Debate with the Palestinian Left

The Palestinian Bourgeoisie and the National Program

The ODA (Organization for Democratic Action) held its fourth convention on November 12-13, 1999. Soon afterwards we published a book in Arabic and Hebrew based on the convention's themes. Entitled The Palestinian Question and the Socialist Alternative, it is in three parts: The first is a discussion with the Palestinian National Movement and especially the Palestinian Left. The second relates to globalization and the crisis of capitalism, emphasizing the latter's need to make war in order to rule. The third part looks into globalization as it affects the Middle East and discusses a possible agenda for a solution to the Palestinian question.
Many activists and scholars have urged us to translate the book into English. We have finally begun this project, relying on voluntary efforts. Here we publish Chapter Three, our critique of the Palestinian Left. We shall continue this critique in Chapter Four, next issue. We have decided to publish these sections because they relate to the frequently asked question: What has become of the Palestinian Left?

Since 1948, the key question for the Arab Left and the Marxist parties has been this: What stand ought we to take toward the Arab national bourgeoisie in general and the Palestinian in particular?
The defeat of the regular Arab armies in the 1948 war against Israel opened an era of revolution in the Arab world. These armies, which had served their countries' feudal and colonial regimes, were seen as bearing a large part of the responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe (naqba). The revolutions brought to power the bearers of a new trend: parties of the national bourgeoisie like the Syrian Baath and the Free Officers Movement in Egypt. Under these new parties, too, however, the Arab armies suffered defeat in 1967. The loss destroyed any faith among the Left that the Arab national bourgeois could lead their people's fight in the confrontation with Israel and bring about political and economic independence. The Arab national program, as represented by Egyptian president Jamal Abed al-Nasser, had failed.
Despite the disillusionment, no wave of revolutions followed the defeat of 1967. Far from it: the Arab national bourgeoisie began a process of integration into the world capitalist system. Gradually, national industries were pushed to the sidelines; the bourgeois themselves became a comprador class, submissive to the dictates of global financial institutions.

Foreign-policy steps marked the progress of integration. In 1972 Egypt expelled its Soviet advisers. Seven years later its president, Anwar Sadat, addressed the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem; he then signed a peace agreement with the Zionist state. In 1980 Iraq declared war on the Iranian Revolution, serving (with America's support) as protector of the reactionary Gulf Emirates. The process of integration reached its peak in 1990, after Iraq lost favor with the White House: most countries of the Arab Middle East joined America in its war on Iraq. This was their way of declaring allegiance to the new capitalist world order. An immediate visible result was their acceptance of the American-led Madrid framework for ending the Arab conflict with Israel.

What happened to transform the anti-colonial movements of 1948 into the American puppets of the nineties? The answer lies in the nature of this new bourgeoisie. It had accumulated its wealth from the apparatus of the state. Its members had risen from the ranks of the middle class: army officers, clerks, merchants, and professionals. These people did not belong to the wealthy bourgeoisie, but their lot was much better than that of the peasants or workers. In the late forties, they adopted nationalist aspirations and slogans. They called for the liberation of Arab land, both from colonialism and from Arab feudal overlords. They wanted to build national economies, not merely to serve the interests of foreign capitalists. The main symbols of these aspirations, the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the construction of the Aswan Dam, were established in the late 1950s by Jamal Abed al-Nasser. The aim of Nasser's reforms was not only to build an independent national economy for Egypt, but also to achieve Arab unity. Neither dream was to be realized.

The newly nationalized economy did not primarily serve the masses. Its main beneficiary was the middle class, which controlled the state economy. As they accumulated wealth and position over the years, the members of this new ruling class joined the remnants of the feudal bourgeoisie in seeking a place in the worldwide capitalist system.
The parties of the Palestinian Left have long accepted this analysis of the general Arab bourgeoisie, yet to this day they refuse to apply it to their own branch. They stubbornly hold to the notion that their bourgeois are progressive. This peculiar view rests on the premise that the Palestinian bourgeoisie has an objective interest in liberating the land from Occupation because - unlike the rest of the Arab ruling class - it has no land to rule.

