There are three further aspects of the internationalist battle which require attention. The first regards our class forces. In comparison with 1967, wage-earners in the North African and Middle Eastern area which extends from Morocco to Iran, including Turkey, have risen in number from 20 to 120 million and amount to two thirds of the working population, with a quarter of them belonging to the industrial proletariat. This interweaves in the Gulf petro-monarchies with sizeable Indian and Asian immigration, often forming the absolute majority of the labour force. It is understandable that only an internationalist position can conceive of the unity of such a vast proletariat in North Africa and the Middle East, but it is also possible to glimpse the force it could express if organised and oriented by a revolutionary strategy.
In 1967, Arrigo Cervetto rejected the argument that the relations of force were not favourable to the proletariat in the Middle East. Wage-earners already accounted for a considerable share of the working population and there were “large masses of proletarianised peasants;” in any case, a Leninist strategy could not be built solely on the Middle Eastern proletariat but would need to be welded to the “revolutionary struggle of the European proletariat.” Only an internationalist battle, and certainly not “interventionism” in support of the various Nassers and the social-national myths of the Arab bourgeoisies, would be able to entrench that class strategy in Europe.
Half a century later, 120 million proletarians along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, six times as many as in 1967, could count on 200 million class comrades in Europe, if only a communist strategy knew how to coordinate them. Undoubtedly, we can see with our own eyes the delay of the world party, the lack of an International founded on the class principle, but even more openly revealed is the failure, after a whole century, of the national principle, in the ineptitude of bourgeoisies drenched in oil revenue, incapable of any kind of regional agreement and degraded to the point of supporting the worst fanaticisms.
The second question which requires revisiting is, precisely, the relationship between the Arab bourgeoisie and the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Commenting on the tragic defeat of the PLO in Lebanon in 1982, hard-pressed by Israel and abandoned by the Arab countries, Cervetto observed that the PLO was “a heterogeneous collective of dozens of organisations in constant conflict, sometimes armed,” a “sum of military groups coming directly under the various Arab bourgeoisies which financed them, from the Saudi to the Iraqi.” Moreover, only the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza, under Israeli occupation, were stably entrenched, with a social stratification in which “a property-owning bourgeoisie” influenced some PLO currents with one hand, while with the other it collaborated economically with the Israeli bourgeoisie, in a market “in full expansion” despite the permanent state of war.
Yasser Arafat himself, Palestinian historian report, recognised that the various organisations gathered in the PLO were part of the “conflict of the Arab nation” and were “linked to Arab countries;” hence, facing them would have meant facing those countries; his attempt, or his illusion, was a continual oscillation between the different influences in order to avoid depending on them.
Edward Said, one of the greatest Palestinian intellectuals, defined Palestinians as “victims of victims,” thanks to the unique situation of the millions who found themselves exiled or in refugee camps at the hands of a state, Israel, which carries imprinted in its moral factor centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms and the horror of the Shoah. It is Said himself who claimed in a 1978 book that the Palestinian diaspora has given birth to one of the “regional elites” in the Middle East, an important part of the “Arab upper middle class,” with “key positions in the bureaucracies or in the oil industry” or “roles as advisers in the economic field or as counsellors of various Arab governments.”
What must be added today is the following: the dependence of the Palestinian bourgeoisie of the diaspora on the various sectors of the Arab bourgeoisie was its original sin; it exposed the PLO’s fragility when the trickle of oil revenue devoted to it was redirected to the Islamist currents and Iranian influence also became part of the game. The first Gulf War in 1991 was an about-turn, the Arab powers siding with Washington while the PLO continued to support Saddam Hussein. The decisive boost to Hamas dates back to that time, when it was subsequently encouraged by the right-wing Israeli governments themselves, who saw in it the opportunity to split the Palestinian front while colonisation of the West Bank was proceeding. This is why the Israeli government is also to be numbered among the ruinous bourgeoisies, in the sorcerer’s apprentice game regarding Hamas which overwhelmed it on October 7th, while the atrocious fury of its retaliation on Gaza, in the era of social media and TV carnage, will leave an indelible mark on its reputation.
The consequence of the slow annexation of the West Bank was the weakening of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), while Gaza ended up in the hands of Hamas: a failure for the old secular and social-national roots of Palestinian representation, a mirror image of the political setback suffered by the Israeli currents which were still amenable to the formula two peoples, two states. And there was a division of Palestine’s future prospects along two lines of influence: that of Tehran, which aims to become a nuclear power, and that of Riyadh, which would like to emulate it via the Abraham Accords with Israel. There could not have been a more tragic and derisive epilogue for the Palestinians than to be left exposed, with 40,000 victims, to Israel’s retaliation in the name of the atomic ambitions of the Iranian mullahs, and of having as an alternative a downward compromise with Israel itself in the shadow cast by the Saudi petro-monarchy.
It is difficult to say, in this framework, what fate will befall the Beijing Declaration, by which fourteen organisations, including Fatah and Hamas, recognise the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinians; what is certain is the role that China is confirming in the area, which has already emerged with its attempted mediation between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Finally, the third question regards the prospects of internationalism. In 1985, taking stock of the principle of class struggle in dealing with the national question, Cervetto wrote that the Leninist party which complied with this principle would not be dragged into “social-imperialist positions” by the transmission belt of the national question: it could “be reduced to extreme isolation” but it could not “be distorted.”
