by Theresa Henry
Campism is a factor holding back an international movement against authoritarianism—including Trumpist fascism. By campism, I mean the idea that the world is divided into an imperialist camp, which corresponds to the United States and its allies, and an “anti-imperialist” camp, which corresponds to anti-American or Western regimes. Unfortunately for those struggling against authoritarianism worldwide, this conception dominates much of the left. This is unfortunate because, as I will demonstrate, campism leads the left to work against or remain aloof from democratic social movements while helping to consolidate authoritarian regimes.
For example, campists have refused to aid progressive movements in Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran, among other countries, ostensibly because these regimes are “anti-imperialist.” Further, in the United States, campists have accommodated Trumpism because they see it as beneficial for empowering Putin’s regime in Russia and establishing a “multi-polar” world. In doing so, campists have elevated the support of authoritarian regimes to the status of a principle of “international solidarity.” What is implied, if not stated outright, is that these states are the real anti-imperialist forces, and the people fighting against them are imperialist pawns. From this principle all campist positions and activity flow.
Yet there is a different way to conceive of the world. Marxist-Humanists conceive of the world as divided into “two worlds in each country.” Raya Dunayevskaya used this principle to refer to the division in each country between the ruling class and “the masses in opposition … armed with the most powerful weapon of all—the idea of Freedom.” For Marxist-Humanists, this principle holds in the United States as much as it holds in Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, or anywhere else. In all cases, our concern is supporting the struggle of progressive and revolutionary movements against the regimes they are fighting. Unlike campism, this conception of the world elaborates on rather than rejects the central principle of socialist internationalism: people-to-people solidarity across nations.
Russian bombardment on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photo credit: Wikipedia.
Looking at three countries—Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran—I want to make three points about campism. First, the campist idea that the world is divided into two camps involves substituting states for social movements. Second, the campist position on Russia is self-contradictory: against US imperialism, but for it at the same time. Third, campists have aided and continue to aid the consolidation of indefensible regimes. Throughout, I will counterpose the Marxist-Humanist principle of “two worlds in each country” to campism. Finally, I will conclude by discussing how campism accommodates Trumpism.
Afghanistan: The Campist Substitution
The campist conception of the world requires a treacherous substitution of states for social movements. In other words, it is a substitution of bourgeois rulers for workers and other progressive forces, such as Indigenous peoples, the peasantry, women, youth, national and ethnic minorities, etc. In principle, it is a substitution of bourgeois nationalism for proletarian internationalism. In practice, it is a substitution of the defence of states for the development of people-to-people, organization-to-organization, and movement-to-movement solidarity. Therefore, the campist substitution is treacherous (a word I use advisedly): it betrays social revolution.
To clarify, let us look at one of Marxist-Humanist Initiative’s (MHI’s) first editorials, “We Protest, We Condemn.” In this editorial, we recount an experience of ours at an International Socialist Organization (ISO) conference in 2010:
we attended the … conference to hear the Afghan feminist and human rights advocate Malalai Joya, who was on tour promoting her recent book, A Woman Among Warlords. Joya had been expelled from the Afghan parliament for speaking the truth about the warlords in the government. She gave a beautiful speech calling for women’s rights and democracy as well as an end to the U.S. war. The ISO still proceeded to speak as if the only matter to be discussed was U.S. imperialism. One of us got the floor and repeated Joya’s call to support the Afghanis’ own struggles against their rulers and oppressors—adding that our talking about this was a way to build the U.S. anti-war movement. At the end of our member’s remarks, Joya got up, bent down over the edge of the stage, and kissed her on both cheeks. Whereupon an ISO speaker jumped up to say, on the contrary, that we should engage only in “knee-jerk anti-U.S. imperialism” (his words).
At this conference, the ISO speakers failed to credit the women’s and pro-democracy movements in Afghanistan as the potential forces of revolution. Instead, they chose to support the alleged “lesser evil,” which, in this case, was Afghan warlords. Thus, they suggested that neither the people of Afghanistan nor the anti-war movement in the US should be considered the main agents in the battle against American imperialism. Judging by their actions, the ISO speakers thought that, in this case, the main agent in the battle of American imperialism was the rulers of Afghanistan.
Conversely, MHI argues in “We Protest, We Condemn” that unconditional support for regimes simply because they are anti-American or anti-Western “can only hurt oppressed people in other countries, endanger Leftists here by giving the government an excuse to attack the Left, and cripple the Left’s ability to build mass movements against U.S policies.” Further, MHI members identified Afghan people and social movements as progressive forces.
