Note: This is part one of a three part series.
A new era
When Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb 24,
2022, a new historical epoch came into being.
It was the end of the post-Cold War period that began with the collapse
of the Soviet Union in August of 1991. Only time will tell what name will be
associated with this new epoch but one thing is clear, it is not simply a
return to the period of the Cold War that began shortly after World War
II. On the contrary the era we have
entered is far more dangerous than the period of the Cold War. At least during
the Cold War period there were certain rules of engagement that both sides
respected with a few notable and frightening exceptions such as the
confrontation that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But there are no such rules that guide
conduct among global nuclear powers in this new period. As one Cold War historian recently lamented,
I sense a period
ending. I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the
years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period
to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find
ourselves missing the Cold War. [1]
If Putin’s recklessness is one marker of the
present danger, so are Biden’s recent rhetorical outbursts. Twice he has
denounced Putin as a war criminal, and in a speech in Warsaw, he declared that
Putin “cannot remain in power” – an open call for regime change, something that
no previous US administration allowed itself to do even in the worst moments of
the Cold War. That Biden is a doddering old man who went off script for a
moment (only to have his officials and European allies walk back the comment)
changes nothing about the fact that the fate of the world is in the hands of
reckless imperialists on both sides. This is how world wars begin – and how,
via nuclear annihilation, the world could come to an end.
Europe is seeing the largest military conflict
since World War II. This coincides with an unprecedented pandemic, a global
economic crisis further aggravated by the war, the rise of neo-fascist
movements challenging the legitimacy of liberal bourgeois democratic regimes in
the West. At the same time the past decade has seen a re-emergence of the class
struggle with strikes and massive protest movements throughout the globe. All
remaining illusions that we have entered a post-historical period dominated by the
Western model of bourgeois democracy no longer burdened by war and class conflict
have been shattered. That is not to say
that this happened overnight. The
disintegration of the post-Cold War myth of an “end of history” has been evident
for some time , but one can say that the Russian invasion of the Ukraine was
the final nail in its coffin.
As with all endings there are also new
beginnings. The end of the post-Cold War
equilibrium, the increasing danger of nuclear war, is accompanied by new
possibilities of social revolution. Which
road will be taken depends to a great extent on the consciousness of the
working class. This is where the need
for a revolutionary leadership arises. While the working class spontaneously moves
to socialist consciousness, bourgeois consciousness is also spontaneously
reinforced. As old illusions fall away, new forms of bourgeois consciousness
emerge. The role of Marxists is to
participate in the struggles of the working class with the goal of raising the
level of class consciousness. In the
context of the Ukraine-Russian War that goal becomes concretized to raising the
level of international class solidarity between the Ukrainian and Russian
working class.
We do not pretend that any groups claiming to
be Marxist will have a significant impact on the course of events in the
Ukraine. It’s been at least three generations since mass socialist parties were
in a position to challenge the bourgeois order. The long period of isolation of
Marxists from the working class amidst the general level of the atomization of
working class consciousness preclude any immediate impact. But there is a critical educational program
with which Marxists are tasked. The
question needs to be raised, “What should be the proper response to the
Ukraine-Russian War?”
This task takes
on added significance because the outbreak of wars typically splits the
political left, and this war is no exception. Given that the radical left was
already badly fragmented, it would be more accurate to speak of splintering
instead of splits.
The principle of opposition to war
We must start by elucidating some basic
principles. A fundamental principle is that we are anti-war. If we are not anti-war, we are part of the
problem. We recognize as Marxists that
capitalism is the ultimate cause of war and that a consistent strategy for
opposing war is to fight for the socialist alternative to capitalism. But that
principle by itself does not tell us what it means to be anti-war in any
specific situation. Unlike pacifists we do not think it is possible to orient
oneself with abstract slogans. Rather
it is necessary to locate the path of opposition to war concretely based on one’s
assessment of the immediate situation within the context of global
capitalism.
When it comes to the complex situation that we
face today in the Russian-Ukraine war, there has been an almost unanimous
collective failure to assess the dynamics of this conflict and find the proper
orientation. Much of the left have indeed abandoned an anti-war stand in
relation to the Russian-Ukraine conflict, while still claiming to be anti-war.
