Once Again on Palestine and the National Question: A Polemic between Révolution Permanente and Lutte Ouvrière
A polemic between Révolution Permanente with Lutte Ouvrière on Palestine and the question of national self-determination.
I LOVE THIS SHIT
Damien Bernard and Claude Piperno
Damien Bernard and Claude Piperno
August 31, 2024
LEFT VOICE
This article is a polemic between Révolution Permanente, Left Voice’s sister group in France, and Lutte Ouvrière (LO, Workers Struggle), another French Trotskyist organization. The debate is part of a series of exchanges on the national question and self-determination.
While the authors focus on Palestine, they also discuss the national self-determination struggle of Kanaky, an island territory in the South Pacific colonized by France since 1853, also known by its colonial name, New Caledonia. In May, Indigenous Kanaks rose up against France’s plan to impose new voting rules that would weaken the Kanak vote. The uprising faced severe repression by the military and armed police, as well as social media bans imposed by the government.
The original article was published before the European elections and snap elections in France, which you can read more about in both Left Voice and Révolution Permanente.
***
After a week of semi-spontaneous demonstrations in response to the Rafah massacre and massive mobilizations in France on June 1, Palestine continues to be at the forefront of the political situation. And yet, although Lutte Ouvrière mentions Palestine in its press, at its annual gathering, and in its European election campaign, the group continues to consider Palestine separately from the question of national liberation — thus failing to link it to a revolutionary perspective.
In recent months, Lutte Ouvrière has taken up the subject more directly in an article entitled “The Far Left, the Palestinian Question and Hamas.” LO’s spokeswoman, Nathalie Arthaud, revisited the issue in her speech on the international situation on the last day of the annual gathering. These elaborations and speeches clarify the debate we began last October, when LO continued to dodge the national question and equate Hamas and Netanyahu, calling workers to unite “from the sea to the Jordan River,” without addressing the need for the Israeli working class to break with Zionism.
The development of the international movement for Palestine, the spontaneity and strength with which an entire generation has raised the flag of international solidarity, as well as the resurgence of the national question in Kanaky, all compel us to continue this debate with the comrades of LO.
Just or Unjust War?
In the context of the war-genocide that Israel has been waging against the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians since October, LO has developed a position that can be summarized as follows: they denounce Israeli state terrorism and its imperialist supporters, but also denounce Hamas, whose interests they see as opposed to those of the Palestinians; they express solidarity with the Palestinian people and support their rights and oppose their dispossession; and they call for class unity between workers in Palestine and Israel. Lutte Ouvrière has used this slogan in its press and media: “Against imperialism and its maneuvers; against Netanyahu and Hamas; workers of France, Palestine, and Israel, unite!”
In discussing this position, we pointed out at the end of October 2023 that LO ultimately equates Hamas, a Palestinian national movement organization — which is indeed politically reactionary and ideologically ultra-conservative and religious — with the State of Israel, which is not only a religious and theocratic state in its foundations, but also an advanced outpost and enforcer of imperialist interests in the region. The comrades of LO claim they have never “stopped denouncing the policy of the Israeli leaders … and their state terrorism, whose violence is on a completely different scale than that of Hamas.” It would be our interpretation of Marxism, however, that poses a problem. This interpretation supposedly sweeps under the rug the fundamental question of the political independence that revolutionaries must maintain vis-à-vis national bourgeoisies and their political currents.
To demonstrate our “opportunism,” LO’s argues:
RP points out that, in Socialism and War (1915), Lenin advocated the victory of Morocco over France, of India over England, of Persia or China over Russia. But Lenin also defended the class struggle of the proletariat in colonized or semi-colonial countries against their local ruling classes and their representatives, be they sultans, warlords or maharajas.
This maneuver allows the LO comrades to avoid taking a stance on Lenin’s first assertion, which is that
if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just,” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave owning, predatory “great” powers.
While Lenin’s assertion seems to be considered self-evident by LO, the latter’s position on the current war in Palestine is far from analogous. On the one hand, LO maintains that “Israel has been waging a war of oppression and colonization for over 70 years,” but on the other hand, it never mentions whether Palestinians are undertaking a “just” war of national liberation, which would require that revolutionaries support the military side of the oppressed nation. This ambiguity regarding the nature of the war in Palestine contrasts with the comrades’ stance on the war in Ukraine, where the LO openly states that “this war is not a just war.”
This refusal to take a position on the war allows LO to evade the question of choosing a military side, asserting that there are
indeed two sides in this war, but not the ones we are presented with. On one side, there are the leaders of Israel and the great powers, but also those of the Arab states, Hamas, and even the Palestinian Authority, who primarily seek power and each contribute in their own way to the continued oppression of the peoples. On the other side, the oppressed Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis have no interest in this war. But they will only be able to end it by uniting on the basis of their class interests against all their oppressors.”
This abstract position of “neutrality” denies the clear opposition between the State of Israel, on the one hand, supported by a number of imperialist powers, some of which are currently critical of Netanyahu’s extremism, and the Palestinian people resisting colonization and occupation on the other, whose cause is being instrumentalized by several bourgeois states or currents in the Near and Middle East in the face of Zionist colonialism.
The Exception and the Rule: When Lutte Ouvrière Resolutely Defended the Side of Oppressed Nations
LO has not always held the same position on the Palestinian question, notably from the late 1960s to the 1970s. For instance, a few days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, initiated by Nasserist Egypt and Ba’athist Syria in reaction to Israel’s colonial offensive during the Six-Day War in 1967, LO explicitly positioned itself on the side of the oppressed nations with an article titled “Middle East: Why Revolutionaries Are in the Camp of the Arab Countries.” As early as 1967, the comrades (then known as Voix Ouvrière [Worker’s Voice]) expressed a similar position in an article titled “The Palestinian Problem.”
