One of the things that the western left has failed to understand is how, thanks to combined and uneven development, capitalism emerges in different nations. This failure lies rooted in the western lefts position as a largely petit-bourgeois outfit that is subservient to empire.

One example of this is the Iranian government and the revolution that created it. This is a hugely significant event in that the Iranians carried through a successful struggle against semi-colonial rule by the Shah. They achieved genuine national independence.

This makes the Iranian revolution an inherently progressive event in history. Yet most leftists in the west do not understand this and in fact will contort themselves into a knot trying to "condemn" the "Iranian regime"whilst still claiming to oppose the US empire.

What the revolution in Iran did was carry through a successful bourgeois revolution in a semi-colonial nation. This is undeniably progressive. Just as it was progressive when the Italians unified their nation under Garribaldi and Mazzini.

The bourgeois revolutions of Europe ended feudal property relation or severely weakened them, established centralised state authority, built new legal systems and created a new national consciousness. All of this takes society forward. This is what the Iranian revolution did.

So just as, back in the day, Marx viewed the bourgeois revolutions as something to be defended against feudal reaction so we must defend nations such as Iran from the predatory actions of US imperialism. This should not be a controversial point of view.

Iran today has all the contradictions of a capitalist society, primarily class, it's government is on that is a capitalist one. Yet because of Iran's status as a semi-colonised nation capitalism and a bourgeoisie that defends national independence is playing a progressive role.

This applies to other nations. The government of Gadaffi was building an independent nation, often utilising capitalist methods, but was undoubtedly a progressive one compared to the colonial status that Libya had beforehand. And yet the western left supported it's destruction

Another example is Hezbollah. Undoubtedly they play a progressive role in Lebanon and the wider region. Freeing Lebanon from colonial domination and defending it's independence is something we must support. And yet again though, the western left has totally lost the plot here.

The left often hides behind dumb Trotskyite formulations about "permanent revolution" or various sub-Maoist crap of the same nature. But the truth is that the western lefts failure to support true national liberation movements is because the left is empires handmaiden.

I'm a communist who fights for socialism in Britain. Doing so because capitalism has truly played out it's progressive role here over 100 years ago. Now all it does is damage us and the world. Other nations are further behind. Their historical process must play out.

One of capitalisms central contradictions is that it opens up the idea of things like state sovereignty, independence, mass democracy and yet it can never truly deliver on them. In the case of sovereignty it cannot deliver because the imperialism of the first capitalist states.

Just as the French revolution had to battle against the forces of feudal reaction so the peoples of the colonised nations must fight against imperial reactionaries just to win basic sovereignty. In that we must assist them by striking blows against the empire at home.

The French revolution also showed the limitations of such talk about the "rights of man" and national independence in that neither the Jacobins nor the Bonapartists were prepared to treat the Haitians as equals.

Toussaint L'overture dared to take the universal claims of the French revolution at face value. He found out to his cost though that the French were determined to hang onto Haiti as an economic asset. The ideals went only as far as the class interests of the French bourgeois.