In fact, the AWL/USC argument can easily be turned on its head. If, in the question of national liberation struggles, Marxists only support the organisations of the revolutionary proletariat, as they seek to take the lead in those struggles, and carry them forward into proletarian revolution, how would it be rational for Marxists to support an existing capitalist state, as against only supporting the revolutionary proletariat within that state, whose fight against any external enemy could not be separated from its struggle against its own ruling class and state?
McDonnell's article sought to get around the problem of social-patriotism, and “defence of the fatherland”, in the way that social-chauvinists have always done in the past, by conflating the right to free secession with the right to national self-determination, and by ignoring this fundamental issue of class, and which class it is that is conducting that struggle. But, as also described, even in arguing for the right of free secession, we do not commit ourselves to advocating such secession, nor to supporting any given struggle for such secession. It is always subordinated to the interests of the working-class and the struggle for socialism.
So, McDonnell states that the Left has always supported liberation struggles, for example that of the Viet Cong, and, of course, Denham and the AWL/USC seize upon this analogy, because, the Left has, in the past, been guilty of petty-bourgeois nationalism, and moralism in supporting all such struggles without any consideration of the nature of the class forces undertaking them. The problem for the AWL is that, in the past, they have, correctly, criticised such actions by that Left as “idiot anti-imperialism”! Now they want to advocate such idiot anti-imperialism themselves, because, as with their support for Libyan jihadists, in 2011, it suits their current pro-imperialist position. The case of the Viet Cong is a good one, and a parallel again could be made with Trotsky's approach to the KMT, in the Chinese revolution, in the 1920's, as against the Popular Frontist strategy of Stalin.
McDonnell notes that the Left gave support to the Viet Cong, and Denham/AWL/USC, are quick to point out the nature of the Viet Cong. Denham copies an AWL response to Joe Attard of Socialist Appeal, in which the AWL write,
“The Stalinist movement that led Vietnam’s war of national liberation against US imperialism murdered thousands of revolutionary socialists and suppressed all working-class organisations. Was it wrong to support the Vietnamese against the US, and their arming by the Soviet Union and China?”
Note that the wording of this argument is duplicitous, in the same way as previous arguments by the AWL, in response to Libya have been. It shifts from the question of supporting the Stalinist Viet Cong to the question of supporting “the Vietnamese”, as though these are identical, in the same way that they talked about Libyan “rebels”, i.e. jihadists, supported by NATO and the Gulf Monarchies, as identical with the Libyan masses. Of course, when it suits the AWL, they are quite clear about these being two completely different things. For example, they are perfectly able to distinguish between the Iraqi masses, and the need to support their right to liberation, as against the clerical-fascists in Iraq who were leading the struggle against the US occupation, just as they are able to distinguish between the rights of Palestinian masses for liberation, as against Hamas that is the main force leading that struggle in Gaza.
Not only is it quite possible, but it is essential, for a Marxist, to make this distinction consistently. It was not only possible, but vital, as Trotsky set out, to distinguish between the right of the Chinese masses for national liberation from neocolonial domination by Britain, Japan and others, and support for it, as against support for the Kuomintang, which was the main bourgeois-nationalist force leading that struggle. Far from supporting the KMT, Trotsky decried the support that Stalin and the Comintern were giving to it, rather than warning against the danger presented to Chinese workers and peasants by it, a danger that was manifest in the massacre of thousands of Chinese communists in Shanghai, in 1927, at the hands of the KMT.
Similarly, it is not only possible, but vital to have argued the right of the Vietnamese masses to national liberation, both against French colonialism, and US imperialism, whilst giving no support to the Vietnamese Stalinists, politically or materially, who were the hangmen of the Vietnamese Revolution, and, similarly, murdered thousands of Vietnamese revolutionaries. Our duty, resided in opposing the war waged by French colonialism, and US imperialism, and not in providing any support for the Vietnamese Stalinists, against whom we had a duty to warn the Vietnamese workers and peasants. Our policy should not have been some kind of Popular Front with those Stalinists, in the way Stalin and the Comintern did with the KMT, but to have put our resources into trying to support the real revolutionary forces in Vietnam to organise independently from them!
Would that mean that these truly revolutionary forces would not forge temporary tactical alliances with the Vietnamese Stalinists? Of course not, on the same basis that Marx had set out in his 1850 Address to the Communist League.
“In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory.”
But, this position of supporting only the truly revolutionary forces, who might have to make such temporary alliances, in action, is quite different to supporting the Vietnamese Stalinists, in that case, or other conservative, let alone reactionary forces in Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, and, now, in Ukraine.
So, in this same response, the AWL say, in relation to the Algerian liberation struggle,
“But the Algerian national liberation movement that eventually overthrew French rule created a repressive one-party regime. Should the left have not supported it against France?”
To which the answer is again that we should support any truly revolutionary movement, Algerian, Vietnamese or other, but that does not at all require us to support any such movement that is not truly revolutionary let alone any that are reactionary, counter-revolutionary, or in any other way detrimental to the class struggle, which is our prime concern, and not, as the AWL seem to believe, simply the achievement of bourgeois-democratic demands, such as national self-determination, which is merely the application of the Stalinist “stages theory”, and not the Marxist theory of Permanent Revolution. Indeed, when the SWP and others were supporting the clerical-fascist insurgency in Iraq, against the US occupation, the AWL opposed it using that same argument, just as they oppose the struggle of Hamas and Hezbollah.
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