In these two texts, LO adopts a clear position on the war. While the comrades sharply criticize and denounce the maneuvers and inconsistencies of the nationalist bourgeois leaderships of the Arab states, such as the PLO, they do so from a position of unconditional support for the resistance of oppressed peoples against imperialism. Several excerpts from these texts could apply to the current war. For instance, in their 1973 article, the comrades point out that “proletarian revolutionaries cannot determine their stance based on the nationalisms and national justifications at play. Nor can they determine their stance based on the nature of the regimes of the states involved in this war,” before adding that without harboring any illusions about “the anti-imperialist or, even less, revolutionary character of the conflict,”
proletarian revolutionaries must support the Arab countries. They must support them unconditionally, despite the reactionary anti-worker nationalist policies of the regimes in place, because imperialism is on the other side. Because imperialism would be strengthened by an Israeli victory, because Israel, in defending its own interests in this part of the world, also defends those of global imperialism.
LO then made it clear that “support for the Arab countries in no way means alignment with nationalist leaders,” thus distinguishing between military and political camps, a distinction we ourselves draw in our texts on Palestine, which our comrades consider “opportunist.” While acknowledging the reactionary aspects of Arab leaderships, whether it’s the collusion between Nasser, Hussein, and Faisal 1 or “the anti-Jewish propaganda of a Choukeiry,” 2 LO believed that “all this is not enough to equate Israel and the Arab countries.” According to the organization at that time,
in the event of a conflict between Israel and the Arab states, we stand with the latter, because the policies of Arab leaders may be contrary to the interests of their people, but Israeli leaders are fighting for imperialism. In a war between American democracy and the Sultan of Kuwait, we would not look at where the Republic is and where the Monarchy is, but where imperialism is.
Although the LO likes to emphasize the consistency of its politics and strategy, these positions sharply contrast with its positions on the current war. Unfortunately, these positions from 1973 have been more of an exception than the rule in the history of the organization, likely influenced by the (healthy, in our view) pressure of the 1968 revolutionary spirit. In any case, this period allowed for the development of texts that are light-years away from the rigid stance LO now presents as proof of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, LO’s analytical framework on the national question fundamentally differs from the theory of permanent revolution and Trotskyism, despite the organization’s claims to uphold them.
Rhetoric and Abstractions: LO’s Trotskyism and the Negation of the National Question
Throughout its history, LO has tried to establish a framework for understanding the tasks of revolutionary Marxists in semicolonial and colonial countries, and in doing so, it has often derided the errors and deviations of the other two major Trotskyist currents in France. On one side, there’s the “Mandelite” current — formerly the Unified Secretariat, now the International Committee associated historically with the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) and today with various currents within the NPA and Ensemble [See “Permanent revolution, as defended by the Unified Secretariat.”]]. On the other side, there’s the Lambertist current 3. LO has focused its critiques particularly on the LCR, with which LO has occasionally collaborated, such as in shared interventions and activist groups. LO has consistently criticized the Mandelite stance of following bourgeois nationalist or Stalinist leaderships that have led revolutionary processes in the latter half of the 20th century, from Maoism to Sandinism and Castroism, among others.4 We partially share these critiques, which form the basis for our profound strategic differences with this current 5; however, they do not vindicate the LO’s incorrect strategic analysis of the national question, the tasks of national liberation arising from it, and their connection to the perspective of social revolution.
LO’s positions on this question indeed rest on denying the national question. LO advocates a stance presented as “class-based”: the only thing that ultimately matters is that the working class can overthrow the dictatorship of capital. This truth is expressed abstractly, overlooking a range of other struggles that, while ultimately subordinate to the primary objective, can play a decisive role in the capacity of the working class to mobilize.
In the case of countries that LO describes as “backward” or “poor” 6, where the national question is more obvious and unavoidable, LO maintains formally anti-imperialist positions, condemning exploitation, plundering, and violence, while sidestepping the issue of national liberation. When it comes to unresolved national questions in countries or nations at the heart of the imperialist system, such as the Catalan or Basque question with respect to the Spanish or French state, LO considers them nationalist and reactionary demands — or reactionary because they are nationalist 7.
In both cases, LO never concretely addresses the link between national and social liberation: namely, as posited by Lenin and Trotsky within the Communist International, the way in which a struggle for democratic and national rights can “grow into” a fight against capital, and conversely, how only a fight against capital can ensure the real success of these democratic and national struggles, provided the working class intervenes independently and through self-organization. LO omits the first part of this reasoning and retains only fragments of the second. Thus, in its main polemical texts against the Unified Secretariat, for example, LO ridicules Mandelism’s use of the idea of “growing into” as if it were an “invention” on par with other Marxist categories that emerged in the postwar period, even though the term is one of the key operational concepts highlighted by Trotsky in the preface to The Permanent Revolution, to cite just one text.
To justify this de facto break with Trotskyism, Lutte Ouvrière relies on the real political adaptations of certain currents, suggesting that the idea of a bourgeois revolution “growing into” a socialist revolution entails expecting nationalist leaderships themselves to transform into workers’ and revolutionary leaderships. This polemical distortion is countered by LO with the notion — abstractly correct but politically revealing of its choices, hesitations, and limitations — that “only the dictatorship of the proletariat can fully resolve and guarantee the fulfillment of bourgeois democratic tasks, as it opens the perspective of world socialist revolution.” This formulation from 1967, in “The Permanent Revolution in China,” is the same one that is denied in 2024 to Kanaky, which LO continues to call “New Caledonia”: “The aspirations of the oppressed to escape poverty and decide their fate,” reads the conclusion of LO’s latest national editorial signed by Nathalie Arthaud, “cannot be realized without overthrowing imperialism, that is, the capitalist economic order, which is at the root of the relations of domination and borders it has created. Without this perspective, we are condemned to continue witnessing the inequalities and violence that fuel rejection, hatred, and racism among workers and oppressed people.”
