At a time when the US and Israel have set in motion the “reshaping” of the Middle East, resorting to violent (military) means and causing the deaths of thousands of civilians in Iran, Lebanon, and other countries in the region;
At a time when these developments are drawing even more countries into the vortex of imperialist war, waged over the division of mineral wealth, trade routes, energy, market shares, and so on;
And while the conflict intensifies over which capitalist power (the US or China) will hold the reins of the international imperialist system, the so-called “luminaries” of the “World Anti-Imperialist Platform” (WAP) —in which, unfortunately, certain Communist Parties also participate— have struck again.
Until now, its was clear that through their analyses they sought to whitewash the principal forces of the emerging Eurasian imperialist axis (China, Russia). Now, however, the WAP’s “interpretation” of international developments goes so far as to make room even for Trump. Such views stem from a complete detachment from the struggles of the working class, from erroneous opportunist theories about the imperialist system, and from the refusal to fulfil the duty of the working class and the peoples to develop an independent strategy against the bourgeois classes and imperialist alliances.
Based on their crude and unscientific analysis, according to which bourgeois forces worldwide are divided into supporters of “globalization” (see Kamala Harris) and “chauvinists” (see Donald Trump, etc.), communists are urged to side with the latter and even establish forms of tactical cooperation with them.
Thus, in a recent article —a monument to shameless opportunism— the “organizer” of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, writing under the pseudonym Stephen Cho, claims, among other things, that: “The fact that the Republican Party appeals to the founding ideals of the United States, which include a spirit of independence, cannot be ignored” and similarly that “meanwhile, chauvinists do not oppose war in principle; rather, they avoid and refrain from wars they do not desire”.
The culmination, of course, is his call that: “Anti-imperialist forces including the communist forces can’t form a tactical joint front with chauvinist and conservative forces, but they can engage in tactical cooperation with them”. He further adds: “Tactical cooperation, in the sense of acting in step tactically, refers to a situation in which anti-imperialist forces and conservative chauvinists, for the purpose of isolating and striking more forcefully at their common enemy —the globalists— each direct the spearhead of their attacks toward the globalists, while restraining mutual attacks between the two forces”1. In other words, by chauvinist and conservative forces he clearly refers to the Donald Trump administration and its allies.
We had our suspicions —from the stance of the so-called American Communist Party (supporters of MAGA communism), which participates in the WAP and supported Trump in the last presidential election. Yet some persist with the same narrative, portraying Trump as a “pacifist” and seeking to draw the communists into “tactical cooperation” with him, or even with Le Pen, Orbán, and the other figures of the far right in Europe and beyond. This once again exposes their dubious role.
The article, which is also reproduced by a similar one-person “group” in Greece, even attempts to justify this position by drawing an analogy with the “Non-Aggression Pact”, also known as the “Ribbentrop–Molotov” Pact, signed by the USSR in 1939 to gain valuable time for its defence by exploiting inter-imperialist contradictions.
This reflects profound confusion. It does not take many words to demonstrate that the lack of principles, adventurism, and vulgarization of revolutionary theory by the opportunists lead, through various channels, into the arms of the bourgeois classes. The collapse of this construct —which now goes so far as to advocate regular cooperation with governments like Trump’s— knows no limits. Their attempt to grossly distort the lessons of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks, of the USSR’s struggle to defend the world’s first workers’ state, is futile. The Leninist legacy is clear: to exploit every crack, split, and difficulty within the bourgeois camp, while subordinating necessary manoeuvres to the main objective —the overthrow of bourgeois power, the construction and defence of socialism.
What is ultimately revealed is a strand of opportunism that imagines various “anti-imperialist axes” supposedly formed by bourgeois states and governments, despite full awareness that their ruling classes pursue their own agendas and participate, on that basis, in international imperialist competition. They distort and falsify historical truth in order to entrap the peoples, undermining their independent struggle for their own interests against every bourgeois class and its imperialist alliances, for the overthrow of the exploitative system. These are dangerous views and they must be confronted with a firm ideological and political response.
Reference:
- Stephen Cho, “Trump’s Dominoes”