The following article was originally published on the website of the UJC-PCRF on 12 June 2025, it appears here translated to English. The original French version is available here: https://www.unionjc.fr/2025/06/12/les-luttes-de-classes-au-moyen-orient-trois-lecons-politiques-pour-notre-jeunesse/
Since October 2023, the Palestinian resistance has gradually become a flashpoint for international capitalism and anti-imperialist resistance. However, it is not enough to focus solely on this fact, as it can be interpreted in many contradictory ways.
What is anti-imperialism in this case, and how is the Palestinian struggle a central focus of resistance? But also, would the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad also be a significant moment of “anti-imperialism”? Are the recent statements by the PKK through its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, calling for an end to the armed struggle for Kurdish self-determination, on the contrary, a “betrayal” of anti-imperialism? What does it mean to be anti-imperialist in France?
At a time when Israel’s genocidal war is reaching its climax, this article revisits what we as Leninists consider essential in the sequence of class struggles that began in 2023 throughout the Middle East. We believe it is crucial to take stock of the experience gained in practice and in theory from the Palestinian resistance, but also from the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the dissolution of the PKK, in order to continue to gain maximum clarity on the issues facing our youth today.
We will see that our anti-imperialism allows us to understand the particularities of three key situations in the region: Palestine, Syria, but also the Kurdish question. We will also see how each of these situations only makes sense within a framework of analysis that considers imperialism as international monopoly capitalism in its Leninist understanding.
Finally, the analysis of these three situations allows us to draw perspectives for our struggles in France and to set out the theoretical and political challenges that our youth must take up.
Without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement!
Young people, organize your anger!
Since October 2023 and the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance, what was already one of the sequences of class struggles led by the exploited and oppressed of central importance on a global scale, the struggle of the Palestinian people and their organizations, has had consequences for the entire region. The genocidal war waged by the Israeli state against an entire people has provoked a massive movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people in France, in which our youth and our party took part in demonstrations, university occupations, and as a central political concern during the dissolution of the National Assembly in June 2024 and the parliamentary crisis that followed. Today, the Union of Communist Youth is therefore reviewing the class struggles in the Middle East that followed the Palestinian struggle alone, focusing on three lessons, three political experiences that our organization considers crucial for guiding our youth and our struggles towards a combative anti-imperialism and internationalism, an anti-imperialism and internationalism that can at any moment be reoriented by our monopolies and their state towards social-democratic channeling under the name of the New Popular Front. Indeed, the major social and political struggles that have taken place in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey are part of a class struggle dynamic that can be traced rationally and objectively, far from mere humanitarian appeals or isolated or purely geopolitical analyses. It is the link between the central events that have taken place in the Middle East since October 2023, as well as the lessons specific to each of them, that the UJC will return to here, in order to arm our youth to rally them to its Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of France, for its construction and strengthening.
1.
First of all, the struggle of the Palestinian people and the global resonance it has had among the popular youth of different nations of the world does not owe its unprecedented echo to a single subjective factor, such as the appalling number of deaths or the terrifying destruction wrought by this genocide, which is being filmed and followed live. The echo of the Palestinian struggle is also due to objective reasons: fighting against Israeli occupation, against its plans for ethnic cleansing and its denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, the Palestinian forces have objectively entered into a struggle against international capitalism as a whole. The bourgeoisies of Europe, as well as the imperialist cartel that is the European Union, are not merely “consenting” to genocide, they are actively participating in it through a thousand direct and indirect, open and covert means, profiting for their own plans in the region from the genocidal war of the Zionist state.1 Yet, has the “axis of resistance” also emerged, are the Palestinians part of a broader bloc against “Western imperialism”? No, neither China nor Russia have severed their trade relations with Israel, the Lebanese Hezbollah was very quickly rendered incapable of responding, crushed by the Israeli military-industrial complex, while the Yemeni Houthis and Iran do not carry significant weight in supporting the Palestinian struggle.2 Admittedly, these targeted operations may have supported the Palestinian struggle and helped it in certain key areas, such as crossing the Red Sea or opening up another front for the Israeli army in the case of Lebanon, but to speak of a “bloc” of resistance does not reflect the reality of the forces involved. This is what makes the Palestinian struggle so heroic and special for our youth. By launching a response to the Israeli occupation, the Palestinians have clashed and fought against the entire international monopoly capitalism and continue to this day, at the cost of immense sacrifices, to fight against it.
