We are reproducing the interview with Diarmuid Mac Dubhghlais of Republican Sinn Fein originally published in Serbo-Croatian language on Princip.Info. Enjoy!
The audience in Balkans is not familiar with details of Irish politics beyond what mainstream media serves them, which in reality means that little to no news from Ireland reach us. Could you briefly introduce Republican Sinn Fein and tell us how is it different from other organisations that split from the original Sinn Fein that claim historical continuity?
While it is generally accepted that Republican Sinn Féin (RSF) split from Provisional Sinn Féin (PSF), this is not quite true. In 1986 the annual conference discussed the acceptance of one of the two partitionist assemblies (governments) in Ireland that owed their existence to British laws. The majority voted in favour of acceptance, leading to a number of members leaving. Technically those who walked out retained the existing constitution and thus are the continuation of the Sin Féin formed in 1905. It was a mistake to adopt a different name but such is history.
As for the difference between RSF and others who did split from PSF; the simplest explanation is that they too accepted the partitionist assemblies in Ireland, some of the newer groups to split from PSF accepted the legitimacy of Stormont assembly in the Occupied Six Counties and thus the overall legitimacy of the rule of Westminster.
A question from history: relation to the issue of Michael Collins, what is the correct road for RSF, a treaty with the British or not?
Short answer- NOT. Britain has no place in Ireland, they have tried every tactic in our land except one; – WITHDRAWAL. While the war/peace levels have ebbed and flowed over the generations one has remained, there will always be some resistance to the occupation of our land. M Collins used the analogy of his deal being “a stepping-stone” to unity. 100 years on and 3 more splits from the attitude of driving out the occupation all these parties have watered down their attitude towards the British interference in Ireland, all have used that same “stepping-stone” line, yet we are no further down the line towards unity.
What are the political objectives of Republican Sinn Fein and what is its strategy to achieve them?
The obvious first objecting is to remove all British interference in Irish affairs and re-establish the Republic. Then we must work towards regaining our sovereignty, much of this has been ceded to the EU in treaty after treaty. The people of Ireland rejected both the Niece and Lisbon treaties but the establishment parties told the people they made wrong decisions and made them retake the vote, with the implication that we would re-do the voting until the correct decision is made.
RSF want a 4 province Federal Ireland, and have had policies promoting (see Éire Nua program ). This we feel is best suited Ireland where we have hugely differing requirements for different areas, ie West of Ireland ( Connaught )having a majority of small farmers, North of Ireland (9 county Ulster) having a high population of Protestants etc
We understand that bourgeois elections are far from being an objective measure of political strength, so we wanted to ask you how do you compare the strength of RSF in comparison to other political formations beyond the parliamentary representation?
RSF are not a huge group, but have a steady and dedicated membership, over the years members have left to become involved in other newer organisations, but it is fair to say that RSF have firm written policies that deal with many aspects of life in Ireland. While some of the newer parties are in my opinion more popular today, like those who initially split from PSF, their membership tends to dwindle after a relatively short time and they do not have policies other than a demand for unity, with no idea what form a United Ireland should take ie; – Federal, Neo-Liberal, Anti-Imperialist etc.
Ireland witnessed a surprising victory of Sinn Fein in Ireland. What is the relation of RSF with the (Provisional) Sinn Fein?
There is no great relationship between both, the split of ’86 is still fresh enough in the memories of many, Also the fact that PSF administer the Occupied Six Counties for Westminster means they are (to us), puppets at best and collaborators at worst. They project themselves as Republicans yet call for recognition of Westminster superiority in politics, call for recognition of colonial paramilitary police at a legitimate police in Occupied Ireland and call on the people to inform on those who still oppose the occupation by physical means.
The victory which surprised even Sinn Fein. Does it mean that the right-wing neoliberal policies pushed the people of Ireland to demand a more radical break with the unrestrained capitalist policies? Do you think Sinn Fein would be able to keep its promises?
While for many in the wider world a vote for more leftist policies and parties may seem of little consequences, for Ireland it was and is somewhat significant. For generation the control of church and neo liberal politicians has kept 2 parties in power for 100 years. This past election more younger people made conscious decision as to who they would vote, This was a direct result of the unrepresentative policies inflicted on the people for the past decade in particular, no social housing, underinvestment in schools and hospitals and an increase in retirement ages for older our generation while at the same time generous and early pensions for politicians, an ability for politicians and those of better means to access first class private health alongside being able to afford private housing or rent.
For generations people voted the way their parents did or not at all, so it is good to see a higher number of youth (20-35) get out and vote, the majority of whom voted for parties professing to be left. I feel IF PSF can form a coalition with other parties they will try bring in some progressive left policies. They have written legislation for returning the age of retirement down by 2 years, and everyone knows there has to be a program of house building. This feeling is however tempered by the knowledge that in Occupied Ireland they have stood over an increase in retirement age and an increase in some regressive taxes. Also for those who may know the administration in Occupied Ireland did not sit for almost 3 years, yet the PSF assembly members (along with all others) continues to draw their wages, which at best is not good socialist politics.
In case Sinn Fein does not manage to keep up with the promises, could a further radicalisation of the society be expected? For example, among the youth which seems to be carrying all the weight of the neolibral burden. Does it also mean that RSF could gain from that situation?
A good question and if it was asked 2 years ago I would have said NO. But the politicization of a huge swath of our youth will mean that things will change, whether at a slow pace or in a radical manner is really unknown. A mass movement in the past few years against water tax and a home tax surprised the establishment and PSF, on both these new taxes PSF were on the wrong side and had to do a complete turnaround. RSF are an abstentionist party, until such time as the Republic has been re-established, this does somewhat stifle our growth. Alongside this the oppression from the state, through their political police makes it hard to grow, but if the youth become more radical there is the chance of better growth but equally a growth in other left parties. Also an awareness that a United Ireland would be a more prosperous Ireland will dawn on the politically aware citizens and a growth in the calls for Unity and disengagement of British Imperialism.
When talking about Ireland, the media talks about the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as two separate entities without mentioning the context of British colonisation. The language being a way to legitimise particular political contexts, what is for you the correct way to refer to those two entities?
As you will have seen from earlier answers the correct term for “northern Ireland” is Occupied Six Counties” or “Occupied Ireland”. If it is correct to call all lands of Zionist Israel Occupied Palestine then the same has to be true for the area occupied by the British.
For the area known at The Republic, we use the “Twenty-Six County State” or the “Freestate”. Historically the Republic was founded under arms is 1916 and consisted of all 32 counties, it was also confirmed with the only All-Ireland election of 1918. What was established in 1922 by M Collins was called The Freestate consisting of only 26 counties.
There was a recent survey which claims that only 22% of Irish citizens in the occupied 6 counties desire independence. Does it reflect the reality? Does a British standard of living play a role in how the citizens of the occupied 6 counties percieve Irish unity?
I have not heard of this particular survey, but any survey result depends on the complexity or simplicity of the question put and the demographic asked. What I do know is that over the past 2 years the results of such surveys have consistently resulted in a majority favouring. Unity/Independence. Many surveys have also done to gauge the impact unity would have on the finances of a United Ireland over the existing 2 states; again these consistently concluded that a United Ireland would be financially better off to the tune of Billions.
For the second part of your question, my belief is that all those within the UK will be financially worse off after Brexit is finalized, people in Occupied Ireland will obviously see a financial benefit of unity irrespective of their present allegiance.
In regards to Balkans, how does RSF evaluate the situation around the imperialist-imposed independence of Kosovo?
This is something I have only briefly looked at, I suppose the propaganda of my early adulthood had be believing the age-old tactic of Imperialists, that warring tribes within Yugoslavia could not work together and areas wanted independence etc. The arbitrary recognition of an independent Kosovo stands in stark contrast with that of Catalonia. It is clear that a politically weakened Serbia was the desire or USA, UK and others within the EU. To date it is still difficult to find hard facts from independent media outlets, I would be very interested in a full analysis of the situation from on-the-ground activists.
And about Rojava?
The fighting of the Rojava is well documented in all media here, which is strange in many ways, normally we see hear little of groups seeking a homeland considering our past/present. Traditionally Irish Republicans have called for a homeland for the Kurds, we have stood in solidarity with their political prisoners. Today, it is clear that the Rojava are again being used as a tool by Imperialists, the USA has established airbases in areas controlled by Rojava and at the same time facilitated Turkeys annexation of areas of Syria. It is clear this is a continuation of the proxy war against Syria and its people.
Finally, what is your favourite football club?
Football? American football? British/European football? Rugby football? Australian football or Gaelic Football?
I can assume it is the football of Liverpool + Manchester United. This is SOCCER J and I have no interest in it. Over-payed soft men who fall and roll round crying if a strong wind from a challenge blows them. I recommend you look at; Hurling or Gaelic Football for a real man’s game 😉
Donald Clelland is an American sociologist with over 30 years of research and teaching experience, yet with a fairly small number of published works covering the subject of World-Systems Analysis. His existing works and drafts published over the last decade bring the World-Systems Analysis back to its radical roots basing itself on new research.
Clelland’s main subjects cover analysis of commodity chains with a special focus on the role of female labour. Due to this feminist perspective, he refers to commodity chains as Gendered commodity chains.
Although it has the word “chain” in its name, commodity chains are in fact networks of production consisting of a number of geographically distributed producers, each of whom produces a single component of the final product. Every producer in the network is a node, and the distribution of nodes forms a hierarchy akin to core-periphery relationship. For example, the producers of raw materials are to be found in the lowest part of the production hierarchy, just as they happen to be on the periphery of the world-system. Above them are the producers that process the raw materials, then those who produce individual components, followed by the ones that assemble the components into final product that is delivered to the company on top of the hierarchy that maintains control over the commodity chain, owns the final product and markets it. This company is typically a corporation based in a core country.
Clelland focuses on the process of creation of value in each node and its transfer to the last node in the chain. For this reason, he describes commodity chains as surplus extraction chains. This question had been posed by Wallerstein in the 70s when he first formulated the concept of commodity chains.
The key elements of his analysis are:
surplus drain,
bright value, and
dark value.
Surplus Drain
Economic Surplus
Although Marxism is one of the foundations of the World-Systems Analysis, its theorists often criticise and modify Marx’s economic model. That is also the case with Clelland who presents his theory of surplus drain through modification of Marx’s labour theory of value.
Marx’s model supposes that the source of surplus value is to be found in the difference between the value created by the worker and the value of reproduction of his labour force. The logical outcome of that assumption is that the wage covers the costs of survival of the worker and his family[1]. Yet, this does not correspond to the existing situation in the periphery where labour is not completely proletarianised[2].
As an alternative to Marx’s model, Clelland uses Baran’s and Sweezy’s concept of economic surplus. Baran’s definition of surplus is shortly: “The difference between what society produces and the costs of producing it.” Baran’s concept of surplus is not to be mixed up with Marx’s concept of surplus value: economic surplus is a part of the surplus value that is being accumulated, hence it does not include capitalist consumption, state expenses for administration, defence, repressive apparatus, etc. Defined in such a way, this concept is more flexible as it allows for analysis of additional cases which do not fit into the classic model that Marx devised. For example: unpaid labour, underpaid labour, ecological degradation as a source of value, etc.[3] It would be wrong to claim that Marx did not contemplate those cases, however he did not include them into his abstract model as he considered them to be precapitalist features.
Degree of Monopoly
Second dimension of the criticism of Marx’s model refers to the supposition about the free market exchange. Much like Smith’s classic model, Marx too bases his theory on free market relations without external influences such as state intervention and monopolies.
Clelland considers that the main tendency of the capitalists is not the increase of exploitation but the increase in the degree of monopoly (deviation from the free market).
