For Communist Leadership within the Global United Front Against Empire

by Jacob Brown

(leadinglightcommunist.org)

In the earlier part of 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the masses in Iraq were taking to the streets to demand the expulsion of US troops following the US empire’s assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Major General Qassem Soleimani.(1) Close to the same time, there were reports that anti-imperialist resistance forces in Afghanistan have also downed the plane of CIA operative Michael “Ayatollah Mike” D’Andrea, righteously ending the life of one of the biggest imperialist enemies of the world’s people.(2) This article summarizes the historical and contemporary the struggle against empire in the context of the decline of the communist project in the decades following World War 2, and also points to the necessity of a communist renaissance here in the 21st century.

The masses in Western and Central Asia had the benefit of Iranian support through the Quds Force, led by the martyred Major General Qassem Soleimani, to resist the ongoing aggression of the First World Empire and its local proxies. Whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, from the 1980s to today, the Quds Force was instrumental with their assistance to the masses in the region. Their militant solidarity with the armed masses in the region foiled both the covert schemes and the overt military invasions and occupations of NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Zionist entity, and the US Empire generally. The resistance of the masses in the region under siege from empire benefit greatly from having a mainly reliable base in the Islamic Republic of Iran, from where the Quds Force can be a crucial lifeline for the masses outside of Iran. This is the reason that the US empire is lashing out, assassinating Soleimani and the leader of Iraqi Hezbollah Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis for their successful leadership in foiling the plans of the imperialists in the region.(3)

Iran has the right to defend itself with nuclear weapons, and should do so as the DPRK has done with great effect.(4) Imperialists do not honor any agreements they have made with their Third World targets. It is good news that Iran is now pushing hard to fully develop their nuclear program, both for domestic energy and military purposes.(5) Nukes in the possession of Third World states force the imperialists to the negotiating table, and prevent military invasions and other regime change operations. The US invasion of Iraq would have never happened if Baathist Iraq was armed with nuclear weapons. The Libyan anti-imperialist martyr Muammar al-Qaddafi correctly noted as a matter of justice under international law that if Israel has nukes, then Palestine should have nukes.(6) Qaddafi should have taken his own advice, as the Libyan state and the masses were left vulnerable to the NATO / GCC imperialist plot that was framed as the “February 17 Libyan Revolution” when Libya abandoned its own nuclear weapons program at the empire’s demand.(7)

One of the then social-imperialist Soviet Union’s biggest betrayals of Cuba after the so-called “Cuban Missile Crisis” was the removal of nuclear weapons from Cuba, instead of showing Third World solidarity by giving them to Cuba.(8) With that betrayal alongside the martyrdom of Che Guevara in Bolivia, the Cuban state has preferred the social-democratic electoral route of resistance to US empire in Latin America, often with tragic results for the masses who are left exposed to the plots of the imperialists and their lackeys. With the social-democratic or progressive governments of Brazil, Chile, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Ecuador, and most recently Bolivia falling through imperialist intrigues, the negative examples outweigh the positive ones (Venezuela’s government holding on despite imperialist sanctions and Nicaragua making a comeback after decades with mixed results).(9) Without nukes, the only defense against empire in Latin America is for the masses improve and refine the line of the martyr Che Guevara, creating two, three, many Vietnams to draw and quarter the forces of empire.(10) This is the reason why the martyr Soleimani was called the “Che Guevara of the Middle East”, as he played the same role in helping to drive the occupation and their agents into the quagmire of defeat.(11)

Non-communist forces resisting the onslaught of empire are hobbled by anti-science and anti-communist outlooks. The national liberation movements that emerged after WW2 credibility of the post-WW2 Soviet Union’s conception of the transition to communism. The USSR gave up on the dictatorship of the proletariat and instead declared its ruling party as a “party of the whole people” instead of a proletarian vanguard.(12) The USSR also leveraged its geopolitical power its allies in the Third World in a neocolonial way and dressing it up with “socialist” lingo like “international socialist division of labor”.(13)(14) While the People’s Republic of China played a positive role in assisting the Third World masses in their resistance against both US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism alike, the PRC in the 1970s would start to lean towards assisting NATO and Western lackeys in their own anti-USSR national foreign policy. China went from the proto-Global People’s War idea expressed in Lin Biao’s pamphlet “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” of uniting the entire Third World proletariat against the First World and their neocolonial lackeys,(15) to supporting those very lackeys in Latin America and Africa and dressing it up with their own “socialist” lingo called the “Three Worlds Theory”(16)(17). The PRC ultimately also helped to discredit the communist project alongside their Soviet social-imperialist rivals in the eyes of the masses.

