Imagine that the Socialist Workers Party and its organized supporters and friends had....

Post from a comrade on FB:

Imagine that the Socialist Workers Party and its organized supporters and friends had failed to notice the degeneration of the FSLN; and were still supporting them in elections. They are now a left-nationalist bourgeois party. US imperialism may still not like them, but at some point, they may need them. There are lots of individuals and groups who still don’t get it. They should read New International no. 9: ‘The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution.’

Imagine that we hadn’t noticed the degeneration of the ANC, and were giving them left cover as they, like the Sandinistas had their orgy of breaking piñatas.

What if we had failed to understand the nature of the Bernard Coard-led counterrevolution in Grenada, and hadn’t continued defending the legacy of Maurice Bishop? (See New International no. 6)

As far back as New International no. 7, dated 1991, Jack Barnes was writing about the bourgeoisification of the PLO.

Lenin said, and maybe someone has the full quote, that we support bourgeois national liberation movements only if they are “really revolutionary.” [LCW, vol. 31, p. 242.]

Does Hamas, a reactionary Jew-hating bourgeois-clerical movement meet that criteria? Does the Palestine authority? Really?

It’s not the Socialist Workers Party that has abandoned the Palestinians; it’s their own mis-leadership. And the stakes in getting this right are even greater than with Nicaragua and South Africa, because of the economic crisis, which has, as always, resulted in a rise of Jew-hatred, especially in France, where many Jews are either fleeing to Israel, or re-ghettoizing themselves!

People who think that the party shouldn’t have changed its call for a democratic secular Palestine, are living in another era, and should reread and discuss “Israel and the Arab Revolution,’ still available from Pathfinder or Amazon. Today, to the extent one can speak of an Arab Revolution, it has nothing to do with Israel and the Palestinians; it is about winning democratic rights in their own countries. And this is true beyond the Arab world, such as in Iran, where recent protests were not only against economic conditions, but also against Iran's war in Syria and elsewhere, and its support of Hezbollah and similar-type reactionary groups. (Much of the middle class "left" supports the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, but this is not what working people are interested in fighting for). And as I stated, there is no revolutionary national group leading the Palestinians. We support their struggle for a state of their own, regardless of the lack of leadership. It’s a lot better than pretending that Hamas and Fatah are revolutionary organizations.