It is simply impossible to be anti-war if you are cheering for the victory of
one side or the other in the current conflict. What is happening in the U.S. and other
countries, is that given the vacuum on the left of a clear anti-war stand, the
right has stepped in to fill that gap. This
is clear enough in the U.S. where the liberal media has fallen into lockstep
behind the militarism and the anti-Russian witch-hunt of the Biden
Administration. It is not surprising that right wing enemies of the Biden
Administration such as Tucker Carlson from Fox News, has taken advantage of the
subservience of the liberal media to the war plans of the Biden Administration
by appealing to anti-war sentiments. But it is also true that those groups on
the left that claim that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is some kind of
progressive measure that Russia was “forced” to undertake due to the threats of
NATO expansion have equally abandoned an anti-war position.
Who are the principals in the conflict?
To start with it is crucial to determine the
nature of the states involved in the conflict. The question of who attacked who
first, while not irrelevant, is not
decisive. More fundamental is one’s assessment of the nature of the warring
parties involved in the conflict. But before we can even ask that question, we
should first be able to identify the warring parties. Strangely, there is not
even a consensus on that simple matter. Some groups on the left think the
conflict is between NATO and US imperialism on one side and Russia on the
other. The Ukraine, a nation of 45 million
people, barely enters into their consideration, being dismissed as little more
than a proxy of NATO. Analysis of the war among much of the left
consists in deciding which side, either NATO or Russia deserves to be
supported.
To take one example from the American left,
Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action writes the following about the divisions in
the U.S.:
‘The Ukraine
crisis has taken its toll, at least for the moment, on the still modest forces
of the U.S. and international antiwar movements, with two poles emerging with
counterposed strategic conceptions. In the U.S. a growing minority, perhaps a
majority, feels compelled to denounce with equal fervor both sides, Russia on
the one, and US/NATO on the other.
In sharp
contrast, organizations representing the major antiwar coalitions demand: “No
to US/NATO War in Ukraine! No wars with Russia! No sanctions! No to NATO
and NATO expansion” – a central cause of the present crisis – and, “Fund human
needs, education, housing, the environment & healthcare not war!”’ [2]
From Mackler’s description of the conflict,
one would never know that Russia invaded the Ukraine. Mackler also reduces the available options
for the anti-war movement to denounce “with equal fervor” Russia and NATO or to
only denounce NATO and remain silent about Russia. It never seems to occur to
him that it is possible to concentrate our fire on NATO, which is certainly a
responsibility of those of us living in NATO aligned countries, and at the same
time denounce the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. In contrast to Mackler, who represents a
typical position of what can be called the radical left, the narrative
unanimously pushed by the mainstream media, in line with the Biden
Administration, as well as some groups on the left, completely leaves out any
discussion of NATO and decontextualizes Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine,
portraying it as a simple morality tale of good Ukraine vs. evil Russia. We will get back to this shortly.
Russian as an imperialist power
In our estimation Russia is clearly an
imperialist power, although a second class one in comparison to the U.S. We discussed
this previously in a piece written shortly after the initial outbreak of
hostilities between Russian and the Ukraine in 2014.
Recently the
question of one’s assessment of the Russian state has become a key issue among
left wing groups, particularly those claiming to be Marxist. The reason
for this is all too obvious when we consider the events of the past few years
in Syria and the Ukraine. In both situations Russia is directly involved in a
political and military conflict that places it squarely at odds against forces
supported by U.S. and European imperialism. In the case of Syria tensions
have escalated to the point where there is a real danger of a direct
confrontation between the Russian and American military. The possibility of the
world’s two largest nuclear powers engaging each other militarily brings back
memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of the Cold War.
In such a
situation the task of revolutionary socialists is to formulate and fight for a
strategy and a program that is opposed to imperialist war and defends the
interests of the international working class. Historically, the response
of revolutionary socialists to imperialist war has been the slogan “The main
enemy is at home”. This means that in a conflict between two imperialist
powers, it is impermissible to support either one or the other as a “lesser
evil”. The historic responsibility of the working class in the
imperialist countries is to work for the defeat of their “own” Imperialist
power. On the other hand, when a conflict emerges between an imperialist
power and a colonial or semi-colonial country, it is necessary to defend the
struggles of the colonial people against imperialism. Given this
historical background it becomes clear why one’s assessment of the nature of
Russia becomes a key theoretical question. Were we to consider Russia an
imperialist power then we are duty bound to oppose Russian imperialism just as
strongly as U.S. imperialism. On the other hand were we to consider
Russia a colonial or semi-colonial country oppressed by the great imperialist
powers, then we are duty bound to support Russia in its conflict with
imperialism.