Degree of monopoly is defined as any kind of mechanism which lowers the price of production or increases the sales price in comparison to free market. Degree of monopoly is present in every node of a commodity chain, and its efficiency is directly related to the position of the node in the hierarchy of the chain. Within every node unpaid value is drained and moved upstream in the chain.
Observed from another perspective, the degree of monopoly could be understood as a capacity of an enterprise to transfer its costs to the enterprises lower down the chain.
Degree of monopoly as we have it today in commodity chains is mainly a degree of oligopsony. Oligopsony is a situation on the market characterised by a small number of buyers and a large number of sellers. This situation allows buyers to lower the price of commodities by leveraging the competition between the sellers. That is, the degree of oligopsony allows buyers to control the prices.
The Importance of Surplus Drain
Surplus drain as a concept is akin to unequal exchange, although it is used in a winder sense and it can be applied to precapitalist systems.
Surplus drain is considered to be a basis of every world-system. Hence, the core-periphery relationship is also defined as a relationship of surplus drain – the zone which creates value but is unable to retain it, is the periphery, while the zone which captures the value is the core. Semi-periphery can be understood as a proxy which drains the value from periphery, while it is itself being drained of value by the core.
Therefore, the division of world into core-periphery zones according to the World-Systems Analysis is neither geographic nor nation-bound, it is a division which reflects the flow of surplus.
In the precapitalist systems, surplus drain was effected by forceful appropriation, or what Marx called “primary accumulation”. Modern, capitalist world-system has two characteristics regarding surplus drain:
it is effected via commodity by realising production and distribution through different zones of the system, and
the system has to expand in order to sustain its growth and survival, and that is achieved by searching for new locations with lower prices. (Clelland, 2012)
Surplus drain is one of the mechanisms which reproduces the core-periphery hierarchy and the capitalist world-system itself. At the same time, surplus drain not only allows increased accumulation of profit for the capitalists, but it also makes subsidies for the consumers possible by lowering the final price of the product.
Two Categories of Value
To explain the concept of value, Clelland uses the analogy from the world of physics which considers that 90% of the matter is invisible. According to this analogy, the biggest portion of value is not officially accounted for. It is not a terminology one would come across in World-Systems Analysis, rather a way for Clelland to illustrate the transfer of value.
Value is categorised as bright and dark depending upon it being registered or not in the accounting books. Namely, the capitalists run their accounting in conformity with the information they need for efficient business management. In this respect, they do not account for costs which are not closely related to production. In other words, they do not register externalised costs – the costs borne by someone else even though they should be borne by the capitalist. Unregistered costs are invisible, dark value.
Bright Value
The mechanisms of bright value drain are:
export of capital (FDI) which enables the repatriation of profit to the country of origin;
system of monopolies to bypass the competitive market;
monopolistic control through patents and intellectual property;
expats in the peripheral countries who send their earnings back to their home country or they buy luxury items from their country of origin, and
debt slavery – loans which, in spite of being paid over and over, keep being serviced due to accumulated interests.
Additional mechanisms include: capital flight – when comprador bourgeoisie transfer their personal wealth to the core countries; foreign exchange manipulation – devaluation of local currency which reduces the income from imports; portfolio investments – transfer of dividends from periphery to core, among others.
Dark Value
Clelland considers dark value to be present in all factors of production: capital, labour, land, natural resources, knowledge, and energy. Dark value is being realised through ownership over each component in the production chain under its price on the world market.
Dark value is hidden in the way it subsidises commodity chains:
commodity inputs to commodity chains which are paid under the market price, and they originate from the household labour in the informal market[5];
cheap natural resources, and
ecological and human externalities which are free for the capitalist (such as unpaid labour, ecological degradation, etc.).
Characteristics of dark value are:
surplus drain is free for the capitalist, hence, as it is not a cost it is not accounted for in the official registers;
unaccounted surplus can be converted into accounted surplus (bright value) either by being transformed into profit to the benefit of the capitalists, or it can be transferred into lower prices to the benefit of the consumers;
the economic significance of dark value grows over time which is why it’s transfer has to expand with the increase of trade volume. In that case, the increase in consumption is what triggers dark value drain from the periphery.
In the context of knowledge and natural resources as a source of dark value, we can name two examples:
By the means of transnational flow of labour and brain drain from periphery to core, the costs of training and reproduction of the labour force is externalised to the periphery.
By controlling the ecosystem of the periphery, the core exercises the so called ecologically unequal exchange. The core maintains low price of the raw materials through ownership of their sources. The effects of the uncompensated ecological damage are borne by the peripheral communities via health risks, loss of access to resources for food and costs for rehabilitation of the ecosystem.
Labour as Source of Dark Value
The contribution of labour to the value of commodity consists of the total hours of work – both accounted and unaccounted (i.e. paid and unpaid)–which are realised in the production, including the work on reproduction of the labour force.
Unpaid Labour
Household labour and household resources subsidise the income of the peripheral workers allowing capitalists to pay them wages below subsistence level. The essential characteristic of semi-proletarian households is their capacity to survive via unpaid labour, which is what lowers the price of their labour force in the market.
Unpaid labour of semi-proletarian households has 4 forms:[6]
capitalists do not bear the costs for the biological reproduction of women, nor for the upbringing of the new generation of workers;
households engage with an array of unpaid activities for survival which indirectly subsidise capitalists, i.e. collection of unpaid resources;
women and female children provide unpaid labour in form of support to the male-owned household-based business, and
women provide unpaid labour for search and use of capitalist products.
From the standpoint of the capital, households are commodity producers: they produce labour force. As such, households are the basis of capitalist production.
Informal Sector
Commodity chains include horizontal chains of small commodity production based on informal sector and non-waged labour. They provide cheap labour, services and inputs for commodity chains below market price. They are also based on semi-proletarian households.
An example of this relationship is a female worker who works in a factory but also employs a caregiver from informal sector to provide care for her child while she’s at work.
Consequences of the Surplus Drain
Consumers in the Core and Dark Value
As mentioned previously, dark value is based upon uncompensated labour or underpaid labour. If production were to be carried out in the core, the final price would be significantly higher. Consumers in the core enjoy the benefits of the exploitation of the periphery through the lower prices provided by dark value.
Social consequences are reflected in the maintenance of the high living standard in the core by the means of high consumption in spite of the decrease in social spending and salary levels. In such a manner, neoliberal reforms counter the effect of lowering real wages by providing cheap imports.
Core-Periphery and Dependence
Surplus drain is super-exploitation of peripheral labour, households and ecological resources which blocks economic growth through investments and expanded production by depriving periphery of its surplus.
On the other hand, dark value drain is also a threat to the ecological sustainability and quality of life of the workers in the periphery, especially that of women.
Surplus drain from the periphery represents a big portion of its economic wealth, but it doesn’t mean a big increase of wealth in the core because the biggest portion of trade is carried out among core countries.
Commodity-Chain Analysis
Let us reformulate the analysis of commodity chains. Commodity chains are exploitative structural relations which occur in the arrays of unequal exchange between its nodes and across world-system zones. Powerful companies use degree of monopoly within the commodity chain to capture bright and dark value.
The cost structure of each node is as follows:
raw materials
Value added
production costs
management
overhead costs
profit
Value captured
Total: sales price
Every following node in the array takes the price of the component from the previous chain as the first item in the cost structure. Values calculated this way constitute bright value. In parallel, each node contains dark value in form of externalities. For example: by lowering the wages, the unpaid portion of the created value is captured as profit – i.e. the cost is externalised onto the worker who has to work additional hours in order to earn the wage that covers his subsistence costs.
In a purely competitive system dark value capture would quickly become universal. However, in the monopoly capitalism, the dark value can be leveraged in 3 ways:
to lower the product price in relation to the price of the competition;
to expand the accumulation by converting dark value in bright value (reinvestment), and
as a protection from competition via degree of monopoly.
Enterprises achieve the degree of monopoly via: scale, tariff and non-tariff barriers to protect access to the market, innovation, intellectual rights, marketing… and via monopsonic conditions. Monopsony allows for unequal relations between the participants in the chain. Hence, it allows for surplus drain via unequal exchange.
Clelland reached his conclusions by applying the existing theory on Apple’s commodity chain:
In the capitalist world, Apple is the prime example of an enterprise that perfected commodity chain management becoming a model for other companies. Its model is fabless (without owning a factory) which outsources the whole production process to individual component suppliers and producers which assembles them. On top of the chain, Apple designs the product, controls the production process, coordinates it, manages marketing, logistics and sales.
The way Apple carries out its degree of monopoly is via: innovation, intellectual property, oligopoly relations with the producers in the commodity chain, and externalisation of costs onto them. Apart from the products themselves, the innovation is also to be found in the control of the production process, selection of component suppliers etc. However, innovation alone is not enough. What is also required to ensure monopoly conditions is the legal protection (intellectual property and patents), strict control over the production process and quality control.
The buyer, Apple in this case, encourages competition between suppliers by hiring multiple producers of the same component. At the same time, it keeps searching for new ones who could deliver the component at a lower price. In this way the “non-competitive” suppliers are eliminated from the chain, and on the other hand, pressure is applied by the means of competition in order to prevent the increase of component prices. As a result, the suppliers are forced to drive their costs down and externalise them onto their own suppliers in the lower instances of the chain (for example, suppliers of raw materials, informal sectors, households, etc.).
Finally, Apple provides credit lines for the suppliers. The credits are conditioned by long-term obligations which provide: raw materials below market price, transfer of risk over to suppliers and long-term use of the suppliers’ labour force.
Reference:
Amin, Samir, 1974. “Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment”
Baran, Paul, 1957. “The Political Economy of Growth”
Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul, 1966. “Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order”
Clelland, Donald, “Surplus Drain versus the Labor Theory of Value”
—, 2012.”Surplus Drain and Dark Value in the Modern World-System”
—, 2014. “Unpaid Labor as Dark Value in Global Commodity Chains”
—, 2015. “The Core of the Apple:Dark Value and Degrees of Monopoly in Global Commodity Chains”
Emmanuel, Arghiri, 1972. “Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade”
Wallerstein, immanuel, 1974. “The Modern World-System I”
This is what the reproduction of labour force refers to, i.e. it’s renewal on daily basis by covering basic material necessities, and upbringing of new generation of workers. ↑
Proleterisation refers to a process which integrates workers into the labour market making them dependent on it (i.e. selling their labour force on the labour market is their only source of income). Contrary to the full proletarisation, a class of semi-proletarian labour has to complement their income from the sales of labour force by different means typically outside of formal economy in order to subsists (for example, cultivating their own crops for personal use). ↑
Emmanuel ‘sand Amin’s formulation of the concept of unequal exchange is completely based on Marx’s classical model and does not deviate from Marx’s assumptions. ↑
Formal labour refers to the legal employment of workers with all welfare benefits. ↑
Informal employment refers to production without legally arranged work and production relations between the worker and the capitalist. This implies various types of violation of workers’ rights.↑
Examples for this cases. Families in Uganda survive first and foremost by horticulture. However, they need money for scholarisation of children and other expenses which drives them to grow coffee. Coffee cultivation is performed mostly by women, although children also take part in the harvest. The sales is carried out by men as owners. They also keep the earnings. Also, the excess of food produced in semi-proletarian households is sold on the market to the formal workers. Food produced in such a way has a price lower then the market price which lowers the price of the workers that buy it. They then sell their labour force to a supplier which takes part in a commodity chain of a big core-based corporation. ↑
Thanks to Greta Thunberg’s media protagonism, the until recently ignored environmental pollution problem came into public focus, and all other problems are as if forgotten. Is the environmental problem really as catastrophic as Greta claims, and is the ecological question more important than all else?
