of Gaza’s resistance, and this attempt at covering up the ongoing genocide is its best hope for getting to a “Final Solution” on Palestine. We need to expose how “Israel” is still bombing Gaza, still occupying large parts of it, and still imposing a siege that’s starving Gaza’s people. We must show the world that the Palestinian resistance fighters continue to deal blows against the aggressors, while building up the movements towards getting humanitarian aid to the genocide’s victims and economically cutting off “Israel.”
These are among the practices that we need to keep at the forefront of what we do. If we neglect these tasks, and only support Palestine in words while failing to fight for it in practice, we’ll fall into a new type of stagnation—even if we have a political line that supports Russia. It was the progression in Palestine’s anti-colonial war, marked by the great strategic victory of October 7, that gave pro-Russian political actors the opportunity to impact history on a more practical level. Backing Russia was in itself revolutionary, but with the unprecedented global momentum behind Palestine’s liberation, we could now take on a direct role in advancing the anti-imperialist struggle which Russia is part of.
Unsurprisingly, the KKE has also failed the Palestine test. It hasn’t just failed this test because it stands against the broader anti-imperialist forces, though this is certainly one problem with its positions. The main problem with the KKE’s stance on Palestine is that it recognizes the Zionist entity’s “right” to exist. This is the message within the KKE’s statement about how to view the role of the “Israeli” people: “The KKE expressed its full solidarity with and support for the Palestinian people and their need to have their own state and be masters in their own land, while pointing out that the victim of the policy pursued by the bourgeois state of Israel and the reactionary Netanyahu government is the Israeli people themselves. This statement has been met with hostility by certain forces that claim to be anti-imperialist and that do not recognize the existence of the Israeli state, describing it simply as a ‘a base of the USA’ and, among other things, do not recognize the existence of an Israeli bourgeoisie, with its own plans, and the Israeli people.”
We know that this statement advances the “right to exist” argument because the KKE explicitly justifies the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine, stating: “The existence of the Israeli state is a reality today. The massacre of the Jews by the Nazis and the anti-Semitism promoted by the bourgeois classes before the Second World War in many capitalist countries led to the acceptance by the USSR and the international labour movement of the creation of the state of Israel alongside the state of Palestine.”
This is the very worst position that can come from crude economism, even worse than “neither Russia nor NATO” or “neither Washington nor Beijing.” Here, the KKE is taking the position that a Jewish state in Palestine should continue to exist, as it says in its October 9 statement that the KKE wants “an independent [Palestinian] state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” It’s promoting the most perverse kind of “peaceful coexistence” doctrine; the one where liberal politicians advocate for the Zionist occupation of Palestine to continue, using the promise that this occupation can exist alongside a “free” Palestine.
The only effect this can have is to weaken the pro-Palestine cause, because especially in the context of the KKE’s insistence that we must “recognize the existence of the Israeli state,” it leads workers to support normalization of the Jewish ethno-supremacist project. And it’s all justified by the idea that in order to account for the class contradictions, we need to frame the Jewish colonizers in Palestine as victims; which is an analysis that grotesquely minimizes the seriousness of Palestine’s holocaust.
These actions by the propagators of crude economism are extremely harmful, but they also show us which actions we can take that are most positively impactful. If we wage the struggle for Palestine with consistency and dedication, fighting against the push for normalization that forces like the KKE advance, we will be able to keep building on our cause’s recent gains.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment