[The following article appeared in the October 26 issue of the French Trotskyist weekly, Rouge. As the author explains, it was written to clear up some confusion about the revolutionary position on the October War that has been apparent within the French and Arab far left. In large part the article takes the form of a polemic against the position taken by Lutte Ouvrière, a French far-left group. Already the debate has borne fruit. The box on the next page also appeared in the October 26 Rouge. It indicates that Lutte Ouvrière has rectified its position.
[But the line originally taken by Lutte Ouvrière remains an unfortunately common one in many leftist circles throughout the world. Rouge's answer thus retains its relevance. The translation of it is by Intercontinental Press.]
In its past two issues Rouge has explained its position on the fourth Arab-Israeli war, both through its own articles and through publishing articles by revolutionary Marxists in the Middle East. That position can be summed up in three points:
1. No consistent Marxist can be neutral in this conflict; against Israel, the national oppressor of the Arab peoples, we are on the side of the Arab states, even though they are bourgeois states.
2. The Arab bourgeoisies launched this war in order to reach a compromise with imperialism that would satisfy each side, involving on the one hand recognition of Israel "within secure borders," and on the other hand repossession of the occupied territories by the Arabs.
3. Therefore, our solidarity with the Arab armies goes along with a call to
struggle against the existing regimes, to organize the workers independently, outside the pale of nationalist pressures, and to put forward transitional slogans that can be summed up in the formula: Transform the war into a revolutionary offensive!
This position contrasts with two opinions that have cropped up within the far left, both French and Arab.
First, an opportunist position: a simple tail-endism that liquidates any critique of the Arab bourgeoisies, disregarding their responsibility in militarily crushing the Palestinian resistance. The dominant tone that comes through in the pages of Politique-Hebdo (a far-left weekly], certain of whose articles go so far as to speak of "a new dynamic between peoples and leaders," reflects this position.
Then there is a dogmatic position:
setting the belligerent states on the same level; giving Israel, Egypt, and Syria equal treatment. In short, the position revolutionary Marxists took during the India-Pakistan war [of 1965). The editorial that appeared in the October 9-15 issue of Lutte Ouvrière expressed this position: This war "serves neither the interests of the Arab peoples nor those of the Israeli people.... For all peoples, nationalism is a bloody trap that they are being pushed into by their own ruling classes."
Because of these differences within the far left, it appears necessary for us to develop our position in more detail. Furthermore, some letters sent to Rouge indicate an uncertainty that can be summed up in the following question: Is Rouge capitulating before the revival of Arab nationalism that the offensive of the Egyptian and Syrian regular armies is inevitably provoking?
The judgment of revolutionary Marxists on the events in the Middle East is based on two levels: a principled position on the colonial question, and a particular position in regard to the concrete development of the class struggle in the region.
In 1920, in its theses on the national and colonial question, the Second Congress of the Communist International (when Lenin was alive) expressed the guidelines of the revolutionary Marxist analysis of the movements for national liberation this way: "Foreign domination impedes the free development of economic forces. That is why the destruction of foreign domination is the first step of the revolution in the colonies, and that is why the aid accorded to the destruction of foreign domination in the colonies is not in reality aid accorded the nationalist movement of the indigenous bourgeoisie, but is the opening of the road for the oppressed proletariat itself."
It is an identical reasoning that guides us today, just as in 1967, when in face of the Israeli aggression the Fourth International placed itself on the side of the Arab states. In this war, you have to take sides. The "states" that Lutte Ouvrière's editorial talks about cannot be put on the same plane, even though in the final analysis Egypt and Syria are dependent on, subjected to, and tied to world imperialism.
Lutte Ouvriere Makes a Rectification
The article that we are publishing in this issue of Rouge on the Middle
East conflict criticizes an editorial that appeared in the October 9-15
issue of Lutte Ouvrière. That editorial basically developed a "neutral" position that treated the two opposing sides as equivalent and put the Arab and Israeli bourgeoisies on the same level.
This polemic need go no further.
For Lutte Ouvrière has rectified its position. First in a communiqué
of "support to the Arab peoples,"
and later, in more detail, in the columns of Lutte Ouvrière itself. We can only agree with the article by
Georges Kaldy published in the October 23-29 issue, entitled "Take
Sides."
He wrote:
"Neither of the two camps fighting in the Middle East represents the interests of the workers. Both are
Israel is a colonial phenomenon, a state set up by force, by expelling the Palestinian people from their land; it is an imperialist policeman created out of whole cloth; it is a fundamentally racist and expansionist bastion. The Israeli army is the most docile, the best organized, and the most solid ideologically of all imperialist armies. An Israeli victory in the current war comparable to that of 1967 would be a very violent blow to the development of class struggle in the whole Middle East.
The recent evolution of American strategy in the region (establishing closer political ties with the existing Arab regimes, considering post-Nasserite Egypt as the other pillar of U.S. policy after Israel in the framework of an imperialist peace, the growing role of Saudi Arabia as a guarantor of the whole package) changes nothing in this respect.
Our conclusions are comparable to those of Lenin in 1916 in "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination"; namely, that the fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain conditions, be utilized by another "great" power for its own equally imled by reactionary regimes. The two are waging the war in the name of a fanatical and aggravated nationalism.
"Nevertheless, no revolutionary socialist can remain neutral in the conflict.
"Our position in this conflict must therefore be clear. The two existing camps are not the same.
••• Our support goes to the oppressed peoples, even when these oppressed peoples are fighting under the leadership of their worst class enemies."
"And this support to the battle of the oppressed peoples as it is being fought and not as we would like it to be fought implies absolutely no abandoning of the concomitant struggle, to be waged in the clearest and sharpest manner, against the existing Arab leaderships and regimes."
We entirely agree!
perialist aims, in no way obliges us to reject the right of nations to selfdetermination.
The bourgeois character of the Egyptian and Syrian states and the fact that they are tied to imperialism cannot make us abandon the affirmation of their right to recover the territories oceupied by Israel.
This is not a capitulation to these regimes. The fact is that every development of Arab nationalism, even under the initiative of these bourgeois leaders, favors the cause of the workers in the region. In fact, this revival of Arab nationalism is the expressionled astray by the ruling classes — of the development of national consciousness of the oppressed of the Middle East. That is the essential thing. Revolutionary Marxists must seek the full flowering of this national consciousness, all the while working toward the independent organization of the workers and peasants against the capitulationist leaderships, the leaders of the 1967 rout, the leaders of the defeat of the Palestinian resistance.
The war has already had very important consequences for the future of class struggle in the region. Assad and Sadat have opened the door to a movement that can go beyond them.
This war of pressure on imperialism, which seeks to force the imperialists to impose a "peaceful solution," is not a matter of a handful of generals pushing buttons. It is real live men who are fighting, workers from Alexandria, students i from Cairo who for several years have been aching for war and have pressed for war.
Sadat and Assad are confronted with the essential contradiction of Arab nationalism, particularly in the form lent to it by Nasserism: In order to oppose imperialism even a little, to sweep away a few pieces of the old exploitation, to develop the economic foundation of the bourgeois state, the masses must be mobilized, but their revolutionary awakening must be limited. The Egyptian and Syrian leaders are playing with fire.
The fact is that this war has wiped out the temporary retreat of the revolution in the region that followed the defeat of the Palestinian resistance under the blows of Arab reaction. September 1970 — "Black September"— the crushing of the cause that had focused the aspirations of all the Arab peoples, the elimination of thousands of fighters of the objective vanguard of the Arab revolution, had allowed for a series of counterrevolutionary offensives in the Middle East: military dietatorship in Turkey, growing repression in Morocco, liquidation of the living forces of the Sudanese CP, increasingly right-wing turns by Naser's successors, increasing American influence, strengthening of imperialist pressure in the Arab Gulf through the intermediaries of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The blood was flowing in waves.
