Month: March 2025

Ghassan Kanafani, China, and the global struggle against imperialism

The following review by Carlos Martinez of Ghassan Kanafani — Selected Political Writings first appeared in the Morning Star.

This new volume from Pluto Press, edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi, brings together some of the most important essays, manifestos and journalistic reports by the revered Palestinian writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani.

Kanafani is best known for his literary works, all of which are deeply imbued with the spirit of anti-colonial resistance. His novels, short stories and essays, such as Men in the Sun (1962) and Returning to Haifa (1969), vividly depict the experiences of exile, dispossession and resilience, giving voice to the Palestinian collective memory.

Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine observes that, “among the literary figures whose ideas and images played a major role in the revival of Palestinian identity, Kanafani was perhaps the most prominent prose writer and the most widely translated”.

Kanafani also made important contributions as a journalist, theorist and political activist. Indeed, the editors of Selected Political Writings consider that he was “Palestine’s greatest Marxist thinker. His ideas – forged in the firepit of war, crisis and armed resistance – are flammable materials, rich in the lessons of the revolutionary sparks which ignited his era.”

Kanafani was spokesperson of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP – a Marxist-Leninist organisation that forms part of the resistance front in Gaza today) from the time of its formation in 1969, and co-authored its program, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.

A powerful and consistent advocate of armed struggle against colonial occupation, and of the centrality of the working class and peasantry in the struggle for national liberation, Kanafani was deeply influenced by the ideas of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, and situated the Palestinian liberation struggle within the broader global struggle against imperialism and for socialism. His two visits to China (in 1965 and 66) “left a comparably profound mark on his thinking”.

Indeed, on page 113 of Selected Political Writings, in an extract from Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, we find: “The Palestinian and Arab liberation movement in alliance with national liberation movements in all undeveloped and poor countries will, in facing world imperialism led by the USA, find a strong ally to back its forces and augment its power of resistance. This ally is the People’s Republic of China.”

In a review for Counterfire, Michael Lavalette notes, with perhaps a hint of disapproval, that the PFLP’s Marxism was “heavily influenced by Third World, anti-colonial, armed struggles”. In Lavalette’s view, this is “not the classical Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky with its emphasis on the ‘self-emancipation’ of the working class”.

This comment brings Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism – recently reviewed in these pages – to mind. In their introduction to the English translation of that book, Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill observe that “Eastern and Western Marxism … refer to two different political orientations… One of them is dedicated to the difficult and drawn-out process of building socialism in a capitalist-dominated world and, in particular, across the Global South, which has been the principal site for such endeavours thus far. The other is generally dismissive of such practical undertakings, often belittling concrete struggles against imperialism because they do not live up to an imagined standard of theoretical or moral purity.”

Kanafani’s writings and record of activity locate his thought very much within the sphere of Eastern Marxism. There is no “imagined standard of theoretical or moral purity”, and a great deal of “concrete struggle against imperialism”. He took tremendous inspiration from the construction of “actually existing socialism” and the revolutionary anti-colonial struggles waging around the world, and situated the Palestinian struggle within a global united front against imperialism.

In our struggle for the liberation of Palestine, we face primarily world imperialism… The major conflict experienced by the world of today is the conflict between exploiting world imperialism on the one hand, and these peoples [of Africa, Asia and Latin America] and the socialist camp on the other. The alliance of the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movement with the liberation movement in Vietnam, the revolutionary situation in Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America is the only way to create a camp that is capable of facing and triumphing over the imperialist camp. (p113)

Interestingly, the PFLP was one of only a handful of organisations globally to successfully navigate the Sino-Soviet Split, maintaining good relations with both the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. While clearly closer to China’s strategic orientation at the time, it recognised the Soviet Union as a “major supporter of the Arab masses in their fight against imperialism”, and benefitted from Soviet weapons, training and scholarships.

It’s also worth noting that the PFLP continues to maintain close links with People’s China. In July 2023, Deputy Secretary-General Jamil Mezher described China as a springboard for important global transformations that put an end to US imperialist hegemony and its savage policies in the world, and commended China’s constant support for the just causes of the Palestinian people in their struggle to restore their legitimate national rights.

Ghassan Kanafani’s ideas profoundly shaped Palestinian identity and resistance during a critical period of struggle against occupation and displacement. His influence was such that the Israeli foreign intelligence service saw fit to assassinate him on 8 July 1972. However, this despicable act (which can but remind us of so many other similarly despicable operations carried out by Mossad in the last 16 months), did not silence Kanafani, did not prevent his words from resonating. His clear-sighted and skilful application of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete reality of the Palestinian resistance has lost none of its relevance or its influence.

As Kanafani wrote, “the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever they are, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era” (p95). As such, Selected Political Writings deserves to be widely read. The editors have performed a most valuable service in making Kanafani’s political contributions available for readers of English.

Strategic autonomy or Stockholm syndrome: whither Europe?

The following article by Carlos Martinez, first published in the Morning Star, assesses Western Europe’s position regarding the prospects for peace in Ukraine.

