By Adhiraj — New Wave
Shortly after Sheikh Hasina’s regime was overthrown, an unusual propaganda campaign began to emerge, particularly among right-wing nationalist circles in India. Following the Stalinists’ example, they blamed the United States and the CIA for the youth-led revolution. Added to this conspiracy are China and Pakistan and their intelligence agency, the ISI, which joined forces to overthrow India’s favored government, led by the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina.
From this perspective, the complex social processes and mass discontent that led to the political overthrow can be reduced to a conspiracy by a clique of spies who financed the “agitators.” Right-wing nationalists in India have repeated the same propaganda we’ve seen in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine during democratic revolutions against autocratic regimes perceived as opposed to the imperial interests of the United States and Europe. It is important to note that these regimes were perceived as opposed to Western imperialism, as none of them offered any realistic resistance to it.
However, each of these regimes positioned itself against the West. An important part of the propaganda for dictators threatened by mass popular mobilizations is to present themselves as victims while exercising enormous repressive power against their own people. They do this by invoking grand conspiracy theories and intrigues hatched by clandestine Western intelligence agencies or covert operations. Stalinists amplify this propaganda because protecting reactionary Bonapartist regimes is more important to them than analyzing complex social processes and positioning themselves to lead any mass mobilization.
Sheikh Hasina is now following in the footsteps of Assad and Gaddafi, backed by an army of Indian nationalist conspirators supporting her absurd claims.
However, there are undeniable cases in which Western imperialism plays a role. Without a revolutionary party or the direct involvement of the working class, the revolutionary process loses direction. This creates opportunities for the imperialist bourgeoisie to hijack, subvert, and corrupt the process. Ultimately, the democratic revolution fails, and the chaos in Libya and the rise of Zelensky’s neoliberal government are some of the results of that process.
Democratic revolutions
As early as 1848, Marx concluded that the bourgeoisie could no longer play a progressive role in history. His conclusions in The Communist Manifesto were confirmed and expanded upon in 1905 by Trotsky in his writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution. Trotsky stated that the proletariat must fulfill the goals of democratic revolution as part of the socialist revolution because the bourgeoisie could no longer play a progressive role in history. We continue to live in the era of imperialism. Not only is the bourgeoisie incapable of playing its historical role, but the advance of imperialist capital has also made it nearly impossible.
However, history does not occur in a vacuum. While the bourgeoisie is unable to fulfill the task of democratic revolutions, the proletariat suffers from a lack of class consciousness. More importantly, it lacks the revolutionary leadership necessary to fulfill its historical role as the gravedigger of capitalism. With each passing year, the contradictions of capitalism deepen and the objective conditions mature, but the subjective conditions stagnate.
The dialectic that arises from these seemingly contradictory forces is that revolutionary situations often erupt without the working class playing a leading role, let alone assuming a leadership position, and without a revolutionary socialist party.
Time and again, history has proven that no democratic revolution can succeed without being part of the socialist revolution, a lesson we must learn once more. Under bourgeois and petty-bourgeois rule, failure is inevitable.
We have seen such eruptions wither away in Sri Lanka and Egypt. In Ukraine, the revolutionary potential is increasingly being hijacked by Zelensky’s neoliberal agenda.
Using the Maidan mobilization as a pretext for patriotic self-defense, the bourgeois government of Ukraine has exploited the war to deepen the country’s dependence on imperialist capital. This has given Blackrock access to Ukraine’s resources, dismantled the last progressive labor laws of the Soviet era, enriched the oligarchy, and repeatedly failed against the Russian army.
For Stalinists, the term “color revolution” best describes the Maidan protests, the Syrian civil war, and the Libyan chaos. They claim that all of these were “Western-orchestrated” conspiracies in which agencies stoked minor “discontent” that is normally minimized or dismissed altogether. They overlook the fact that these were all brutal capitalist dictatorships that collaborated with imperialism and used the enormous power of the state to repress their own people.
The discontent was natural and the protests were not staged; however, they suffered from the same fundamental weakness that plagued the revolutionary processes in Libya and Egypt. The working class was absent from the revolutionary leadership, and there was no revolutionary party at the helm.
Today, Assad’s dictatorship has been overthrown by a coalition led by the HTS, an Islamist entity backed by Turkey. Its leader, Al Sharar (also known as Jolani), has reached an agreement with Russia and promised a free market system for Syria, which will likely lead to continued imperialist domination.
