Lenin and the Iraqi Resistance

A certain quote from Lenin seems to be doing the rounds at present, and it is starting to annoy me somewhat.

When I argue with SWP members that class is quite important in questions of national liberation, and that we shouldn’t support the resistance but instead the workers’ movement, I am often answered with this quote, in one form or another. It is generally alleged that Lenin said of the Easter Rising of 1916 that anyone who thought a revolution was the proletariat on one side and the bourgeoisie on the other side, battle lines drawn up, would never see a real revolution.

The interpretation offered of this is that a workers revolution might come about through the actions of the petty-bourgeoisie, or another class. This doesn’t sound, to me, like something Lenin would say. After I heard Chris Bambery trot this quote out to refute my critique of the Iraqi resistance I decided to try and read up a bit about it.

An SWP member friend of mine directed me towards an article in the winter 2005 edition of International Socialism on the resistance. It’s called “Iraq: The rise of the resistance”, and it’s by Anne Alexander and Simon Assaf. The article itself isn’t what concerns me right now – there’s lots of stuff by Workers' Liberty on why Al-Sadr isn’t the man to support, even if he’s not as bad as Al-Zarqawi. But the article finishes with the following quote from Lenin:

“To imagine that a social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against national oppression, etc – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution… Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it”

This is quoted from “The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up”, which was written by Lenin in July 1916. It’s available in Volume 22 of the 1964 Progress Publishers Collected Works. Alexander and Assaf raise this to argue that the leadership of struggles against imperialism should not put us off supporting them. It is alleged that Lenin is here attacking those who would not support the Irish rebellion because of its leaders. The sentence introducing the quote reads:

“Lenin bitterly attacked those socialists who were more interested in their own political differences with the rebellion’s nationalist leadership than with the impact the uprising had on the British ruling class”.

But unfortunately Lenin is not actually attacking that mentality in the statement quoted. Lenin is attacking people who argue that the Easter Rising represents a putsch; that it represented no one besides a few conspirators and cranks. He attacks them saying:

“it [The Irish national liberation movement] also manifested itself in street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.” (pg. 355)

After which follows the oft-quoted passage. This seem to indicate that the part of the proletariat in this uprising is rather important to him after all. His principle objection to the charge that the Rising was a putsch is that it represented sections of the proletariat. The fact that they did not consider themselves socialists should not mean we, as socialists, should withhold our support. No mention is made of the leaders of the movement; instead the dispute focuses on the class basis of the rebellion. In fact, Lenin seems to go on about class quite a bit in this work. What, for example, is the proletariat’s role in such living phenomena?

“the class conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for different reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism” (pg. 356)

Okay, let’s recap. We argue that the national liberation struggle we should support should be the one led by the workers movement, not by its class enemies. The answer we receive is that Lenin would not be too keen on that, as, after all, he was quite in favour of other classes revolting against capitalism, and argued socialists should support them. But digging a little deeper we find that actually Lenin is here most concerned with struggles that represent real movements of the proletariat, and is chastising those socialists who refuse to support a real movement because it does not yet have proper class consciousness.

What is Lenin’s answer to all this? Is it to forget about the class struggle until national liberation has been achieved? Not quite. The proletariat should lead the struggle for national liberation and direct the struggle of the other classes.

The case against the use of the quote in the fashion I’ve described becomes even stronger when one considers the work as a whole. Not only is the quote in question not directed at who the SWP say it is, but the target of the work as a whole is completely different.

Lenin is attacking, in this particular document, those socialists who argued that struggles for national liberation should not be supported at all. In an age of Imperialism, it was said, national borders were disappearing. That was good for socialism, as socialism was international after all. This boils down to what Lenin called “imperialist Economism” (pg. 324), as all that matters to these socialists is the economic convergence of the nations. The political dominance of a section of the proletariat, and the failure of other sections to stand by it, can be forgotten. Lenin charges that for them:

“ the given war or revolt is not assessed on the strength of its real social content (the struggle of an oppressed nation for its liberation from the oppressor nation)… There is nothing Marxist or even revolutionary in this argument. If we do not want to betray socialism we must support every revolt against our chief enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big states, provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class.” (pg. 332-3)

National liberation movements must be assessed on their real social content, if we are to follow Lenin on this issue. Where they represent struggles by the oppressed for their liberation from their oppressor they must be supported. Where they represent the struggle for power of a reactionary class then they must not. I’m not going to argue here which of those two categories the Iraqi resistance falls into, although that is clearly a very important question.