Political leaders in western Europe occasionally like to talk up the need for “strategic autonomy” from the US. Emmanuel Macron in particular placed it at the centre of his foreign policy platform at the start of his presidency eight years ago, and has raised the issue several times since.

The idea of Europe exercising strategic autonomy rather than simply outsourcing its foreign policy to Washington is not new, but rather a reiteration of Charles de Gaulle’s ideas on international relations from the 1950s.

There have been a handful of noteworthy examples of its deployment in the 21st century. France, under president Jacques Chirac, and Germany, under Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, refused to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The reason given is that they were not convinced by the dubious intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The real reason is that France and Germany had no interest in pursuing the intended outcome of that war: US control of Iraq’s vast reserves of high-quality, easily extractable oil.

Despite repeated warnings from multiple US administrations (Obama, Trump and Biden), Germany participated in the planning and construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, providing cheap natural gas from Russia to central Europe via the Baltic Sea.

Again in spite of the “friendly advice” of the Obama administration, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain all signed up to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — headquartered in Beijing and first proposed by China — in 2016. This at a time when the US was several years into its Pivot to Asia.

And yet, in the US-led “post-war international order,” strategic autonomy has largely been honoured in the breach. The truth is that exercising strategic autonomy is not as easy as it sounds, given the US’s actually existing economic and military hegemony.

The centrality of the US dollar to the global economy, along with the cynical use of the IMF and World Bank to further Wall Street’s agenda, causes Western governments to think twice about defying instructions emanating from the White House.

Meanwhile, the US overwhelmingly provides the muscle for an imperialist world order that western Europe — along with Japan, Canada and Australia — benefits from, albeit not to the same degree as the US itself.

“McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,” and ultimately the US’s nuclear arsenal, Nato, hundreds of overseas military bases and an elaborate system of troop and weapons deployments around the world all have their role to play in maintaining the flow of profits from periphery to metropole.

As such, the privileging of US economic and strategic interests is built into the imperialist world system. Faced, therefore, with the choice of embracing the multipolar trajectory or seeking shelter under an increasingly leaky and fragile US hegemonic umbrella, Europe has tended towards the latter.

The examples are numerous. Britain’s involvement in Aukus; French and British enthusiasm for the war of regime change against Libya; European imposition of sanctions against China on entirely fictional charges of human rights abuses in Xinjiang — to name but a few. But rarely has this toxic relationship been more evident than with Europe’s total subservience in Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This is a war from which the US has benefited and Europe has suffered in equal measure. The US military-industrial complex has — to coin a phrase — made a killing. Shareholders in the US fracking industry are sitting pretty, while European pensioners shiver their way through another long winter of high energy prices resulting from sanctions on Russian natural gas. All in the name of a disastrous and entirely unnecessary conflict in which an estimated million people have lost their lives.

Now all of a sudden, Donald Trump is back and a new tune is playing on the Pentagon speakers. Team Trump has clearly come to the conclusion that, rather than trying to wage a new cold war on multiple fronts, it would be better for the US to build a rapprochement with Russia and consolidate forces against China, by now the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms, the major trading partner of two-thirds of the world’s countries, and the leading force in the multipolar trajectory.

For the US, extricating itself from an unwinnable war in Ukraine is an essential first step down this road. But Europe finds itself in a quandary. On the one hand, a withdrawal from Ukraine that Starmer and Macron can put down to a whimsical and capricious White House resident could be just what the doctor ordered.

On the other hand, it’s painful for London, Paris and Berlin to have their subordinate role in the empire hierarchy so brutally exposed. Meanwhile, if Trump’s turn to China means that Britain, France and Germany are forced to “decouple” from China and significantly reduce trade and investment, that will likely have an even more deleterious effect on their economies than the sanctions on Russia.

All in all, now would be an excellent time for Europe to seriously develop its strategic autonomy; to accept that the world is moving in the direction of multilateralism and sovereignty; to accept that imperialism is in decline; and to develop positive and mutually beneficial relations with China, with Russia, with Iran, with the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Such a programme is by no means easy, but it is obviously necessary.

Unfortunately, this is not the way things are going. Starmer, Macron, Merz and Meloni, instead of adapting to a shifting reality, are desperately (“pathetically” is perhaps more precise) trying to persuade Trump to get the band back together and recommit to the Ukraine war. The endlessly hawkish Starmer, channelling Tony Blair and George W Bush, has proposed a “coalition of the willing” to “bring a durable peace” to Ukraine by means of, well, keeping the war going as long as possible.

He has even offered British “boots on the ground and planes in the air.” Given Russia’s oft-stated and not-unreasonable position that it will never accede to Nato troops in Ukraine, any such British deployment would likely look more like “planes on the ground and boots in the air.”

Meanwhile, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says that “Europe urgently needs to rearm and member states must be given the fiscal space to carry out a surge in defence spending.” That is, European workers must accept ever-deeper austerity in order to help out our arms manufacturers and defend our democracy from Big, Bad Vlad.

If Europe continues down this treacherous path, the continent will see further decline, poverty, inequality, instability and conflict, inevitably accompanied by racist scapegoating and the rise of the far right. Working-class and oppressed communities should ask themselves whether they accept such a destiny.