Permanent Revolution & the fight for revolutionary leadership today

In June 2024 the Spartacist League of Australia debated the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) at Trades Hall, Melbourne. The event drew around thirty people, mostly members and supporters of the two organisations as well as of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation and the Platypus outfit. The IBT emerged from individuals who left the forerunner of the ICL in the 1980s. The topic of our debate, “Permanent Revolution and the struggle for revolutionary leadership today,” not only reflects the ICL’s programmatic reorientation (see Spartacist No. 68, September 2023) and the IBT’s central criticism of it, but strikes at the core of the Marxist struggle for revolutionary leadership in the neocolonial world.

In her presentation, SL/A National Chairman C. Bourchier motivated the ICL’s reassertion, against longstanding revisionism, of permanent revolution as the positive Marxist program for national liberation and anti-imperialism. Frankly, we found it surprising that the IBT’s response was to emphatically declare that they too see national liberation as a motor force for social revolution. We welcome such a position, the problem is that it is completely contradicted by every single concrete perspective the IBT defended at the debate.

For instance, while the ICL’s presentation and floor interventions emphasised the pressing struggle for Palestinian liberation, and the broader historic tasks for Marxists, the IBT could only muddy the waters. When questioned on the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing which gave birth to Israel (and historic Spartacism’s reactionary pro-Israel and later dual defeatist line on the 1948 Arab-Israeli war) the IBT responded that they take a side “for defence of Palestinian homes in the Nakba” but not on the war in which the victory or defeat of the Nakba was decided! When we pressed the question: do you fight to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” they lamely ducked our argument as simply being “whether we do or don’t endorse a slogan, a chant.” But the point of our argument was to concretise the implications of the pseudo-Marxist “interpenetrated peoples” theory, a mainstay of “old Spartacism” slavishly defended today by the IBT. What the IBT’s response confirmed is that the real content of this “theory” is to obscure the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations and reject the fight for Palestinian national liberation in fear of “reversing the terms of national oppression.” (For more on this question see “Marxists & Palestine: 100 Years of Failure,” Spartacist No. 69, August 2024.)

Charging the ICL with abandoning the Trotskyist transitional program as “old hat,” what the IBT misses is that our whole program on permanent revolution is precisely a struggle for the transitional program in the neocolonial world. As Trotsky put it, in the semicolonial and backward countries:

The transitional program fights to bridge existing consciousness and aspirations to the question of class power. This is precisely the content of our critical support to the black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa, for all the IBT’s hue and cry over that intervention. As the AmaBolsheviki Amnyama article republished in this issue of Red Battler makes clear, the whole thrust of our recent work in South Africa has been the fight to raise an independent class-struggle pole against the EFF’s parliamentary class-collaborationism. This is what it means to draw a class line between the powerful aspirations of the masses for black freedom and a leadership chained to the status quo and bourgeoisie. This is the real content of the anti-imperialist united front: a fight to explode unity with the national bourgeoisie not, as the IBT caricatures, to seek a “permanent alliance” with it.

Beneath the IBT’s muck, the debate made clear that the central political divergence between our organisations is counterposed conceptions of the tasks of Marxists in the fight for revolutionary leadership. Encapsulating their perspective put forward at the debate, they afterwards wrote that the “role of a numerically weak Trotskyist organisation…is to fight for leadership on a realistic scale while outlining a program and strategy for workers’ power”—a program they determine “will necessarily have something of an abstract and anticipatory quality” in the absence of a mass revolutionary party. As we see it, the real outcome of their perspective is not fighting for revolutionary leadership anywhere on any scale but a sterile regurgitation of “Marxist” formulae, lines, and slogans—arrayed against the living reality of the class struggle with all its contours, including national ones.