Our view is diametrically opposed to that of the campists. But which view is more coherent? That depends on your goal.
If your goal is a classless society, i.e., socialism, because you see global capitalism as your greatest enemy, then it is completely incoherent to support capitalist and authoritarian regimes. If your goal, however, is not a classless society but a “multi-polar” world, that is, a world defined by multiple competing imperialist powers rather than by American hegemony, then perhaps supporting anti-American regimes is effective—even if they are bourgeois and authoritarian. What is incoherent about the campist view is that it regards this multi-polar world as a step towards socialism. In other words, it claims that by empowering the ruling class of certain countries, we get closer to a classless society.
Ukraine: Campist Contradictions
Above, I assumed for the sake of argument that campist positions and activities weaken the American ruling class. But this is not a point that can be taken for granted. In the case of Russia, it is unlikely that supporting Putin will weaken the American ruling class—at least not now that Trump has been re-elected. Putin’s regime has interfered with American democracy on Trump’s behalf. Further, Putinism shares an ideological affinity with Trumpism. In a March 2022 editorial, “Ukraine Fights for National Self-Determination Against Russian Imperialism,” MHI wrote that “Trumpism and Putinism are two facets of one and the same struggle…[they are] two manifestations of a rising global tide of authoritarianism and rejection of liberal democracy.” To defend Putinism, then, is to accommodate Trumpism.
There is a self-contradiction within campism here. The second Donald Trump presidency will likely mean the end of liberal democracy in the United States, meaning that the state will be empowered at the expense of individual rights and civil liberties. Accommodation of Trumpism is thus accommodation of an especially racist, sexist, and authoritarian form of bourgeois rule in the United States. One does not undermine American imperialism by accommodating this; one strengthens it. In other words, campists have not only aligned themselves with imperialist Russian rulers but American ones too—underneath the guise of fighting American imperialism!
Another contradiction with the campist position on Russia is that while campists claim to be the true heirs of the Leninist tradition, they completely break with Lenin’s conception of social revolution. Lenin writes in “The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up”:
The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.
While campists can say that they support “small nations” insofar as such small nations “play a part” in the global struggle against “the imperialist camp,” they cannot say that Russia is a “small nation.” Nor can campists, who repeatedly defend regimes that repress progressive and workers’ movements because they are ostensibly “anti-imperialist,” deny that they are at odds with Lenin regarding who is the subject of anti-imperialist struggle is and, therefore, what are “the dialectics of history.”
It is worth taking Lenin’s position seriously, as it is relevant to the current Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism. In an article on the Commons website entitled “Resistance and Solidarity: The Left Volunteer Movement in the Russo-Ukrainian War,” Vladyslav Starodubtsev describes how leftists “fighting side by side in the army allows for strengthening the left authority and building new contacts.” He also describes how “the state’s impotence in fulfilling its social role formed a vacuum filled by decentralized cooperation.” By “decentralized cooperation,” he means that socialists, students, and workers came together to find ways to meet the daily survival needs of Ukrainians and to develop eco-socialist and eco-anarchist alternatives to the Ukrainian government’s economic policies.
Through their mass resistance to Russian imperialism, Ukrainian socialists, feminists, and trade unionists are helping lay the foundation of a less-exploitative and more-democratic postwar Ukraine. To realize this postwar society, however, they must be victorious in the war. Thus, while there are multiple contradictions in the campist position, there are no contradictions in MHI’s position that supporting the Ukrainian resistance could lead to a freer Ukraine or in our argument that our position follows Lenin’s position of who the “real anti-imperialist” forces are.
Iran: Campists Consolidating Reaction
Unsurprisingly, campists have not only defended indefensible regimes. They have also aided in the consolidation of these regimes. For example, campists have a long history of defending the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). They have done this despite the facts that the IRI does not represent any fundamental challenge to capitalist production; it has virtually eliminated women’s rights; it grants virtually no rights for LGBTQ people; it has outlawed independent worker organizations; it has suppressed multiple movements for national autonomy; and it has one of the highest execution rates in the world—among other indefensible qualities.
Even after the 2023 Jina Uprising, a movement led by women and youth explicitly calling for an end to the Islamic Republic and its replacement with a democratic and even socialist society,[1] campists have continued to support the IRI regime (notwithstanding a fig-leaf reference to “the domestic reality of Iran”):
However, while socialists should see the domestic reality of Iran and not fall into the trap of romanticizing anti-American political forces, they should not let the orthodox view about the relation between capitalism and imperialism cloud their judgment about the reality of anti-imperialist struggles.
