The quarrel between ‘Révolution Permanente’ and ‘Lutte Ouvrière’: Two Trotskyist varieties of the same nationalist positions

A dispute arose a few months ago between the two French Trotskyist groups, Révolution Permanente (RP), an offshoot of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste), and Lutte Ouvrière (LO), concerning the Palestinian question. The argument centred above all on what each of these organisations considers to be the clearest internationalist position in the face of the barbarity of the Middle East conflict, with RP criticising LO for pitting the State of Israel and Hamas against each other and refusing to “come down on one side or the other”.

Even if these two Trotskyist groups claim to defend proletarian internationalism and the communist revolutionary perspective, the reality is quite different since as leading members of the extreme left of capital, they are still the most relentless defenders of Palestinian nationalism in a more or less insidious way, always backing one imperialist camp against the others behind devious verbiage.

In such military conflicts where the working class is used as cannon fodder and massacred in its thousands as a result of being politically hijacked in the countries involved, their approach is always to conduct all the verbal exchanges in a supposed debate of clarification, which is nothing but a bourgeois discourse in which both want to be the most radical ‘champion’ of the defence of the national interests of the Palestinian people. And this is all in the name of the ‘right of peoples to self-determination’, in the name of the ‘right of the oppressed to respond to the imperialist oppressor’, principles seen as emancipatory and springboards for a supposed revolutionary perspective: “it is a political mistake to equate the nationalism of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. It amounts to failing to understand that the national, anti-imperialist and/or anti-colonial sentiment of an oppressed people has a progressive and liberating content (even if it is limited)” (RP, September 2023).

Despite their fine speeches and their falsified references to Marx, Lenin and even Trotsky, there is nothing at all proletarian about the nationalist terrain and, in the declining phase of the capitalist system, the ‘progressive content’ of the warlike adventures of ‘an oppressed people’ has always turned out to be reactionary and barbaric in practice. The constant confused and vacillating language is nothing other than the contribution of these organisations, in all their more or less radical forms, to the barbarity of war itself, with the call to choose one imperialist camp against another!

The Trotskyists' shoddy 'internationalism'

This dispute was triggered by RP, who criticised LO for having a ‘Bordigist position’, seen as the result of having a globally invariant political position, incapable of analysing the actual evolution of the imperialist balance of forces: the positions might be “right” in general but “do not take the current situation into account”. RP defends the idea that there are internationalist principles, of course, but that there are different dimensions to it, and it must be defended within the framework of a “reality principle”, a policy of the lesser evil, adapted to the circumstances!

However, this reference to Bordigism[1] is not insignificant. It seeks to link Trotskyist ideology, however critical, to an authentic historical internationalist tradition of the workers' movement which did not betray the proletariat during the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War. This is in contrast to the Trotskyists who wallowed in anti-fascism and sank into supporting the Allied imperialist camp behind the Russian Stalinist state. The objective of this quarrelling is clearly poisonous! It is nothing more than a deception designed to misrepresent the real defence of internationalist principles by existing groups of the Communist Left, such as the Bordigist current or the ICC.

Whatever criticisms, however important, that the ICC may level at the Bordigist current and the groups which make it up, this current has remained in the camp of the proletariat and that of the Communist Left since it denounced the imperialist character of the Second World War, refusing to choose between the barbarity of the anti-fascist camp or that of the Axis powers.

RP and LO make grand internationalist declarations: “revolutionary organisations seek to analyse the opposing sides in conflicts and where the interests of the international proletariat ultimately lie in a given armed confrontation, and which outcome would be the more favourable or, conversely, be opposed to the revolutionary perspective” (RP, November 2024). But their nationalist agenda is never far away. For Révolution Permanente: “To make a strong political stand without then taking sides in a military conflict is tantamount to burying your head in the sand”. “In the case of a conflict between an imperialist belligerent [...] and colonised peoples or semi-colonial countries [...] under the yoke of imperialism, revolutionaries are in the ‘military camp’ of the latter”. “Whether we like it or not, Hamas is not Daesh and, in military terms, it is the main organisation of Palestinian national resistance to the State of Israel”...

It is in the name of the revolutionary perspective that these recruiting sergeants have the nerve to defend the most shameless policy of mass murder: “This headlong rush into an ever more destructive war could create an opening for the popular masses of the region to enter the stage on a social, political and military terrain, depending on the different scenarios, and could change the dynamics of the conflict [...]. Any victory or advance by the Palestinian camp could open the way for a revolutionary development in the region”.

Such warlike and nationalistic raving has lead LO to distance itself a little more from its own defence of the Palestinian cause by criticising RP's ‘abandonment of internationalism’. But it doesn't matter: the nationalist logic still oozes out of every pore.  RP regrets having to remind LO that during the 1973 war LO clearly did take sides. It's true that LO's apparent and counterfeit radicalism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing but window dressing, given that on other occasions LO has never hesitated to defend openly nationalist positions (Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq...).

It is hence a reflex for LO to restate its slimy message after having worked the ambiguities to perfection: “As revolutionary communists, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, the Lebanese and all the peoples who are victims of the violence of imperialism and the Israeli state which acts as its armed force in the Middle East. In the war it is waging, we hope for the military defeat of the Israeli state” (LO, September 2024). So there you have it! However radical the rhetoric of Lutte Ouvrière or Révolution Permanente, their internationalism is a bluff, an authentically bourgeois deception!

But far from us making fun of this bluster, these sometimes tortuous speeches to justify the unjustifiable, we continue to believe that they represent above all a major trap in the politicisation of those who are trying to understand what wars really represent in today's imperialist chaos and how to oppose them. For the Trotskyists, it's clear: one way or another, you must take part and take sides: “We have therefore chosen a side, but it is first and foremost a political side: we are in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people in the face of the oppression they are suffering” (LO, September 2024).

That's the whole point of their intervention: to respond to and spoil any clear understanding in the working class regarding the massacres by Hamas and the IDF. In the end, RP and LO shared the dirty work: while RP waded into a ‘critical’ support for the barbarians of Hamas, LO assumed a more underhanded support by saying it “flew the red flag, that of the international working class and not the Palestinian national flag, unlike RP”. Unanimously, these two organisations regretted that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations “have only involved a very small fraction of young people, particularly in France where they have never reached a level of mobilisation comparable to that in the United States” (LO, September 2024).

These mobilisations are a trap designed to exploit the difficulty of the working class and its younger generation to understand the seriousness of the situation of decomposition and the chaos of capitalism that lies behind the military conflicts. But the lack of mobilisation behind the Palestinian nationalist flags is also a sign that the young working class generation in the central countries, for all its confusion, is not ready to be mobilised behind the rhetoric of the war-mongers and be drawn into the ever more bloody and irrational butchery that in no way serves its interests, clearly much to the displeasure of Trotskyism...

Stopio, 5 January 2025

 

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[1] A complete lie, this reference to Bordigism includes a reference to Lotta Comunista, an Italian group which is also leftist, descended from Trotskyism, but which tries to pass itself off as a group of the Communist Left. What's more, it's astonishing that the criticism of Bordigist ‘deviation’ which RP levelled at LO is more or less the same as that which LO levelled a few years ago... at Lotta Comunista! Here RP and LO are giving publicity to Lotta Comunista, a group which is not linked to the Communist Left either by its affiliation or, above all, by its political positions. Lotta Comunista's positions are in every way the antithesis of those of the authentic Communist Left.