The Palestinian Left and the Arab bourgeoisie

In our attempt to pinpoint the political error made by the Palestinian Left, we shall rely on the critique of the Arab Left by the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). This analysis, part of the theoretical report of the DFLP's national conference of 1981, was published in Arabic for internal distribution under the title, The National Liberation Movement Confronts the Imperialist, Zionist and Reactionary Alliance.
In this valuable document, the DFLP goes so far as to accuse most of the Arab national bourgeoisie of treachery. "By adopting progressive measures, the new Arab bourgeoisie was strengthened. Now, however, they viewed these same measures as hampering their newly gained interests. They were eager to open up to the world capitalist market. The political meaning of this new outlook was to clear the way for imperialism and reaction by eliminating the public sector and permitting free and unlimited capitalist activity. These new interests stood at the basis of the right-wing slide that took place in Egypt, Iraq and Northern Yemen. The new bourgeoisie was transformed into a reactionary force. It threw itself into the arms of Imperialism, abandoning the national liberation movement after betraying its ranks." (P. 138)
The DFLP document deals extensively with the mistakes that the Arab leftist parties made in their relationships with the national bourgeoisie. The conduct of the Egyptian Communist Party is an example. In the mid-1960s it became apparent that many of Nasser's economic projects had failed because of bad management and bureaucratization. To reduce public criticism, Nasser released members of the Communist party from prison. In exchange, the Communists dissolved their party and joined the ruling Socialist Union.
The DFLP document also dismisses a central thesis of the Arab Communist parties concerning "the non-capitalist path to socialism". They had the notion that the Arab "revolutionary" national bourgeoisie could lead the country towards socialism in a peaceful way, without a workers' revolution. This notion was popular in the 1960s, when the bourgeois regimes were implementing progressive reforms. By questioning the need for independent working-class parties, the thesis paved the way for the Arab Left to merge with the bourgeois nationalist parties.

At the start, claims the DFLP, the national bourgeoisie did indeed enjoy wide popular support from the middle classes and the peasantry. Those strata were, after all, the main beneficiaries of the bourgeois economic reforms. As a result, leftist parties avoided criticizing the regimes: they feared isolation from the masses. In addition, the leading national bourgeois parties were famous for their radical rhetoric. But all their fierce words against Zionism and imperialism were so much camouflage, aimed at covering up their flirtation with the West on the one hand and their fierce repression of human rights and the workers' parties on the other.

In confronting this political phenomenon, the DFLP document issued two crucial warnings to the parties of the Arab Left. First, it warned against following the bourgeois leadership, pointing out how easily the interests of the national bourgeoisie could coincide with those of imperialism. Second, it warned against turning over the leadership of the national liberation movement to the bourgeoisie and giving up the class program. Thus the document emphasized the acute need for an independent party of the working class.

The unrealistic strategy of the DFLP

The main theoretical contribution of the 1981 DFLP conference was its insistence on the vanguard role of the working class. "The fate and future of the national liberation movement and its ability to succeed in confronting imperialist schemes and Israeli aggression, as well as its readiness to continue the national democratic march, depend on the vanguard role that the working class will play in its leadership. Only the leadership of the working class can guarantee the conditions for the victory of the democratic national revolution." (P. 164)
The conference defined a new strategic task for the Left: to take the leadership of the national liberation movement away from the bourgeoisie. This definition was based on two premises: that the national bourgeoisie was politically bankrupt, and that precisely then (in the early 1980s), conditions were ripe for achieving socialism. National liberation movements had won significant victories over imperialism, including those in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Angola. The Left was convinced that the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism had reached the final historical stage laid out in the Marxist-Leninist program.

Although it specifies the leading role of the proletariat in the national movement, the DFLP document makes a programmatic mistake that has since proven fatal. In outlining the broad national alliance that the Left must construct, it fails to recognize the working class and the peasantry as the sole components. Rather, it specifies that "the bourgeoisie may and must remain part of the national alliance." (P. 163)
This idea is posed as a theoretical question: "Do we mean to say that the Arab Revolution, at its present stage, has lost its national democratic character and that the alliance with the national bourgeoisie is not necessary anymore and can be dispensed with? The answer is No. But the bourgeoisie's monopoly of the leadership, in the framework of this alliance, does not comply with the objective conditions needed for the revival and progress of the national movement and the national democratic revolution." (P. 163)
The DFLP never carried out its self-defined strategic task - to seize the leadership of its national liberation movement - because its analysis was not consistent. Despite its criticism of the Arab national bourgeoisie, it took a lenient, unrealistic stance toward its own branch of that bourgeoisie.
To justify this inconsistency, the document creates a new concept - one that deviates from Marxist-Leninist tenets - by distinguishing two levels of contradiction. The main contradiction pits the people (including all classes: workers and bourgeois alike) against imperialism and Zionism. Only a secondary contradiction, within the people, divides the Palestinian working class from the bourgeoisie.