The real struggle for revolutionary leadership is to connect, at every single juncture, the urgent necessity for an independent, class-struggle program to the pressing needs and aspirations of the masses. We have no illusions that a small organisation like the ICL could today seize the leadership of mass workers and national movements. But only concrete intervention on this basis can lay the foundations for and build the revolutionary party capable of doing this. Far from aiming at a “fake mass orientation,” as the IBT chirps, our work has fought to drive a wedge through the ruptures in the workers and anti-imperialist movements to plant a revolutionary pole.

This is what a small Marxist group, armed with a revolutionary program, can and must do. It was what our organisation did in the face of counterrevolution and the collapse of Stalinism in East Germany and the Soviet Union. At this critical moment—a world historic conjuncture for the working class—the ICL stood at its post and fought for revolutionary leadership. Reflecting their underlying outlook that any real revolutionary intervention by a small group is impossible, the IBT took pains in the debate to denounce this intervention specifically as “delusion.” But the real delusion is to believe that the Marxist program can exist divorced from the living class struggle and the fight for leadership. As our comrade concluded in her summary remarks:

Our struggle has been to reassert the program of Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the most revolutionary aspects of our own history. A critical re-evaluating of our tendency’s past has been central to our programmatic reorientation, but unlike the IBT we continue to study this history only insofar as it progresses the fight for revolutionary leadership today. This debate was one of a number that have taken place between the ICL and other organisations, aiming to further political and programmatic clarification and regroupment of the forces of international revolution, today minuscule and isolated. We print below the SL/A’s presentation at the debate, edited for publication. The full debate and discussion can be viewed on the Red Battler YouTube channel.

Hello comrades. Permanent revolution and the fight for revolutionary leadership today. This question is not an academic one, not one of theoretical differences in abstract understanding of the theory of permanent revolution. No. At its core, this debate is between two fundamentally opposed methods. There is one, the IBT’s, that sees the world through the lens of sterile formulas and dogmas. The IBT proudly stakes its claim on all that is sterile, reactionary and counter to Leninism in historic Spartacism’s distortion of permanent revolution. Then there is our own, orientated by the fight to advance the class struggle through the struggle against imperialism.

Both groups proclaim the need for revolution, but unlike the IBT we actually forge a path to put those words into action. In this presentation I will demonstrate what the fight for revolutionary leadership actually entails and why the IBT fails to wage a fight and is in fact a roadblock to this struggle in general but especially in the neocolonies.

The world order today—the tasks at hand

Today, the imperialist hegemony of the US is in decline. The American Empire has responded hysterically by holding ever tighter to its position and eyeing any potential threats, from Russia in Ukraine to China through the AUKUS military pact. In part motivated by weakened US hegemony and in reaction to years of brutal siege on Palestinians, Hamas attempted to draw neighbouring states into war. Another crack in the US-led world order, the reaction has been the holding on ever tighter to their Zionist enclave in the Middle East as it rolls through and bombs Gaza. The US is looking to drag the workers of the world down with it in a spiral of war and destruction. And the world over, the workers movement has been completely tied to this course by its bourgeois misleaders.

In this decline, the US is squeezing its allies and clients. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the neocolonies. These countries have been defined by imperialist oppression, which has plunged the working class into the depths of misery. Austerity is dictated through imperialist debts. The backwardness of pre-capitalist relations that denied peasants land and bread are maintained and reinforced by foreign domination. Under “globalised” imperialist hegemony the massively growing proletariat of the neocolonies are kept superexploited and in a stagnating social position. It is here that the workers and toilers yearn to modernise and resist the deplorable conditions enforced by the imperialists, giving an explosive dynamic to the struggle for the most basic demands and propelling the working class to its feet.

This felt sense of imperialist oppression has thus far been channelled into support to bourgeois nationalists, from AMLO in Mexico to Modi in India, who claim that they represent the interests of the nation and pose as progressive or modernising forces in developing the country—capable of uplifting the masses from the conditions enforced by imperialism.