The national question is thrown out the window — as if, before addressing the essential issue of class unity between Kanak and Caldoche workers, whites and Melanesians, it was unnecessary to defend the right to self-determination, self-defense, and independence of the Kanak people, which LO avoids addressing. This position leads to sidestepping an essential struggle in France: convincing French workers of the imperialist nature of their state by engaging them in a very concrete critique of it through support for the self-determination of the peoples it oppresses. This has historically been the position of the revolutionary labor movement, which sought to eradicate any tendency toward chauvinism and adaptation to its imperialism, and to do so not through calls for abstract internationalism but through the unconditional defense of “the freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their’ nation.”
This position, presented by LO as the most orthodox adherence to Trotskyism, actually aligns more with Bordigism — with which LO has or has had ideological, political, and organizational connections — or with ultra-left positions that it often downplays. These positions have been influenced by the ideological contributions or cadres from leftist currents like Socialisme ou Barbarie, which have fed into the press and ranks of VO and later LO.
A Trotskyist Defense of a Class-Independent Policy on the National Question
Our differences on the national question in general, the Palestinian issue in particular, and especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza are not at all about “opportunism,” as our comrades suggest. Rather, they are theoretical and strategic differences on how to connect democratic tasks to the perspective of revolution. To support its position, LO relies on an excerpt from The Permanent Revolution:
Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.
The strict correlation with the situation in the Gaza Strip or the occupied territories of the West Bank is a bit crude — the only country in the region where these conditions would be “ripe,” at least from a strictly economistic point of view, is the socioeconomic complex of Israel. Analogies, however, have their limits, both in politics and theory, when referring to texts. The Permanent Revolution is an essay written from 1928 to 1931 in light of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, in order to draw lessons for the communist movement from the errors and missteps of the leadership of the Third International. In it, Trotsky opposes the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry for the whole East,” which Karl Radek defended on behalf of the International. Trotsky and his supporters, persecuted and marginalized within the Comintern, fought the positions of the majority, which supported “socialism in one country” in the USSR and, after the crushing of the Chinese Revolution by the Kuomintang, persisted in justifying a policy of collaboration between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie by relying on out-of-context positions from Lenin. Behind this was the Soviet bureaucracy’s inclination to form diplomatic ties with certain bourgeoisies in the East.
In this excerpt, Trotsky does not deny, as the LO article suggests, the progressive nature of national liberation struggles in the imperialist era. On the contrary, he rejects opportunism and argues that even in the “backward” countries of the East, specifically a vast region colonized or in the process of being colonized by Japanese imperialism in the case of China, “a true popular democracy, that is, of workers and peasants, can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This does not negate the communists’ obligation to support national liberation struggles against imperialism. Rather, it emphasizes that the only way to prepare for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat or the workers’ and peasants’ government is through supporting national liberation struggles while maintaining complete political independence from nationalist bourgeois leaderships, whether secular or religious, “socialist” or politically conservative.
A few years later, in 1937, within the Movement for the Fourth International, Trotsky engaged in polemics with several non-Stalinist currents that adopted some “class against class” positions and advocated an ultra-left stance toward the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the precursor to World War II. In a letter to Diego Rivera called “On the Sino-Japanese War,” Trotsky emphasized that “the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity.” Within the Fourth Internationalist Movement, some currents existing within or having been part of it before breaking away accused this position of “social-patriotism,” renouncing proletarian internationalism, and conceding to bourgeois nationalism. For these currents, known as “Oehlerites” and “Eiffelites” in the debates of Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists at the time, the Sino-Japanese War was either imperialist or inter-imperialist, and the proletariat had no side in it to support.
On the contrary, for Trotsky,
China is a semicolonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive. … If Japan is an imperialist country and if China is the victim of imperialism, we favor China. Japanese patriotism is the hideous mask of worldwide robbery. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive.
And yet the Chinese resistance was largely led by the Kuomintang of
Chiang Kai-shek [who was] the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China. … But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China.
Trotsky thus defends himself against accusations from the Eiffelists and Oehlerites that he has changed his attitude toward the “Chinese question” and his positions from the 1920s:
During the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 we attacked the policies of the Comintern. Why? It is necessary to understand well the reasons. The Eiffelites claim that we have changed our attitude on the Chinese question. That is because the poor fellows have understood nothing of our attitude in 1925–27. We never denied that it was the duty of the Communist Party to participate in the war of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the South against the generals of the North, agents of foreign imperialism. We never denied the necessity of a military bloc between the CP and the Kuomintang. On the contrary, we were the first to propose it. We demanded, however, that the CP maintain its entire political and organizational independence, that is, that during the civil war against the internal agents of imperialism, as in the national war against foreign imperialism, the working class, while remaining in the front lines of the military struggle, prepare the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie. We hold the same policies in the present war. We have not changed our attitude one iota. The Oehlerites and the Eiffelites, on the other hand, have not understood a single bit of our policies, neither those of 1925–27, nor those of today.