The problem of destruction of the environment, contrary to what is shown on the screen with Greta and the biggest polluters she shakes hands with, must be ripped out of national boundaries (especially the boundaries of the few most developed countries) and regarded from the perspective of economic and political relations of all the countries of the world as a whole.
Upon looking at the world organization from that angle, we may savvy what is to be done, plainly speaking, about the hierarchical division between countries, in which the countries at the bottom of the hierarchy produce raw materials for the countries in the middle of the hierarchy, who then make final products for consumption intended for those at the top.
Such an organization of the world order is a consequence of economic processes whose goal is to accumulate wealth at the top of the hierarchy, or what we call “capitalism” in its monopolistic form. Capitalism as economic world order is on the one hand maintained by global political institution such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), etc.; on the other hand, it is “secured” by the military force of the wealthiest and most developed countries (NATO and its allies).
There are almost no products being produced entirely in one country (from raw materials to final product), instead the production takes place through so called global commodity chains, in which hundreds, and for certain products even thousands of individual suppliers and manufacturers spread all across the world take part. If the environmental problem is a direct consequence of the capitalist way of production, the production that includes dozens of countries per product, how do we not link the “ecological catastrophe” to all other problems that the most of the world faces, and that the handful of the most developed countries would rather cover up?
Ecologically Unequal Exchange
One of the mechanisms of accumulation of wealth in the developed countries on the top of the hierarchy is the so called unequal exchange. More precisely, if one of the countries doing the exchange has low worker’s income (in poor countries), and the other country has high worker’s income (in wealthy countries), value produced in the first country is transferred into the second.
Let us simplify why it comes to this: Marx saw that national economies produce what he called “General Rate of Profit” – when a new branch of production appears for capital inflow, the rate of profit falls, and when it falls to a low enough level, the investments stop and relocate to another, more profitable branch. During a long enough period, the relocation of capital from one branch to another makes all the branches give a similar, so called general rate of profit. This happens because of the mobility of capital – its feature to be freely invested wherever needed.
At the same time, Marx noted a similar thing happening with workers’ salaries. When there is a high demand for workforce in one branch, the workers are paid higher salaries, so they naturally gravitate to higher paying branches. This mobility of the workforce makes average salaries grow and equalize over a longer period of time.
However, we are speaking about international trade, not national. In that context, capital has the same mobility as in the national (it can relocate from one country to another), but not the workforce – its mobility is limited by state borders. Because of that effect, a general rate of profit is formed internationally, but labor wages aren’t equalizing, which makes the poor stay poor.[1]
One way to understand unequal exchange is this: if we assume that technology all across the world is the same or similar, that productivity of the Third World is the same or similar, while the only difference is the cost of the workforce, then we may presume that the value made by a poor country worker is the same as the value made by a rich country worker. However, the produced item is being sold as if produced by the rich country worker, meaning that the source of profit for the capitalist is in the discrepancy of salaries between the worker of the rich country and the worker of the poor country.
The basis for unequal exchange of goods also applies to the theory of “ecologically unequal exchange”, more precisely as “ratio of unequal exchange between countries holding different positions in the world-system”. This theoretical perspective focuses not only on the damage being done to the environment of poor countries as a consequence of trade with wealthy countries, but also on its effects to health, safety and socio-economic occurrences. Likewise, we must accentuate the fact that this way of “exchange” is far more beneficial for wealthy countries than for the poor ones.[2] Wealthy countries “export” pollution into poor countries, intending to make the countries of production pay the expenses of environmental protection, not the company that manages the production (from another, usually more developed country). The aforementioned global institutions are a part of maintaining the order that “expropriates ecological well-being” of poor countries by the wealthy ones.[3]
The main motive behind the ecologically unequal exchange is first and foremost an economic one. The biggest companies tend to increase income and competitiveness of their products on the market by reducing the cost of production. Or we can put it like this: they tend to snatch the biggest possible ration of value that is produced somewhere else. The source of that value can be human labor (paid, unpaid or underpaid paid) or expenses that the possessor of capital should bear, but someone else bears them instead.[4]
Expenses of ecological damage belong in the last category, and that’s called externalization. As an example, we can mention the American company Apple, one of the most famous examples of an efficient commodity chain. Every produced iPad takes almost 15kg of ore, almost 300l of water, as well as fossil fuel for power used in production that emits 30kg of carbon-monoxide. First generation of iPads made 47.5kg of greenhouse gas per product. If the iPad were produced in the USA, every product, for ecological expenses only, would cost 190 dollars more.[5]
It is clear that the iPad has the same components and takes the same amount of work wherever produced, so the pollution is the same independent of the location of the factory. Production of the iPad in Asian countries means that those countries would carry the burden of pollution, but also the cost of its elimination. That’s how the aforementioned “export of pollution” functions, and there are two winners in this combo: Apple as the owner of the product on the market, but also the consumer in the wealthy countries who gets the product way bellow its value.
Consequences of Ecologically Unequal Exchange
To reduce all ecological problems to global warming is to close our eyes to reality. Truth be told, that may be easier than it sounds, because that reality hits countries and populations somewhere far from those who focus on the emissions of carbon-monoxide. Degradation of the eco-system in peripheral countries leads to a whole chain of problems. Let us look at some examples.
In the Turkish town of Bergama, EuroGold Group was given license for the exploitation of gold. However, EuroGold used cyanide, which lead to the destruction of the soil and the revenues of local farmers. [6]
In the Niger Delta oil is exploited. Oil drillings are destroying the water and they are a serious threat to local communities who survive thanks to fishing. The situation is so critical that in the region there are a number of guerilla groups who attack the oil rigs.
The reach of ecological consequences is fairly evident in the case of coffee farming in Uganda. Most farmers in Uganda live on agricultural products they breed themselves. However, the need money in order to send their children to school, and the only way to acquire it is through coffee breeding. Coffee breeding is the cause of deforestation on the mountains, which increased the number of landslides over the years. Every year the number of farmers who lose their lives due to landslides gets bigger. Aside from landslides, the number of malaria cases increased because coffee needs shade and moisture, the ideal conditions for mosquitoes to breed. By expanding the areas for coffee farming, the number of mosquitoes increases and farmers often take mosquito nets off of their houses and use them to make shade, which makes them far more vulnerable and exposed to bites and malaria.[7]
The Green New Deal
The media frenzy around Greta and the ecological catastrophe aims to make a positive public opinion about the so called Green New Deal. It is about a series of policies alike to Roosevelt’s New Deal – policies close to social democracies of the ‘70s that combined infrastructural state investments with social policies, salary increments and other, but this time the emphasis is on protecting the environment.
The originators of this initiative are the “progressive” US democrats, who are enjoying the support of the UN as of a couple of days ago. Due to the forthcoming recession, they call for an abandonment of austerity measures, but also for infrastructural state investments like ecological transport, “clean” energy and food systems, as well as investments into developing countries, with a goal to create a “greener” industry.[8]
This is an open confession that the forces of the market and the logic of free trade lead directly into a crisis, not out of it. More accurately, they lead to the impossibility of the market and financial capital to create growth, development and prosperity. A call to an open intervention of the state to break the sacred rule of liberalism about the non-intervention in trade relations, it only means that the oligarchy is looking for a way to get out of the problem at the expense of its profits. However, that solution only means that the problems will “nationalize” (taxpayers’ money will finance the growth of private businesses without making the state a competitor for private capital), but also that the West will impose the “green solution” on the rest of the world, by any means (political, economic and through global institutions), for its own problems.
Let’s revisit the externalization and the shifting of expenses outside of the production process: just as the burden of pollution is shifted onto the peripheral states, the burden of making the industry “green” falls on the state. When it comes to most developed countries, the effect of this policy is different.
It is expected that the state will invest into a new, greener infrastructure, which can only mean a few things: 1. To use public means to create demand where it otherwise couldn’t be (another way of externalization, companies believing that the infrastructure cost of their business should fall on the state), 2. To subsidize the shift to an ecological production (the cost of shifting to a new way of production shouldn’t be paid for by the companies, and the whole operation shouldn’t severely effect the profit margin and growth), 3. To invest into the development of new, greener technologies.
This way a monopoly is created on the global market in the field of green technologies, by protecting the new technologies with intellectual rights and patents (another way of robbing other countries of their wealth), and it guaranties the owner of that technology (either of the land or a company) that they will harvest high profit just up to that technology spreading so far and wide that it becomes unprofitable. At the same time, they will be able to compel manufacturers and suppliers from poor countries to use them, and that way they will create a market for their capital green products, but also maintain the dependency of those countries in economic, and therefore political sense.
Subsidies may be looked upon as a protectionist measure. Wealthy countries are protecting their businesses by bearing a part of the expense, which brings down the price of their products on the global market. On the other hand, peripheral countries will be compelled to import the green technology, to pay for the patents and to maintain the free trade regime. That way they won’t be able to independently develop their own green technology because violating the patents would have negative economic consequence (they wouldn’t be able to find a buyer on the global market), and their green technology would be uncompetitive, it would be more costly than the imported one. Thus, while poor countries are expected to be almost religiously devoted to free trade, rich countries are openly interfering with it by protectionist measures, in order to ensure their economic hegemony.
The Green New Deal is nothing but a political maneuver to get out of the neoliberal deadlock over the backs of peripheral countries, just as it was the custom with all previous solution to a crisis. That’s the solution for a crisis in rich countries, and it means exporting it to poor countries. It is pretty clear that the main cause behind the ecological destruction is the capitalist logic, universal for the whole planet. Changing the way of accumulation doesn’t change the logic of the system, and therefore doesn’t eliminate the cause of ecological problems. The biggest share in those problems will still go to those whose share in the wealth is the smallest.
In the end we should answer the questions posed at the beginning of the text. The ecological problem is critical and it leads to a catastrophe. Equally, it is a part of a chain of other problems, and a direct consequence of political and economic world order. The problem of climate change cannot be regarded, and let alone solved, as if it were in a vacuum; it can be completely solved only by transitioning to a sustainable way of production, incompatible with the accumulation of capital.
Paul K. Gellert, R. Scott Frey, Harry F. Dahms, “Introduction to Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative Perspective”, JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Vol. 23 Issue 2 ↑
David Ciplet, “Splintering South: Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory in a Fragmented Global Climate”, JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Vol. 23 Issue 2 ↑
Donald Clelland, “Unpaid Labor as Dark Value in Global Commodity Chains”, https://sites.google.com/site/surplusdrain/ ↑
Donald Clelland, “The Core of the Apple: Dark Value and Degrees of Monopoly in Global Commodity Chains”, JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH ↑
Kelly F. Austin, “Brewing Unequal Exchanges in Coffee:<br /> A Qualitative Investigation into the Consequences of the Java Trade in Rural Uganda”, JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Vol. 23 Issue 2 ↑
As practice has shown, this organization has never failed to give an accurate analysis of political events deemed important for the struggle of world proletariat for socialism, from wars on Syria, Palestine and Libya, over the coup in Zimbabwe, aspirations for secession in Rojava, Kosovo and Catalonia, economic pressures on DPRK and Venezuela, to the First world social imperialism of Sanders and Corbyn. That analytical superiority derives as much as from the ability to apply the theoretical knowledge on those events, as from the constant development of that theory, paying attention to notions of time and place and regarding the changes in national and global conditions of the constant economical evolution. Yet, the factor to accentuate is that of the class character of our members in both national and global terms, which gives no room for mistakes or failures, considering the stakes for organizations in neo-colonies are much higher than for those in First or Second world countries.