They are the representatives of the national bourgeoisie of the neocolonial countries, what Trotsky described as a semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class veering between foreign finance capital and the national proletariat. As a propertied class, they are perennially in fear of the independent mobilisation of the proletariat, the only class with the capacity to fight and ultimately defeat imperialism. For all their rhetoric about defending the nation, under their leadership there is neither national nor social emancipation. AMLO, Modi, Lula, etc. only offer dead ends for the working class, and offer no solutions to escape the trajectory of misery and imperialist carnage. The question is, what way forwards?

What way forwards?

Over the past decades, there have been two reactions on the left to the seemingly unbreakable grip that the bourgeois nationalists have over the neocolonial masses, both of which surrender the fight for proletarian leadership.

On the one hand, there are those who tail the bourgeois nationalists as a progressive force—openly repudiating the necessity of independent revolutionary leadership, or at least postponing it to an indefinite future. A classic example were the Pabloites who saw the nationalists not as an obstacle but as a “blunt instrument” against imperialism. There are countless contemporary iterations of these politics today each of which cheers on, or plays left critic-advisers to, bourgeois nationalism as it leads the working class into betrayal after betrayal and defeat after defeat. One example is how much of the left cynically fawns over Hamas, promoting the movement under their leadership as the path to Palestinian liberation.

Against such flagrant opportunism there are those who, in the name of proletarian leadership, drew sterile and rigid lines against the national liberation struggle, juxtaposing national liberation with socialism. In this camp stood the old ICL, and stands the current IBT, who often denounce the struggle for national liberation as bourgeois in itself or otherwise a barrier to class struggle. Under this schema national liberation is not something to champion but to remove from the agenda. But this only leaves the national liberation struggle firmly in the hands of the bourgeois nationalists.

The former trend amounts to “competing” with the national bourgeois by matching it with nationalist sloganeering, that is, to tail and cheer them on. The latter denounces the struggle to compete at all. Both are a roadblock. What is really necessary is to fight for communist leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle. This is the core of permanent revolution, and its strength.

As the Comintern’s Theses on the Eastern Question outlined in 1922, our duty is to demonstrate that even the smallest day-to-day struggles of the working class must be directed at imperialism to permit any real victories. Even in the struggle for the most basic democratic tasks we must fight to guide the workers to the question of class power.

At every step we must expose these nationalists and their program of conciliation to the imperialists as incapable of achieving even their own limited demands, let alone the broader democratic and national tasks necessary to achieve national emancipation! Our task is to push forward the struggle against the imperialists, to counterpose our strategy of independent action of the working class against the ones of the national bourgeoisie, and show that in fact they constitute the main political roadblock to a victorious struggle against imperialism.

In fact, by advancing each struggle against the imperialists, by bringing the masses to their feet, we do not push the working class closer to the national bourgeoisie but deepen the polarisation between the two classes. As the struggle against imperialism is pushed to its limits, torn asunder is the nationalist lie of a common interest between the two classes against imperialism. Only through this can we destroy the nationalist illusions that have a stranglehold over the masses.

This cannot be done through endless pontification of Marxist-sounding formulas but by actively participating in the anti-imperialist struggle and fighting for a communist program within it, and for communist hegemony over it. Only through actively intervening and championing the movement for democracy and national independence against imperialism can the proletariat take leadership and come to power, the only thing that can ensure resolution of these fundamental questions. This is what it means to fight for revolutionary leadership of the working class of the neocolonies. Not, as the ICL has previously done and the IBT does today, abstractly juxtaposing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the real daily needs and aspirations of the masses. As Trotsky said in reference to Mexico:

IBT’s method and the Marxist method

In response to this Trotsky quote the IBT will say they agree with him, that they too would have supported the expropriation of imperialist assets in Latin America. In doing so, what they will miss is the forest for the trees. That is, they miss that Trotsky’s method centres the fight for revolutionary leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle. Of course we support the expropriation of imperialist assets. But this narrow view of whether something is “supportable” or not supportable misses the basis of Trotsky’s support. The very thing that it is trying to accomplish—fighting to show that communists are the best and most consistent fighters against foreign imperialists—is something the IBT denounces us for.