Given the
centrality of the question of the nature of Russia one would think that groups
claiming adherence to Marxism and to the traditions of Bolshevism would have
done a good deal of theoretical work based on solid evidence before coming to
any conclusions about the nature of Russia. One would think that but one
would be wrong. On the contrary, with few exceptions, most of those
groups derive their assessment of the nature of Russia not from any original
research or theoretical work but strictly from their political
prejudices. And those political prejudices are roughly divided into two
camps. On the one side there are the traditional social chauvinists who
tend to adapt to their own ruling class. Besides moribund Social
Democratic parties these groups include outfits like the ISO who have ties to
the trade union bureaucracy. In the other camp are what some have called
“inverted social chauvinists”. These are groups who oppose their own
bourgeoisie but do so by supporting whoever is in conflict with them. The
policy followed by the inverted social chauvinists is sometimes mislabeled as
“anti-imperialism”. In the U.S. the paradigm of inverted social
chauvinism is the neo-Stalinist Workers World Party which lets no opportunity
pass by for supporting whatever imperialist power or dictatorship is in
conflict with U.S. imperialism. They are guided by the rule, “The enemy
of my enemy is my friend.” [3]
Some groups on the left not only disagree that
Russia is an imperialist power, but condemn anyone who takes that position as a
stooge of NATO and the CIA. A typical
example is the following diatribe from the World Socialist Web Site aimed at a
group who dared to call Russia an imperialist nation,
The IMT’s role
amid the current war drive is to repackage with “Marxist” phraseology the
propaganda of the US State Department and other NATO countries that they have
no intention of militarily intervening against Russia. They seek to lull leftward-moving
workers and young people to sleep by promoting illusions in the continued
viability of the capitalist system. [4]
The particular target of this statement, the
International Marxist Tendency (IMT), is
of no importance. You can fill in whatever
“pseudo-left” organization is the WSWS target of the day. Any group that does
not agree 100% with the analysis of the WSWS is by definition guilty of
“lulling” unnamed “leftward moving forces to sleep”. As we have previously
noted in our essay from 2014, while the WSWS/SEP vigorously denies that Russia
is an imperialist power it has no real analysis of what Russia is though it
acts as if it is some kind of semi-colonial country.
There are exceptions among Marxists to this
cavalier attitude to this important question, namely those who take seriously
the theoretical issues involved in assessing the nature of Russia and look to
the Marxist theory of imperialism to get a handle on it. A seminal text in this
area is Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. [5]
While Lenin’s work is certainly not the last word on the subject and
imperialism has continued to evolve and take on new forms in the 100 years
since Lenin was writing, any serious discussion on imperialism must confront
this classic work. We have pointed to what we consider the excellent analysis
of Michael Pröbsting on the nature of Russia whose point of departure is a
discussion of Lenin’s work when confronted with the economic and political
tendencies of the 21st century. [6]
The upshot of Pröbsting’s investigation
is that Russia is indeed an imperialist power, though one significantly weaker
than the U.S.
Pröbsting writes,
The
characteristic of an imperialist power has to be seen in the totality of its
economic, political, and military position in the global hierarchy of states.
Thus, a given state must – following Lenin’s dialectical advice about
examining 'the entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing
to others’ – be viewed not only as a separate unit but first and
foremost in its relation to other states and nations. An imperialist state
usually enters a relationship with other states and nations whom it oppresses
in one way or another and super-exploits – i.e., appropriates a share of its
produced capitalist value. Again this has to be viewed in its totality, i.e.,
if a state gains certain profits from foreign investment but has to pay much
more (debt service, profit repatriation, etc.) to other countries’ foreign
investment, this state can usually not be considered as imperialist. Finally we
want to stress the necessity of considering the totality of a state’s economic,
political, and military position in the global hierarchy of states. Thus we can
consider a given state as imperialist even it is economically weaker but
possesses a relatively strong political and military position (like Russia
before 1917 and, again, in the early 2000s). Such a strong political and
military position can be used to oppress other countries and nations and to
appropriate capitalist value from them.
There have been a number of challenges to Pröbsting’s
analysis but none of them are convincing.