With responsibilities, therefore, being larger, any sort of speculation denied by the reality on the ground must result in severe sanctions, even to the point of removal from the organization. Which is why we were astonished to find that even some of the Third Worldist organizations who, unable to grasp the role of Greek Syriza a few years ago, after promoting it as “progressive”, never underwent the self-criticism process (a practice long abandoned by the Marxist organizations). On the other hand, unlike Trots and Maoists who are constantly firing blanks, the only other Western leftist organizations not to take part in the imperialist interventions across the Third World are the so called “Stalinists”. When we say “taking part”, it’s obvious we consider the misunderstanding of material reality and mismanagement of available resources and the opportunities of action against imperialism as a direct help to imperialism.
Although wrongfully named, since Stalin was a creative Marxist and they are merely a by-product of Stalin’s compromise with the West in order for the USSR to gain some breathing space after the WW2 and pursue the revolutions in the East (which is why they got stuck in legalism and never developed a parallel apparatus of action), these organizations tended to show the greater understanding of the very nature of imperialism and continuously defended the progressive governments in the Third world under the attack by imperialism. However, that “defense” was merely vocal, and not sufficient to greatly impact those events, since their political achievements at home, even after many decades of organized struggle, are hardly worth a mention. That is, of course, of no surprise, as the theory they rely on hasn’t developed since the 1950-ies and is of little or no relevance today in terms of understanding the mechanisms of world polarization and its economic consequences, which in return shape the aims and methods of class struggle accordingly.
Yet, their continuous rejection of reactionary positions on imperialist interventions and spurs or support of social unrest that often precedes those interventions, tells us the theoretical writings of Lenin and Stalin are almost quite sufficient to adopt the correct attitude towards the events developed out of the imperialist need to partly restructure the world economy after the collapse of the USSR and prevent the tendencies of certain peripheral countries to reject the global division of labor and, partly or fully, delink from the way the global economy is run. That is, if interpreted correctly.
The principle of “primary contradiction” attributed to Mao, actually has its roots in Marx’s views on temporary denying the right of self-determination to certain European peoples whom he perceived as the outposts of the then Russian tsarism.1 Building upon that, Lenin rejected the evaluation of the national liberation movements from the aspect of formal democracy, and judged them from the standpoint of the current results of the state of the struggle against imperialism – not in isolation, but on a global scale.2 That’s where Lenin fully adopted the combination of Marx and Durkheim – emphasizing the class struggle, yet giving priority to whole over parts. Although usually not regarded as a theoretician that further developed Marxism (which is far from the truth) and considered simply a Leninist of a new epoch, Stalin took it a significant step further, with almost a complete disregard for the matters of formal democracy when compared to results of the struggle against the principal contradiction – imperialism. Unlike Lenin, he even considered the monarchist views held by certain national liberation movements as secondary compared to actual results in the general balance sheet of the struggle against imperialism (a very important point for the Third Worldists of today, since a wide specter of mostly Islamists lead the armed struggle against imperialism in the periphery, and even the Western Third Worldists – including the comrades from KAK – failed to understand that there’s no such thing as “reactionary anti-imperialism”), yet classified the struggle of those national liberation movements with high level of formal democracy who fail to deliver outright blows to imperialism and even strengthen it, as reactionary.3
Considering the above mentioned, it may seem that those who name themselves “Maoist”, expressing their support for the Kurdish national liberation movement in Rojava from the standpoint of formal democracy, regardless of their role in strengthening the imperialism in the Middle East, are at odds with Mao’s principle of “primary contradiction”. But they are not. From the Third Worldist perspective, and let us remark that our theory never ceased with Stalin or Mao and is developing even today, it is precisely their primary contradiction they have taken into account whilst directing their vocal and material support to the YPG, alongside the volunteers from across the Western world. For what is a primary contradiction to the Westerner today but Islamism? One might argue that, declaring oneself a communist requires redefining that contradiction and still be wrong. For in reality, one’s primary contradiction is determined according to the class character, whether in national or global terms. Which is why we never saw any of those volunteers hasty to join the Palestinian Intifada(s) against the Israeli settler-colonialism. To be able to redefine that contradiction, as we have been taught by Amilcar Cabral, western communists (in this case) need to commit a class suicide – the only method of arriving at the line of the masses.4
On the other hand, their so called “Stalinist” counterparts almost succeeded in getting there, as we have previously shown. They wouldn’t go as far as openly denouncing the likes of the YPG as reactionary, as Stalin would have done, but they’d pick their allies more carefully and stand by the government under siege by imperialism, almost regardless of its character, understanding that the siege itself has nothing to do with pretexts given and everything to do with not accommodating (partly or fully) the profit making activities of the core countries. That is, until we recently came across their positions on the on-going protests in Iran.5 According to what they’re insinuating, the protests should be supported for the two main reasons: they’re socially driven – targeting the economic policies of the “repressive regime” and the Iranian communists (Tudeh Party) declared their support for the protesters.6 That (KKE) support is also accompanied by the statement of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) who boldly claims that “the alternative to the mullahs and imams doesn’t have to be the Yankee”.7
Although immune to Maoist type liberalism on the one side, it’s clear they’re not resistant to Trotskyist type idealism on the other. Unfortunately, it’s not some junior party members we’re referring to here, but the actual leadership itself – supposed to be the cream of the crop of the modern socialist thought. To briefly address that attitude by both theory and practice, let’s start by pointing out that one cannot be against something and for nothing. Marxism is about dealing with objective antagonisms not imaginary scenarios. More plainly – basing one’s position on the statement by marginal forces is what it’s not about (Tudeh party leadership is based in exile and its influence amongst the Iranians at home is barely worth a mention). And that’s how we got the so called “Stalinists” sharing goals on Iran with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. But wait, just to be on the safe side, they quickly published another statement by the Tudeh, which expressed the opposition to “any kind of foreign intervention”.8 In a parallel universe Trump and Netanyahu both read it and discussed it over tea, then decided to carry it through as the means of achieving peace and stability in the Middle East.
Now let’s take a look at the historical practice, for unfortunately, to the anti-materialists, etiam repetitio est non mater studiorum. In 2003, amidst the imperialist sanctions and all sorts of pressures on the Iraqi government, just before the Western military aggression, the Iraqi Communist Party called on “social and political forces to take political change into their own hands in order to topple the ‘dictatorship’ and set up a democracy”. However, it announced the opposition to “any kind of foreign intervention”.9 In 2011, after the Trots expressed their support to the Libyan opposition protests, they emphasized the rejection of any foreign involvement, and pointed to some of the protesters with banners upholding similar views.10 And how about a more recent event, when just a few months ago the Communist Party of Zimbabwe, based in South Africa, called for “the people” to march down on government buildings and help the military topple Mugabe?11 As you may know, all of that went down well: the Iraqi Communist Party was rewarded by 1 out of 328 seats in the neo-colonial Parliament of Iraq after the intervention; Libyan opposition succeeded in bringing the country to the state of dependency, whilst their Trotskyist spokesmen transferred their analytical “skills” to Syria; and the Zimbabwean communists are still to release a statement on Zimbabwe applying to rejoin Commonwealth and first cases of “returning” the land to the settler-colonists – except they temporarily run out of ink.
Did they think history will not hold them accountable?
But enough with references to “infantile disorders”. Shall we give a few accounts on protests in Iran ignored by the pro-imperialist left? Most of the protests included chants “bless your soul” and other slogans praising Reza Shah whose dynasty was deposed in the Iranian Revolution.12 Protesters also shouted slogans praising Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran.13 Other dominating slogans include “Let go of Palestine”, “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’d give my life only for Iran” and “Leave Syria, think about us”.14 Are these not all pro-imperialist slogans? And how do “socially driven” protests with “large sections of working class” end up aiming at re-establishing the pro-imperialist monarchy and supporting Israeli settler colonialism? The answers are quite simple.
Yes, the protests were initially socially driven, and have started as a gathering instigated by the younger opponents of Rouhani in the conservative city of Mashhad in eastern Iran, caused by the general rise in prices and draft budget, presented to parliament in December, that would have cut subsidies for the poor, if adopted.15 Although at first not aimed at a radical change, once the protests spread and gained momentum, by inclusion and dominance of other social strata, they gradually became political and tended to misinterpret the causes of financial hardships of the bottom layer as consequences of the anti-imperialist aspect of the government’s policies. Whether it’s the CIA and Mossad operatives that should claim the credit or the organized liberal groups constituting the “pro-American” element is hard to tell, but what’s easy is concluding who the objective forces are and aren’t. Since then, the demands shifted to “down with dictator”, “let go of Palestine” and “bless Reza Shah”. So, there’s the answer, if it insofar wasn’t clear, whether the “alternative to the mullahs and imams has to be the Yankee”.
As we haven’t seen any concrete analysis from the statement of the General Secretary of TKP, except plain claims that the “regime” protested is itself “reactionary”, it’s difficult for a proper Marxist not to wonder – compared to what objective force? Or have the so called “Stalinists” finally adopted the Trotskyist slogan of “Neither NATO nor Gaddafi” and “We support the (imaginary) people”?
So what would an objective opposition force need to represent in order to be classed as “progressive” in Iran? Let’s take a look. Iran has a mixed economy with a large public sector. About 60% of the economy is centrally planned and another 10-20% is in the hands of five semi-governmental foundations.16 These “bonyads” were set up after the revolution chiefly to administer property confiscated by the state, for charitable purposes. Although under the US sanctions since 1979 and under the UN sanctions since 2006, an estimated $40-100 billion was paid every year to keep Iranians supplied with cheap energy, water, fuel and basic food, even in the most remote villages – the huge cost of subsidizing the growing population of 77m.17 Iran is classed as a middle income country and has made significant progress in provision of health and education services in the period covered by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 70% of Iranians own their homes.18 The literacy rate is over 85%, with 68% of university entrants being women and some 234,000 new engineers graduating every year. Iran has a very low debt: net government debt to GDP is a mere 4%.19 Interestingly, Iran ranked first in scientific growth in the world in 2011 and has one of the fastest rates of development in telecommunication globally.20
The Library of Congress study from 2008 complains that the allure of the country to foreign businesses and investors as a field for profit-making remains unfulfilled, and the public sector squeezes out opportunities for private investment.21 Even the Western press was losing patience with Iran’s protectionism openly demanding cuts to subsidies to allegedly help privatize the country’s uncompetitive industries.22 Additionally to sabotaging Iran’s economy by sanctions for more than a decade, imperialism forces Iran to divert critical resources to its military and self-defense. That’s the part of a low-level campaign of warfare in order to goad a civilian population into pressuring its government to change the policies the West objects to – the policies which deny Western banks, corporations and investors access to Iran’s markets, labor and natural resources.23
To those familiar with the Third Worldist terminology, the economic policies of the Iranian revolution aimed at exploiting the limited possibilities of transformation within the capitalist world economy. Conscious and deliberate movement towards achieving a different position in the world hierarchy of production, profits and consumption doesn’t mean avoiding the inevitable dependency nor the rejection of the world division of labor, but may demand a partial restructuring of the world economy at the expense of the core countries. It is in the interest of such a movement of the semi-peripheral country to reduce foreign trade, even if it is balanced, as one of the main ways in which the overall profit margin can be increased is to win high percentage of its domestic market for its domestic products. One way to expand the market for national products is to control the access of other manufacturers to that market: hence prohibitions, quotas and customs. That may (or may not in case of China) lead to the common structural response of economic pressure and isolation.24 Accordingly, Iran’s exports grew from $8.5bn in 1987 to $70bn in 2006, representing an 824% increase.25
But Iran’s response to exclusion from the world financial markets was equally efficient. Although initially burdened by sanctions, that exclusion actually helped Iran to avoid recession in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. To continue on the path towards becoming upwardly mobile, even under sanctions, the country transferred its strategy from “seizing a chance” to “development by invitation”, which is why the net flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Iran has grown. That was made possible by Iran’s successful and increasing reliance on ‘South-South’ trade, which effectively translated into its own sanctions against the West.26 It’s former strategy, as Third Worldists should know, also carries some of the inherent problems, given that industrial development suggests to import both machinery and semi-finished reproduction materials from the core countries, essentially replacing the old dependency with a new one. That’s how Germany became Iran’s key trading partner, and even Iran’s nuclear program depended mainly upon German products and services (for example centrifuges used to enrich the uranium are controlled by multi-purpose automation hardware and software made by Siemens).27 Yet, as interdependence would have it, the economic sanctions against Iran were to cost more than 10,000 German jobs and have a negative impact on the economic growth of Germany,28 which beamed for a shift in German business ties with Iran from long-term business to short-term and from large to mid-sized companies.