For the IBT and the old ICL, Marxism is not a guide to action, but little more than a grab bag of formulas to wave around at the end of articles to ward off opportunism. The struggles and works of Lenin and Trotsky; hell, all the lessons of the Russian Revolution as codified in the first four congresses of the Comintern; are not so much distilled but sterilised into abstract principles to use at any occasion. Such cross-reference “Marxism” teaches you not how to navigate the waters of class struggle, but to stay on land to avoid drowning.

It is no surprise that when we actually laid out a program for revolutionary leadership in the neocolonies in Spartacist No. 68, against our old sterility, the IBT has only been able to cry out “opportunism!” At best they declare we have crossed some imagined line of opportunism, at worse they distort our position beyond recognition. Not once do they motivate how their own program advances the fight for revolutionary leadership and ours does not. To be fair, I wouldn’t know how to argue on this basis against the ICL’s program either!

In their article “Spartacism Junked,” to argue that we are now orientating to bourgeois nationalism, they pull from us a quote criticising our old position as opposition to “bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity.” With such a statement they seemingly imply we now support bourgeois nationalism. But what they neglect to quote is the second half of that sentence, which says that the old ICL method “opposes bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity instead of seeking to break its hold on the masses by showing how it is an obstacle to both social and national liberation” (our emphasis). In fact, the full quote is a pretty apt summary of the difference between the ICL and IBT. Two fundamentally opposed methods to break the hold of bourgeois nationalism, only one of which is actually capable of doing so.

The actual basis of their opposition to our struggle really is reflected in their repeated assertion that we champion the national liberation struggle instead of class struggle as the fundamental lever of revolution in the neocolonies. Their method of reaching this conclusion is simple: Trotsky says we need a dictatorship of the proletariat to overthrow the imperialist yoke in the neocolonies. Thus, what is needed is revolution. Revolution can only be achieved through class struggle. Thus, we just need to preach for class struggle and revolution, to criticise the nationalist leadership, not on the basis of their ability to actually wage this struggle but on the basis that they are not revolutionary and aren’t for class struggle.

Such methods are very easy for those who would not like to think. But can we be real? People who support AMLO and Modi already know that they aren’t revolutionaries. Such an argument convinces them of nothing, other than the fact that these would-be Marxists have nothing to offer the national liberation movement of today.

What are the implications of juxtaposing class struggle and national liberation? The world today is defined by a handful of imperialist countries dividing up and dominating the rest of the world through the export of finance capital. In Lenin’s words, our current epoch is defined by imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. To think that in this situation, the anti-imperialist struggle is not key to liberation, that the struggle against imperialism is in any way separated from the struggle against capitalism, is to renounce the Leninist understanding of capitalism altogether.

The difference between ourselves and the IBT is not that we see class struggle or the struggle against capitalism as subordinate to a struggle against imperialism. Our difference is that the IBT puts one against the other. The IBT treats the goal of national emancipation not as intimately connected with social emancipation but as a diversion from class struggle, something to strike off the agenda to focus on some imagined “pure” class struggle untainted by the pesky reality of imperialist oppression. Or, as is said in IBT’s favourite “old Spartacist” article, the 1977 Theses on Ireland: “We support the right of self-determination and national liberation struggles in order to remove the national question from the historic agenda, not to create another such question.” That is bankruptcy to the highest degree. As Lenin argued against those who dismissed the struggle against the British in the Dublin Easter rebellion in 1916:

There lies our difference. In place of an actual argument, their “Spartacism Junked” article can only call out and decry us as Pabloites. Our crime? Fighting for national liberation as key to revolution in the neocolonies. The Fourth International was liquidated by the rise of Pabloism because it was a political tendency which represented, at its core, an open repudiation of the necessity of revolutionary leadership. But the IBT transforms the whole struggle against Pabloism into a caricature. For them the fundamental problem with Pabloism is that it championed national liberation. For the doctrinaire, repudiating the fight for revolutionary leadership is a secondary question.