Supporting the Palestinian people in their multifaceted resistance is, for our youth, and for communist youth like ours who aspire to become leaders, an anti-imperialist struggle because it confronts capitalism as a whole head-on. Supporting the Palestinian people is not a moral issue, nor is it a matter of standing on the sidelines of a distant situation full of fear and violence. It is supporting a struggle that threatens the entire capitalist world and its system of states. Social-democratic organizations may try to channel or distance themselves from this analysis, preferring to see it as a humanitarian problem falling under “international law.” The UJC considers it essential to remind our youth that the Palestinian struggle is a central struggle against global capitalism itself and all the pretexts it can use to disorient and delude people about the real adversary in the ongoing war.
2.
Further North, it was the bourgeois regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria that was overthrown in January 2025 after years of internationalized civil war experienced by our youth in that nation. Amid the general destabilization of the region, al-Sharaa, leader of the jihadist group HTS, took power, celebrated and hailed by the various national bourgeoisies as a freedom fighter.3 The NFP in France was not to be outdone, asking only that the president be “firm” when the Islamist leader was invited to France in May 2025.4 Al-Sharaa’s recent visit clearly revealed the real interests of jihadists from Al-Qaeda, who are guilty of war crimes. A week before this visit, an event went almost unnoticed: the jihadist government oversaw the signing of a contract with the French logistics monopoly CMA CGM (the same maritime transport and logistics monopoly that signed a giant $20 billion contract with the United States under the Trump administration in early March 2025). CMA CGM had already pushed hard for its company to win a contract at the port of Beirut a few years ago. Now, it is the exploitation of the port of Latakia for 30 years that has been agreed upon.5 The new Syrian government is therefore committing massacres of civilians and negotiating with international monopolies such as the Turkish, French, and German monopolies in order to carve up the Syrian nation and its youth, already destroyed by years of war, for the most lucrative contracts and profits. After destroying Syria through war, dozens of bourgeoisies are still dividing up the reconstruction projects of the country they have deliberately dismantled
The overthrow of the Syrian government reminds our youth that we must never trust the political colors displayed or assumed by the parties in power, as in this case of the supposed “liberation” of the Syrian people and their entry into “democracy.” The monopolies and their inter-imperialist alliances know perfectly well how to coordinate their maneuvers on the economic, political, and ideological fronts in order to impose their new plans, as in the case of Syria. The UJC considers it essential to remind our youth that the Syrian people are not liberated, and that the political upheaval in Syria reminds us that no people are liberated by political rhetoric and representations alone. The facts are stubborn, and in order to arm our youth with a clear direction, it is always socio-economic movements that explain the representations that are so often false, demagogic, and mask war crimes and repression, as in the case of Syria.
3.
More recently, the Kurdish question has also changed rapidly. The PKK, a political organization claiming to be fighting for Kurdish liberation, which has carried out armed operations against the Turkish state and has strong links with Kurdish forces in Syrian Rojava (the SDF), has successively announced a possible democratic solution with the Turkish state and then the definitive end of the armed struggle.6 Many cried “treason” against the PKK, accusing it of abandoning the Kurdish question, while others applauded this “democratic” solution with the Turkish state. If, as in the Syrian case, socio-economic movements explain political directions and programs, the PKK shows no inconsistency, and let us be clear, no betrayal in these recent divisions: it is politically continuing the long transformation already underway socially. Kurdish forces in Syria have been negotiating and signing contracts with US monopolies for control of Syrian oil resources for years,7 since the 1990s, Abdullah Ocalan and the PKK have rejected any reference to anti-capitalism and Marxism, thus becoming more or less conscious actors in the carving up of Syria for the benefit of the Turkish, Israeli, and Syrian states themselves under the new figure of HTS. The PKK is therefore not betraying anything; it is continuing its slow integration into imperialist plans in the region in order to carve out a place for itself in the sun, while the Turkish state sinks deeper into ever more violent repression of the democratic demands of the Turkish people, as well as the Kurds and Syrian refugees.8
The recent positions of the PKK therefore remind us that no self-determination, no protection of peoples and their borders can be possible today without anti-capitalist leadership and a central role for the working class. Bourgeois parties, or those that tend to represent the bourgeoisie, always sacrifice, in the short or medium term, the popular interests of the peoples and their youth for their profits and class alliances, as is clearly the case with the PKK and its affiliated Iraqi and Syrian organizations. Beyond the PKK, it is also the Lebanese and Syrian peoples who have found themselves disarmed and massacred by the Zionist state, on the Lebanese-Israeli front and on the Golan Heights in the latter case. When they do not betray the interests of the people, the ruling classes are simply incapable of defending them in view of their particular interests: that of representing the various bourgeoisies of the region, however weak, as well as their alliances. The UJC honors and expresses its solidarity with the Lebanese, Syrian, and Turkish people and youth, caught up in the power struggles and defeats of their various bourgeoisies, and salutes their resistance and resilience in the face of the political struggles underway in the region. Without placing anti-capitalism at the heart of the political project of political parties, in complete independence from the bourgeoisie and its representatives, the peoples will never be protected from the barbarism of international capitalism.