Certainly, different classes have always shared common interests in the face of oppression. The French bourgeoisie succeeded in overthrowing its feudal regime with the participation of the workers and the poor; the Russian bourgeoisie did the same. But Marx and Lenin repeatedly warned the workers against the dangers of such cooperation with the bourgeoisie. They held that after seizing power, the same bourgeoisie would not hesitate to massacre the workers as soon as the latter demanded their rights. Recent Arab history bears out this prediction: examples are Muhammad Najib's bloody repression of Egyptian workers after the victory of the Free Officers Revolution in 1952, and the assault that the Iraqi Baath Party made on the workers immediately upon taking power.

After the revolutionary experience of 1905, Lenin summed up his position on alliances for the workers in Russia's bourgeois democratic revolution. In a work called "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," he bluntly proclaimed that the bourgeoisie is not an ally of the working class. Rather, he insisted, it is agricultural laborers who are the workers' strategic allies in the democratic revolution. The Vietnamese Communist Party made the same point in its 1930 program, when it defined the tasks of the national revolution against French colonial rule:
"The bourgeois democratic revolution also includes the agricultural revolution, aimed at overthrowing the French imperialists and the feudal regime so as to achieve independence and lead Vietnam toward socialism. In order to guarantee the success of such a political line there is a need to build a workers' party, to form a workers' and farmers' army, to establish a workers' and peasants' alliance and form a united national front.

"We should create a strong link between the struggle against imperialism and the struggle against feudalism. The workers and the peasants are the main social force of the revolution. Therefore our party should strengthen this alliance and use the revolutionary force of the masses in order to revolt and take power." ("A Concise History of the Vietnamese Workers Party, 1930 - 1970," Arab Institution for Research and Publishing, 1973.)

Despite both theory and experience, the Palestinian Left tried to reconcile the interests of the national bourgeoisie with those of the working class. Such an aim has no precedent in the history of socialist revolution. The working class cannot lead the bourgeoisie, for the simple reason that the latter cannot accept its leadership. The bourgeoisie, after all, has links to foreign capital. It wants to keep its financial advantages. It will always seek to preserve, therefore, its ties to the forces of reaction and imperialism. The bourgeois classes of Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan have demonstrated this; so, also, has that of Palestine, ever since it entered the imperialist orbit by means of the Oslo agreements.
Although the Arab and Palestinian Left are ready to let the bourgeoisie lead them in the national struggle, the bourgeoisie does not take up the offer. History has amply shown that when the bourgeois have to choose between their own narrow class interests and those of the people, they will choose their own, even at the cost of allying themselves with the enemy. The Oslo Accords bluntly ended the Left's illusions about the supposedly revolutionary characteristics of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. In the framework of Oslo, the latter made commitments to Israel even deeper and more dangerous than those made by Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, whom the DFLP document had accused of treason.

The Palestinian Left shares the ills of the Arab Left

The demise of the DFLP springs directly from its earlier programmatic mistakes. At first, when the Oslo Accords were signed, the leftist parties began a campaign against them, calling on Palestinians to boycott the Palestinian Authority (PA), which had joined the colonialist system. The aim was to bring the bourgeoisie back into the national camp. When this failed, the organized Left decided to acknowledge Oslo as a fait accompli; it began calling for national unity, this time on the basis of simply "overlooking" Oslo. Instead of doing its utmost to isolate the bourgeoisie from the masses, the Palestinian Left put all its efforts into finding a national common denominator with the bourgeoisie. The latter, of course, never committed itself to this common denominator. The bourgeois simply used the concept to cover up their surrender so as to keep their grip on the masses. The illusion of national unity among all classes served bourgeois interests and prevented the Left from fulfilling its strategic task: to create a political alternative.