There are those who challenge Pröbsting’s statistical analysis. [7] Others
claim that Russia does not provide an exact fit into the criteria Lenin
discussed for classifying a nation as imperialist. [8]
Still another argument departs from
Lenin’s analysis and attempts to define imperialism exclusively in economic
terms without any attention to the political and military conditions of a
nation. [9]
Lenin clearly never intended his analysis of imperialism to be strictly an
economic one. He wrote in the preface to
his pamphlet,
This pamphlet was
written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to
confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic
analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics
with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language—in that accursed
Aesopian language—to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have
recourse whenever they took up the pen to write a “legal” work. [10]
A common approach of those who deny that
Russia is an imperialist power is to compare the economy of Russia to that of
the United States – the United States being the example par excellence
of an imperialist power. This approach,
which claims to be Marxist and claims to be faithful to Lenin’s analysis of
imperialism, is actually a sad caricature of a Marxist analysis of
imperialism. When Lenin characterized
imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism”, he had in mind the general
features that were then emerging of a global economic system. How each country fits into that system is a
question of its relations with other countries, not whether it meets or does
not meet one or more of the criterion for being classified as an imperialist
power. These relationships can be very
complex and cannot simply be reduced to the binary opposition between an
imperialist aggressor and a colonial subject. While a relationship of domination of one
nation over another is a feature of imperialism, the forms in which that
domination is realized can vary tremendously.
Furthermore a nation can be dominated by a more powerful neighbor and at
the same time can in turn dominate other less powerful neighbors. There are different forms of imperialism
today. Indeed, even in Lenin’s time imperialism took on different forms and
imperialism has evolved in an exponential fashion since that time. One hundred
years ago the imperialist “norm” consisted in direct colonial rule. If you look at a map of Africa from the late
19th or early 20th century you will see that it has been
divided up into a patchwork of colonies between the great powers of Europe (and
even some not so “great” powers such as Belgium.) Today, while direct colonial rule still
exists, it is a curious exception to the norm. The norm today is the indirect
domination of a country that is formally independent but is forced to enter
into an unequal economic relationship with one or more predator countries. A
good example of this contemporary form of imperialism is the subjugation of
Greece by the European Union. Whereas Greece does not fit the stereotypical image
of a semi-colonial country, it has in fact been forced to cede its sovereignty
in all but name in order to insure the payments of its debts to the European
bankers.
Now to return to a consideration of Russia, those who raise the question, “Has Russia
reached the highest stage of capitalism? “,[11]
are asking the wrong question. They
fail to recognize that when Lenin discussed “the highest stage of capitalism”,
he was not thinking of it as a measure against which individual countries had
to be judged but as a network of evolving relationships into which each country
participates in different ways.
If you try to fit Russia into the template of
the U.S. economy, then it clearly does not fit.
It is certainly true for instance that Russia does not have a large and
highly evolved financial sector. To many
this becomes a kind of acid test as to whether Russia is an imperialist
power. But that is because they are
cherry picking certain features of the Russian economy and isolating them. They are not looking at Russia’s relationship
to the world economy and its neighbors as a whole and they dismiss the
political and military dimension as well.
If the size of the financial sector were really the decisive acid test,
then we would have to conclude that Germany, which has a rather weak financial
sector compared to its industrial sector, is also not an imperialist
power. Is that really true?
Furthermore Lenin recognized that an
imperialist power can exist that has almost no financial sector, seemingly
challenging his emphasis on the importance of the financial sector for his analysis
of imperialism. But Lenin was not a
formalist, recognizing that definitions can be tentative and relative and
should not be considered an albatross around ones neck. For example, Lenin considered Tsarist Russia to be an imperialist
nation.[12] Yet there is no doubt that Tsarist Russia did
not fit into the criteria that would have defined it as being at “the highest
stage of capitalism.”
It is clear that these are complicated
questions and require serious historical and theoretical work. In addition to a
consideration of the economic, political and military dimensions we may also
take a look at the ideological dimension
that informs the ruling elite in Russia for it too plays a role in
formulating a picture of Russia as an imperialist nation. It should be clear to
all but the willfully blind apologists for Putin, that Russia, in invading the
Ukraine, is pursuing its own
geo-political interests as much as it is reacting to legitimate fears of being
encircled by a hostile NATO. If anyone
doubts that all they have to do is read the speech Putin gave on the eve of the
invasion where he expressed unambiguously the war aims of the Russian oligarchs
he represents. It was one of the most
reactionary speeches any world leader has given in decades.