The Union of Communist Youth, together with its party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of France, defends the view that only Marxism-Leninism is the scientific weapon for the historical and social elimination of the bourgeoisie and its mode of production, capitalism, which has now developed to its final stage: imperialism. Our scientific conception of imperialism is central, not because we recite what it is, its definition, but because only this conception allows for a scientific study of the developments of the present class struggles, an analysis of a real situation. This scientific conception is based on a few strong principles that must be observed throughout the political and social struggle of our comrades to win victory over capital.
First, international conditions and developments take precedence over national ones in every situation. Every situation of national class struggle expresses the content of international struggles, in the particular form imposed by its national context. These are the two aspects of the question that must be kept in mind in the analysis, without ever reducing one to the other: form is essential to the content it expresses, but form alone cannot account for the overall coherence of the global material and social developments in which it is embedded. The Palestinian people are fighting against global imperialism, globalized monopoly capitalism; whether the Palestinian resistance forces explicitly name this adversary is another question. It is the objective social balance of power that determines who the actors in the class struggle are, not how they think about this struggle politically and ideologically. Class struggles in occupied Palestine are therefore intensifying in line with the systemic crisis of imperialism and the contradictions that are worsening day by day as these same capitalists seek to redivide the world. This national struggle is an expression of international struggles and conditions national struggles in France and in all countries. No national class struggle is isolated, no international struggle can be understood exclusively as international, but must be observed through its expressions in all national developments of class struggles.
This point reminds us that imperialism is not a political choice but the development of a mode of production and its social relations: monopoly capitalism throughout the world. Imperialism is not the work of a state or a group of states with more or less imperialist bourgeoisies. This “geopolitical”9 view, in which Lenin’s imperialism is reduced to a theory of international relations between states, is widely shared in the opportunist camp in our country and worldwide. It is a question of considering that one group of states is more imperialist than others and that it is therefore necessary to ally oneself with and support another group of states against the first, the second group being judged “anti-imperialist.” In concrete terms, some of these opportunists say that we must support the Russian state and the Chinese state (even assuming that China is socialist!) against the US state and the European Union. This view is scientifically false. To hold this position is to support one bourgeoisie against another, which ultimately means supporting world imperialism. For every bourgeois state in imperialism carries aspirations for domination over other bourgeoisies within the framework of imperialism. All bourgeoisies, even at the bottom of the imperialist pyramid, cannot defend and express the interests of the popular and exploited masses. All the bourgeoisies of the world, even those of the poorest and most internationally enslaved countries, are integrated into the inter-imperialist contradictions, which are therefore internal to the system formed by international capitalism. On the contrary, the economic, political, and ideological maneuvers of the dominated bourgeoisies, which we describe as occupying intermediate or lower places in the imperialist pyramid, aim only to gain a decent place in this pyramid, on a regional, continental, or global scale. When bourgeois state leaders speak of anti-imperialism, these are maneuvers of national unity for capitalist accumulation and the increase of profits of the national bourgeoisie on the backs of the national proletariat and against the peoples. Think of the Maduro government, which violently represses our comrades of the PCV.