The IBT’s decrying of our defence of the anti-imperialist united front is premised on the same distortion of Leninism. In the fight for revolutionary leadership against imperialism, we must seek to find every avenue to expose the bourgeois nationalists for their betrayals. That includes united fronts. To paraphrase Trotsky: it is necessary to reach episodic agreements with the bourgeois nationalists within the framework of strictly defined practical tasks while maintaining complete political independence.

This perhaps is not the case for the IBT, but communists use the united front not to just cohere broader forces for a common purpose in itself but also to struggle for communist hegemony within this united front. This does not mean we are entering permanent blocs with the national bourgeoisie as the IBT implies. Even the IBT seemingly understand the necessity of this anti-imperialist united front in certain situations—after all, do they not take a military side with Hamas against Israel? Again, for the IBT they see capitulation and opportunism not in the failure to fight for revolutionary leadership, but in crossing of imagined principles—to accomplish this they resort to distorting the Fourth Congress of the Comintern which this call derives from.

The ICL’s position on the anti-imperialist united front, and on the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole, was not invented by us. Our framework on the anti-imperialist struggle is based on the Second and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern. I ask the IBT—do you stand on the Second and Fourth Congresses, or do you denounce it just like the old ICL did?

The junk IBT peddles

In criticising what they call our “junking” of Spartacism the IBT declares we have thrown “the baby out with the bathwater,” in their words:

From Mexico to Palestine, the IBT cries that we dropped everything Spartacist. But really we have only junked the junk, which the IBT still desperately clings on to. Take a look at Mexico for instance, a country whose entire history is defined by imperialist bondage and devastation. The NAFTA trade agreement opened today’s era of unrestricted pillaging. The IMF imposes the harshest austerity measures on Mexico in the interests of US imperialism. US companies are the direct employers of most of the workers. Imperialism dictates every single political and economic aspect of Mexico, and the whole struggle of the Mexican people has been resistance to such imperialist oppression.

In response to this, the ICL argued in 2000 “We Spartacists insist that in Mexico the main enemy is at home: it is the Mexican bourgeoisie, lackey of imperialism”! We insisted that the main enemy is not imperialism in Mexico. This is a reiteration of earlier articles that the IBT upholds such as 1972’s “Not Green Against Orange, but Class Against Class!” which declares that “…the main battle of workers in one nation must always be against their own bourgeoisie.” So the “main enemy” isn’t the one actually calling their shots, but the national bourgeoisie—a class which in reality is at best a local branch manager administering imperialist dictates.

We later repudiated the “main enemy is at home” slogan in Mexico but still approached each question from the basis of some “pure” class struggle against the Mexican bourgeoisie, not by using the struggle against imperialism to expose its national lackeys. This is what the GEM, Mexican section of the ICL repudiated. Today, we actually have a program to expose the bourgeois nationalists as nothing but an obstacle to national liberation.

So what does the IBT oppose? That we say the main enemy is imperialism? That we say that the struggle against imperialism is key to liberation? That we criticise the nationalists for betraying the struggle against imperialism?

This is not isolated to Mexico of course but look around at Asia and the Pacific. How the hell are you going to win any workers from Indonesia, Kanaky, Papua New Guinea if you argue that the main enemy is not imperialism but that, in fact, in the neocolonies the main enemy is at home? Or argue that the struggle against imperialism is not central to their liberation? The IBT’s position amounts to arguing from the heights of Wellington that the struggle to liberate the nation from imperialism, the root of oppression in the neocolonies, is nothing but a distraction!