In Libya, a bourgeois transitional government based in Tripoli is embroiled in a bloody civil war that takes the form of a proxy war. Rival nations back one faction or the other, destroying all the achievements of the progressive nationalist revolution of the 1960s. This pattern has been repeated in many countries, where revolutionary processes are frustrated, derailed, or crushed by triumphant counterrevolution. At the heart of this failure lies not an imperialist conspiracy, but rather the inability to establish a viable revolutionary working-class party and the absence of the working class and its socialist program at the center of the democratic revolution.
The Nepalese exception
The only possible exception to this process is Nepal, where a self-proclaimed communist party led the democratic revolution that overthrew the autocratic monarchy and established a bourgeois democratic republic. However, many fundamental democratic objectives were not fulfilled, such as agrarian reform. Nepal is perhaps the only example of a democratic revolution that has resisted counterrevolution and maintained bourgeois political leadership.
The revolution was neither crushed nor triumphant. Instead, the revolution was deliberately slowed down, largely by the Maoist leadership itself. The “new democracy” in Nepal is simply the old bourgeois democracy repackaged with revolutionary jargon.
Today, Nepal has provided a political platform for right-wing Hindu fundamentalists, pro-monarchists, and the former liberal bourgeoisie, who openly collaborated with the autocratic monarchy and India. Far from being nationalized, foreign capital has found an increasingly favorable environment in which to operate, while a small section of the Nepalese bourgeoisie is getting richer. The majority of Nepal’s population remains poor and exploited, much as they were before the revolution.
Despite the revolution’s success in Nepal, there have been failures in most respects due to the Maoists’ inability to consolidate their position among the working class or implement a socialist program. Key democratic goals, such as agrarian reform and liberation from imperialism, remain difficult to achieve.
Today, the outdated arguments about color revolutions and CIA conspiracies have returned to the spotlight as a seemingly “pro-China” government led by Maoists has been overthrown by a movement led by young workers and students. Indian Maoists have spoken out in favor of the movement, but some Stalinist groups cannot overcome Cold War calculations. To them, the overthrow of the traitorous Maoist government is another “color revolution.”
The Strategy of Democratic Reaction
The bourgeoisie has many tools in its arsenal, which it deploys against the masses during a revolution. In the era of revolution, every democratic revolutionary process has the potential to evolve into a socialist revolution. The tasks of a bourgeois democratic revolution cannot be accomplished without a socialist revolution led by the working class. Trotsky first discovered this truth in Results and Prospects, and it has been repeated over and over again in the revolutions of the 20th century, often in a negative way.
This remains true in the 21st century as we witness the failure of revolutionary situations due to the absence of a socialist program, socialist revolutionary leadership, and most importantly, a working-class leadership.
In most cases, an imperialist hand is involved to ensure the failure of a revolutionary process. During the Cold War, the United States and the United Kingdom orchestrated coups against democratic governments using their intelligence services and military allies, often from the comprador bourgeois elite of the target semi-colonial country.
Brazil, Iran, Chile, Argentina, and Central America are examples of countries where this strategy was used. The United States employed this strategy liberally in its own hemisphere to ensure the continued exploitation of South and Central American countries under its sphere of influence.
However, this strategy had run its course by the late 1980s and early 1990s. Military dictatorships were ineffective and unpopular, making them difficult to maintain and resulting in incredibly volatile regimes that did not serve U.S. imperialism’s long-term interests. A more effective alternative then emerged, as seen in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Rather than supporting reactionary military dictatorships, U.S. imperialism can subvert democratic leadership or work with compromised leadership. This democratic reaction strategy is now the mainstay of imperialist capital, where democratic revolutions can be subverted by reactionary or comprador leadership.
Lech Wałęsa in Poland and Al-Shararr, also known as Jolani, in Syria fit these roles. Far from transitioning to socialism, democratic revolutions under this type of reactionary bourgeois leadership are likely to fail or regress into reaction.
By not directly confronting the masses, imperialist forces can reposition themselves by working with leaders who compromise their country’s sovereignty rather than allow workers to come to power.
Meanwhile, the mobilization continues. The United States is not the only power employing this strategy. India used it with traitorous collaborators in Nepal to derail its revolutionary process, and Pakistan and China are applying it to the current revolutionary process in Bangladesh.
The strategy of democratic reaction has the added power of confusing the masses. The most compromising and reactionary leaders appear as revolutionaries, and the imperialist hand becomes almost invisible, or even benign. The threat of exploitation and subjugation hidden behind this mask of benevolence becomes impossible to detect until it is too late. Conversely, Stalinists condemn the entire revolutionary process based solely on the presence of imperialist support, regardless of how repressive the regimes may be.