Thus, contrary to what LO claims, Trotsky does not conclude that, based on the lessons drawn from the Chinese Revolution, revolutionaries should only support national liberation struggles on the condition that the country’s “social and political relations” are sufficiently “ripe” for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In participating in the military struggle under the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, since unfortunately it is he who has the command in the war for independence — to prepare politically the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek … that is the only revolutionary policy. The Eiffelites counterpose the policy of “class struggle” to this “nationalist and social patriotic” policy. Lenin fought this abstract and sterile opposition all his life. To him, the interests of the world proletariat dictated the duty of aiding oppressed peoples in their national and patriotic struggle against imperialism.
In this excerpt, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to replace “Eiffelists” with “LO” and see their “class struggle” policy applied to Palestine and Israel. The bourgeois nationalist currents in Palestine, religious or otherwise, currently represent the military leadership of the struggle, and are characterized by their historical maneuvers and latch-ditch compromises. Yet the only way to prepare for confronting these bourgeois nationalist currents is precisely by unconditionally positioning oneself in the military camp of the resistance — not to support its leadership, but to contest their influence and defend a revolutionary strategy that alone can solve the national question by forming a faction that defends a revolutionary program and strategy with complete class independence. This is the condition for a stance that is not abstentionist in the final analysis, as demonstrated by LO’s weak participation in the solidarity movement for Palestine, which nevertheless constitutes a crucible of politicization, mobilization, and even radicalization for many young people and workers.
The Exception Is Better than the Rule
In their 1973 position paper, the comrades of LO very rightly explained what the policy of revolutionaries should be from imperialist countries:
The revolutionary militants of advanced capitalist countries … have the political and moral duty to support these countries when they are involved in a conflict with imperialism. And this, regardless of the leaders that the peoples choose or accept.
They then clarified the consequences in terms of internationalism:
Revolutionaries from advanced capitalist countries can only unite with the proletarians of backward countries by demonstrating their own internationalism, by unconditionally supporting them in their resistance to imperialism, even when these proletarians are still following nationalist and bourgeois leaders.
After this detour through a political position that offered a proper framework for understanding revolutionary intervention, LO quickly reverted to its political conceptions, which align more with a global workerist and economistic mindset, more akin to Bordigism than to Trotskyism and the Fourth International, of which LO claims to be the sole heir. One with this mindset cannot link the struggle against exploitation, the fight against oppression, the national question, and the democratic question, and this naturally has significant consequences on the LO’s program and politics.
The LO’s analytical framework is now strengthened by its extremely grim characterization of the current global situation. LO considers the era in which “national questions” contained “exceptional revolutionary potential” to be over. From the post–World War II period until the 1970s, this era included “the period of colonial revolutions that shook the old European imperialisms,” “the Black movement in the United States in the 1960s,” and “the Palestinian people’s movement in the Middle East after World War II, at least until the civil war that engulfed Lebanon in the 1970s.”
The international youth movement in recent months, fueled by anti-imperialism and support for Palestinian national aspirations, with its epicenter in the United States, does not seem to change the situation for LO. Seeing the situation only through the lens of the extreme decline of the labor movement and the exacerbation of militarism and state rivalries, without recognizing the contradictory dynamics expressed in sectors of the labor movement, the working classes, and the youth, LO condemns itself to passivity. While the genocide continues in Gaza and Macron plays the civil war card in Kanaky, the correct policy is to intervene in the situation using a strategy that allows the working world and the youth to take an active part in the struggles for self-determination, linked to the perspective of revolution. This is an essential issue for revolutionaries and internationalists, even more so in the context of an electoral campaign dominated by the Right, the Far Right, and reactionary one-upmanship.
A way to remember and apply, in the current era, elements of conduct bequeathed to us by the Bolsheviks in a situation even darker than ours, when they were preparing for 1917: as Lenin emphasized, the way to address and campaign among workers in imperialist countries should be to advocate
freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. This is an absolute demand, even where the chance of secession being possible and “practicable” before the introduction of socialism is only one in a thousand.
Palestine and Kanaky are both implicitly part of this strategic line, which should be embraced by the entire revolutionary Left today.
Originally published in French on June 2 by Révolution Permanente.
Translated by Emma Lee.
Notes
Notes↑1 This is a reference to King Hussein of Jordan (1952–99) and King Faisal of Iraq (1939–58), both of whom were indirectly supported by Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser, who, despite his policy of pan-Arab unity, did not wish to structurally challenge the region’s geopolitical balance or its links with its historical imperial overseer, in this case Great Britain.
↑2 Ahmed Choukeiry was the first secretary-general of the PLO from 1964 to 1967.
↑3 Today, they are referred to as Parti des Travailleurs (PT, Workers Party) and Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI, Internationalist Workers Party), and like Ensemble, they are also part of La France insoumise.
↑4 Only recently, at the ceremony to pay tribute to Alain Krivine, Michel Rodinson, on behalf of the LO leadership, gave a vitriolic speech purporting to sum up 50 years of militancy in the ranks of the revolution, attacking in particular the league’s “opportunism” vis-à-vis “nationalist currents,” among which Rodinson listed, in no particular order, everything from the PLO to Sandinism and the French flag defended by Mélenchon.
↑5 See, among many other polemical texts, “At the Limits of Bourgeois Restoration.”
↑6 LO rejects the Marxist category of “semicolonial countries,” i.e., countries that are formally independent but in reality totally subject, to varying degrees, to the dictates of the imperialist powers, which is the lot of the vast majority of countries in what is now known as the “Global South.” In publications and speeches, LO prefers more or less vague terminology such as “backward countries,” “poor countries,” or even “underdeveloped countries.” This nomenclature is not linked to a desire for pedagogical clarity but has major politico-strategic repercussions.
↑7 We can also analyze LO’s “orthodox” premise as a way of adapting to the consciousness (real or supposed) of the least advanced sectors of the working world: Why make the anti-colonial question a political axis and oppose its “milieu” if the latter is not, a priori, any more than the union bureaucracy, for the right to self-determination of all the current French colonies, notably in the Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans?