That condition of “extreme isolation” brings us back to the reality which a line advocating Arab-Israeli class unity has to face today in both Israel and the Arab world. This is nothing new: even the simple positions of economic and trade union unity in the 1920s were opposed and often physically liquidated in both the Jewish and the Palestinian camps. Moreover, this has been the case throughout history for every internationalist minority which has found itself facing the fanaticisms stirred up in war mobilisations: the Bolsheviks were forced into living outside the law or taking refuge abroad, accused of being agents of Germany, before war itself shattered consensus within the country and in the trenches, and opened up the way to revolutionary defeatism.
And yet, in this half-century the possibilities of consolidating a class position, of rebuilding an internationalist strategy, albeit along a narrow and arduous path, have grown. Let’s deal with the question starting from another Cervetto article, written in 1986, regarding the “poisoned seeds of Mediterranean politics.” One of these “poisoned seeds” was terrorism, which from a highly-developed Middle East and “incandescent hotbed of wars,” and therefore a “chaotic hothouse of bombs and bombers,” spilled into the Italian and European metropolises. Another poisoned seed was the condition of the immigrant labour force, with low wages and “without any kind of protection;” the Italian metropolis drew on “a new source of surplus value from the Mediterranean basin” which increased “its imperialist maturity and the ‘wage-earning aristocracy’s’ possibility of corruption.”
In these decades, this same progress of capitalist development, of the disintegration of the peasantry and of demographic growth which has sextupled the proletariat along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the periphery of European imperialism, has pushed tens of millions of migrants into the Old Continent’s big cities. It goes without saying that this fact alone makes our internationalist battle in Europe indispensable; our opposition to the poisons of nationalism, which inevitably spread through a multiethnic proletariat, accompanies our struggle against every kind of racism and every kind of discrimination.
The vast majority of immigrants are undoubtedly by now part of Europe’s wage-earning stratification and also end up being assimilated into the metabolism of the social scale; hence, questions of class defence now prevail over distinctions by migratory origin. Nevertheless, such a vast pool of immigrant labour force, destined to grow, to a certain extent opens the way to the interpretation which sees Europe as the rearguard of the Middle Eastern conflicts. The ruling class is discussing this with ample doses of hypocrisy and cynicism. After October 7th, Henry Kissinger went so far as to state on Welt TV that “it was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different cultures and religions and concepts because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that.” With a bourgeoisie which cannot do without immigration but must reassure public opinions which have grown old and afraid, the pretexts for hateful discrimination and xenophobic campaigns are multiplying; we need only think of the suspicions raised against French people with dual nationality, or the controversies in Germany over the new right to citizenship which accelerates naturalisation.
However, that same presence of tens of millions of immigrants from the southern shore of the Mediterranean, with the entrenchment of the second and third young generations, may prove to be an opportunity for our internationalist battle. If the margin of action for a communist minority in the Middle Eastern tangle is limited to “extreme isolation,” the possibilities of clarification and internationalist entrenchment in the European rearguard are much greater.
We Leninists are no longer that small group which sought to consolidate internationalist positions in 1967. Every year, thousands of young people now have the possibility of knowing the positions of revolutionary Marxism; in the growing share which has its roots in immigration, there are increasingly those who find in internationalism the solution — almost a revelation — in the face of a century of failures on the part of the Middle Eastern nationalisms. The same holds true — while the conflict is again raising the spectre of anti-Semitism in the Old Continent — for the young Jews, Arabs, Arab-Israelis, Iranians or whoever living in Europe for studies. Removed from the climate of fanaticism of the union sacrée of war, and to a certain extent safe from the obtuse ferocity of retaliation, they can come to terms with Marxism and internationalism; this is why the young people of our Workers’ Clubs are carrying on their battle in the universities, rejecting the boycotting of Israel’s universities and those of any other country.
Here, too, pages of the history of the revolutionary movement, which should be read, act as confirmation. The First International, starting from Marx and Engels, was powered by the immigration of Europeans and political émigrés to London. In the early 1920s, whole sectors of the Third International, before being engulfed or annihilated by Stalinism, were recruited among the young people who were in Paris, London or Berlin from all over the world for studies or for work.
This is the practical way that half a century of political battles has opened up since those six days in 1967. We do not know what wars of the crisis in the world order will shake the next decade, nor to what extent. What is certain is that very many young people and very many proletarians, in Europe and in the world, will find themselves facing fundamental questions regarding the barbaric future which this society promises new generations. It is therefore a matter of rooting Leninism in Europe and throughout Europe, among European young people and proletarians as well as among those of every origin.
This is a task which requires the patience to rebuild internationalism youth by youth, and worker by worker, but also promptness in grasping about-turns and sudden accelerations which may shake class consciousness. Is this a narrow path? Take a look at what is believed to be the broad way, the highway of bourgeois rule, that of nationalism or of the share-outs of imperialism: that is a dead end paved with millions of victims, and promising further millions the same future.
(From the introduction of the forthcoming book The War in Gaza: An Internationalist Response)
Lotta Comunista, September 2024