The far left has a dictator problem

Their crime was to undermine the left’s supposed “solidarity” with the regime in Tehran. Vijay Prashad, whose Tricontinental Institute is funded to the tune of millions by a businessman living in Shanghai, wrote: “This is the time of solidarity with Iran, and not a time to make a claim that advantages the aggressor imperialists”. 

Suggested Reading

The end of Putin is at last on the table – but we must be sceptical

Paul Mason

Carlos Martinez, of a group called Friends of Socialist China and a regular writer for the Morning Star, complained that criticism of the Islamic Republic’s prison regime “erases the reality of the Iranian people’s achievements and the popular support for their government”.

Others weighed in: to make any criticism of the murdering regime in Tehran is “obscene” and – with a clockwork inevitability – also implicates the writers in the “genocide” of Gaza.

If you’re old enough to remember the USSR, you know what is going on here: an attempt to drag people appalled at the launch and conduct of the USA’s war against Iran into support for its regime. And to destroy anyone who disagrees with the same vehemence the DDR’s Stasi once reserved for dissidents.

And though such rhetoric may seem irrelevant to mainstream politics, these controversies are designed to have a disciplining effect on the wider left: “for or against the Open Letter” is this week’s dividing line, just as uncritical defence of the late Jason Arday was last week’s, and defiance of the Supreme Court ruling on transgender rights the week before that.

Having wrecked Your Party, this cocktail of unreason now looks likely to intoxicate the Green Party of England and Wales as well. Last week, the Greens elected to their ruling council a woman who recently posted: “Glory to the Iranian resistance, whose courageous fight against the imperialist dogs of the USA has utterly humiliated the Great Satan”. By “resistance” she meant the regime, not its prisoners.

This rising insistence on supporting “anti-imperialist” dictators on the left, of course, presents an open goal to the state media of Moscow, Tehran and Beijing. And it should be a wakeup call for those of us who want a progressive politics rooted in logic and evidence.

It should make us ask what, beyond liberalism, is the basis for a left wing politics that supports political prisoners, not their jailers?

For me, the anchor point has to be the primacy of class. The working class culture I grew up in has largely vanished, and among the places it has survived in, it is now mixed – as it always was, to be honest – with themes of xenophobia and racism. 

But the primary contradiction in a society ruled by market forces and an economy dominated by global finance, is between the haves and have nots, the rich and poor; the workers and – if not their line managers – the private equity groups squeezing them for every penny. 

Detach yourself from working people and you are left with either liberal pragmatism or – and this is what’s emerging among the Greens, Your Party and the far left – a politics where the primary contradiction is between the developed world and the global south. 

And when the “global south” fights back by sending rapists and murderers to attack an Israeli music festival, or anti-ship missiles against the civilian crews of oil tankers, logic demands that otherwise reasonable people in the West cheer them on.

You may be inclined to accommodate this view to a socialism that is concerned about workers’ rights, women’s rights and the just transition beyond carbon in your own country. To say to the pro-Tehran and pro-Hamas left “let’s agree to differ” or even “let’s do both things at once”. 

Suggested Reading

The 60% problem: Why a hotter climate is a crisis for the UK economy

Paul Mason

I am not. But it does not matter. Once hooked on the idea that everything that fights “imperialism” is de facto progressive – even when “imperialism” means the Arab peoples of the Gulf and any Palestinian organisation that still wants a two-state solution – the neo-Leninists cannot coexist with a politics of hope in the global north. 

They are obliged to attack it as their most bitter adversary – just as the original Leninists attacked anarchists, Mensheviks and even the Ukrainian version of Bolshevism – because the very existence of a left-wing politics of hope among working people here invalidates their central claim.

If we were only dealing with people who go on revolutionary sightseeing tours to China it would be easier. But there’s an entire academic discipline – decolonisation theory – premised on the idea that the white working class of Europe and the Americas (together with any ethnic minority that has successfully integrated) are the enemy.

And the political impact reaches much farther than the Green Party. It has created an atmosphere in progressive politics where there can be no dialogue between the centre left and anyone who wants to remain in the kudos economy of the ultras.

In the 1980s, when I was on the militant left of the Labour Party, I would sit in the bars of hotels in Blackpool at conference time arguing the toss with grizzled cold warriors from the engineering union. We thought each other’s politics mistaken. We bought each other pints. We sang the Red Flag at closing time. And when the chips were down – as on the picket lines of Warrington, Wapping and the miner’s strike – we linked arms and pushed.

In the history of this argument between the far left and the centre left, there’s only been one period where the assumption of solidarity broke down: between 1927 and 1934 when the Communist International decreed Europe’s socialist parties to be “social fascist”.

The results? A roster of catastrophic defeats. The victory of Hitler in 1933. The crushing of the Austrian labour movement the following year.

The communist tradition recovered by ditching the theory of social fascism and embracing alliances not just with Labour parties but with “anti-fascist” liberal parties, most notably forming governments with them in both Spain and France in 1936. 

Suggested Reading

Meet Gen Xi: The young westerners falling in love with repressive China

Lucy Reade

But I do not see a way back for the neo-Leninists and their decolonial theory chums. First, because there is no Comintern to give them orders – only the People’s Republic of China. Second, there are thousands of PhDs and hundreds of academic books whose validity depends on this melange of simplistic assertions being right, and the white working class of the global north being irreparably reactionary.

So it’s time for people on the left of politics – including those in the Greens – who care more about the planet than disarming the police of tasers, to state more clearly what we are for.

For me, the term social democracy means exactly what it meant to the German workers who annoyed Marx and Engels by inventing it in the 1870s. It means democracy as the precondition for social justice. It means attachment to the rule of law, to universal rights, to a civil society separate from the state, to freedom to conduct investigative journalism on the claims of public figures – in fact to all seven of the “Western ideas” Xi Jinping wants to ban from Chinese political discourse.

It means seeing the democratic state of a country like ours, for all its imperial roots and trappings, as the more likely tool for achieving what we want than any mixture of struggle “from below”, and a better defender of our energy, information and national security than any letter writing campaign.

We on the left who acknowledge socialism and environmentalism’s roots in the Enlightenment, and want a progressive politics based on logic and evidence, just have to fight for it. Harder.