How ironic! The same right-wing tendencies of the Arab Left, so aptly criticized in the DFLP document fifteen years earlier, now infected the Party itself. The 1981 document says: "The right-wing theories and the tail-end policies towards the national bourgeoisie, the misunderstanding of its role in the national democratic revolution, kept the working class from becoming aware of its leading role in the Arab national liberation movement and weakened its left wing. They hindered the struggle of the working-class parties to rally the masses around their politics and program as an alternative to the wavering policies of the bourgeois leadership. They also impeded the achievement of a gradual change in the balance of forces inside the national movement, such as would have permitted the working class and the Left in general to fulfill its leadership task.

"Moreover, these theories and ideas resulted in the missing of valuable opportunities, when the balance of forces could have enabled the working class to get a leading role." (Op. cit., pp. 188-189.) But it was the DFLP itself that missed valuable opportunities. During the Intifada of 1987, it took the lead by publishing the first manifesto of the United Leadership. But the party failed to seize this historic opportunity to take over the leadership of the Palestinian people and isolate the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Instead, it remained committed to unity with Fatah, even after Arafat gave up the National Charter and started the dialogue with America. Thus, all too soon, the United Leadership of the first Intifada became an instrument of the corrupt bourgeois in Tunisia. These people strove toward their own class goals at the expense of the Palestinian working class and the mass of the refugees.

The gravity of the error was soon apparent. At the end of 1988, a deep rift opened in the ranks of the DFLP. A major section of the party, among both the leaders and the rank-and-file, joined the right-wing Yasser Abed Rabo, who became Arafat's chief negotiator. This was the price the party paid for passing the keys of the Intifada to Arafat instead of curtailing his influence over the masses. Here was the biggest revolutionary upsurge in Palestinian history. It had the potential of allowing the workers' party, for the first time, to take a leading role in the liberation movement. Instead, the party split in two, thus ending its relevance for the masses.

The main reason for the DFLP's retreat lies in its irresolute attitude toward the bourgeoisie. This lack of clarity opened the DFLP's leading bodies to infiltration by bourgeois positions. As a result, many of the party's leading cadres went over to Arafat's camp.
Objective conditions at the international level during this period certainly helped the bourgeoisie to increase its influence, both among the masses and within the ranks of the Left. The political regression in the Soviet Union after Gorbachev came to power, and the ensuing collapse of the socialist camp, left America as the sole world power. This change offered right-wingers and opportunists in the DFLP a powerful incentive to split away.
However, the deep influence of the opportunists within the party was not incidental, nor did it grow up overnight. It was rooted in long years of cooperation between the DFLP and the Palestinian national bourgeoisie within the framework of the PLO. While the Left cherished the illusion that the Palestinian bourgeoisie would not betray its national program, the bourgeoisie was making plans to split the Left in order to keep its leading position.

When the DFLP called on the working class to cooperate with the national bourgeoisie in leading the liberation movement, it was trying to avoid confrontation. But confrontation was inevitable. The repressive regime that the PA established in conjunction with Israel had roots that the DFLP preferred to forget: among them, for example, was Arafat's murderous elimination - during the seventies and eighties - of opponents within his own Fatah organization. There had never been a real possibility of building a common national movement between the working class and the treacherous Palestinian bourgeoisie. Despite the Left's wishful thinking, this bourgeoisie does not differ in nature from its broader Arab counterpart. Where has the Palestinian Left stood since the Palestinian bourgeoisie, like other Arab regimes, went over to the enemy camp? What is its strategy? Is it sticking to its main task, to take over the leadership of the national movement?
The Left does not appear to be interested in such questions now. It sees its main task today as one of dialogue with the PA, in order to convince it to retreat from its commitment to the Oslo accords. One of the leaders of the DFLP has described the relationship between the Left and the PA in these words: "Nobody in the Left's ranks proposes or intends or calls for the establishment of an alternative Authority or a parallel one. This means the recognition of the exclusivity of the PA. But to ask the opposition consequently to abide by the unfair commitments imposed on the PA by the Accords will mean to empty the opposition of its content." (From the Ramallah bi-weekly, al-Massar, mid-April, 1999). Thus the Left has abandoned the goal of replacing the bourgeois PA. It merely asks that the latter recognize its activity as a peaceful opposition which expresses its opinion without questioning the Authority's legitimacy.

In supporting a repressive and corrupt regime, the Palestinian bourgeoisie behaves like its counterparts elsewhere. Likewise, the Palestinian Left now shares the crisis of the Arab Left. It has placed itself in the very situation it warned against some twenty years ago.

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