At this stage, one of the biggest things we can do to turn this imperialist war into a class war is combat the Trotskyist sentiments which dismiss anti-imperialist struggles. This opposition often varies in its forms and severity, because Trotskyist orgs aren’t a monolith. But the reality we need to deal with is that throughout much of the communist movement, there exists a fundamental hostility towards the countries or movements that are at the forefront of resisting Washington. And Trotskyism is the ideological throughline that we can identify among these trends.
One example of this problem from recent times is when these communist formations have opposed Russia’s war against Ukrainian fascism; which is a stance that opposes not only the anti-fascist effort itself, but also the workers struggles that produced this effort. Another example is Venezuela, which the KKE and its ideologically aligned parties have failed; they’ve promoted the lies from Venezuela’s Trotskyist wrecker faction about Maduro having betrayed the workers, which split the workers movement amid Washington’s escalating campaign of aggression against Venezuela.
Of course, these same formations have denounced these aggressions, but only after they contributed towards weakening the resistance against what Washington has been doing. And the same applies to how they’ve handled Iran, though in a manner that’s more subtle (and therefore in a way more dangerous).
In terms of the pro-imperialist narratives that we’ve seen from popular Marxist publications, among the biggest problems can be found within In Defense of Communism, which has platformed the Tudeh Party of Iran’s statement from this February that said Khamenei “drove the country [Iran] to the brink of war and destruction.” Zionist lies within a pseudo-“Marxist” framing really don’t get any worse than that; but I will not accuse any of the actual parties I’m speaking about of endorsing this particular lie, since Idcommunism isn’t officially a publication for any party. The fact that Idcommunism is run by individuals who support Greece’s communist party, though, is something we should note in relation to Tudeh. Because Tudeh has successfully gotten the KKE, and many other CPs, to sign on to a statement that’s influenced by Tudeh’s agenda of slandering the Islamic Republic.
The statement I’m talking about doesn’t go so far as to blame Iran for the war, which I doubt that any CP on earth besides Tudeh would do. But it does show that Tudeh has managed to legitimize itself within the movement as a perceived source of reporting on the events within Iran, which is of course very troubling. The statement was made in January, and was endorsed by dozens of communist orgs around the globe; not just the KKE and its European partners, but also Global South formations like the Palestinian Communist Party. It said that “We have received detailed reports, published by the fraternal Tudeh Party of Iran, regarding the circumstances surrounding the protest demonstrations that began on December 28 in Tehran. According to all reports, the brutal mass crackdown waged by the authorities of the Islamic Republic was unleashed in response to the legitimate protests of people against the catastrophic collapse of the country’s national currency and the acutely deteriorating living conditions being endured by the population at large.”
Its language about the crackdown is non-specific, but it shows that Tudeh has been able to normalize two key narratives within the global communist movement: 1) that Iran’s security forces have been committing abuses in as serious of a way as Zionism’s propaganda has portrayed, and 2) that the protests should simply be viewed as organic, even though the Mossad has said it’s sent agents to shape the character and behavior of the demonstrations. These are the ideas that bad actors within the communist movement have been proliferating about Iran, and they certainly have played a role in letting the U.S. take its attacks on Iran this far.
As our third world war goes on, and more countries come into the center of the conflict, the communist movement’s principles keep being tested. And to make it pass this test of history, we must wage a struggle inside socialism. Combating Trotskyism is among the most productive things we can do at the moment for the same reason that it was so important for Lenin to combat the “socialists” who supported the first world war.
Exposing the impediments towards anti-imperialist struggle within the left is how we create the friction that the workers movement needs during times like this one. Forcing the debate over anti-imperialism into working-class spaces is one critical step towards realizing the outcome Mao envisioned for when a third world war came about; the outcome where the global working class makes this war backfire on the capitalists, and carries out an unprecedented wave of revolutions.
When I name Trotskyists as the source of the imperial collaborationism within the communist movement, I’m not only talking about the formations that outright use the “Trotskyist” label. I’m even more so referring to the elements within socialism which have internalized the ideology of Trotskyism; which share its fixation on perceived ideological purity, over the practical needs of liberation struggles. Any self-described socialist formation that refuses to get behind the Islamic Republic is practicing Trotskyism, and is thereby embodying the modern version of the chauvinism that Lenin identified within the left opportunists of his time:
Mere appeals to the workers of all countries, empty assurances of devotion to internationalism, direct or indirect attempts to fix a “sequence” of action by the revolutionary proletariat in the various belligerent countries, laborious efforts to conclude “agreements” between the socialists of the belligerent countries on the question of the revolutionary struggle, all the fuss over the summoning of socialist congresses for the purpose of a peace campaign, etc., etc.—no matter how sincere the authors of such ideas, attempts, and plans may be – amount, as far as their objective significance is concerned, to mere phrase-mongering, and at best are innocent and pious wishes, fit only to conceal the deception of the people by the chauvinists. The French social-chauvinists, who are the most adroit and accomplished in methods of parliamentary hocus-pocus, have long since broken the record for ranting and resonant pacifist and internationalist phrases coupled with the incredibly brazen betrayal of socialism and the International, the acceptance of posts in governments which conduct the imperialist war, the voting of credits or loans (as Chkheidze, Skobelev, Tsereteli and Steklov have been doing recently in Russia), opposition to the revolutionary struggle in their own country, etc., etc.
Good people often forget the brutal and savage setting of the imperialist world war. This setting does not tolerate phrases, and mocks at innocent and pious wishes. There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is—working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.
If we wage a serious struggle against Trotskyism, like Lenin waged a struggle against these earlier social-chauvinists, we’ll put the workers movement in position to take advantage of the many opportunities which are appearing before it. We’ll be able to connect our labor struggles with the fight that’s being waged by the Iranians, and by all the other peoples who are engaged in or preparing for armed defense against the imperial aggressors.
There lies the true value in this whole debate: it lets us take example from the struggles of the Global South. This task of ending the separation between workers struggles and anti-colonial struggles actually has a very direct connection to the origins of Trotskyism, because Trotskyism’s rise depended on Marxists failing to properly understand the character of the Global South’s revolts. When the expectation by Marx and Engels about workers revolutions first happening in the most developed countries failed to come true, and the early 20th century’s European worker uprisings were successfully crushed, many in the socialist movement reacted by going in a right-wing deviationist direction. They came to the position that building socialism in one country would make socialism fail, because according to their interpretation of the old “workers can only win in the most developed countries” idea, socialism could only be built when Russia’s revolution expanded beyond the underdeveloped country in which it had taken place.
This translated to an inherent bias in favor of the working-class politics within the imperialist countries, and a dismissal of the liberation fights within the colonized or formerly colonized nations. In ideological terms, the problem here is an unwillingness to recognize primary vs. secondary contradictions. On a material level, there’s a deeper reason for why these Trotskyist and chauvinist attitudes exist. This ideological conflict is truly a conflict between the petty-bourgeois forces within the socialist movement, and the forces that have a truly firm basis in the working class—that is the global working class, and the concrete struggles it’s waging against U.S. hegemony. If we properly understand the petty-bourgeois side, we can prevent the workers from falling into the traps that the opportunists create for them.
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