But, each strategy being targeted by new rounds of sanctions, and with no backing in the UN SC from Russia and China, the country was pushed towards developing plans for a partial delinking. The supreme leader Ali Khamenei and ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both revealed the government’s plans to build a self-reliant economy,29,30 recognizing there’s no other alternative in fighting isolation. The decision wasn’t taken well in the Western diplomatic circles for two reasons: 1. The historical practice proves the “self-reliance” strategy as the most efficient (out of the three) way of transformation within the capitalist world economy for the underdeveloped countries (Tanzanian Ujamaa),31 2. Juche socialism turned North Korea to impenetrable by the world counter-revolution and easy to manage amidst the isolation,32 3. The larger the country, with wider specter of resources, the better the forecasts for achieving the self-reliance.33 Being an energy superpower, with 10% of the world’s proven oil reserves and 15% of its gas reserves, Iran’s economy was dominated by oil and gas production.34 But the road to self-reliance leads through diversification of the industrial base – the first step almost completed by Teheran.35 That in time led to over 40 industries being directly involved in the Tehran Stock Exchange, one of the best performing exchanges in the world over the past decade.36
It is important to note that the strategy of self-reliance wasn’t the first choice of the Iranian government nor an ideological decision to delink from the world economy for the purpose of building socialism. The government of Iran was simply pushed into it. In countries based on private entrepreneurship (which Iran partly is) it leads to what we call a “development federation”, since it includes a temporary convergence and the gathering of industrial bourgeoisie and urban workers in the search for certain forms of state action. That inevitably leads to different and more progressive modalities of internal profit sharing.37 The program of cash transfers to the working class under Ahmadinejad’s government should be viewed from this perspective.38
Has Iran succeeded in defeating the effects of isolation by managing to build a self-reliant economy? Not exactly. But the possible effects of that strategy surely accelerated the P5+1 efforts to secure the deal with Iran which would reintegrate it into global economy. So actually, the West thought it might and Iran thought it mightn’t. The so called “Nuclear deal”, which reduced the country’s uranium stockpile by 98% and directed it to Russia39 and China40 for its nuclear energy, pretty much assured that Iran would not relink into the world economy on its own protectionist terms as a self-reliable economy nor as a military super-power. The new administration of Hassan Rouhani and the IMF both had a role to play in that process,41 and are managing the so called “transition to the market economy”.42 In return, the transition slowly takes its toll on the bottom strata, recreating “healthy” conditions for the class struggle in national frame, which the latest protests were a fruit of (well, at least initially).
But not so fast. Additionally to the obstructions by the parliamentary opposition and remnants of legal obstacles to carrying out the transition in full, unfortunately for Rouhani’s clique, the new “dotard” led US administration has its own geopolitical reasons for prolonging the economic warfare on Iran. Iranian Privatization Organization (IPO) complains to be granted inadequate authority in the process of privatization and can’t overcome the pressure from the officials and the Parliament, nor the resistance of the state-owned companies.43 According to the IPO, merely a small fraction of state-owned enterprises, estimated at about 5%, have actually been divested to what would be regarded as the real private sector. On a broader, structural level, the private sector still only makes up roughly one-fifth of the economy. Meanwhile, 80% of fiscal spending is allocated to state-owned enterprises.44 Foreign investors can bid in Iranian privatization tenders, but need permission from the Economy Ministry on a case-by-case basis.45 After the threat of new US sanctions and a clear warning by Rex Tillerson to Europeans not to invest in certain Iranian businesses,46 a stream of major international corporations announced a departure from the Iranian market. For instance, the French company Total withdrew from developing the South Pars gas field, which is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard. China National Petroleum Corporation replaced the French company but pulled out as well, and withdrew all its experts and workers from Iran’s Assaluyeh region.47 Additionally there’s the military threat to Iran’s regional interests conducted by the US/EU proxies, whether in Yemen, Syria or Palestine which Iran, unlike the West, cannot sustain on the long run and needs relatively quick victories in order not to endure significant damages to its budget.
It’s not that hard concluding that if Iran’s going to relink, it’ll happen on the terms set up by the structural imperialism or it’s not going to happen at all. What to non-Marxist observers may seem as a paradox, which it is by no means, is that the process of delinking inevitably produces more progressive, both internal and external politics, and vice versa. In Lenin’s language, “the bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we support”.48 That’s exactly what the Syrian communists understood perfectly in their determination to support the government under the attack by imperialism.
The latest protests and the world’s response are a clear sign to Iran’s political actors of which direction the country should take in order to secure its sovereignty, independence and social progress. The fact that Khamenei stressed that those with legitimate complaints about Iran’s economy should be heard, differentiating between the “righteous and honest demands” and “barbaric and disruptive moves by different groups” is a sign the events were understood properly.49 Eshaq Jahangiri, first vice president of Iran, admitted that there is an increase in the prices of some products and the government is working on fixing causes of high prices.50
As we have shown, Iran’s recent push towards the market economy opens up space for organized class and political struggle. That may take part on the streets, inside the parliament, even within the government, but most importantly it is the global class struggle that defines the objective political options inside the country at present. If leftists are going to engage it must be done by correctly interpreting the material reality from the anti-imperialist position and physical presence inside the country. Otherwise, if “the alternative to the mullahs and imams” is idealism of the marginal forces, then we’d rather have mullahs and imams”.
Bonus Info:
Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) claimed the Kurds have played an important role in the protests in Iran saying they’re “expecting help from the US”.51
The other country to watch is the Sudan. After the accusations against the US that it’s intending to split the country into 5 states, Sudanese president openly required military help from Moscow. In our opinion, the US may very soon increase funding to the rebel groups in the west of the country or stir up larger opposition protests in the capital.52
“I would like to point out that the airstrikes of the coalition have saved many civilian lives, as well as contributed to the YPG resistance. Therefore I am conveying my hopes that the bombings will not cease. They are exerting a strong influence on the friendly ties between our people and the forces that are fighting for world peace and democracy. In the name of my Party and the people of Kobane, I would like to express my gratitude to the International Coalition and the people around the world who have given us support.” – Salih Muslim
With these words the president of PYD and the leader of the Kurdish Armed Forces in Syria had brought to an end the press-conference concerning the “liberation” of the Syrian city of Kobane.1
There was a hush among the leftists following Mister Muslim’s statement. Leaving aside the Indian Maoists and the African national socialist party (APSP), we can safely say that the entire global left-wing, being liberal or radical, has been vigorously propagating and encouraging the Kurdish struggle for the defense of the city of Kobane in Syria, as well as in northern Iraq, where the Islamists have succeed in making an armed breakthrough into the territory under the Kurdish control. The “civilized” and “progressive” Kurds as opposed to the “primitive” and “fanatical” barbarians, higher degree of women emancipation as opposed to patriarchal “oppressors” etc. These are some of the images which propagandize the Kurdish “cause”(the opposite of what they are doing to the Islamic one).
The fact that this narrative was installed mostly by the liberals and leftists of the developed nations and was indisputably accepted by most of the left on the periphery and the semi-periphery, further stresses out the newly-acquired habit of evading class analyses, anti-imperialism and poor understanding of the “evil” nature of the supremacist ideology of “the empire”, so the lack of theoretical framework needed for analyzing and understanding the complexity of the current situation in the Middle East (as well in the other epicenters of the world) doesn’t come as a surprise.
Had the leftists by any chance observed the events concerning the relationship between the Kurdish political representatives and the imperialists over the last fifteen years, and not only after the erupting headlines in the corporate media, Salih’s speech wouldn’t have surprised anyone.
In the absence of real information from the media regarding the background of this relationship, we are going to put an effort to bring about some of the less known details regarding this. As well as offer an analysis of the situation from the Marxist point of view.
PKK is not a Marxist organization.
PKK was formed in the year 1978. Under the name Worker’s Party of Kurdistan, by the Kurdish students under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan. The primary and completely legitimate goal of this organization was to create an independent state of Kurdistan; made up of territories belonging to Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, where the Kurds made most of the population. Also, it is estimated that in Turkey, the Kurds make up around 20% of the population. Marxism-Leninism was the official ideology the Organization. From the year 1983, the Organization has been employing the method of armed struggle, creating paramilitary formations which have been operating mostly on the Turkish territory. By the end of the 1980-s, the PKK had gained a massive support from the Kurdish population and had gained first military accomplishments by succeeding in taking over and administrating some parts of the Turkish territory near the border with Iraq and Syria , which they have been winning and losing periodically. One of the combat methods they were employing were the suicide bombing attacks with which Turkey was then confronted for the first time.
In the beginning of the 1990-s, after the collapse of the USSR, the organization looses its greatest financial injection, and for the sake of survival moves to alternative financing methods, including the distribution of narcotics.2 In the mid 1990-s, under pressure from fierce offensives of the Turkish Army, they were periodically retreating to inaccessible areas of the Southern Mountains; from where they would launch guerilla assaults on the Turkish Army, causing it considerable losses. By putting pressure on the International Community, the Turkish authorities have succeeded in adding the PKK on the international terror list. That kind of stalemate, which also diminishes the security and soverenity on the Turkish side, and causes considerable economic losses, while at the same time prevents the Kurdish side from gaining important military and political victories, was the basis for imminent negotiations and peace talks by which, with help from western imperialists both sides involved in the conflict reached important political achievements. All that, of course, in the name of economic “stability” of the region, and the American hegemony in the Middle East, at the expense of the peoples of Iraq and Syria.
Contacts with the Turkish authorities and the United States that led to progress in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict were already being held. It is speculated that Öcalan was offered kind of autonomy in Turkey, as well as a significant role in the political life of Iraqi (and later Syrian) Kurdistan, after the invasion of Iraq, which the Americans planned in early 2000. All this, of course, provided that the PKK disarm, renounce Marxism-Leninism and the goal of an independent state on the territory of Turkey. The first publication of contacts and cooperation involving the PKK and the MIT-TV (Turkish secret police) was published by the journalist Ugur Mumcu, who sadly paid for that matter with his life, and his executors have never been found.34 Ankara proved to be a tougher negotiator, and what followed on the Kurdish side was supposed to be a shock to the entire world left, but it seems that important political decisions and ideological contortions among the Third World movements remain relatively poorly observed, due to the dominance of Eurocentric discourse and opportunism which, quite wrongly, assumes that solving the main antagonisms today shall be dealt with within the core countries, with a domino effect in the periphery, as we’ve previously written. Öcalan (who was hiding in Syria at that time), gave an interview to Michael M. Gunther5 , the professor of the University of Tennessee, where he promoted the new concept, Federalism, as a substitute for previous goal of independence, and refused to be labeled a communist:
“The dialogue between Turkey and the PKK, then the agreement would be good for Turkey and would make it stronger. All we ask for is real democracy in Turkey. I am more of a Turk than the Turkish leaders! … It is not possible for us to be communists. Why the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States did not? Because in communism the government is everything but a human being is nothing. USA is development. “- March 1998.