Secondly, this scientific conception of imperialism leads us to identify two types of war: inter-imperialist wars of plunder and wars of the exploited against the exploiters, unjust wars and just wars. We must support the Palestinian people and their struggle by all necessary means and their military unity bringing together all national independence organizations, because this is a war of the exploited against the exploiters. The material impossibility for the bourgeoisie to coordinate around a single party, whether Hamas or Fatah, due to the lack of a bourgeois state, as well as the impossibility of accumulating Palestinian capital in Gaza itself, has led to a more popular than bourgeois dynamic in its social base over the last ten years. More generally, and unlike other Islamic fundamentalist movements in the Middle East such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, it is important to note that the process of merging the political leadership of Hamas with the Palestinian bourgeoisie has been limited. Of course, we should have no illusions about Hamas’s goals: by positioning itself as the only possible military defender of the Palestinians, the movement aims to demonstrate its ability within the enclave itself to express and serve the political and social needs of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. The latter is certainly fragmented and in difficulty, but it remains a bourgeoisie with its own interests and, like Hamas, desires the establishment of a bourgeois nation-state. However, this dynamic is greatly reduced by the political and social reality of Gaza, characterized by a deadly siege and continuous wars waged by the Israeli army, which maintains a relatively strong link between the local Hamas leadership and the Palestinian working classes in both Gaza and the West Bank. In Palestine, therefore, from a class perspective, this is indeed a just war being waged for the Palestinian people. It is a war by a people colonized by a bourgeois state, Israel, which is supported by almost all of world imperialism in the interests of each bourgeoisie involved. Even if the Palestinian people do not want to confront international capitalism, they inevitably encounter it in their just struggle for self-determination. We must not, on the contrary, support Russia or Ukraine in the ongoing war in Ukraine, because this is exclusively a struggle between bourgeois forces for the redivision of Ukraine, its resources, and its people.10 Any war is the continuation, through different forms of struggle, of movements and directions taken from a socioeconomic point of view, of strategies and tactics by different classes. Only Marxism-Leninism allows us to identify and understand the class substance of these conflicts. A clear Marxism-Leninism on the conception of imperialism, allowing us to draw on the particular and specific experience of each struggle, as here in the Middle East, while always keeping in mind the system that our youth and their party must overthrow in order to meet these needs: capitalism-imperialism.
Endnotes:
- For more on the interests of the European bourgeoisie, see: Gaza: historical sequence of the struggle against imperialism! on the PCRF website.
↩︎ - Unfortunately, we do not have the space to develop these sources here, so we will focus on the urgent political issues for our youth. On this point, you can read all the contributions to the conference of the European Communist Action, in which our party took part and of which it is the only member in France, on the European Communist Action website: Developments in the Middle East. We strengthen our solidarity with the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian peoples. The PCRF’s statement can be found in French on its website, which includes a map of the issues at stake for these three nations under global capitalism. ↩︎
- Our Party already took a position on this issue in January 2025 in the statement available on its website: On the recent developments in the Syrian civil war, see also the most recent UJC statement: on the recent abuses by HTS and the ongoing class struggles.
↩︎ - https://rmc.bfmtv.com/actualites/international/la-visit-du-nouveau-che-f-f-tat-syrien-ahmad-al-chara-en-france-fait-polemique-AV-202505070334.html
↩︎ - https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/visite-polemique-a-lelysee-quels-enjeux-economiques-entre-la-france-et-la-syrie-1513607
↩︎ - https://www.rfi.fr/fr/europe/20250512-turquie-le-parti-des-travailleurs-kurdes-pkk-annonce-sa-dissolution-apr%C3%A8s-plus-de-40-ans-de-lutte-arm%C3%A9e
↩︎ - For a quick overview of the economic links between Kurdish forces and other international forces: https://icibeyrouth.com/articles/1303328/rojava-l-enclave-kurde-de-syria-subprotection-American
For an overview of the political positions on the nature of the current Syrian government: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/21/drones-are-above
↩︎ - Our youth comrades of the Communist Party of Turkey ( TKG), led alongside their party (TKP), a heroic struggle against the repression of the bourgeois government of Erdogan and for the democratic rights to which the UJC fully supported, see: https://www.pcrf-ic.fr/Notre-Parti-en-solidarite-with-le
↩︎ - We use this term, following our Party, to describe the reduction of imperialism to state policies since the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine.
↩︎ - We refer to the PCRF brochure Their wars, our deaths! On the war in Ukraine and the tasks of communists. ↩︎