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A TRUE SOLIDARITY WITH LEBANON AND SOUTH AFRICA
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The exploited masses of Lebanon and Palestine have today come under the blows of a united attack by the most compact of counterrevolutionary alliances gathered around the chief policeman, the U.S., and flanked by France, the protector of Christian right. They must face the colonist state of Israel and have seen each of their «brother» states transform themselves in turn into policemen and butchers. They can count neither on the so-called «socialist» states, which one by one have given their blessing to all these policemen, nor on the democratic leaders who can only propose so-called «agreements» which turn out to be nothing more than breathing spaces for the enemy and traps for the fedayeens and the oppressed masses.

These are the same forces which today have set themselves up in southern Africa - an area shaken by the tremendous black revolt against a South African regime armed to the teeth, and especially so by France. Can we expect anything else from these forces than what they did in the Middle East?

No. Only one force is capable of giving a true aid to the anti-imperialist struggles. It is that force which needs to weaken imperialism, an imperialism which solidly unites all the enemies of these struggles: this force is the proletariat of the large capitalist countries whose dramatic absence from direct struggle against imperialism has left the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed countries in decades of isolation, of which the Lebanese tragedy is the most recent consequence.

The perspective of Marx and Lenin was of soldering one to the other, the proletarian struggles in the imperialist countries and the struggle of the workers and poor peasants in the colonies and semicolonies. This alliance must break imperialism at its core, opening the way to communism in the economically advanced countries, and in the backwards countries enabling the democratic revolution to be carried up to its end and insuring its transformation into a proletarian revolution.

Lenin's International was defeated by the counterrevolution. However in its defeat, the perspective that it defended has been confirmed. Not only has Stalinism chained the proletariat in the large imperialist countries to the chariot of the national economy and the state, and driven it into the bloody disputes between rapacious imperialists in World War II, thus driving off for decades all hope for the renewal of the proletarian struggle; not only has it broken the link between the two movements, but when it participated in the governments (as in France in 1945-47) it has made itself the direct accomplice of the repression of the struggles in the colonies, and throughout the world it helped to subordinate the militant movement of the workers and poor peasants to the bourgeois democratic movement and sometimes even to still more moderate movements! The latter want to limit the struggle to the demand for political independence and are so much the more ready to compromise with imperialism and the old classes and castes when the danger of a militant movement of the exploited masses against all forms of exploitation becomes more menacing.

In this way Stalinism has replaced the necessary solidarity with the revolutionary struggles in the «Third World» with appeals to governments in the name of the empty principles of justice, liberty in general and equality between nations, and with «humanitarian campaigns» which cause no harm to imperialism and are designed to hide behind «noble attitudes» their actual capitulation before the established order. Such a «solidarity» can be received only as an insult by the proletarians and semi-proletarians who have taken up arms against imperialism.

The struggle of the oppressed masses of the Middle East and South Africa is linked to our struggle because it strikes a common enemy - the great imperialist states which feed off of the double exploitation of the «domestic» proletarians and of the impoverished masses of the oppressed countries. This is why all the defeats of the anti-imperialist movement in Beirut, Johannesburg or elsewhere are our defeats. They mean heavier irons around our wrists. On the other hand, a victory there would open a break in the prison wall of our exploitation and would give a tremendous aid to our struggle in the heart of imperialism.

Certainly, the immediate objectives of the revolutionary movements in the Middle East and South Africa are not socialist. But their realisation would allow the bridles of social backwardness, reinforced by the imperialist states, to be broken, and would open the way to the development of the modern class struggle in these areas. It would thus bring the hour of socialism nearer for the «Third World» as for all humanity.

This is why the needs of the struggle of the exploited masses of the oppressed countries just as those of the proletarian struggle throughout the world require that the most radical political methods be used in the Middle East as in South Africa. This necessity will collide with the politics of the democratic leaders of these movements, whom the Stalinist counterrevolution often allowed to assume leadership in the anti-imperialist struggles.

The proletarian movement in the imperialist countries and the movement for social emancipation in the oppressed countries are linked by a common fate: together they must win or together they will be defeated.

The true aid needed by the exploited masses of Lebanon, Palestine, Southern Africa and all the oppressed countries is for the proletariat of the imperialist countries to take the road of the class struggle again. What is needed is the expression of its solidarity not on the sterile terrain of inoffensive pleas but on that of the direct struggle against the common enemy.

It is through this struggle - a struggle which must be linked to the fight to eradicate the poison of reformism and social-imperialism - that it will be possible to unlock the jaws of imperialist oppression. It is only through this struggle that the indispensable alliance of the proletarians and poor peasants of the entire world can be forged. This alliance could particularly be expressed by taking up again the tradition of the boycott of arms shipments on the part of the immediate organisations of the proletariat, and by a material aid through reliable channels so that it really reaches its destination.

This alliance can only be forged by the World Communist Party, the rebirth and the reinforcement of which are an urgent need of the proletarian struggle and, as well, of the anti-imperialist struggle which it will be able to integrate into a single international strategy and in a centralised world tactic.

Certainly, this way is long and difficult. But no short and easy way exists. This is the only realistic way.

Long live the proletarians and poor peasants of Palestine and Lebanon!

Long live the black proletarians and semi-proletarians struggling against capitalist domination in South Africa and Rhodesia!

Long live the World Communist Revolution!

Source: «communist program», No. 3, May 1977