The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban raises issues for socialist internationalists. On one side, the departure of US and NATO forces, which had inflicted so much violence and suffering on the people of Afghanistan, is a cause of celebration for many. Those who celebrate include some who refuse to acknowledge that the people of Afghanistan had earlier suffered well over a million civilian deaths at the hands of Russian imperialism. But can we really celebrate the fact that a brutal, authoritarian, misogynist armed group like the Taliban has taken over the state? The fact that they are now in power is certainly not a victory for the working people of Afghanistan.
What this example illustrates is a dilemma that has confronted us for a long time: However vehemently we oppose Western imperialisms, we have to recognise that among the other forces opposing them are some that are equally brutal and authoritarian. We have to reckon with the possibility that genuine support for working people in other countries or our own country may mean confronting two or more enemies who may be fighting against each other but are equally inimical to the self-emancipation of the working classes, and may even be making deals behind the backs of the people they claim to represent, as Trump did with the Taliban. Genuine anti-imperialists must oppose all oppressive forces.
This should be obvious to any socialist, but unfortunately there are people who call themselves anti-imperialists yet end up supporting vicious right-wing regimes either implicitly or explicitly. It was seeing this happen in the case of the Arab uprisings from 2010 onwards that impelled me to write my book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. For example, it was obvious to any unbiased observer that the uprisings in Syria and Libya were part of the same movement as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. They were protesting against the same problems - poverty, unemployment and political repression - and they even chanted the same slogans, including ‘The people want the downfall of the regime’. But whereas the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, whose regimes were seen as allies of the West, were celebrated by all socialists, a vociferous section of socialists assimilated the uprisings in Syria and Libya, whose regimes were seen as allies of Russia, with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003! In their view, the huge anti-regime demonstrations in Syria and Libya consisted of people who had been fooled and manipulated by Western imperialism into demanding regime change – a view which, in my opinion, is Orientalist and even racist, denying the agency of these Third World peoples and their ability to think for themselves.
Pretending that there were no revolutionary uprisings in Syria and Libya against the ruling regimes of Bashar al-Assad and Muammar Gaddafi entailed covering up the truth and, worst of all, providing overt or covert support to the slaughter they were inflicting on their people. When the Iranian and Russian regimes intervened to prop up Assad, their crimes against humanity too had to be whitewashed, even though these were arguably imperialist interventions against the people of another country.
I identified three groups of what I call ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’ who take such positions. The first, mainly in Western Europe and North America, feel that their responsibility is only to oppose their own state and its allies: an extremely West-centric view. Selective solidarity of this sort, which refuses to support working people who are oppressed by other imperialisms and authoritarian states, falls far short of genuine internationalism.
The second group are those who never acknowledged that there was a counter-revolution in Russia under Stalin. By contrast with Lenin, who stood up for the right to national liberation of all colonised peoples, including those who had been colonised by Tsarist Russia, Stalin not only reconstructed the Tsarist empire under cover of the USSR but also grabbed control over several East European countries at the Yalta conference after World War II. Many countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc regained their independence under Gorbachev, but Putin has gone back to Stalin’s imperialist agenda. In some ways, one can understand why many socialists supported Stalin, because he took extraordinary pains to portray himself as Lenin’s closest comrade. It’s more diffcult to understand how any socialists can support Putin, who makes no claim to be a Marxist and openly castigates Lenin for putting a time-bomb under the USSR by arguing for the right to self-determination!
The third group consists of tyrants and non-Western imperialists, who respond to every criticism of their despotism and human rights abuses by claiming that such criticisms are an expression of Western imperialism, ignoring the struggles of oppressed working people that have succeeded in winning these rights. Ironically, they thereby reinforce racist stereotypes of non-Western peoples as either violent and barbaric or docile and submissive, and self-proclaimed socialists who echo their claims do the same.
The first chapter of Indefensible, which constitutes Part 1 of the book, examines theories of imperialism, and the variety of ways in which imperialist domination has been enforced under different models of capitalism. It ends by outlining the politics of genuine anti-imperialism as distinct from pseudo-anti-imperialism.
Part 2 consists of case studies. Chapter 2 looks at the rapidly escalating authoritarianism in Russia under Putin, and the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. As Lenin described it in 1914, ‘What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return.’ Chapter 3 looks at the breakup of Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, and the explosion of Serbian nationalism that led to the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. Chapter 4 is about Iran, where a genuine popular democratic revolution, in which workers played a critical role, overthrew the despotic regime of the Shah, but was followed by an Islamist counter-revolution that installed an even more repressive theocratic dictatorship. Chapter 5 is about Iraq, where the first war of aggression launched by George H.W. Bush resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths but didn’t overthrow Saddam Hussein. The second war, launched by George W. Bush, did overthrow Saddam Hussein and, ironically, replaced his regime by sectarian, misogynist and authoritarian parties and militias affiliated to the Iranian theocracy! Chapter 6 looks at the background to the Syrian uprising, including early democracy movements and the authoritarian regime of Hafez al-Assad. Chapter 7 looks at the uprising itself, which started off as a non-violent mass movement but became militarised in response to the brutal violence inflicted on it by the state as well as by the Iranian and Russian regimes.
In each of these cases, pseudo-anti-imperialists have sided with the right-wing oppressors by propagating their lies, and have either ignored or vilified those who resist them. Chapter 8 in Part 3 identifies some of the ways in which we can fight back: by pursuing and propagating the truth; by reaffirming the moral value of opposing oppression and proclaiming solidarity with the victims of violence; by making a critique of ideologies, especially on the left, that devalue democracy and thereby promote authoritarianism; by reasserting the importance of internationalism, making it clear that there is no such thing as ‘socialism in one country,’ and capitalism can be ended only if and when the working people of the world unite to bring it down; and finally, by rejecting the outdated notion of ‘sovereignty’ that assumes a state has the right to slaughter its own people, and pushing for reforms to the global institutions created to implement international humanitarian, human rights and criminal law to enable them to promote democracy and end mass slaughter.
Socialist internationalism requires us, first and foremost, to identify the people in each country with whom we should be expressing solidarity. The very least we can do is to listen to their voices of courage, wisdom and humanity, and amplify them in whatever way we can.
(This article was published in Socialist Labour (Nigeria) in its October 2021 issue, p.9)