Further indications of willingness of Öcalan to renounce revolutionary activity we notice in his statement that he could not cooperate with the DHKP-C (the Turkish revolutionary organization)6 because they are “responsible for several murders of prominent businessman”, thereby showing his readiness to condemn the attacks on big capital owners.
The dialogue which Öcalan referred to, went on hold, since he was only a few months later denied hospitality by the Syrian government, and after a temporary stay in Moscow and Athens, got arrested in Nairobi in a joint operation by the secret services of Turkey, Israel and the US, and was delivered to Ankara .7 Turkey seems to have won a victory, holding a trump card which would facilitate future negotiations needed. Öcalan was initially sentenced to death for betrayal, but his sentence was, as expected, renamed to life imprisonment.
Pro-Kurdish protest in the USA
Öcalan ‘s Democratic Federalism
During the first few years of captivity Öcalan developed his theory of “Democratic Federalism” in details8 , based on the works of Murray Bookchin and his “Libertarian Municipalism” model. This emerging structure aims not at eliminating private property nor the abolition of classes, and the fact that the tribal system remains, and that the tribal leaders are involved in the administration shows that the goal is not to eliminate feudal and capitalist relations of production, but instead “building a democratic nation.”9
Socio-economic vision of the PKK, in the short term, is the economy based on cooperatives, which would, as they say, “contributed to the democratization” of society. The Co-president of PYD, Asia Abdullah, on the instructions of the “ideological center”, spoke of the economic ideas to rebuild Rojava, in February 2014:
“Who should own the means of production? The state, the cantons, the capitalists? In general we have to protect private property. However, the property of the people must also be protected. ”10
Öcalan’s analysis of the collapse of “real socialism” is reduced to the already well-known liberal ideas of the idealists that the Soviet bloc collapsed because of “totalitarianism”, and so the historical and materialist discourse of that development is absent. For him, socialism and the workers’ struggle is of secondary importance in relation to questions of religious and ethnic identity and democratic freedoms, and he believes that recognizing the democratic rights of all these different identities would lead to a new “democratic civilization”. According to him, the twentieth century was marked by “the disappearance of the material basis of class division,” because of “technological progress”, but the possibility of a society without class divisions remains unfeasible because “the state controls the social structure”.11 Any discussion on the capital is, of course, absent.
It remains a mystery how Öcalan’s “pluralistic democratic structure” solves the class issue, if not striving towards the elimination of capitalist relations of production, but we will not pursue that any further, since we suspect a different pragmatic motive behind the transfiguration of Öcalan and the PKK, and we attribute the theoretical ambiguities and contradictions to the lack of dialectical materialism, as well as the fruitless attempt to transfer the “inevitable” opportunistic and juggling practice to paper or a new ideological framework. In his defense, Ocalan often repeated that the world has changed, but we know that for the proletariat, the dominant role of capitalist class society has not undergone a change. In war or in peace, the proletariat is obliged to be able to discern the reality of class society from fantasy, so the idealistic vision of Öcalan and Bookchin about the alleged overcoming of political categories such as nation, state, and class antagonisms, we see as ignorance or betrayal of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction, because the truth remains that all these categories are very problematic, real, tangible and alive for the proletarian class, and the only way to overcome those is precisely the class struggle.
What we are most interested in, is the right turn and ideological transformation of the PKK leader, under the direct influence of the new circumstances of the prison environment and cooperation with the imperialists, of which the “Democratic Federalism” is the first step. Öcalan suddenly equates the Democracy with parliamentary, capitalist countries of the West: he argues that the European countries developed the “high level of democracy” and that it led to “the supremacy of the West”, therefore the “Western civilization can be labeled a democratic civilization”.12 “In general, the Western democratic system – which was set up by the huge sacrifices – contains everything needed for the solution of social problems.”13
In the courtroom he continued with reinterpretation of history and ideology of the PKK, where he expressed regrets over the death of Turkish soldiers. When the court asked whether it would be right to transcribe his words as an apology, he agreed. He did not mention the suffering of the Kurds but found time to praise Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, and has gone so far as to say that if Turkey would faithfully follow the ideas of Ataturk, there would be no “Kurdish issue”. He added that the goal of an independent Kurdish state is unattainable, even in the long run, and that it is not even desirable.14
Soon after, at the eighth Congress of the PKK, held on 16 April 2002, the “democratic transformation” was voted, which meant that the PKK rejected the violent means to achieve the “liberation”, demanding political rights of Kurds in Turkey. Since that Congress, the PKK has been transformed by creating a new political organization, “Freedom and Democracy Congress of Kurdistan” (KADEK), whose task was to fight exclusively by democratic means. It was also decided that the Armed Forces (HPG), the military wing of the PKK, will not be dismantled yet. Over time, the KADEK turned into more moderate “Kurdistan National Congress” (Kongra-Gel), so as to be allowed to take part in talks with the Turkish authorities and to facilitate the participation in the parliamentary arena. It is also the main body of “Democratic Federalism” and, in essence, the proto-state of Kurdish people under the direction of the PKK, and gathers many other Kurdish forces that recognize the supreme authority of the PKK.
PKK and friends
This new, reformed PKK acquired new friends in the international arena. When in May 2010, after the terrorist attack on Iskerun, one of the leaders of the PKK, Kenan Yıldızbakan, was arrested, close links between the Kurdish organization and the State of Israel were revealed, which turned out to have lasted for eight years, since the eighth Congress in 2002. In Yıldızbakan’s possession, wiretapping equipment that was supplied by Israel, was found, as well as evidence of logistic support. Israel has used the fictitious company established in Azerbaijan to deliver the PKK listening devices produced by an Israeli telecom company “Tadiran”. The units were shipped to Iran from Azerbaijan and then to Turkey through northern Iraq. In 2010, just between February and June, the PKK was equipped with 60 air communication systems and 35 VHF/UHF communication systems.15
Israeli-Kurdish relationship could also have been the missing link in communication between Western imperialists and the organization they classified as “terrorist“. Late last year, after a “surprising” military alliance with the international coalition led by the United States, co-founder and one of the senior officials of the PKK Cemil Bayik said: “Co-operation and contacts between the international coalition and the PKK were held in secret, and implemented through intermediaries.”16 At the same time we heard from other PKK officials who openly acknowledged direct contact, as with US military officials also with CIA operatives.17
Regional power and geopolitics
Salih Muslim with CIA operatives and US diplomats
From Öcalan’s prison “enlightenment” and “democratic transformation” of the organization, a smaller part of the armed forces of the PKK remained in Turkey as a trump for negotiations with the government, but it’s bulk moves to Iraq where, due to the massive support, it installs itself as an important factor in creating a political atmosphere and contributes to political developments.
Iraqi Kurdistan during the rule of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein enjoyed an autonomy, and with American assistance at the end of the nineties hit the degree of independence. The two dominant parties in the political arena of Iraqi Kurdistan have been and still remain the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Djelal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), led by Massoud Barzani. Both parties with identical, neo-liberal economic views, were often used by the US to destabilize Iraq in the nineties, and were then engaged in a failed attempt to murder Saddam Hussein in 1996, planned in Washington, which led to the brutal revenge by the Iraqi authorities.18
Ruthless power struggle in Iraqi Kurdistan, between the KDP and PUK errupted int an armed conflict, which could not be resolved without the intervention of the already present and influential force – the PKK. Öcalan’s organization decided to support Talabani’s PUK and managed to turn the tide of the conflict in their favor. Then the Turkish air force decided to cross over the Iraqi border and deliver air strikes against the PKK and PUK positions, helping Barzani’s KDP.19
Using the general chaos, the Iraqi authorities lifted the aviation, and engaged in the conflict, which concerned the Americans who resolved to end the inter- Kurdish conflict once and for all, before the Iraqi government managed to regain sovereignty over its northern province. The ingenious US plan was put to work in 1998, by offering the two leaders (Barzani and Talabani) eleven million dollars in bribes to stop the conflict and sign a peace agreement.20 Under the agreement, the warring parties were committed to power sharing, as well as not to allow the return of the Iraqi army to Kurdistan, the United States commited to protect the Kurds from any possible future aggression by Saddam Hussein, and the Kurdistan’s air space was declared the “non-flying zone”.21 Such “independence” of Iraqi Kurdistan meant the exemption from sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1992, which are responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi civilians22 , thus the standard of living in the northern province has greatly improved, and a large number of foreign companies rushed to oil-rich province, to grab their part of the pie. The US military Special Forces have been given the task of organizing and training Kurdish fighters called the “Peshmerge”, who in 2003, during the US invasion of Iraq, took part in the fighting against the Iraqi regime on the side of the imperialists.23 What we find most interesting, is the fact that the PKK armed forces and their leadership got the green light from the new KDP-PUK government to remain in Iraqi Kurdistan, where they are still mostly stationed, and it is more than obvious that decisions of this caliber aren’t taken without consultations with the United States.24 It is more than a solid proof that the imperialists did not see the danger to their economic interests and investments from the new, reformed PKK.
The occupation of Iraq, “Democratic federalism” and the Sunni insurgency
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was code-named “Operation Iraqi Liberation” abbreviated OIL (oil). In very short time 148,000 US troops, 70,000 Kurdish Peshmergas, 45,000 British, 2,000 Australian, 1,300 Spanish and 194 Polish soldiers overran Iraqi troops and so crowned the ten years of imposed sanctions with the complete military collapse of the Iraqi government.25 In contrast to Kurdistan, where the imperialists were welcomed as liberators, the people of Iraq treated the invasion as an occupation which they continued to resist even after the overthrow of the Baathist regime.
Shiite militias in the south of the country during the first two years of occupation intensively attacked the British and American troops, until the peace talks in 2004, which were put into service by the new regime dominated by Shiite and Kurdish politicians. In Sunni areas of the province of Anbar, the resistance has not faded, and with more or less success has continued ever since. The remnants of the Baathist regime, Islamists and tribal militia, offered fierce resistance to coalition allies, and expanded the military operations against the newly formed neo-colonial regime in Baghdad and the new Iraqi army. Full destruction of cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi in 2003 and 2004, and a continuation of the genocidal policy of the new Iraqi authorities in 2007 and 2010, had not achieves the desired effect. The siege and indiscriminate bombing of Sunni cities led to massive civilian casualties, but also further radicalized the local population, as we have already written. Thus, contrary to the advertising campaign of the mainstream media, an organization such as ISIS has not suddenly sprung out of the nowhere, but is the result of a decade of struggle which the oppressed and abandoned Iraqi population waged against the imperialist, colonialist and racist oppression of the empire and its subjects. The Islamists did not have to sell their doctrine to be accepted but only prove effective in the fight against the empire.