IBT bankruptcy on Palestine

Nowhere is IBT’s method more obviously bankrupt than in Israel/Palestine. Today, there is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In response, their recent “Stop the Gaza Genocide” article reiterates IBT’s support to the old ICL “interpenetrated peoples theory,” a “theory” which amounts to little more than a justification to not have a side with the oppressed nation against its oppressor, and deny permanent revolution in the region.

This “theory” argues that championing Palestinian liberation could only come at the expense of the democratic rights of the Israeli-Jewish nation, which would necessarily entail “reversing the terms of oppression” and outright national annihilation of the Jewish people. In its stead, the IBT calls for class struggle and revolution—but how are you going to have either when you don’t champion the fight for Palestinian liberation, the only basis on which you can break Israeli workers from Zionism and win over the Palestinian masses?

The IBT goes on further to lament how we renounced this “theory” in favour of our current position. They quote us saying how “‘the struggle for national liberation is not an obstacle to be moved to the side but a motor force for revolution’ as long as communists ‘take leadership of the national-liberation struggle.’” Actually this quote is right on the money. The ICL looks to treat the struggle for Palestinian liberation not as a distraction but a key part of socialist revolution in the region. What is necessary for that is communist leadership of this national liberation struggle.

So what about this quote does the IBT have a problem with? Does the IBT renounce that communists must fight for leadership of the national liberation struggle? Does the IBT see the struggle for Palestinian liberation as nothing more than an obstacle to be moved aside? For the IBT is the Palestinians’ resistance to their national extermination a mere distraction? Exemplifying this bankruptcy is their affirmation of the slogan “Not Jew against Arab, but class against class.” AKA don’t get distracted with the fight to free Palestine, focus on some “pure” class struggle instead!

Soon after October 7, the IBT released the leaflet “Down with Zionist Terror!” which argued that “The apartheid regime run by Tel Aviv is the inevitable result of the Zionist project to establish an ethno-religious state for Jews. Some 75 years ago this led to the violent expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians and the confiscation of over 90 percent of their land. The current attack on Gaza is a direct continuation of that unfinished campaign of ethnic cleansing.” Yes, correct. The Zionist state, established and codified in the 1948 war, was premised on the expulsion of the Palestinians. It is a settler colonial project predicated on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, which the genocide in Gaza is a continuation of.

So where did the Spartacist tradition lie on this question? Well the original position on the 1948 war, a position the SL took in 1968, was that in this war there was a side to take: with Israel! This was the war that led to the expulsion of entire cities of Palestinians and the establishment of the Zionist state within the “green lines,” and we justified it under the lie that the Israeli Jewish nation was threatened with extinction. The same 1968 article also called for a peace treaty on the 1949 boundary lines and equated the Zionist state with the Israeli Jewish nation.

In a later 1974 article, “Birth of a Zionist State,” which the IBT actively promotes today, the old SL changed their position to a dual defeatist one, arguing not that this was a bankrupt capitulation to Zionism, but that “new facts” were discovered that indicated the Jewish nation was not threatened. Since then, the old ICL maintained, as the IBT does today, that the borders that came from the 1948 war constitute a core part of Israel that must be defended if threatened. That is to say, the IBT still defends the settler colonial conquests of the 1948 war as legitimate, which is the same line of the liberal Zionists!

The updated defeatist line on the 1948 war while less egregious is still a gross capitulation to Zionism and imperialism. By having such a position, the IBT puts an equal sign between the Zionists who were looking to expropriate Palestine and the Arab nations that were fighting against it. Yes it is true that the Arab leaders would only betray the struggle for Palestinian freedom. But the task of communists was to intervene into this struggle against Zionism and show how these corrupt regimes only undermined the fight for a free Palestine, including by fomenting anti-Jewish reaction which only rallied Jewish workers to the Zionist cause. Instead of this the IBT, like the historic SL, called to point the guns the other way in a conflict which was, in IBT’s own words, a “violent expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians and the confiscation of over 90 percent of their land,” and which the current genocide in Gaza is a continuation of. I ask the IBT—which side are you on in the Nakba?

