Bulletins and News Discussion from April 15th to April 21st, 2024 - Between The Darkness And The Dawn, There Rises A Red Star

CPUSA, through its party's media apparatus People's World, continues to take the ultra-left position of condemning all opposition to American hegemony as it first did against Russia by condemning Iran's anti-imperialist work against Israel through platforming the Tudeh Party of Iran's article.

Iran’s theocratic government is not anti-imperialist BY NAVID SHOMALI

The world has well and truly entered a dangerous epoch, with humanity currently facing a series of interconnected existential threats. A sharply deteriorating situation around the world of poverty, exploitation, and social injustice; “forever” conflicts that could very easily escalate into nuclear war; a looming climate catastrophe by 2030; as well as the exponential increase in ultra-nationalism and ethno-sectarianism and the entailing rise once more of fascism—all of them together represent a mere snapshot of the multi-dimensional crisis which humanity now faces.

The sheer level of brutality waged against the defenseless, and indeed blameless and innocent, Palestinian civilians by Israel’s war machine, along with the propensity of various governments and institutions in the U.S., Britain, and the E.U., hand in glove with the narrative put out by mainstream media outlets in the West that has shamelessly attempted to justify or normalize Israel’s genocidal campaign, is the foremost example of the terrible threat posed to the future of humanity and the international rules and rights-based consensus that followed the end of the Second World War.

We bear witness, with alarm, to so-called liberal democratic governments and “free” media agencies consciously aligning themselves with ultra-right forces in Israel’s ruling circles that openly profess apartheid, even fascistic, politics.

The aforementioned threats are almost all rooted in the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism, compounded by four decades of imposed neoliberalism and its resounding failure, and the desperate attempts by U.S. imperialism to uphold its weakening hegemony, regardless of what this might portend for humanity.

So far sounds nice, but here's where the break in opinions begin to occur.

Thus, it is now vital for the left and a wide spectrum of progressive forces domestically and internationally to form alliances that effectively mobilize to counter the threat posed by U.S. imperialism and its allies. Such alliances depend on the setting of clear and achievable progressive objectives based on class-conscious politics at local, national, and international levels.

Here's a fundamental question for anyone here, what material power does the "left and a wide spectrum of progressive forces domestically and internationally" have? Let me underline this absurdity with the apocryphal tale on Stalin and Christianity: When he was asked to ease the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union in order to strengthen diplomatic ties and possibly strategically flip Pope Pius XII indifferent opinion towards nazi Germany, Stalin jovially said "hah! The Pope? How many divisions does he got?"

When examining today's world we must examine all parts of it in concrete terms and not on ethereal fantasies. What anti-imperialist alliance that exist today can make a material impact on the material world that doesn't just devolve into just yapping on zoom meetings about how bad something is.

Such a vital alliance cannot simply be comprised of an arbitrary and ad hoc collective of regimes, political forces, and paramilitary organizations united solely by their opportunistic—and often shallow—adversarialism to Washington. A glaring example of this flawed equation in process is the confusing of the forces of “political Islam” in the Middle East, which rail from a frighteningly reactionary perspective against Western culture and modernity, as principled anti-imperialist allies.

Here we see the common argument of the current ultra-left faction of the contemporary international marxist-leninist movement. An argument that has been fossilized since the end of the Second internationale during the first world war.

It is an argument couched on world-changing strength of the international labor movement of the time that had the power to topple empires.

Our concrete conditions today do not even reflect a shadow of that period.

You do not take as the starting point of your policy a series of theatrical gestures towards ethereal parties and beings who are revolutionary from head to foot instead of concrete human beings and the nations they reside in.

And foremost among these forces of “political Islam” falsely considered as anti-imperialist by some in left and progressive circles is the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. The reaching of this deeply flawed conclusion involves the convenient ignoring or pushing aside of that regime’s despotic material nature and horrific track record, while fundamentally misunderstanding or misrepresenting its destabilizing, malevolent, and sectarian posturing regionally and internationally.

How many missiles have you launched at the IDF in support of the PLFP?

It is important to note that Iran’s foreign policies in the Middle East region, and consequently its extraterritorial military proxy activities, are predicated on Shia sectarianism and Ayatollah Khomeini’s exhortation to “export the Islamic Revolution.” Aside from running wholly contrary to Iran’s national interests as well as wantonly endangering the Iranian people, this policy bent has proved deeply divisive and unpopular throughout the region and has always manifested to the major detriment of secular, particularly left and progressive, forces.

I shan't comment on Islamic religious or Iranian state policies as I have no academic knowledge on the field.

At every critical juncture in the region’s history over the past 40 years, the Islamic Republic has actively collaborated with U.S. imperialism—including in Afghanistan and Iraq. The theocratic regime’s empty posturing and crocodile tears shed for the plight of the Palestinians are exposed as just that when one considers how Iran has consistently worked to undermine the struggle of secular, left, and progressive Palestinian forces against Israel’s occupation.

Is countering u.s engineered virulant Wahhabism after its rampaged out of CIA control in conjunction with u.s, Iraqi, Syrian, kurdish, Russian forces, etc. really the condemnation they think it is?

Put simply, a truly anti-imperialist alliance cannot be crafted on the defunct logic that goes along the lines of “the enemy of my enemy is therefore my friend!”

The person writing this would rather have a pure anti-imperialist alliance that entirely exists on paper.

From a left perspective, rooted in the works of Marx and Lenin on class analysis and imperialism, the Iranian regime does not even come close to classifying as anti-imperialist—unless one is happy to omit its ever dwindling social class base inside Iran, the exploitative neoliberal political economy over which it presides, its total disregard for basic human rights and freedom, along with its continuing track record of horrific human rights abuses and brutal oppression (directed not least against the various forces that make up the Iranian left).

Yet again, to the ultra-left fence straddles, history ended with the death of Lenin and everything else that occured hitherto doesn't exist.

WW2? What's that? A wrestling competition?

The left forces in the Middle East, and especially in Iran, over the 40 years since the defeat of the popular anti-imperialist 1979 Revolution, have first-hand bitter experiences of “political Islam” and its devastating impact.

That does genuinely suck, no doubt about it. A communist guided Iran in infinitely preferred to the current Iran. But they failed and we have to work with what we got.

With heavy hearts, we recall how the popular 1979 Revolution was hijacked and derailed by the nascent theocracy and the people’s demands for true emancipation and social justice were scorned in favor of a parasitic capitalist class backed by the Islamist force.

See last statement.

We recall how women’s basic rights were trampled upon by the theocratic regime and how Iran’s women and girls were essentially consigned to, at best, second-class citizenry and placed at the mercy of crushing misogyny.

Also bad. That's a given.

And we recall that while Ayatollah Khomeini declared the devastating Iran-Iraq War to be a “blessing,” the Tudeh Party of Iran opposed its continuation beyond Iran’s liberating of its sovereign territory as an imperialist ploy to subvert the Iranian Revolution. As punishment for this—and to display its anti-communist credentials for all to see—the regime launched an unprecedented bloody attack upon the party based on the false premise it had spied for the USSR as well as fabricated “evidence” supplied by the CIA, MI6, and Pakistan’s ISI. Khomeini later referred to this help as “a divine act.”

Folks here's where history gets a bit interesting. During the Iran-Iraq War, both the United States and the NATO bloc AND the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact AND Yugoslavia diplomatically and materially backed Saddam's more secular Iraq, whereas the PRC, DPRK, Israel, the People's Republic of Yemen, Syria, Libiya, and Pakistan supported theocratic iran.

Besides stating the obvious in the fact it was a terrible war, what a bizarre network of supporters.