Meanwhile, the development of political life in Iraqi Kurdistan led to fertile conditions for the profit of the dominant class of external power centers, foreign investment, market opening, a very small tax on profit of foreign corporations and the abundance of cheap labor and raw materials. Among the oil companies that profit the most dominate the American, British, Canadian, Turkish and French companies, but neither Russia nor China have not remained unrewarded for the tacit support of the invasion, and the non-use of the veto in the Security Council (the recipe that was repeated during the invasion of Libya, 2011) .26 The raw materials that the new Kurdistan authorities were permitted to keep to themselves found their way to foreign markets of Israel, the US, Italy, Germany and Netherlands.27
Due to the US “suggestions”, the Kurdish authorities renounced aspirations for independence and accepted federalism as the offered model of operation. According to the Constitution of 2005, Iraqi Kurdistan is a federal Iraqi entity, with its own assembly and parliamentary system.28 In the presidential election that year, Barzai and his KDP achieved victory, while his rival and leader of the PUK, Talabani, became the president of Iraq in 2007. That same year, former US President Bill Clinton at a donor party explained to the richest Americans why their troops, after the announced withdrawal from Iraq, must remain in Iraqi Kurdistan: “The Kurds are reconciled with each other and enjoy relative peace and security … And if we leave , not only may they again engage in a civil war, but the Turks may be tempted to attack them, because they do not like the fact that the PKK guerrillas are sometimes stationed in northern Iraq, where they are hiding after the attacks carried out in Turkey. ”29
Iranian PJAK, PKK sister organisation
All these data shed light on the question to why the air force of the international coalition responded instantly when fighters from ISIS stationed in Mosul waged their first attacks on the fringes of the Kurdish cities of Iraq and later in the town of Kobane in Syria. When big economic interests are at stake, the imperialists do not tend to lose time. In addition to the air strikes, military aid in arms was delivered directly to Kurdish authorities30 even though the mainstream media claimed to the contrary, and the military “advisers” and experts from the US31) , France32 , Germany and Sweden33 , Britain and Norway34 , joined the already present Israelis35 , which since 2004 trained and armed the Kurdish “militias” in Iraqi Kurdistan. Israeli Prime Minister had already openly and loudly called for support to the Kurds and the complete independence of Kurdistan36 , and the public is informed of the fact that a company owned by former Mossad chief Danny Latom and businessman Schlomi Mikaels does business with the Kurdish government, providing strategic consultations on economic and security issues , and has delivered “a ton of equipment, including motorcycles, tractors, sniffer dogs, systems to upgrade Kalashnikov rifles, body armor, etc …”37
Let’s see how the PKK organizes in this bastion of imperialism. The PKK continued engagement in the political scene of the region through the newly established organization in Turkey – HDP38 , Iraq – Gorran39 , in Syria – YPD and its armed wing YPG40 . In Turkey, the peace process is coming to an end, and the remaining soldiers of the PKK, were commanded by Öcalan to relocate to Iraqi Kurdistan where the entire military force of the PKK is now placed.41) After the complete disarmament of the PKK, the military units leaving Turkish territory, and legal political activity conducted through the HDP, what remains is to determine the details around the federal status of Turkish Kurdistan, a new electoral law and the future release of Ocalan from prison.
On the political scene of Iraqi Kurdistan, the PKK has grown into one of the three key political players, so the parliamentary results of the political movement “Gorran” are expected soon, as it was announced42 , while the military forces of the PKK actively participate in combat operations against Isis, side by side with the international coalition and the Peshmergas.
In Syria, the PKK operates through the PYD, and it’s armed wing the YPG, which during the first days of the Syrian crisis, occupied predominantly Kurdish areas in the north of Syria and by now largely self-administer the entire Kurdish North.
Of course, the “Democratic Federalism” would not be complete without the territory inhabited by the Iranian Kurds, on what issue the armed forces of PJAK, the Iranian branch of the PKK have been working intensively, until recently43 , funded by … again Israel and the United States.44
It is absurd, that inspite it all, the PKK enjoys the support of both liberal and “radical” left of the First World, and, as expected, the sympathy in liberal circles in the West, where more and more voice their support of “decriminalization” of the organization, and demand their removal from the EU and US terrorist list.
“Islamic” pipeline and Syria
Syria is not a “big” oil producer, but until the outbreak of the Civil War Damascus was making a negligible four billion US dollars a year from oil sales – one third of the state budget. However, Syria is more important as the “energy crossroads” than as a manufacturer, and serves as a “conductor” of the Arab gas pipeline (AGP) from Egypt to Tripoli (in Lebanon) and IPC pipeline from Kirkuk, in Iraq, to the port of Banias (this flow is out use since the US led invasion of 2003). Syria in 2011 announced that it has discovered a promising gas field around the city of Homs, which will later see some of the fiercest battles between the government forces and rebels. But the majority of Syrian oil reserves lie in the Kurdish northeast, which is geographically located between Iraq and Turkey, and the rest is along the Euphrates River, in the south.45
Qatar, home to the world’s largest natural gas fields besides Iran, proposed the gas pipeline from the Gulf through the Syria to Turkey, from where, through the Mediterranean, the gas would be delivered to Europe. This plan was supported by the US and the EU, however, Assad in 2009, rejected the proposal, and instead, accepted the offer from Russia and Iran to build “Islamic gas pipeline” Iran-Iraq-Syria, which would have ended in the Russian military bases, Latakia and Tartus on the Syrian Mediterranean coast. Upon completion, the project would drastically reduce the strategic energy power of the allies (Qatar and the US) and eliminate Turkey from the future pipeline, which has long wanted to become the main bridge in distribution of natural gas and oil between East and West. Iran, Iraq and Syria signed an agreement for the construction of 3480 kilometers of gas pipeline back in 2010, and the deadline for the opening has been set for 2016.46 ,47
Favoring Russia and Iran against Western energy interests would cost the Syrian government dearly, and even before the construction of the agreed project began, Syria was hit by the terrible civil war, so that the whole project was stopped until further notice. In his address to Congress in 2013. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Arab friends offered to pay for the cost of US military intervention in Syria. Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen asked for the estimated amount by which the Arabs can contribute, and Kerry responded that they offered to pay the full cost of the invasion.48
Such a scenario that excluded Turkey from the “Islamic gas pipeline” was not approved by the Kurds who make up nine percent of the population of Syria – about 1.6 million people – because every land flow of natural gas to Turkey inevitably passes through Kurdish territory of Syria or Iraq. Upon realization of the plan of federalism, which includes the Syrian Kurds, the issue of a direct route for oil exports from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Mediterranean would be sorted out, as well as an absolute control over 70 percent of Syrian oil reserves.49 In general, each post-Assad scenario that envisages the release of the gas pipeline to Turkey, relies on the peace and stability in Kurdistan, and the reformed PKK as a guarantor of security of imperialist interests. The safety factor definitely accelerated the Kurdish-Turkish peace process and successfully brought it to an end.
YPG and FSA in common operations
During 2003 and the US invasion of Iraq, PKK activists of Syrian origin established the PYD, a branch of the organization in Syria50 , and members of the PYD do not deny their subordination to PKK whose name they off the record continue to use. They recognize the “National Congress of Kurdistan”(KONGRA-GEL), as the highest organ of the Kurdish people.51 What we can say with certainty is that the PYD is not established in order to legally take part in political life in Syria because the Syrian Constitution prohibits political parties which are based on national, religious, regional or tribal basis, so due to the prohibition of action, until the start of the Civil War in Syria, it was based in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2012, the Syrian army was forced to withdraw troops from the Kurdish areas and regroup them around the city of Homs, where some of the fiercest fighting against the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) took place, and so immediately after the withdrawal, the YPG, the armed wing of PYD, entered and occupied these territories and proclaimed the Kurdish self-rule.52
In spring 2012, the President of Iraqi Kurdistan Massoud Barzani organized a meeting of all Kurdish organizations from Syria in order to form a single organization “Kurdish National Council” to assume the role of administering conquered areas in Syria, as well as the establishment of units “Popular Defence Forces’ military wing organization. PYD, as a branch of the PKK, accepted the invitation, and joined the “Kurdish National Council,” which declared it’s main aim was to fight against the Assad regime.53 Following the takeover of the city of Kobane after the withdrawal of the Syrian army, the flags of the PKK and of Iraqi Kurdistan were hanged at the municipal building. Asked about it by journalists, the PYD spokesman stated: “The PKK is not able to administer the western Kurdistan on it’s own. We need the unity of all organizations. ”54 Shortly afterwards, a statement was issued by the PYD to the Kurdish population of Rojava, which issued a ban on leaving the province, and threatened those who want to leave their villages by seizure of assets55 , so as to preserve the Kurdish region in Syria of the potential demographic change. This was followed by another shocking statement of the PYD leader Salih Muslim for TV station “Selek“, where he said: “One day, those Arabs who have immigrated to the Kurdish region will have to be driven out”56 , referring to the Syrians who for decades inhabited those areas, in their own country.
The battle for the Kobane
What began as a rebellion of the Sunnis in Iraq has turned into a successful march against the neo-colonial regime in Baghdad, the Kurdish collaborators in Iraq and Syria, and less successful conflict with national authorities in Damascus. Intoxicated by continuous successes in the territory of the size of Western Europe, which certainly would not be achieved without the support of the locals, ISIS fighters tactlessly , but more or less successfully engaged on several fronts at once, untill the inclusion of the international coalition led by the United States in the conflict. The attack on the Kurdish town of Kobane was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”, just as was the armed threat to Iraqi Kurdistan, and under the pretext of “human rights, freedom and democracy” as always, the imperialists started off the military campaign in the service of preserving their own interests. ISIS attacks are, of course, directed mainly towards the oil-rich areas, and by 2012 the PYD controled about 60 percent of Syria’s oil facilities, which were continuously delivered to the Iraqi Kurdistan57 , where they found its way to Western markets, as we have already shown.
Opaque meetings and contacts with the imperialists of which we hear subsequently, provide clues to how the relations of production are to be regulated and how the “revolution” will win in Rojava, and given that the consultations take place in Turkey58 , London59 , Paris60 and Washington6162, the afore mentioned statement of the co-president of YPG’s about protecting private property, comes as no surprise. What we are told is that Mr. Salih Muslim, leader of the YPG, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, and “the highest US security and diplomatic officials” agreed on how the Syrian Kurdistan will be administered.63
During the armed conflict in Kobane, instead of class and geopolitical analysis on the Left, mostly rumors and conspiracy theories dominated, which liberal and “wannabe” radical sectors of the left promoted in order to hide their own ignorance and inertia. So according to the majority on the left, apparently the Turkish government was “definitely on the side of Isis” whom they supported with armes and logistics, while obstructing the YPG. Thus, the United States were also “arming and training the Islamists”, “very ineffective in the bombing” and were intentionally delaying the dispatchment of heavy weapons to the Kurds because they supposedly had no interest in seeing the “left-wing revolution” achieve victory in Rojava, etc, etc …
US volunteers in Kobani
To the other ones, who in their analysis track the flow of money (the only true spokesman of imperialism), a denial that followed did not come as a surprise. The President of Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani subsequently declared that the Turks, immediately after the Iranians, were among the first to send armed assistance to the Kurds during the conflict with ISIS, but have requested for personal reasons, not to go out public with that information.64 The Turks have also took care of the wounded PKK/YPG soldiers in the military hospitals in Turkey, during the conflict with the Islamists, so 422 wounded YPG and 40 PKK soldiers from Kobane were transported directly to military hospitals in Turkey where they were treated.65
Further earthquakes continued to arrive. The following straight from the PKK officials, who have revealed that they were in direct contact with the Americans since 2012 via the US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, and special envoy for Syria Daniel Rubinstein, regarding the arms sent to YPG, and a possible coalition with the Syrian, pro-Western Opposition FSA66 .