This strategy’s success is evident in the current situations in South and Central America and Eastern Europe, where it was developed. The overthrow of military dictatorships could have led to a socialist revolution and, in the case of former Warsaw Pact countries, a political revolution. Instead, we are witnessing the expansion of imperialist capital and the continued subjugation of these regions by imperialism. The regimes that replaced the deformed workers’ state are, without exception, reactionary, whether they are bourgeois democratic or dictatorial.
The usual script of imperialism-backed democratic reaction is to subvert a democratic revolution and counter revolutionary leadership by exploiting the contradiction of a democratic revolutionary process.
This only works because of the nature of the democratic revolution in our era and the total absence of revolutionary leadership.
Reactionary dictators will not save us!
Whenever imperialists threaten reactionary regimes, Stalinists are quick to defend them. This is a continuation of the policy of supporting the progressive national bourgeoisie in another form. Today’s Stalinists support the progressive national bourgeoisie in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Assad regime in Syria, and Gaddafi in Libya. This policy results in their confused position on Ukraine. They talk about an abstract “peace,” ignoring the obvious reality that imperialist Russia is crushing and destroying Ukraine. Thus, while Assad was progressive, Zelensky is not progressive enough to earn their support.
As an extension of this stance, Stalinists lend political support to the most ruthless repression by reactionary regimes. They justify everything as long as it harms U.S. imperialism, regardless of whether another imperialist benefits or if the working class and the poor suffer. Rather than investing energy, time, or effort in the real solution to reactionary repression, Stalinists prefer to play geopolitics by citing color revolutions.
In a recent video, Hakim, a popular Stalinist YouTuber, concluded that reactionary regimes become more repressive when faced with the imperialist tactic of fomenting color revolutions. One consequence of this is the regime’s inclination to align itself with imperialists who oppose the United States. The video ended on a hopeful note with the message “Another world is possible” and an image of Xi Jinping with the leaders of the BRICS countries, including the president of Iran.
This is a clear example of a fundamental Stalinist fallacy, particularly with regard to color revolutions. They recognize the dangers of imperialist reaction but view reactionary regimes as a preferable alternative. They often hide or minimize the problems arising from the reactionary nature of the regime in order to focus attention solely on the role of the imperialists. For example, Assad’s brutality is excused because of his support for Hezbollah in the Palestinian resistance, and Gaddafi’s rapprochement with African nations is exaggerated while his cooperation with Italian imperialism in implementing the anti-immigrant “shield” is ignored.
The bitter truth is seen most clearly in the eyes of the workers and peasants oppressed by these regimes. They will not save us from imperialism. When the working class rebels against these regimes, we cannot applaud the regime. By denouncing imperialist efforts to influence mass mobilizations, the Stalinists reject the mobilization as a whole. Color revolutions should not be possible unless they exploit the contradictions of a democratic revolution. The only reason they have any success is due to the absence of revolutionary leadership and the resulting lack of class consciousness.
Our task is not to support repression but to build revolutionary leadership and take command of the democratic struggle. Imperialism must be fought not with the weapons of the regime but with an organized working class.
From Nepal to the Arab Spring, via Bangladesh
In the era of imperialism, we are confronted with a bourgeoisie that has long since declined. In 1906, Trotsky wrote Results and Prospects, reflecting on the Russian Revolution of 1905. He concluded that the bourgeoisie of that time was incapable of resolving the tasks of the democratic revolution.
The working class, in alliance with the peasantry, must lead the revolutionary process. In essence, the revolution of the working class is the socialist revolution. However, in underdeveloped countries where capitalist development is stagnant, they face social reaction, dictatorship, and various autocratic distortions. In these countries, the revolution will initially be democratic in nature. This was true in Russia and is true in most underdeveloped capitalist countries.
In this century, we have witnessed revolutionary processes in which the working class was an unconscious participant rather than a leading force. This was the case in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, as well as in all the Arab uprisings from North Africa to the Levant. This absence is mainly due to the crisis of revolutionary leadership, the most important crisis of our time. The result of these two critical absences is evident in the failure of these revolutionary processes. Much of North Africa and the Levant has returned to autocracy or descended into civil war. Nepal remains mired in its semi-colonial status, and Bangladesh seems poised to resume the cycle of anarchy and exploitation from which its people have striven to escape.
The same danger is present in Nepal today. If left in the hands of the liberal bourgeois leadership, the revolutionary process initiated by the youth uprising can slide into reaction or fail. Liberal NGOs and reactionary monarchists, tacitly supported by the army, have already begun to undermine the protests.
Overthrowing the Maoist government will not free Nepal from corruption and poverty unless the underlying material conditions are addressed. Only a socialist program can resolve these issues. To achieve this, however, the revolutionary forces must engage with the youth and the working class and refrain from dismissing the chaotic uprising as a “color revolution.”
