By Daphne Lawless, Fightback Tāmaki Makarau

At the time of writing, Russian forces are intervening in the civil wars in Ukraine and Syria; supporting the rebellions in the eastern provinces in the first case, and dropping bombs in support of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the second.

While he may have been a general in the old KGB, Vladimir Putin is no socialist. While Russia is formally ‘democratic’, political rights are very limited for anyone not aligned with Putin’s United Russia party. Notoriously, queer communities are persecuted by means of a law against “homosexual propaganda”, and Putin has fought a bloody civil war to quell the independence struggle in the republic of Chechenya. Neo-liberal economics has been used to cut living standards every bit as fiercely as it has in the West.

So why would anyone on the Left support Russia intervening in Ukraine or Syria, any more than they support the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan? Because they do. Leftist magazines like Counterpunch support Russian bombs falling in Syria. Several leftists in Aotearoa/NZ are members of a Facebook group called “Vladimir Putin Fan Club NZ. Putin it right !!” (sic)

Multipolar disorder

Several arguments have been used by such people. Perhaps the most serious is that in favour of a “multipolar world”. The argument is that the current world neoliberal system hinges on the unchallenged hegemony of the “Western” bloc, under the military leadership of the biggest imperial power of the planet, the United States. Therefore, a “multipolar” world would mean more freedom for popular forces to move against the global neoliberal order.

The late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was a great promoter of this idea. Many Western leftists who supported his government’s struggle for the working people and poor at home were left scratching their heads as he toured the world shaking hands and doing deals with the authoritarian leaderships of Russia or China, or Libya’s Qadhafi. He even supported the Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, which imprisons and tortures socialists, and counted as an ally the Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko, who boasts of “wringing the necks” of the political opposition.

As an isolated leader of a socialist government in a capitalist state, Chávez can’t be blamed for trying to get any help he could. But for those of us without the responsibilities of state power, making a virtue out of necessity is not the basis for a political strategy.

This kind of politics is often called “campism” – in the metaphor that the world is divided into several military “camps”, with the largest being the Western camp led by the United States. Therefore, any government which disagrees with American foreign policy – no matter how oppressive to its own people, or however wedded to neoliberal market economics – can be supported. These governments are even called “anti-imperialist” – as if there were only one imperialism, that of the Western bloc. Those who’ve been watching China’s moves to extend its military reach across East Asia, or its economic power in Africa, have good reason to question that.

When two camps go to war…

The best argument which has been made to explain this thought process is that it’s a left-over from the Cold War, when the world was (at first) divided between the Western/USA bloc under the slogan of “freedom”, and the Eastern/Soviet bloc under the slogan of “peace”. Later, China emerged as the leader of a third bloc under a slogan of “national independence”.

At the time, many Western leftists saw the Soviet Union or China as “workers’ states”, which were a better alternative to capitalism. This led to many twists and turns as local parties and movements jumped around to justify the foreign policy of their preferred foreign “socialist” country. It was an article of faith for such groups that since their preferred country was “socialist”, it could not be imperialist, based on Vladimir Lenin’s analysis that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. Therefore, even when the Soviet Union ransacked eastern Germany’s industrial base after the Second World War, or invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan to support its puppet regimes, this could not be “imperialist” by definition.

In contrast, other socialists refused to take sides. They described themselves as supporters of a “Third Camp” – opposing both the Western/US camp, and the camp of the bureaucratic states claiming to be socialist, with the “camp” of independent working-class action. The Socialist Workers Party in Britain led with the famous slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism”. During the workers’ uprising in Poland in the 1980s, while other socialists were trying to justify a Russian-backed military crackdown on the Solidarity independent union, the SWP’s newspaper headline read: “Russian tanks, Western banks, hands off Solidarity.”

Old slogans

One way to see the love-fest for Putin or other “anti-imperialist” dictatorships is simply a leftover from the days of the Soviet Union. Of course neither Russia nor Syria claim to be any sort of socialist country. But when you’ve spent a long time in the habit of thinking that the real problem in the world is American military hegemony – rather than the global capitalist system which that hegemony really serves – then you can justify any oppressive regime which is anti-American.

The “campists” even still use the old Soviet sloganeering – for example, when they claim that the Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine are fighting “fascists” in the Ukrainian government. While there certainly are some vile fascist mobs backing the Kiev regime, the mobs who rule the “Novorossiya” zones are only different in the symbols they use. Like the USA uses “anti-terrorism” as an excuse for conquest today, so did the old Soviet Union use “anti-fascism”; the official name of the Berlin Wall was the “Anti-fascist Protection Barrier”.