Damien Bernard
Damien is an editor of our French sister site Révolution Permanente.
This article is a polemic between Révolution Permanente, Left Voice’s sister group in France, and Lutte Ouvrière (LO, Workers Struggle), another French Trotskyist organization. The debate is part of a series of exchanges on the national question and self-determination.
While the authors focus on Palestine, they also discuss the national self-determination struggle of Kanaky, an island territory in the South Pacific colonized by France since 1853, also known by its colonial name, New Caledonia. In May, Indigenous Kanaks rose up against France’s plan to impose new voting rules that would weaken the Kanak vote. The uprising faced severe repression by the military and armed police, as well as social media bans imposed by the government.
The original article was published before the European elections and snap elections in France, which you can read more about in both Left Voice and Révolution Permanente.
***
After a week of semi-spontaneous demonstrations in response to the Rafah massacre and massive mobilizations in France on June 1, Palestine continues to be at the forefront of the political situation. And yet, although Lutte Ouvrière mentions Palestine in its press, at its annual gathering, and in its European election campaign, the group continues to consider Palestine separately from the question of national liberation — thus failing to link it to a revolutionary perspective.
In recent months, Lutte Ouvrière has taken up the subject more directly in an article entitled “The Far Left, the Palestinian Question and Hamas.” LO’s spokeswoman, Nathalie Arthaud, revisited the issue in her speech on the international situation on the last day of the annual gathering. These elaborations and speeches clarify the debate we began last October, when LO continued to dodge the national question and equate Hamas and Netanyahu, calling workers to unite “from the sea to the Jordan River,” without addressing the need for the Israeli working class to break with Zionism.
The development of the international movement for Palestine, the spontaneity and strength with which an entire generation has raised the flag of international solidarity, as well as the resurgence of the national question in Kanaky, all compel us to continue this debate with the comrades of LO.
Just or Unjust War?
In the context of the war-genocide that Israel has been waging against the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians since October, LO has developed a position that can be summarized as follows: they denounce Israeli state terrorism and its imperialist supporters, but also denounce Hamas, whose interests they see as opposed to those of the Palestinians; they express solidarity with the Palestinian people and support their rights and oppose their dispossession; and they call for class unity between workers in Palestine and Israel. Lutte Ouvrière has used this slogan in its press and media: “Against imperialism and its maneuvers; against Netanyahu and Hamas; workers of France, Palestine, and Israel, unite!”
In discussing this position, we pointed out at the end of October 2023 that LO ultimately equates Hamas, a Palestinian national movement organization — which is indeed politically reactionary and ideologically ultra-conservative and religious — with the State of Israel, which is not only a religious and theocratic state in its foundations, but also an advanced outpost and enforcer of imperialist interests in the region. The comrades of LO claim they have never “stopped denouncing the policy of the Israeli leaders … and their state terrorism, whose violence is on a completely different scale than that of Hamas.” It would be our interpretation of Marxism, however, that poses a problem. This interpretation supposedly sweeps under the rug the fundamental question of the political independence that revolutionaries must maintain vis-à-vis national bourgeoisies and their political currents.
To demonstrate our “opportunism,” LO’s argues:
RP points out that, in Socialism and War (1915), Lenin advocated the victory of Morocco over France, of India over England, of Persia or China over Russia. But Lenin also defended the class struggle of the proletariat in colonized or semi-colonial countries against their local ruling classes and their representatives, be they sultans, warlords or maharajas.
This maneuver allows the LO comrades to avoid taking a stance on Lenin’s first assertion, which is that
if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just,” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave owning, predatory “great” powers.
While Lenin’s assertion seems to be considered self-evident by LO, the latter’s position on the current war in Palestine is far from analogous. On the one hand, LO maintains that “Israel has been waging a war of oppression and colonization for over 70 years,” but on the other hand, it never mentions whether Palestinians are undertaking a “just” war of national liberation, which would require that revolutionaries support the military side of the oppressed nation. This ambiguity regarding the nature of the war in Palestine contrasts with the comrades’ stance on the war in Ukraine, where the LO openly states that “this war is not a just war.”
This refusal to take a position on the war allows LO to evade the question of choosing a military side, asserting that there are
indeed two sides in this war, but not the ones we are presented with. On one side, there are the leaders of Israel and the great powers, but also those of the Arab states, Hamas, and even the Palestinian Authority, who primarily seek power and each contribute in their own way to the continued oppression of the peoples. On the other side, the oppressed Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis have no interest in this war. But they will only be able to end it by uniting on the basis of their class interests against all their oppressors.”
This abstract position of “neutrality” denies the clear opposition between the State of Israel, on the one hand, supported by a number of imperialist powers, some of which are currently critical of Netanyahu’s extremism, and the Palestinian people resisting colonization and occupation on the other, whose cause is being instrumentalized by several bourgeois states or currents in the Near and Middle East in the face of Zionist colonialism.
The Exception and the Rule: When Lutte Ouvrière Resolutely Defended the Side of Oppressed Nations
LO has not always held the same position on the Palestinian question, notably from the late 1960s to the 1970s. For instance, a few days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, initiated by Nasserist Egypt and Ba’athist Syria in reaction to Israel’s colonial offensive during the Six-Day War in 1967, LO explicitly positioned itself on the side of the oppressed nations with an article titled “Middle East: Why Revolutionaries Are in the Camp of the Arab Countries.” As early as 1967, the comrades (then known as Voix Ouvrière [Worker’s Voice]) expressed a similar position in an article titled “The Palestinian Problem.”