Then, the PYD leader Salih Muslim in an interview to “Daily News” stated that the relations with the Americans are very good, and on the question of journalists whether they were armed by the US only in relation to a Kobane, Muslim replied: “No, they will send us weapons whenever request. ”67
And finally, the tip of the iceberg, a YPG spokesman Polat Can declares:
“Air strikes are very effective … Some groups of the FSA (pro-Western Syrian opposition) are here in the Kobane and help us … We have a direct relation with the coalition without any intermediaries. YPG representative is physically ready in the joint operation command center and transmits the coordinates… Hence, the victory of Kobane resistance means a victory for Kurdistan, coalition forces, USA and for every human being with a conscience. “68
A few months later, Turkey and Kurdistan signed a contract on the construction of a joint gas pipeline as part of the “Southern Gas Corridor”, from Irbil in Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan69 , the United States opened a new military base in Kurdistan, near Irbil70 , PYD explained to Fransois Oland: “We are fighting against those who attacked Charlie Hebdo. Our resistance is your resistance. PYD and YPG are your friends. ”71 PYD agreed an alliance with the FSA (Free Syrian Army) and clashed with the Syrian army in Aleppo and Hasaka72, Salih Muslim thanks the imperialists for the help73 , yet the loud and vigorous support and contribution from the World Left no one seems to remember, even though it has played a significant role in securing unimpeded popular support for the neo-colonial project, because if we by some chance were to practice Marxism, write class analysis, organize debates, protests, pressure the imperialists, challenge its propaganda, and who knows what more radical and extreme, perhaps this imperialist plot would not have succeeded.
Conclusion
How does Öcalan’s statement of 1998 differ from Salih Muslim’s a few months ago? For Öcalan the imperialists are “development”, and for Muslim “forces defending peace and democracy in the world”. Abandonment or misunderstanding of Marxism-Leninism by the leadership of the PKK, as well as by the Western Left, may lead to dangerous errors of opportunism, the alienation of the oppressed masses and open or tacit support to the geopolitical games imperialists conduct daily against the peoples of the Third World, paving the way for their own economic interests. Taking to such lines tremendously damages the reputation of the left among the masses of the underdeveloped countries, it does not offer an anti-imperialist alternative to the oppressed and openly pushes away revolutionary subjects with the anti-imperialist sentiments into the hands of the Islamists, which explains their growth and strengthening.
If we accept that the US occupation of Iraq (as well as any occupation) is illegitimate and guided by clear interest in profit and capital accumulation in the centers of power, then we accept that the installed regimes in Baghdad and Irbil, which enable the realization of such, unhindered enrichment of the foreign centers of power on the expense of the Iraqi people, are also illegitimate, and that the resistance of the marginalized, alienated, impoverished, militarily and politically oppressed Sunni population is quite legitimate.
To quote Lenin: ” If we do not want to betray socialism we must support every revolt against our chief enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big states, provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class. By refusing to support the revolt of annexed regions we become, objectively, annexationists. It is precisely in the “era of imperialism”, which is the era of nascent social revolution, that the proletariat will today give especially vigorous support to any revolt of the annexed regions so that tomorrow, or simultaneously, it may attack the bourgeoisie of the “great” power that is weakened by the revolt.”74
Things are simple as far as the struggle against imperialism is concerned, what weakens them abroad weakens them at home, so any attack on neo-colonial regimes in Baghdad and Irbil should be supported and benefits from the crisis effects that such blows inflict on imperialism should be taken advantage of. However, the problem of inertia arises as the proletariat of the developed countries, although it is not participating in the exploitation of the proletariat of the Third World, directly benefits from such exploitation75 , and the alliance with the bourgeoisie in the core countries seems unavoidable, and opportunism “inevitable”. An even greater problem is that such a proletariat, and such Left, of the imperialist core, dominates and dictates the ideological trends on which the left of the periphery gathers and wholeheartedly follows (at their own expense). This opportunism slowly but surely penetrates into our world view, and gives it a certain liberal ideological framework that favors anti-authoritarinism over anti-imperialism.
But to us, the proletariat of the Third World, it is the imperialism, not the reactionary aspect in social and cultural issues, that should be the primary enemy, because our lived experience of oppression means that, unlike the Western Left, we can not afford the luxury of not being clear on the nature of the”Empire“. And therefore we can not afford to, such as opportunists, provide tacit support for imperialism and attribute a progressive role to the murederers of mankind. That, very racist liberal framework adopted by the Left, which equates imperialism with reactionary cultural and social practices of the Islamists, really helps to build popular support for neo-colonialist project, and we want to make it clear that the alleged superiority of Western civilization and its values, is simply based on constructed lies and myths. The contradictory nature of European self-understanding and self-perception is completely excluded from it’s practice, and we know how many people in the world see five centuries of European hegemony as a continuous hell.
Kobani air strikes
For such Left, fifty million African slaves (half of which ended at the bottom of the Atlantic)76 , the African holocaust committed against the local population in European colonies where only in Congo ten million people were killed77 , not to mention the rest of Africa, Asia and Australia, the longest genocide in the history of the world, over the American Indians that took the lives of forty million people in four centuries78 , four million children who die of hunger each year79 , a number of victims of imperialist aggression against Iraq, Somalia , Libya, Mali, Serbia, El Salvador, Vietnam, etc., the systematic impoverishment of the Third World for the sake of enriching the First, the international banking system, a brutal economic exploitation of three-quarters of the planet, etc., etc. – is equalized with the reactionary social practice of women oppression by ISIS, and “uncivilized”executions of a dozen of imperialist journalists. Ask yourself which cause such Left serves.
Using the Maoist principle to pay the attention to the main contradiction, Indian Maoists support the anti-imperialist aspect of the Islamists, while also struggling against the reactionary ideology of the social and cultural issues80 , using Marxism-Leninism as the basis of understanding the nature of imperialism. “Where will the revolution start? Where, in what country, can the front of capital be pierced first? “Writes Stalin. “Where the industry is more developed, where the proletariat constitutes the majority, where there is more culture, more democracy? No! – Answers the Leninist theory of revolution. Front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, because the proletarian revolution results in cracking the chain of world imperialist front at its weakest link; and it may turn out that the country that started the revolution, which broke through the font of capital, is less developed in a capitalist sense than other, more developed countries, which still remain in the framework of capitalism. ”81
Does this mean that we openly support the ISIS? For those who are less familiar with the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, let us explain. There is no unconditional support for the movements and organizations that do not seek the abolition of capitalist relations of production, private ownership of the means of production and strive not for socialism. But Marxism is dealing with the objective antagonisms, and the situation as it is and not as we would like it to be, based on imaginary scenarios. Accordingly, we support the progressive functioning of certain movements directed towards the destruction of the old, still existing relations and withdraw it where the operation is aimed at combating more progressive relations. Those unfamiliar with dialectical materialism will ask how the same thing is and is not, and how can we simultaneously support and condemn the same movement. To explain by an example: the communists always support the “democratic revolutions”, as they seek to destroy the reactionary feudal relations, but at the same time criticize them as they seek to establish a new, exploitative, capitalist relations.
In the case of Sunni, Baath/ISIS resistance, we support the people’s struggle against imperialism, even though we internally criticize reactionary ideology and social appearance of Muslim fundamentalism, yet we do not privilege it in relation to a key and principal contradiction, responsible for “hell on earth”. We consider that any attack on the collaborators of imperialism is an attack on imperialism itself and serves its weakening and undermining, as it contributes significantly to the loss of funding of the centers of power, and thus a weaker standard of the proletariat of the empire, as well as its re-engagement as a revolutionary subject.
We’ll make a brief analogy of Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the many uprisings of slaves in the West. During the 400 years of slavery in the West, contrary to popular opinion, numerous uprisings of slaves were recorded. Led by such names as Gaspar Janga, a Baptist priest Samuel Sharp, Nani Marun, Nat Turner, etc., many of which were under the influence of Christian teaching, to which they, due to material circumstances, offered their own reinterpretation. The case of mentioned Nat Turner sparked revolt and anger amongst white population of America’s 19th century, even in regions where the idea of slavery did not have huge support. Nat Turner killed the landlord of the plantation where he worked, and later with a group of slaves he set free, murdered the landlords of all of the surrounding plantations, including their families, wives, children, and animals that he found on the farm. He spared only a few homes because he believed that poor whites did not have much better treatment than blacks.8283 Turner also believed that the revolutionary violence served to awaken the attitudes of white people about the reality of the inherent brutality of slavery, a concept similar to the 20th century philosopher Franz Fanon about the idea of ”violence as being purgatory.”84 He was responsible for the murder of sixty whites, then caught by national organized militia and hanged. If we support Turner’s revolt, and we, of course, won’t hesitate to, does this mean that we support the Christian fundamentalism, which inspired him ? Or are we willing to accept such ideas as a product of Turner’s material circumstances?
Captured pilot of the “International coalition” forces
Instead of denying support to the attacks on imperialists and their puppets, due to the extremist religious cultural practices of the rebels, as do the liberal left folks, we understand the suffering of the oppressed peoples caused by the imperialists and their local allies, and aspirations of the people of the Third World to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism. As Marxists, we believe that it’s not the idea, but the material circumstances that shape the reality, we understand that in accordance with such realities oppressed people of Iraq seek anti-imperialist interpretation of existing, dominant and offered ideas. Accordingly, Islamic fundamentalism seems like a logical and realistic option. But such an approach at the same time carries a large dose of self-criticism, because we are aware that our militant disengagement and lack of clear attitude, action and cooperation, leaves room for less progressive ideology and movements to organize such a struggle.
What does it mean on the paper? In the clashes of Baath/ISIS team against the puppet Iraqi government, the Kurdish collaborators and the international coalition, we support the Baath/ISIS coalition and applaud at every endangering the safety of imperialist interests. In the clashes between ISIS against the Syrian authorities (Iraqi Baath is not participating in this conflict) and Hezbollah, we support the Syrian government and Hezbollah. Why? We have shown that the Syrian government refuses to be a puppet of the West, insisting on the promotion of local interests at the expense of foreign powers and foreign companies. It leads a state that is based on anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, Arab nationalism and the (non-Marxist) socialism, it’s disobedient to the Empire, and does not put the interests of foreign investors to make profits ahead of economic development of Syria. The State Department regrets that “ideological reasons” prevent Assad to move towards “liberalization” of the economy85 , while the American “Library of Congress” disapproves of the “socialist structure,” of the Syrian government and economy.86 Any attack on Syrian state and government, currently serves only the interests of the imperialists.
As for the Kurds and the right to self-determination, we know that Marx and Engels in a given time supported the right of individual nations to self-determination and denied support to other nations during the 19th century.87 The reason for this was that they felt that some of the newly-established, nationally liberated countries would be a prolonged hand of the then Russian Tsarism, and had consequently taken a position against the national liberation of the peoples in that, specific moment. The key here is that we have shown the link between all of the objective forces of Kurdistan and the imperialists. Why is this the key, Comrade Lenin had explained: “Many of the requirements of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general – democratic (now: general – socialist) world movement. In some specific cases, part may contradict the whole; and if so, must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country is only instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; If so, we can not support such a movement. “88
Comrade Stalin added: “… The proletariat does not have to support every national movement, everywhere and always, in each individual case. Support must be given to such national movements which seek to undermine, overthrow imperialism, and not to strengthen and preserve it. Lenin was right in saying that the national movement of the oppressed countries should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy, but from the point of view of the actual results, as shown by the general balance sheet of the struggle against imperialism, that is to say, “not in isolation, but on a world scale.
To those who don’t understand the importance of the anti-imperialist character of the movement under siege, and who tend to repeat the liberal mantra on division between the “progressive” and “reactionary” anti-imperialism, Stalin explains: “The unquestionably revolutionary character of the vast majority of national movements is as relative and peculiar as is the possible revolutionary character of certain particular national movements. The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British “Labour” Government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are “for” socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.”
Therefore, the liberal ideological frame must be removed, not only from our ranks, but also detected and removed from our heads. This model is based on supremacist positions of colonial consciousness and survives to a greater extent as on the imperialist Right, also on the liberal left in the power centers and the semiperiphery. Through revolutionary violence, colonized recreate themselves, and our task is to start, see through and end that process.
In the very end, we shall quote Franz Fanon, and so cement our position regarding anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World:
” Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the very first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colonizers. In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.“89
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