One sure sign of a campist mindset is that vile behaviour which is condemned on the other side is condoned on one’s own side, or outright denied. Campists are rightly outraged at the beheadings, sex slavery and other barbaric practices of the Islamist extremist group Da’esh (also known as ISIS). But they keep their mouths shut about the Syrian government’s use of “barrel bombs” and poison gas against opposition forces – even arguing that their chemical attack on Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus was a “false flag” operation.

We are all pawns

The use of the term “false flag” brings up the close alliance of “campism” with conspiracy theory. Campism, which sees the world as something like a “game board” where various governments move their pieces, can’t accept the concept of independent action by oppressed peoples or the working masses. So, every uprising against an “anti-imperialist” government is rejected as a CIA-backed “colour revolution”. It’s no coincidence that RT, the Russian government-backed news channel, promotes American conspiracy theorists who are considered a joke in their own media.

And of course the United States have an interest in overthrowing such governments and replacing them with reliable toadies. But to believe that that nullifies the existence of real grassroots movements within such uprisings is to reject the idea that socialist revolution is possible at all, that everything is secretly manipulated by some government or secret service or other such conspiracy. As one British socialist put it: “If you can’t fight for yourself, either because you are too weak or too isolated the temptation is to look for other forces who can do it for you.”

The kind of mindset which could defend Zimbabwe or North Korea as “anti-imperialist” could end up actually supporting Da’esh, on the basis that the democratic Syrian opposition forces have accepted guns from the West – and this is indeed what at least one group calling itself “communist” has declared. It is the logic that “stability” under a dictatorship is better than a chaotic situation of uprisings – a point of view which should be associated with conservative “realists”, not revolutionary socialists.

The enemy at home?

Other times, you hear the argument that“the main enemy is at home”, and therefore we have to oppose our own governments, not foreign governments. “The main enemy is at home” is a slogan that the German socialist Karl Leibknecht used to oppose the Social Democrats’ sell-out to support the First World War, which was justified with the argument that the Tsar of Russia was a much worse tyrant than the Kaiser of Germany.

But the people using that slogan to support the Syrian or Russian governments on this issue ignore that Liebknecht was opposed to all the imperialist governments fighting in the war. He certainly didn’t support the Russian government of the time any more than he cheered on his own. And of course he supported the Russian Revolution which brought down the Tsar from below – not the German armies on the Eastern Front.

We certainly want to oppose our own government. So we have to oppose New Zealand military intervention in Syria, Ukraine or any other civil conflict, and deny any support for the United States military or any Western-backed coalition – just as we oppose the barbarism of the Russian or Syrian governments or Da’esh. But we can’t let ourselves become useful idiots for any other oppressive regime. To bring up the World War 1 example again, Lenin accepted a train ride from the German regime to get back into Russia; but he certainly never supported the Kaiser as a “lesser evil” to the Tsar.

Neither Labour nor National…

We can find campism not only in foreign politics, but domestic politics. You see this in America with the demands that the socialist Left fall in behind the Democratic candidate – even if that’s the thoroughly imperialist and pro-capitalist Hilary Clinton – because apparently a Republican victory would be worse than a zombie apocalypse.

Similarly in Aotearoa/New Zealand, we see the division of electoral politics into two “camps” – a National-led camp, and “the Left”, being defined as Labour, Greens and New Zealand First. The first two parties are enthusiastically in favour of neoliberal capitalism, and the third support traditional “national” forms of capitalism. None of them has anything to offer the struggle for tino rangatiratanga, real action against climate change or independent workers’ organization – and yet, we are confronted with aggressive demands that we support “the Left” electorally, as if a government of Andrew Little, Winston Peters and James Shaw would be a significant improvement on the John Key regime.

In fact, the over-the-top denunciation of Key – a rather bland merchant banker, interested in entrenching neoliberalism rather than extending it – paradoxically reveals that there is no real difference between the two “camps”. Because that’s the real secret of campism – someone who aggressively demands that you take a side between two evils has an interest in concealing that the two camps are really not that different. Campism is born of weakness and lack of faith in the ability of real popular forces to build their own alternative to Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Damascus, Wellington and all the others. But that is precisely what socialism is supposed to be about.

Special thanks to Sam Charles Hamad and John Game for ideas and research pointers on this topic.

A few helpful links:

• Sam Charles Hamad, “Anti-Anti-Imperialism”
• Mahmoud E., “The Anti-Imperialism of Fools”
• Wikipedia, Ghouta chemical attack

Photo from indymedia

Guest article by Jojo (Fightback correspondent based in Germany).

For upcoming magazine issue on the Climate Crisis.