The war is giving a new vitality to the battles of the masses. It has ended the myth of Israeli invincibility. It is changing the immediate facts of the political period.
And the fact is that the Arab bourgeoisies took the path of "armed diplomacy" and of "peace through war" because they could not do otherwise without greatly aggravating the crisis that is undermining their regimes. They chose to take that step only after their backs were to the wall, after having tried everything else.
As early as 1970 they had opted for seeking a general peace with Israel, recognizing its right to exist as a guarantor of capitalist interests. This solution has had the support of Wash- November 12, 1973
ington and Moscow, which want to break the popular struggles in the region once and for all and bury the source of permanent agitation that the Palestinian question represents. The only obstacle that Sadat's tricks and charades has run up against has been Israeli intransigence, which conforms to the inherent expansionist character of Zionism.
The situation of "no war, no peace" had profoundly shaken the structure of the Egyptian regime. The current resurgence of Sadat's popularity will in no way eliminate the regime's crisis. The compromises heralded by the cease-fire represent the end result of the failure of Nasserism and pettybourgeois nationalism in the struggle against imperialism, a failure that the defeat of June 1967 had already demonstrated. From the six-day war to the just announced imperialist "peace" there is an unbroken line of decay. The position of strength that this war might lend to the bourgeois and pettybourgeois leaderships in the Arab world is only relative.
When the cannon cease firing, Arab reaction will have to move very soon to make the masses who have been mobilized accept compromise and capitulation. In short, the masses will have to be disarmed. And who are these masses? The more than 70,000 students in uniform, who twice (1972 and 1973) confronted the police in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. The communist, or even just leftist, intellectuals, victims of the witch-hunt Sadat has been carrying on for the past two years, intellectuals who have just been released. The workers of the Helwan steel works, who have been mobilized on the home front and are full of enthusiasm, who in August 1971 broke by means of a strike the contract that had been imposed on them by the regime during the period of Nasser's triumphant Bonapartism.
And also, the workers of Damascus, organized into armed militias to respond to the Israeli bombing and to prevent any invasion by the Zionist army. It will not be so easy to get all these people to accept recognition of Israel, even if recognition is embellished by recovery of the occupied territories; for the basic question, the question of Palestine, will remain unresolved.
Hussein, the butcher of Amman, understands all this very well. That is the reason for his purely symbolic and artificial participation in the conflict. He in no way wants to contribute to giving the Palestinian resistance a second wind, all the less so in that about half the Jordanian population is of Palestinian origin. Hussein has denied the fedayeen use of any facilities. In the October 20 Le Monde Eric Rouleau reported that Hussein had even arrested a "former Palestinian terrorist" for "routine interrogation."
A new mass mobilization (within a nationalist framework), increased difficulties for the existing Arab regimes (despite a rise in their popularity), and arming of the youth (for the most part within the regular armies) - these are elements that all revolutionists must take into account in analyzing the concrete situation. That must be done in order to advance transitional slogans corresponding to the revolutionists' task of outflanking the existing bourgeois leaderships.
These slogans, as they were expressed in last week's issue of Rouge by a comrade of the Lebanese Revolutionary Communist Group [see Intercontinental Press, October 29, p. 1213], are totally unambiguous:
NO to the impending compromise! NO to recognition of the Zionist state!
Total and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from the occupied territories, with no embellishing liquidating the Palestinian clauses cause!
NO to a cease-fire!
For the independent organization of the masses: prolonged war, arming and training, democratic rights, freedom of action for the Palestinian resistance in all Arab countries!
After the 1967 debacle of the Arab armies, an unprecedented mass movement arose in the Arab East: the Palestinian resistance, which objectively broke, even if unconsciously, with the petty-bourgeois nationalist framework, the stranglehold of holy interunity against the "common class enemy," Israel.
After the crushing of the Palestinian resistance, the present war threatens to produce a similar phenomenon. A new revolutionary generation, extracting itself little by little from the nationalist framework, can develop on the basis of the mass mobilization engendered by the clashes with the Zionist troops.