This is not a historical question of course, but has its implications in the ongoing war today. In contrast to the IBT’s approach of treating Palestinian liberation as a mere distraction, the ICL produced the article “A Revolutionary Road for Palestinian Liberation” which puts front and centre the question of national liberation. The entire basis of our intervention is centred around putting forward a strategy to defend Gaza, smash the Zionist state and defeat imperialism. We motivate the necessity of joint Jewish-Palestinian struggle not through moral preaching to love one’s neighbour and focus on class struggle, but by putting forward a counterposed strategy to free Palestine and to demonstrate that communists are the best fighters for Palestinian liberation, and that under Hamas there is only death and defeat.

Only by centring the question of Palestinian liberation are we actually able to motivate how Hamas’s approach of looking for mates with bourgeois nationalist rulers, while lumping Jewish workers in with the Zionist state, is in fact completely counterproductive to the struggle to liberate Palestine. In fact to destroy the Zionist state what needs to happen is to break it along class lines—which can only happen if Jewish workers can be won to the struggle for Palestinian freedom as their own. At the same time, we must convince Palestinians of the necessity of joint struggle, and to defend the national rights of Jewish workers to live in Palestine—whose liberation also demands smashing of the Zionist state. Above all, it emphasises that joint class struggle in both Palestine and Israel “must be connected to breaking the main obstacle standing in the way of any social progress: Israel’s oppression of Palestinians,” which is the fundamental central question of the conflict.

The IBT, in their “Stop the Gaza Genocide!” article, clearly have a lot to complain about the ICL. To try and respond to our article they repeat their distortions on the anti-imperialist united front to imply that we see no reason to expose the bourgeois nationalists and believe that revolutionary leadership objectively springs from such tactics automatically. They lament how we centre the question of national liberation, in Palestine! What do they put forward in its place? Class struggle! As if class struggle is abstracted from the struggle for the national liberation of Palestine! This long and turgid article reads more like a wish list for joint class struggle and revolution rather than actually counterposing a strategy to Hamas. When they finally do try and motivate how to break Palestinian workers from Hamas it is almost comical:

Gaza is being turned to rubble. There is an active genocide that threatens to destroy the Palestinian nation. Palestinians are not supporting Hamas because they think they have the best social welfare schemes. Palestinians are supporting Hamas because they think Hamas are the best fighters against Zionism and imperialism, because they believe Hamas is the best bet to free Palestine from the river to the sea! To imagine that the Palestinian people will break from Hamas because you are critical of their austerity reforms is not only economist but pathetic. The ICL puts front and centre the struggle for communist leadership, with a program to expose Hamas for betraying the national liberation struggle. The IBT renounces this fight and in its place offers budget critiques. This is the fruit of separating class struggle from the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

In imperialist countries where the IBT does almost all of their work, it is clear that they are not looking to fight for communist leadership of the Palestinian movement either. In fact the speeches they have published on their website are pretty openly laudatory of elements of the pro-imperialist union bureaucracy: praising what they call “honourable unions” who advance “collective actions” for Palestine, which in their May Day article they make explicit including those “friends of Palestine” bureaucrats in Australia.

In truth, these “friends of Palestine,” most notably in the CFMEU and the MUA, are the main political roadblock to any real workers’ action for Palestine in this country, and have consistently opposed strike action and black bans due to their bloc with the open supporters of genocide in government. The SL/A’s work in the recent period has been primarily to expose the treacherous role of these bureaucrats. Meanwhile the IBT plays their left cover. In imperialist countries too, they betray the struggle for national liberation of the neocolonies.

I would like to end the presentation by quoting the Comintern’s Theses on the Eastern Question:

This is true not just when there is a “military side” in the case of a war, but in peacetime as well. After all, war is politics by other means. This is the road the ICL has rejected. And this is the road the IBT is currently on. Thank you.