When Islamist fascists gained political power in Iran, certain factions within the European right-wing began falsely portrayed these fascist forces as anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fighters among of the communist factions.
Using postmodernism as a tool, they manipulated the concept of communism, creating a distorted and meaningless version of it. They propagated false alternatives, claiming to fight imperialism while actually supporting controlled fascism. As a result, these forces now hold sway in former colonial countries that were once aligned with or under the influence of the United States, such as Iran.
This shift, which occurred particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dealt a significant ideological blow to the principles of communism. Presently, various movements that identify as communist, such as left nationalists, left patriots, and those with left religious tendencies, are in fact espousing fraudulent ideologies.
The root cause of these deviations can be attributed to the prevalence of perspectives that are not aligned with communism or anarchism, particularly concerning capital, capitalism, and imperialism. Several significant political and strategic deviations have arisen as a result, including the acceptance of certain aspects of capitalism as “national and progressive.” This substitution of class collaboration for the pursuit of a practical revolutionary anti-imperialist front, insufficient efforts in consistently exposing left liberalism and the conservative faction of petty capitalism, and the subsequent relinquishing of political leadership in social movements and democratic struggles to the hands of the petty bourgeoisie and left liberalism, are all theoretical reflections of the substantial gap that exists between “revolutionary” theories and the teachings of Marx and Lenin regarding the critique of capitalist economy and its advanced stage, imperialism.
This is how certain factions within the right-wing in Greece (lets keep in mind these people yet are considered as part of the leftist by the Greek themselves but not for me), for example, are able to distort the truth by falsely portraying the Islamic Republic as an enemy of imperialism. They even go as far as labeling a neoliberal conservative president, who played a significant role in the massacre of hundreds of communists and suppression of labor movements, as a leftist and a social democrat. It is evident that they display a complete lack of knowledge on numerous subjects.
Moreover, it is evident that this political trend not only fails to recognize and confront fascism but also displays concerning indications of embracing it. This historical fact serves as a stark reminder that when the science of emancipation of the working class becomes distorted and interpreted in a pseudo-scientific manner, it can lead to dangerous consequences.
In such an environment, the brutal repression and exploitation faced by the working class in Iran fails to evoke any empathetic response. However, the firing of missiles by the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) manages to make some individuals in Europe, who claim to be part of the left, happy. They even label the Islamist fascists in Iran as freedom fighters. The significance of this historical shift becomes apparent when we recall that President Reagan once referred to the very same Islamists who now call themselves Taliban and al-Qaeda as freedom fighters.
It is in such an atmosphere that today criticizing Islamist fascist in Iran or the oligarchs in Russia not only does not attract attention, but they are considered the only real fighters against capitalism and imperialism.
Today it has become the fashion for the pseudo-communist/anarchists to look to see which ingredient has least gone into making their left. They want to make socialism more democratic, make more room in it for nationalism, patriotism, religion and so on and they want to fight racism and discrimination in the same time! It is their own doctrine; they can do with it what they like. I prefer to refer them to as the left side of the right-wing.
That is why the image of a black man wearing the uniform of the Presidential Guard delights them, but they are silent in the face of systematic and daily racism and discrimination against black people. What matters is not the human but the national history and costume! They just forgot how the recognition of workers, women, immigrants, Indigenous and black people as countable individuals and the extension of democracy to them, has itself been the result of decades of struggle by them against the existing democracies. Which even this has not yet been realized in most of the democracies. However, the basis for democracy is not the human being as an absolute, legitimate, and inviolable entity, but the individual as a countable unit. In democracy, the human being is reduced to a vote.
The difference I see concerns how we approach the history of the movement; that is, how communism introduces itself and understand its past.
The way in which existing communism traces its own history, shows to what actual part of society it belongs. I don’t understand why we should consider all those who, under the hammer-and-sickle banner, wished to plan the national economy and organize wage labor in their country, those who sought to reclaim their national rights, consume the bread and butter produced in their own sacred homeland, and have democracy, or whoever felt ‘alienated’ in the ‘post-industrial’ society, as part of the history of communism, but file under the history of trade-unionism the Indian/Chilean/British/Iranian miners’ strike who for a whole year fought the entire capitalism, from its police down to its pen-pushers, or classify the workers’ council movement in this or that country under the history of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. Or during World War II a priest or an anti-occupation nationalist who calls himself a communist has entered the war!
So our first distinction with the existing socialism as a whole is over the history of communism itself; not only past history but, rather, the living history of today going on before our very eyes. For us the history of communism is not the history of an ideology but that of a class struggle. Once we look at it from this angle, we begin to realize what these people have done to the ideology itself, and how, today, when their own movement has reached the end they are also announcing the end of Marxism, i.e. the worker’s criticism of capitalism.
This different way of looking at the history of communism not only allows us to reject the existing scenarios and problematic, but already confronts us with a vast and totally different set of theoretical and practical problems which are essentially not addressed by the existing communism. Some of our differences with these currents, therefore, find expression in what they do not say or understand.
It is high time that we once again, just like when communism crushed nationalism at the time of the First World War and replied to democracy in the October Revolution, make communism independent of any residues of influence of these trends on a vast social scale.
In such a jungle world, in such an anarchic world, what could be better for world capitalism than the absence of the danger of socialism? What can guarantee their competition for the division of the world? Yes, we live in a world where capitalism not only does not see itself in danger of confronting socialism, but has, to the extent possible, exploited the discourse of socialism to justify itself.
To increase the parasite’s minority interests in a time when corruption, oligarchy, racism, repression, wage cuts, reduced social services, reduced access to medical care, etc., are spreading and called democracy, we are facing to be fool by capitalism that corrupted and oligarch Russian’s Putin after this war (which he was/is their friend and companion), today is the representative of communism!
This just show basically two thing: communism yet is a dangerous power against capitalism, and communists will need to once again present their manifesto as a viable alternative to capitalism.
Communism has lost it’s ownership on it’s words, definitions and the agenda. This is our duty to take them back…
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What you think?