When the Conference of Parties (COP15) took place in Copenhagen in 2009, the mobilisation of the climate movement focused mainly on appealing to the governments meeting there to stop climate change. Since these governments were obviously not questioning capitalism and economic growth and were all putting their own interests first, this strategy had to fail. And it will fail again in Paris this December, when some NGOs will try to lobby the participants of this COP to find a solution to climate change. However, the more radical majority of the climate movement changed its strategy after Copenhagen and decided to fight climate change directly at its roots; for example, in the lignite field in the Rhineland between Cologne and Aachen in Germany.

This area is the biggest producer of CO2 in Europe. It has three open cast mines, one of them the size of the city centre of Cologne, as well as its own railways and several power plants. Besides producing massive amounts of greenhouse gas, it also pollutes the region with dust that is partly radio-active due to uranium in the ground. The mines destroy fertile soil, whole villages whose inhabitants are forced to move away and unique ecosystems. The mines and power plants are operated by RWE, one of the monopolists that control the German energy market.

There has always been resistance by local initiatives, but the climate movement discovered it in 2010 when the first climate camp took place there. Ever since then there has been an annual camp in the region, combining discussion and workshops with direct actions. In 2011, activists bought a house and established the Workshop for Actions and Alternatives (WAA) as a permanent space. In 2012, the Hambach forest which is home to some endangered species was occupied. This forest was once 6000 hectares large; the remaining 500 hectares are supposed to be cut down in the next few years. The activists built treehouses and a three story house out of wood between the trees. Some months later, the squat was evicted; this took three days, as one activist locked himself in a tunnel under the ground. After the eviction, they set up a camp on a meadow on the edge of the forest that is owned by a supporter. This camp still exists today and, in addition, several places in the forest are squatted with tree houses.

In the meadow, activists live in tents, caravans and self-built clay huts. They have solar panels for energy supply and collect left-overs from vegetable farmers and bakeries for food. “With our struggle in the Hambach forest we are not only fighting an absurd kind of energy production but also this capitalist system”, says Yogur, one of the squatters.

The occupation is a method of passive resistance but also a platform to start further actions. The clear cutting works, which RWE can only do in autumn and winter because of bird conservation regislations, are being blockaded and the infrastructure is sabotaged. There have also been blockades of the railway that brings the coal from the mine to the power plant. This year, activists also started going into the mine to occupy (and thus stop) the giant coal diggers that are around 200m long and almost up to 100m high, and to blockade the conveyor belts. One digger was occupied during the G7 summit and, since many police including their climbing teams were in Bavaria to stop protesters there, the activists couldn’t be evicted and the occupation lasted for more than 50 hours.

As these actions are a danger for RWE which is already almost bankrupt, repression is rising. RWE employs private security companies whose workers have beaten up activists on more than a few ocasions. Police are working closely together with the security companies and with RWE. Since autumn last year, police have begun taking activists into custody for several weeks. Just some days ago at the time of writing, another activist has been imprisoned.

Nevertheless, the movement is getting bigger. AusgeCO2hlt, the group that organises the annual climate camps has formed an alliance with other organisations like the Interventionist Left and NGOs like 350.org to organise a mass action of civil disobedience called “Ende Gelände” (“Here and no further”) in August this year during the climate camp. 1500 demonstrators went to enter one of the mines and to stop its operations successfully. The media couldn’t ignore this and the vast majority of media coverage was positive – no wonder, as even journalists were attacked by securities and police during the action.

The question however is if co-operation with NGOs might also mark a deradicalisation of the movement that, until now, has had an anti-capitalist (and mostly anti-state) perpective. Some NGOs are distancing themselves from the more militant actions happening around the Hambach Forest. It is clear that it is important for the rather small movement to grow, but at the same time activists should still stress that climate change can’t be stopped within a growth-based capitalist system.

Another important question will be how to gain support or at least understanding of RWE’s workers. When the German government planned a very moderate climate fee that owners of power plants with huge pollution should pay, their union, the IG-BCE, started a huge campaign as they saw their jobs under threat – and successfully stopped the climate fee. It will be hard to fight for a coal exit against the resistance of the workers. So it will be important to fight for conversion into environmental friendly jobs and also for better working conditions in the renewable sector.

When the COP meet in Paris this December, the climate movement will also mobilise there. Most of it will protest on 12 December, at the end of the conference, not to say “please save us from climate change” but to say “we’re not satisfied with your decisions”. The motto is “we are the ones we have been waiting for”. Until then (and after it as well) we will have to continue fighting climate change at its roots. This year’s clear cutting season in the Hambach Forest has just started and at the time of writing, activists are gathering here for a camp to share skills for actions. On the 17 October, they plan to blockade the coal railway once more.