In these two texts, LO adopts a clear position on the war. While the comrades sharply criticize and denounce the maneuvers and inconsistencies of the nationalist bourgeois leaderships of the Arab states, such as the PLO, they do so from a position of unconditional support for the resistance of oppressed peoples against imperialism. Several excerpts from these texts could apply to the current war. For instance, in their 1973 article, the comrades point out that “proletarian revolutionaries cannot determine their stance based on the nationalisms and national justifications at play. Nor can they determine their stance based on the nature of the regimes of the states involved in this war,” before adding that without harboring any illusions about “the anti-imperialist or, even less, revolutionary character of the conflict,”
proletarian revolutionaries must support the Arab countries. They must support them unconditionally, despite the reactionary anti-worker nationalist policies of the regimes in place, because imperialism is on the other side. Because imperialism would be strengthened by an Israeli victory, because Israel, in defending its own interests in this part of the world, also defends those of global imperialism.
LO then made it clear that “support for the Arab countries in no way means alignment with nationalist leaders,” thus distinguishing between military and political camps, a distinction we ourselves draw in our texts on Palestine, which our comrades consider “opportunist.” While acknowledging the reactionary aspects of Arab leaderships, whether it’s the collusion between Nasser, Hussein, and Faisal 1 or “the anti-Jewish propaganda of a Choukeiry,” 2 LO believed that “all this is not enough to equate Israel and the Arab countries.” According to the organization at that time,
in the event of a conflict between Israel and the Arab states, we stand with the latter, because the policies of Arab leaders may be contrary to the interests of their people, but Israeli leaders are fighting for imperialism. In a war between American democracy and the Sultan of Kuwait, we would not look at where the Republic is and where the Monarchy is, but where imperialism is.
Although the LO likes to emphasize the consistency of its politics and strategy, these positions sharply contrast with its positions on the current war. Unfortunately, these positions from 1973 have been more of an exception than the rule in the history of the organization, likely influenced by the (healthy, in our view) pressure of the 1968 revolutionary spirit. In any case, this period allowed for the development of texts that are light-years away from the rigid stance LO now presents as proof of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, LO’s analytical framework on the national question fundamentally differs from the theory of permanent revolution and Trotskyism, despite the organization’s claims to uphold them.
Rhetoric and Abstractions: LO’s Trotskyism and the Negation of the National Question
Throughout its history, LO has tried to establish a framework for understanding the tasks of revolutionary Marxists in semicolonial and colonial countries, and in doing so, it has often derided the errors and deviations of the other two major Trotskyist currents in France. On one side, there’s the “Mandelite” current — formerly the Unified Secretariat, now the International Committee associated historically with the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) and today with various currents within the NPA and Ensemble [See “Permanent revolution, as defended by the Unified Secretariat.”]]. On the other side, there’s the Lambertist current 3. LO has focused its critiques particularly on the LCR, with which LO has occasionally collaborated, such as in shared interventions and activist groups. LO has consistently criticized the Mandelite stance of following bourgeois nationalist or Stalinist leaderships that have led revolutionary processes in the latter half of the 20th century, from Maoism to Sandinism and Castroism, among others.4 We partially share these critiques, which form the basis for our profound strategic differences with this current 5; however, they do not vindicate the LO’s incorrect strategic analysis of the national question, the tasks of national liberation arising from it, and their connection to the perspective of social revolution.
LO’s positions on this question indeed rest on denying the national question. LO advocates a stance presented as “class-based”: the only thing that ultimately matters is that the working class can overthrow the dictatorship of capital. This truth is expressed abstractly, overlooking a range of other struggles that, while ultimately subordinate to the primary objective, can play a decisive role in the capacity of the working class to mobilize.
In the case of countries that LO describes as “backward” or “poor” 6, where the national question is more obvious and unavoidable, LO maintains formally anti-imperialist positions, condemning exploitation, plundering, and violence, while sidestepping the issue of national liberation. When it comes to unresolved national questions in countries or nations at the heart of the imperialist system, such as the Catalan or Basque question with respect to the Spanish or French state, LO considers them nationalist and reactionary demands — or reactionary because they are nationalist 7.
In both cases, LO never concretely addresses the link between national and social liberation: namely, as posited by Lenin and Trotsky within the Communist International, the way in which a struggle for democratic and national rights can “grow into” a fight against capital, and conversely, how only a fight against capital can ensure the real success of these democratic and national struggles, provided the working class intervenes independently and through self-organization. LO omits the first part of this reasoning and retains only fragments of the second. Thus, in its main polemical texts against the Unified Secretariat, for example, LO ridicules Mandelism’s use of the idea of “growing into” as if it were an “invention” on par with other Marxist categories that emerged in the postwar period, even though the term is one of the key operational concepts highlighted by Trotsky in the preface to The Permanent Revolution, to cite just one text.
To justify this de facto break with Trotskyism, Lutte Ouvrière relies on the real political adaptations of certain currents, suggesting that the idea of a bourgeois revolution “growing into” a socialist revolution entails expecting nationalist leaderships themselves to transform into workers’ and revolutionary leaderships. This polemical distortion is countered by LO with the notion — abstractly correct but politically revealing of its choices, hesitations, and limitations — that “only the dictatorship of the proletariat can fully resolve and guarantee the fulfillment of bourgeois democratic tasks, as it opens the perspective of world socialist revolution.” This formulation from 1967, in “The Permanent Revolution in China,” is the same one that is denied in 2024 to Kanaky, which LO continues to call “New Caledonia”: “The aspirations of the oppressed to escape poverty and decide their fate,” reads the conclusion of LO’s latest national editorial signed by Nathalie Arthaud, “cannot be realized without overthrowing imperialism, that is, the capitalist economic order, which is at the root of the relations of domination and borders it has created. Without this perspective, we are condemned to continue witnessing the inequalities and violence that fuel rejection, hatred, and racism among workers and oppressed people.”
