Around mid-September, whilst a wave of Islamic-inspired demonstrations was arising more or less all over the Arab world (set off, so the “means of information” told us, by an obscure little satirical film on the Prophet), a notorious Italian opinion-leader was openly confessing to a well-known radio channel (and we quote from memory): “We got our analysis wrong. What we called ‘revolutions’ were not revolutions but revolts stemming from social and demographic circumstances.” A year and a half or so ago, the guilty ignorance of a gaggle of politicians, journalists, experts, commentators (to sum up, the dregs of the ruling ideology), were deafening us with hymns to the “Arab Springtimes”, the “Twitter revolutions”, “the final triumph of democracy”: today they mill around bewildered, wondering what on earth happened, what went wrong. The mother of imbeciles is ever-pregnant.
Our evaluation of the events that have unfolded in the Maghreb-Mashrek (with wide-reaching ramifications elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East) have proved to be more than accurate. Right from the start we identified the source of the contradictions in the proletarian battles sparked off by the economic crisis, in the wide movements of protest against dreadful living and working conditions affecting mainly Tunisia and Egypt, where it had been possible for years to note widespread social unrest (as we did repeatedly in our articles) – a mass of almost 100 million proletarians who, in the dramatic absence of any political revolutionary guide, were leaning hard on production relations, desperately seeking their own path. Soon grafted onto these broad movements, at the head of them, and eventually leading them far away from the central issue (the conflict between classes and the power issue), came the interests of considerable sectors of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, who had long been interested, as the crisis advanced, in a transition from rigid, centralized régimes, often managed by the army, to more fluid and “freer” forms of economic management (something which, on a smaller scale, brings to mind the events of 1989-90 in the area of the ex-USSR) – thus a change of régime, aiming both to reorganize socio-economic life and to open up an opportunity for proletarian energy to let off steam, since it was starting to build up dangerously.
As we have demonstrated, all the petit-bourgeois, democratic, “progressive” (in fact deeply conservative) hot air served to cover these changes of régime wherever they took place, and however they came about: but the hot air remains, it does not vanish – quite the opposite. Nationalisim, kept within limits by the Mubarak régime, is starting to come out of hiding with the crisis and democracy (religious or secular or of any other variety) is, as always, proving to be the best vehicle and container for the development of nationalism and preparations for war. In this sense Islamism in all forms (ideological and material, secular and fundamentalist) and with its various organized structures (parties, movements, social and financial assistance networks) interprets the same function that has belonged for over a century now to western social-democracy: national solidarity, the binding of all classes to an ideology, the redistribution (within precise limits) of part of the profits harvested thanks to income from oil, adoration of the national State, repression of any antagonist moves. And thus, when pure and simple democratic rhetoric was no longer sufficient to cover up the sores of an increasingly vast and profound social crisis, from the top-hat of the century-old experience of bourgeois dominion in its youngest, North-African expression, out popped thecasus belli: the little old film insulting the Prophet and infuriating the masses – further confirmation of how religion, ideology and superstructure serve to maintain the status quo, to safeguard the economic and social structure of the capitalist mode of production.
We criticized the petit bourgeois “rebels” and “freedom fighters” just as we have always criticized the “dictators” and the “colonels”; the savagery of Euro-American imperialism in Libya, to the same extent as the even greater tragedy that is taking pace in Syria; fundamentalist ideologies just as democratic ones; the empty rhetoric of those who are rediscovering, rather too late, third-world, populist “anti-imperialism”, just as the revolting, anti-proletarian operation carried out by the whole mass of servants to international imperialism who sang the praises of the “Arab Springtimes”, failing to understand (the eternal “useful idiots”) or else understanding only too well (the more cunning of them) what was really going on in the Maghreb-Mashrek. Meanwhile the whole of the Middle-East continues to burn: the “means of information” have kept more or less silent about the clashes that have been taking place, almost simultaneously with the wave of Islamism, amongst the Palestinian proletarians of the West Bank, who came out onto the streets to protest against the cost of living and the policy of the Palestinian National Authority (i.e.their national state, however much of an embryo it may be): clashes that we enthusiastically welcome, in the hope that they may be a first sign of the return to a class perspective and no longer a nationalist one in the whole area – a prospect that it is our historical duty as communists to work towards.
Faced with all this, the drama (one that has been dragging on for eighty years now) is the absence as a deep-rooted political force, of the international communist party, both in the North-African area and at the heart, essential to any revolutionary perspective, of the Euro-American area, the citadel of imperialism. This absence (we have repeated and demonstrated it over and over again) is due to a number of factors, the main one being the catastrophic, destructive and annulling effect of Stalinism as the theory and practice of the bourgeois counter-revolution in the XXth century, which sums up to the hundredth degree the joint role of democracy, social-democracy and nazi-fascism in emptying and distorting the world communist movement internally and repressing it from the outside.
The urgent need to work at reinforcing and putting down international roots for the revolutionary party is thus evident to anyone who avoids looking at events in North Africa (between the huge upheavals and long periods of stagnation) through the distorting lens of petit-bourgeois commonplaces and democratic rhetoric.
Internationalist Communist Party