The Hambach forest and Ende Gelände both also have English-language websites:

hambachforest.blogsport.de

https://ende-gelände.org/en/

translation from: revolutionary-socialism.com, revised by Daphne Lawless

Shahrokh Zamani, a brave and tireless fighter for the Iranian workers’ movement, has died in Gohar Dasht prison. The news was received with total disbelief and utter shock by all. In our view, whatever reasons the authorities may offer, the responsibility for his death lies completely with those who have imposed conditions of slavery on the workers of Iran and have taken away their rights to organise and struggle for a better life; and with those who throw honourable and valiant human beings such as Shahrokh Zamani into dungeons.

The shocking news of his death in jail, without any prior history of illness, is not the first news of such a loss of life of a prisoner, and given the current conditions in the country’s jails, will not be the last. This untimely death will naturally appear suspicious to any unbiased person. But even without any such suspicions, the conditions in prisons, especially for worker activists and political prisoners, are already murderous enough for a thousand and one reasons – from microwave torture to unsuitable food, from inadequate sanitation to absence of medical care, from unhealthy living quarters to every kind of mental and psychological pressure.

Shahrokh Zamani had committed no crime other than defending the rights of his fellow workers. He had no official position, he had not defrauded any one, he had not harmed anybody and he was not a partner to any thieves or highway robbers. He was a building worker and a member of the Committee for the Establishment of Independent Trade Unions, a member of the co-ordinating committee for re-starting the Paint Workers’ Syndicate and an honorary member of the Paint Workers’ Syndicate of Alborz and the Central Province, and its founding mentor.

He was thrown into jail in 2011 for defending workers rights, but for a brave fighter such as Shahrokh, prison did not mean an end to struggle. In his almost 5 years of imprisonment, from his two-man cell at Gohardasht prison, he never stopped struggling and fighting for just causes until his last breath. Jails, courts, repression, and pressure from the security forces and jailers could not silence Shahrokh. With his unrivalled braveness and steadfastness, and without an iota of self promotion, he was the real symbol of Iranian workers’ resistance and struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation.

The death of Shahrokh is an irreplaceable loss for his family and friends and for the workers’ movement as a whole. We are sincerely sorry for this great loss and declare our sympathies with his family, friends, his fellow prisoners and workers all over the country. But despite this unbearable pain, we will not retreat into our sorrow and we will turn his death into the banner of workers’ solidarity and unity.

Long live workers’ unity and solidarity!

We salute you, Shahrokh Zamani!

The list of signatories in alphabetic order:

Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Workers’ Syndicate;

Paint Workers’ syndicate of Alborz Province;

The Centre for the Defence of Workers Rights;

The Committee for the Establishment of Independent Trade Unions;

The Co-ordinating Committee for Establishing Independent Workers Organisations;

The Co-ordinating Committee for Restarting Tehran Paint Workers Syndicate;

The Free Trade Union of Workers in Iran.

By BC, @sinaute

translated by Daphne Lawless, translation originally published here.

“I didn’t go down into the crowd.” One @sinaute expresses, in the comments section of Daniel Schneidermann’s latest article, his unease with respect to the discourse of “national unity” after the murderous attacks against Charlie Hebdo. Under discussion, the “Islamophobic drift” of the magazine and of the “Michel Onfray/Charlie Hebdo/Caroline Fourest secularist” left.

Great unease. I didn’t go down into the crowd. I am not Charlie. And believe me, I am as sad as you are.

But this emotional unanimity, almost compulsory for those who listen to public-service radio and read the mainstream media, I get the feeling that they’ve already tried to shove me into it, twice. French society is completely alienated, but it keeps telling itself its stories. First story: France winning the FIFA World Cup in 1998. Unanimity: Lilian Thuram for President, Black-White-Arab [United], etc. Then, I was in the crowd. A few years later: Player walkouts at the 2010 FIFA World Cup, [commentator Alain] Finkelkraut and his “Black-Black-Black” [comments on the racial composition of the French team – trans.], an outburst of hate against those millionaire ghetto punks, a systematic distrust of illiterate sportspeople emerging from the post-colonial lumpen-proletariat. Wonderful, this “national unity”.

L’Observateur cover on anti-National Front demonstrations in 2002

Second story: between the first and second rounds of the Presidential election in 2002 [where conservative Jacques Chirac faced off against fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen – trans.] Unanimity: the National Front would not pass, “clothespegs [on the nose to vote for Chirac]”, “survival of the Republic”, a “multicoloured” crowd and Moroccan flags on the night of the second round in front of “super-liar” Chirac, the unexpected “saviour” of the Republic, and [his wife] Bernadette sulking, great national relief. I was in the crowd on the demonstrations between the two rounds.

A few years later: the National Front surging to new heights, the invention of “anti-white racism”, the creation of a secular-Leftist coalition including Charlie Hebdo and a hard-Right defending “national identity” against radical Islam in France, people talking about “washing the scum off the streets with a power-hose”, hijab derangement syndrome, prayers in the street, mosques, riots in the suburbs, shots fired at police, curfew, hijacking of secularism by the extreme Right, [anti-immigration journalist] Zemmour, [anti-Semitic commentators] Dieudonné and Soral… Wonderful, this “national unity”. Third story: national survival after the inexcusable massacre at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Unanimity: national mourning, “we are all Charlie”, massive demonstrations to defend freedom of expression all over the country. Charlie? No-one read it any more. For people on the left who thought about it a bit, their Islamophobic drift under cover of “secularism” and “the right to mock everything” was too obvious. For people on the right: they detested this kind of post-1968 culture, but it was always nice to take the piss out of those Middle Eastern mediaevals. For the extreme right: not read, its writers and cartoonists detested culturally and politically, but very useful, its cartoons reprinted in “Secular Response” [an extreme-right Islamophobic website – author’s note]. For a lot of Muslims: a weekly insult, but you keep your mouth shut, that’s “French culture”.

Charlie Hebdo cover mocking National Front leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen

Result: hundreds of thousands of Muslims summoned to prove their bona fides, scarcely a few years after the official purge around national identity. Year after year with the same insistent message: damn you, when are you going to integrate? And you, “moderate” Muslims, why don’t we hear from you more? Starting from today, “you are either for us or against us”. Cabu [one of the murdered cartoonists – trans.] didn’t say any different: “They have to accept caricature, it’s part of French culture”. Wonderful, this “national unity”.

Angry reactions from kids in the neighbourhoods heard on the radio: “it’s not possible, it’s too gross, it must be a false flag”. [Anti-Semitic commentators] Dieudonné, Soral and the conspiracy theorists went that way: obviously some don’t believe in January 7th any more than they believe in September 11th. The reality is that we already lost these people a long time ago, and we’re not going to get them back with public candlelit vigils, nor with calls to “resistance” – what are you “resisting”, really? Are you going to subscribe to Charlie Hebdo? What will that change?

Collective reassurance is a healthy and understandable impulse, faced with such a traumatic massacre. But its flip-side is collective denial, resulting in forgetfulness of the real and profound causes of alienation. The majority will feel better, it will do them good, like it did them good in 1998 and 2002, and that’s precious. But the split in society is complete. And ideological confusion is at its height. No-one asks how we got here, how young Paris kids ended up massacring journalists and artists with a Kalashnikov after a stint in Syria, with no idea about the life or the ideas of the people they killed: they were just on the hit-list of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. No-one can see that French society, behind a façade of unity faced with a horrific event, is really more than ever completely alienated, that it’s desperately pitting the most deprived against each other, and that in just over a decade it has produced its own internal enemies.

No-one wants to see that the biggest producer of Al Qaeda soldiers on our territory is PRISON. No-one understands that France didn’t break down in 2015, but ten years earlier, during the riots. No-one wants to see that we are still suffering the long-term consequences of the immense colonial and post-colonial humiliation, and that because of this, your lectures about “civilisation” and “freedom of expression” fall on deaf ears for some of those who suffered this humiliation, and STILL suffer it.

Libération newspaper front page: “Prison, just a stop on the road of jihad”

And they continue to tell themselves their stories, after the World Cup fiction of 1998, after the “Republican Front” myth of 2002, this time repeating “freedom of expression” over and over like a hiccup, the last resort of a society which can no longer find any reason for existence than the fundamental right to take the piss out of “others”, like a deus ex machina which will miraculously repair this “national unity” which has been ripped to shreds.

You will not be able to rebuild a “national community” on this principle alone, even if it’s essential. I tell you, you won’t be able to. Because THAT is not our problem. Our problem is to make it so that there is no longer anyone in France who has so little to hope for and expect from the land of their birth, that they are reduced to having no more reason to live than to kill people en masse, either here or elsewhere. Because we can’t do anything against those who give them their list of targets, once they are conditioned. So we have to put EVERYTHING into action before they get that far: it’s not easy, but it’s the only thing that counts, if we don’t want to go on slipping into the gulf of civil war, which is the final consequence of alienation. After that, it’s too late. And it’s already too late…