Putin provided a historical explanation of the
war he was about to launch in which it was the destiny of the Russian nation to
absorb the Ukraine, whose sovereign existence he considered to be an
illegitimate product of Bolshevism, specifically of Lenin. He blamed Lenin for the “crime” of separating
Ukraine – and other countries as well - from what had been the Tsarist
empire. He said,
I will start
with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or,
to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process
started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin
and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh
on Russia – by separating, severing what is historically Russian
land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they
thought.
He went on to blame the problem of the
Ukraine, i.e. its independence, on the terrible policies of the October
Revolution which replaced that “prison of nations”, the Tsarist Empire, with a
voluntary union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
And yet, it
is a great pity that the fundamental and formally legal foundations
of our state were not promptly cleansed of the odious
and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution, which are
absolutely destructive for any normal state.
Putin’s speech was an articulation of a
reactionary imperialist ideology known as Eurasianism. It was born 100 years ago, shortly after the
October Revolution, giving voice to a sentiment shared by those who wished to replace the October
revolution with a revived Tsarist Empire. Its current variant was developed by
the extreme right wing Russian, Aleksandr
Dugin. Jane Burbank, a Russian
historian, recently summarized Dugin’s philosophy as follows,
In Mr. Dugin’s
adjustment of Eurasianism to present conditions, Russia had a new opponent — no
longer just Europe, but the whole of the “Atlantic” world led by the United
States. And his Eurasianism was not anti-imperial but the opposite: Russia had
always been an empire, Russian people were “imperial people,” and after the
crippling 1990s sellout to the “eternal enemy,” Russia could revive in the next
phase of global combat and become a “world empire.” On the civilizational
front, Mr. Dugin highlighted the long-term connection between Eastern Orthodoxy
and Russian empire. Orthodoxy’s combat against Western Christianity and Western
decadence could be harnessed to the geopolitical war to come. [13]
There is a common thread of fascist ideology
that ties together Putin’s espousal of Eurasianism with those white
supremacists and neo-Nazis in the U.S. who believe that there is a conspiracy
by liberals and socialists and Jews to “replace” white Americans with people of
color and immigrants. And it is this ideology that expresses the class
interests of the oligarchs around Putin. Moreover, Putin has expressed this ideology for many
years. In a discussion held in 2013, he declared that Eurasia was a major
geopolitical zone where Russia’s “genetic code” and its many peoples would
be defended against “extreme Western-style liberalism.” [14]
Putin’s speech should have been an eye opener
for those on the left who dismissed the possibility that Putin was acting on
behalf of the geo-political ambitions of a great power, and not merely reacting
to provocations from NATO. Unfortunately
the great majority of those on the left who were not cheerleaders for NATO and
the Biden Administration paid short shrift to Putin’s speech. They claimed that Putin was only reacting
like a dog who feels threatened and is incapable of taking positive actions in
his own right. And as we have previously
noted, so invested were some left groups with the notion that Russia was the
sole victim in this scenario that they framed the conflict as NATO attacking Russia. It is true that NATO provoked Russia, but that does not make the disturbing fact
that Russia has invaded the Ukraine go away.
[9]
Michael Roberts, a British Marxist economist has developed a formula for
determining whether a particular country is a net exporter of surplus value –
and therefore an oppressed country, or a net importer of surplus value – and
therefore an oppressor country and thus an imperialist power. See for instance
his blog, The economics of modern imperialism, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2-the-economics-of-modern-imperialism/
. Roberts further claims that the
political and military dimension of a nation play no role in determining
whether it is an imperialist power or not. Rather, adopting a vulgarized
approach to historical materialism, he insists that the economy is the “cause”
and the political and military dimension are the “effects” solely determined by
the economic status of a nation.
[12] Pröbsting
has already covered this topic
exhaustively. One example of Lenin’s
attitude toward Tsarist Russia appears in the Preface to his study, Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He explains
that when writing his pamphlet in 1916 he had to adopt a bit of subterfuge in
order to get past the Tsarist censorship. He substituted a refence to Russia,
which would have raised some alarm bells, with a relatively harmless reference
to Japan. He writes,
I was forced to quote as an
example [of an imperialist nation] —Japan! The careful reader will
easily substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine,
Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians, for
Korea.