The example of Iran is significant because it shows that campists willingly aid in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes. During the 1979 revolution in Iran, campists could certainly see what kind of regime the Islamic Republican Party was trying to establish. While most “Marxists” were aligning themselves with Ayatollah Khomeini, in large part because of his anti-imperialist rhetoric, Raya Dunayevskaya said that Khomeini was a “second shah” who was trying to “complete the counter-revolution.” Instead of supporting Khomeini, she urged the left to support what she called the true revolutionary forces: the proletariat, the peasantry, the ethnic minorities fighting for self-determination, the women’s liberation movement, the revolutionary intellectuals, and the youth.
But there is even more evidence that “Marxists” did not support the Islamic Republican Party because Khomeini duped them. In an interview on the Commons website, Frieda Afary says that Iranian intellectuals at the time “were influenced by Stalinism and Maoism” and that “most leftist and nationalist intellectuals thought they could make an alliance with the religious fundamentalists to get rid of the king, and then gain power.” Ultimately, some leftists voted in favour of an Islamic Republic during a referendum because “they considered it an effort to fight US imperialism.” “Marxist” support for the Islamic Republic was a direct consequence of their idea that all struggles should be subordinated to the struggle against American imperialism and that the new Islamic state would be a powerful agent in this struggle.
Even worse, Marxists supported the Islamic Republican Party against revolutionary Iranian women. In the same interview, Afary describes how “a small part of the Iranian left supported these women at first, and there were even some leftist men, who came to their demonstration and protected women against the attacks by Islamic fundamentalists.” Yet even these leftist men eventually told the women, “You know, you should stop this because this is really taking attention away from the main goal of the struggle, which is fighting US imperialism.” Meanwhile, these women chanted, “We made the revolution for freedom and got unfreedom.” Thus, in 1979, campists consciously aligned themselves with the counter-revolution in Iran.
Conclusion: Implications for the United States
Campists continue to align themselves with counter-revolutionary forces, not just in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, but in the United States as well. Some do so directly by adopting soft-on-Trump or even pro-Trump politics. Others do so indirectly by remaining aloof from democratic social movements. While campists may have many reasons for remaining aloof from democratic social movements in the United States, there is one that immediately follows the principle that states, rather than mass movements, will defeat American imperialism. If that is your principle, then you have rejected the need to build “a mass movement, independent of capitalist interests and politics” (emphasis added) to fight American imperialism—or to fight one expression of it, Trumpism.
January 6 Trumpist insurrection at the United States Capitol Building, Washington, DC. Photo Credit: Wikipedia.
We, however, do not need to adopt that principle. If we recognize that there are “two worlds in each country,” we can see that the United States is not only a world of rulers and owners who compete for control over the world’s resources and human lives. In opposition to it, there is also a world of regular people (born in the country and from around the globe) fighting against a political movement headed by a particularly grim representative of the American capitalist class—Donald Trump.
Further, if we see the “two worlds” in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, we can identify the lessons the progressive and revolutionary movements of these countries offer the American left. These examples demonstrate that it is possible to fight American imperialism and the policies of one’s own government simultaneously.
For example, in Ukraine, the medium through which society is being transformed is the mass resistance to Russia’s imperialist war. This means that the socialists, anarchists, feminists, and trade unionists in the Ukrainian resistance are aligned with their government in opposition to Russia’s invasion, yet opposed to their government’s policies and rule. From this, I can draw two lessons for the United States. The first is that it is possible to align with Democrats and their supporters who oppose Trumpism against Trumpism while remaining opposed to the policies and rule of the Democratic Party. The second is that the American left may be able to expand and transform American democracy through the struggle to preserve it.
The consequences of ignoring these lessons are profound. By ignoring the revolutionary potential of mass democratic movements, campists fail to grasp that the new society is, in Dunayevskaya’s words, “gestating in the old.” Failure to act on this idea is an abdication of our responsibility as revolutionaries to help build that new society. The immediate consequence of this abdication is that the self-proclaimed revolutionary left in the United States has aided in the consolidation of the fascistic regime that Trump will reign over, now that he has been elected again.
Note
[1] For a discussion of alternatives for Iranian society after the IRI regime collapses, see “The Battle of Alternatives,” parts one and two, based on conversations among Marxist organizations inside Iran that the Slingers Collective hosted.
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