My point is that the entire of Lenin’s analysis here is based on the class character of the revolt in question. Lenin states that the mistake of the imperialist economists is in failing to analyse the real social content of these revolts. He then makes it plain what he considers the real social content to be; their class character, and their effect on the class struggle. If the ideas from page 355 and 356 are then brought into the equation as well we find this doesn’t necessarily mean the revolts had to revolts entirely of workers, but we also find Lenin clearly considers the participation of workers in them important.

Lenin’s thesis is that socialists must support any struggle that has as its real social content the defeat of the bourgeoisie by progressive forces, but not reactionary ones. Support of that struggle must be for the proletarian elements within it that must fight to ensure the real social content of that struggle becomes that of a struggle for socialism.

Of special interest for me is the fact that Lenin seems, in some ways, to be anticipating selective misreading of this idea. He is very concerned that this slogan might be taken as an absolute guide to all national liberation movements, and is keen to avoid that. For instance:

“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand from a republic from the programme of international Social-Democracy on these grounds” (pg 341)

We support all demands for national liberation as that is part of the general democratic, or general socialist, cause. It advances the workers movement to support these struggles. But where it does not advance democratic or socialist ideals on a world scale it is “ridiculous” to support them. Once again we find the notion of class, far from being demoted to a back seat position by Lenin, is here the very motivation for his initial comments.

Lenin continues to qualify the rule that socialists must support “any” national liberation struggle. Some opponents of the idea of self-determination argue, Lenin points out, that supporting all national liberation struggles leads to support for extremely reactionary people. Therefore, they argue, we should not support national liberation struggles as socialists. Lenin’s attack on this is rather telling:

“From the standpoint of general theory this argument is outrageous, because it is clearly illogical: first, no democratic demand can fail to give rise to abuses, unless the specific is subordinated to the general; we are not obliged to support either “any” struggle for independence or “any” republican or anti-clerical movement. Secondly, no formula for the struggle against national oppression can fail to suffer from the same “shortcoming”. (pg. 349-350)

So here we have two sides of the same coin under attack from Lenin. There are socialists who “abuse” the demand for support for all national liberation struggles by using it to legitimise support for reactionaries, and there are those who do not check this abuse but use it as an excuse to abandon the slogan altogether. Lenin does not argue that support for all national liberation struggles sometimes means support for the reactionaries, and therefore those who reject support for reactionary struggles also must reject national liberation in general.

Instead he argues support for all national liberation struggles is a democratic demand and therefore must be placed within a wide range of other democratic demands that socialists make in order to advance the cause of the emancipation of the working class. The character, the make-up, and the ideas of the national liberation movement are not to be forgotten in favour of the formula Lenin has put forward, and to do so would be to abuse that formula. Lenin concludes the piece with a timely reminder of this, and incidentally also a reminder of whom the work is directed against in the first place:

“to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened section of certain classes in an oppresses nation against its oppressors as a “putsch”, we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the Kautskyites.”

Lenin is not saying socialists must support even the most reactionary of struggles in order to avoid becoming Kautskyite social chauvinists, but that we must support “enlightened” movements against oppressors, even if those movements do not have a fully fledged socialist program already drawn up. Far from wishing to make the concept of class, or of program, irrelevant to our support for such movements Lenin considers it absolutely vital to asses the movements according to those criteria.

None of this necessarily means Lenin wouldn’t have supported the Iraqi resistance as such. That’s not really the point of what I’m trying to write here. I’m trying to dispense with the idea that the particular quote from Lenin with which I started allows us to sidestep a class based evaluation of the resistance altogether. It is not a get-out clause for socialists, allowing us to switch from one side of the class lines to another whenever we feel like it. To consider the quote a justification for supporting reactionary movements, or an excuse to forget about the working class for now, is simply a gross misrepresentation that can only be supported by forgetting the substance of the article that the quote is taken from. Let alone what Lenin wrote elsewhere.

I say this doesn’t necessarily mean Lenin wouldn’t have supported the resistance as it still leaves a variety of questions to be answered. Is the Iraqi resistance a movement of a reactionary class? Does supporting it advance or put back the class struggle? Can the movement be considered a movement of enlightened classes against the oppressors?

These are bigger questions than I can deal with here, but they are all questions I’ve heard sidestepped by various people with this particular quote from Lenin. The point of this post is to show that that manoeuvre

30-9-2005