The national question is thrown out the window — as if, before addressing the essential issue of class unity between Kanak and Caldoche workers, whites and Melanesians, it was unnecessary to defend the right to self-determination, self-defense, and independence of the Kanak people, which LO avoids addressing. This position leads to sidestepping an essential struggle in France: convincing French workers of the imperialist nature of their state by engaging them in a very concrete critique of it through support for the self-determination of the peoples it oppresses. This has historically been the position of the revolutionary labor movement, which sought to eradicate any tendency toward chauvinism and adaptation to its imperialism, and to do so not through calls for abstract internationalism but through the unconditional defense of “the freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their’ nation.”
This position, presented by LO as the most orthodox adherence to Trotskyism, actually aligns more with Bordigism — with which LO has or has had ideological, political, and organizational connections — or with ultra-left positions that it often downplays. These positions have been influenced by the ideological contributions or cadres from leftist currents like Socialisme ou Barbarie, which have fed into the press and ranks of VO and later LO.
A Trotskyist Defense of a Class-Independent Policy on the National Question
Our differences on the national question in general, the Palestinian issue in particular, and especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza are not at all about “opportunism,” as our comrades suggest. Rather, they are theoretical and strategic differences on how to connect democratic tasks to the perspective of revolution. To support its position, LO relies on an excerpt from The Permanent Revolution:
Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.
The strict correlation with the situation in the Gaza Strip or the occupied territories of the West Bank is a bit crude — the only country in the region where these conditions would be “ripe,” at least from a strictly economistic point of view, is the socioeconomic complex of Israel. Analogies, however, have their limits, both in politics and theory, when referring to texts. The Permanent Revolution is an essay written from 1928 to 1931 in light of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, in order to draw lessons for the communist movement from the errors and missteps of the leadership of the Third International. In it, Trotsky opposes the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry for the whole East,” which Karl Radek defended on behalf of the International. Trotsky and his supporters, persecuted and marginalized within the Comintern, fought the positions of the majority, which supported “socialism in one country” in the USSR and, after the crushing of the Chinese Revolution by the Kuomintang, persisted in justifying a policy of collaboration between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie by relying on out-of-context positions from Lenin. Behind this was the Soviet bureaucracy’s inclination to form diplomatic ties with certain bourgeoisies in the East.
In this excerpt, Trotsky does not deny, as the LO article suggests, the progressive nature of national liberation struggles in the imperialist era. On the contrary, he rejects opportunism and argues that even in the “backward” countries of the East, specifically a vast region colonized or in the process of being colonized by Japanese imperialism in the case of China, “a true popular democracy, that is, of workers and peasants, can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This does not negate the communists’ obligation to support national liberation struggles against imperialism. Rather, it emphasizes that the only way to prepare for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat or the workers’ and peasants’ government is through supporting national liberation struggles while maintaining complete political independence from nationalist bourgeois leaderships, whether secular or religious, “socialist” or politically conservative.
A few years later, in 1937, within the Movement for the Fourth International, Trotsky engaged in polemics with several non-Stalinist currents that adopted some “class against class” positions and advocated an ultra-left stance toward the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the precursor to World War II. In a letter to Diego Rivera called “On the Sino-Japanese War,” Trotsky emphasized that “the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity.” Within the Fourth Internationalist Movement, some currents existing within or having been part of it before breaking away accused this position of “social-patriotism,” renouncing proletarian internationalism, and conceding to bourgeois nationalism. For these currents, known as “Oehlerites” and “Eiffelites” in the debates of Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists at the time, the Sino-Japanese War was either imperialist or inter-imperialist, and the proletariat had no side in it to support.
On the contrary, for Trotsky,
China is a semicolonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive. … If Japan is an imperialist country and if China is the victim of imperialism, we favor China. Japanese patriotism is the hideous mask of worldwide robbery. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive.
And yet the Chinese resistance was largely led by the Kuomintang of
Chiang Kai-shek [who was] the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China. … But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China.
Trotsky thus defends himself against accusations from the Eiffelists and Oehlerites that he has changed his attitude toward the “Chinese question” and his positions from the 1920s:
During the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 we attacked the policies of the Comintern. Why? It is necessary to understand well the reasons. The Eiffelites claim that we have changed our attitude on the Chinese question. That is because the poor fellows have understood nothing of our attitude in 1925–27. We never denied that it was the duty of the Communist Party to participate in the war of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the South against the generals of the North, agents of foreign imperialism. We never denied the necessity of a military bloc between the CP and the Kuomintang. On the contrary, we were the first to propose it. We demanded, however, that the CP maintain its entire political and organizational independence, that is, that during the civil war against the internal agents of imperialism, as in the national war against foreign imperialism, the working class, while remaining in the front lines of the military struggle, prepare the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie. We hold the same policies in the present war. We have not changed our attitude one iota. The Oehlerites and the Eiffelites, on the other hand, have not understood a single bit of our policies, neither those of 1925–27, nor those of today.
Thus, contrary to what LO claims, Trotsky does not conclude that, based on the lessons drawn from the Chinese Revolution, revolutionaries should only support national liberation struggles on the condition that the country’s “social and political relations” are sufficiently “ripe” for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In participating in the military struggle under the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, since unfortunately it is he who has the command in the war for independence — to prepare politically the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek … that is the only revolutionary policy. The Eiffelites counterpose the policy of “class struggle” to this “nationalist and social patriotic” policy. Lenin fought this abstract and sterile opposition all his life. To him, the interests of the world proletariat dictated the duty of aiding oppressed peoples in their national and patriotic struggle against imperialism.
In this excerpt, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to replace “Eiffelists” with “LO” and see their “class struggle” policy applied to Palestine and Israel. The bourgeois nationalist currents in Palestine, religious or otherwise, currently represent the military leadership of the struggle, and are characterized by their historical maneuvers and latch-ditch compromises. Yet the only way to prepare for confronting these bourgeois nationalist currents is precisely by unconditionally positioning oneself in the military camp of the resistance — not to support its leadership, but to contest their influence and defend a revolutionary strategy that alone can solve the national question by forming a faction that defends a revolutionary program and strategy with complete class independence. This is the condition for a stance that is not abstentionist in the final analysis, as demonstrated by LO’s weak participation in the solidarity movement for Palestine, which nevertheless constitutes a crucible of politicization, mobilization, and even radicalization for many young people and workers.
The Exception Is Better than the Rule
In their 1973 position paper, the comrades of LO very rightly explained what the policy of revolutionaries should be from imperialist countries:
The revolutionary militants of advanced capitalist countries … have the political and moral duty to support these countries when they are involved in a conflict with imperialism. And this, regardless of the leaders that the peoples choose or accept.
They then clarified the consequences in terms of internationalism:
Revolutionaries from advanced capitalist countries can only unite with the proletarians of backward countries by demonstrating their own internationalism, by unconditionally supporting them in their resistance to imperialism, even when these proletarians are still following nationalist and bourgeois leaders.
After this detour through a political position that offered a proper framework for understanding revolutionary intervention, LO quickly reverted to its political conceptions, which align more with a global workerist and economistic mindset, more akin to Bordigism than to Trotskyism and the Fourth International, of which LO claims to be the sole heir. One with this mindset cannot link the struggle against exploitation, the fight against oppression, the national question, and the democratic question, and this naturally has significant consequences on the LO’s program and politics.
The LO’s analytical framework is now strengthened by its extremely grim characterization of the current global situation. LO considers the era in which “national questions” contained “exceptional revolutionary potential” to be over. From the post–World War II period until the 1970s, this era included “the period of colonial revolutions that shook the old European imperialisms,” “the Black movement in the United States in the 1960s,” and “the Palestinian people’s movement in the Middle East after World War II, at least until the civil war that engulfed Lebanon in the 1970s.”
The international youth movement in recent months, fueled by anti-imperialism and support for Palestinian national aspirations, with its epicenter in the United States, does not seem to change the situation for LO. Seeing the situation only through the lens of the extreme decline of the labor movement and the exacerbation of militarism and state rivalries, without recognizing the contradictory dynamics expressed in sectors of the labor movement, the working classes, and the youth, LO condemns itself to passivity. While the genocide continues in Gaza and Macron plays the civil war card in Kanaky, the correct policy is to intervene in the situation using a strategy that allows the working world and the youth to take an active part in the struggles for self-determination, linked to the perspective of revolution. This is an essential issue for revolutionaries and internationalists, even more so in the context of an electoral campaign dominated by the Right, the Far Right, and reactionary one-upmanship.
A way to remember and apply, in the current era, elements of conduct bequeathed to us by the Bolsheviks in a situation even darker than ours, when they were preparing for 1917: as Lenin emphasized, the way to address and campaign among workers in imperialist countries should be to advocate
freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. This is an absolute demand, even where the chance of secession being possible and “practicable” before the introduction of socialism is only one in a thousand.
Palestine and Kanaky are both implicitly part of this strategic line, which should be embraced by the entire revolutionary Left today.
Originally published in French on June 2 by Révolution Permanente.
Translated by Emma Lee.
Notes
Notes↑1 This is a reference to King Hussein of Jordan (1952–99) and King Faisal of Iraq (1939–58), both of whom were indirectly supported by Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser, who, despite his policy of pan-Arab unity, did not wish to structurally challenge the region’s geopolitical balance or its links with its historical imperial overseer, in this case Great Britain.
↑2 Ahmed Choukeiry was the first secretary-general of the PLO from 1964 to 1967.
↑3 Today, they are referred to as Parti des Travailleurs (PT, Workers Party) and Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI, Internationalist Workers Party), and like Ensemble, they are also part of La France insoumise.
↑4 Only recently, at the ceremony to pay tribute to Alain Krivine, Michel Rodinson, on behalf of the LO leadership, gave a vitriolic speech purporting to sum up 50 years of militancy in the ranks of the revolution, attacking in particular the league’s “opportunism” vis-à-vis “nationalist currents,” among which Rodinson listed, in no particular order, everything from the PLO to Sandinism and the French flag defended by Mélenchon.
↑5 See, among many other polemical texts, “At the Limits of Bourgeois Restoration.”
↑6 LO rejects the Marxist category of “semicolonial countries,” i.e., countries that are formally independent but in reality totally subject, to varying degrees, to the dictates of the imperialist powers, which is the lot of the vast majority of countries in what is now known as the “Global South.” In publications and speeches, LO prefers more or less vague terminology such as “backward countries,” “poor countries,” or even “underdeveloped countries.” This nomenclature is not linked to a desire for pedagogical clarity but has major politico-strategic repercussions.
↑7 We can also analyze LO’s “orthodox” premise as a way of adapting to the consciousness (real or supposed) of the least advanced sectors of the working world: Why make the anti-colonial question a political axis and oppose its “milieu” if the latter is not, a priori, any more than the union bureaucracy, for the right to self-determination of all the current French colonies, notably in the Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans?
Damien Bernard
Damien is an editor of our French sister site Révolution Permanente.