For the Third World national liberation movements assisted by the post-WW2 Soviet Union, non-communist leaders kept the Soviet party-state model while swapping the communist end goal for a pan-Arab or pan-African national unions as the alternative end goals. While making many progressive gains for the masses from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, these projects began to run out of steam from in the mid-1960s and either became neocolonial regimes or were eclipsed by pan-Islamic movements. The two key events in the mid-1960s that derailed the momentum for pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism was the defeat of the Arab nation to the Zionist entity during the Six Day War (18), and the coup against progressive African unification leader Kwame Nkrumah. (19) The pan-national union project would only continue to persist in the 1990s with Hugo Chavez’s pan-Americanist “Bolivarian Revolution” (20), and Muammar Qaddafi’s renewed pan-African unification efforts with the introduction of the African Gold Dinar. (21)

Without the pan-Third World proletarian internationalism of the communist project, the proletariat cannot organize itself as a class with the broadest possible unity against the empire. The imperialists and their Zionist and Gulf monarchy lackeys were able to foment antagonism between Iraq and Iran from the time of the Shah and the rise of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Iranian Revolution and the fratricidal war between Iraq and Iran, the imperialist invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation, Soleimani’s disastrous compromise with the empire that led to the appointment of US lackey Nouri-al Malaki, and the rise and fall of the Islamic State until today. Also, in 2011 during the “February 17 ‘Libyan’ [NATO] Revolution”, Zionist-originated rumors about the disappearance of Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr would cause Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran to stand with NATO and the Muslim Brotherhood against the masses in Libya. With the rats who assassinated Qaddafi moving onto Syria in an attempt to topple the Baath Party-led government, Hezbollah would have to battle against the very same reactionary forces they had foolishly allied themselves with in Libya previously. (22) While the masses in Syria would emerge victorious, the masses in Libya with the Green Resistance must maneuver an undesirable alliance with an anti-Islamist faction of the NATO / GCC rats led by former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar. (23)

It is a complex and messy strategic situation for the the Global United Front against empire. The biggest heroes of the masses also end up doing treacherous things that undermine anti-imperialist solidarity across the Third World, because as much as they help lead the masses in landing the hardest blows against the empire, they are also steeped in anti-communism or revisionism. Without a vibrant international communist movement to be the standard bearer for the global United Front, these kinds of disadvantaged alliances and breaks in unity among the masses against the empire are inevitable. It is the empire itself that benefits from the fratricidal chaos that emerges, and not the masses.

The global United Front against imperialism, and Leading Light Communists within, know what we are in opposition to. But what are we **for**? That answer is as varied as the participants are united in opposition to empire. Some are nationalists of the oppressed nations, some are Islamists, some are self-described Marxist-Leninist or socialist in the Third World, and even anti-war social democrats or libertarians in the First World. For Leading Light Communists around the world, the answer is clear: We want communism, the new beginning of human history and the end of all oppression of one group of humans by another. For us and the masses of the global poor in their billions, “many socialisms around the world with their own country’s characteristics” is not the final goal. It does not represent a break from commodity production and the parasitism of capital, nor set the stage for one global community with no class distinctions. This is how we know that the class rule of the proletariat is not in effect in the world at this time, and this must change! Leading Light Communists must help to create global public opinion in favor of creating a New Power everywhere where it can be created, putting revolutionary science in command. With bases of New Power rooted in revolutionary science, proletarian internationalism, and the communist goal in focus, the masses can wage a potent offensive against imperialism globally when the time is right. A communist-led offensive on the empire does not divide the masses over nation or religion or make unacceptable compromises with their local bourgeois that derail the socialist march towards communism. In the context of Global People’s War, communist leadership can unite and mobilize the masses to advance the struggle from “Strategic Defensive” stage of the current Global United Front’s resistance against empire into a Global General Strike — the “Strategic Offensive” stage of the Global People’s War.

Leading Light Communists support every act of resistance by the Third World masses against the main enemy. This includes everything from economic policies such as so-called “resource nationalism” that prevents flight of national capital from the Third World, to the acquisition of nuclear and other powerful weapons. At the same time, we will always be Leading Lights for the communist idea, for the kind of world that the masses of the global poor can create with their conscious activity, where everyone on the planet shares in production — from each according to ability, to each according to need. We Leading Light Communists declare with certainty that communism was, is, and will always be the best way to organize human society!

Hold up high the banner of Communist Revolution with us within the United Front! Long Live the Leading Light!

Notes:

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-sadr-idUSKBN1ZN0RI

2. https://southfront.org/top-cia-officer-behind-soleimani-assassination-died-in-e-11a-crash-in-afghanistan-media

3. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/12/iran-middle-eastern-problem-soleimani-figured-out-097350

4. https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/dan-coats-north-korea-nukes-nuclear-libya-regime-change/

5. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/survival-blog/2020/01/iran-preserves-options-over-jcpoa

6. https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Gaddafi-Palestinians-have-right-to-nukes

7. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-libya-gave-up-on-the-bomb/

8. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB393/

9. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/29/latin-americas-left-goes-on-global-marketing-campaign-but-keeps-losing/

10. https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm