Worn out metaphors and tired politics

Tensions in the South China Sea

[This article was originally written on May 27 making it slightly out date. As of today (June 11) the number of WSWS articles with "tensions" in the headline is 568 while the total number of articles containing the word "tensions" also went up. There were no less than 5 such articles on June 2.]

I did a search of all WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) articles with the word "tensions" in the heading. I came up with 564 such articles.  They go back to 1998 when the WSWS first started online publication to the present.  Here is the earliest article that came up:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/02/euro-f17.html

And here are the two most recent from May 27

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/27/indo-m27.html

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/27/taor-m27.html

Of course there are many other articles that use that word - a total of 8,437 according to the WSWS search engine. Multiple uses of the same keyword in the same article are not counted by the WSWS search engine so the use of the word is actually much higher than the figure of 8,437 would indicate.   That's an awful lot of tension registered by WSWS authors since 1998.

The WSWS authors and editors are very creative in coming up with adjectives to qualify these tensions.  While I could not find a single instance where tensions were stabilizing or diminishing, I found numerous descriptions of how they are getting worse and worse.

Besides the ever popular "rising" you will also find that tensions  are "mounting", "growing", "heightening", "escalating", "dominating", "intensifying", "destabilizing", "deepening", "continuing", "exacerbating", "seething", "erupting", "fueling", "ramping up", "surging", "sharpening", "at the breaking point", "surfacing", "inflaming", "flaring", "stoking", and many other creative uses of the English language. (Could some of adjectives - "erupting", "surging", "flaring" be indicative of male sexual fantasies?) Occasionally the metaphor of rising tensions is described in negative terms such as the impossibility of "papering over" these tensions or some international conference that produces a statement of common goals and solidarity "fails to cover up" rising tensions seething beneath the surface.

This is not to say that every one of those 8,437 articles is wrong to point to rising tensions in the global arena. I expect that, clichés aside, many of them are probably correct though perhaps somewhat exaggerated.  But certainly all 8,437 cannot be correct and it is hardly credible that not a single instance of stabilizing or diminishing tensions, however temporary and evanescent, cannot be reported on in the past 20 years. 

I have no doubt that if I did a similar search on keywords such "threat of war", "class conflict", I would find similar results. For the WSWS events always only go in one direction and if something indicates the contrary it is only because the true situation is being "papered over" or "covered up".   Again, I am not saying there is no truth to this; just that it cannot be true 100% of the time. 

One further note: not only are tensions always rising, but their upward trend is accelerating.  A sample of statistics for every year since the WSWS was launched in 1998 shows a steady and sometimes dramatic increase in the rate of "tension" usage each year of publication.

First let us look at a sample of the total number of articles per year.

There were 139 instances of "tensions" in 1998,

 231 in 1999,

 256 in 2001,

 305 in 2005,

 413 in 2008,

 535 in 2010,

 555 in 2012,

 740 in 2014,

 702 in 2015,

 and 834 in 2016,

 the last full year of publication.

Even with the statistical anomaly of 2015, the trend is very clear: usage of the "tension" metaphor is not only rising and appears to be an ever more dominant theme in WSWS articles. Further insight can be gained by checking the percentage of articles using that term per year against the total number of articles written. Is it rising, staying the same or going down? A graphical representation of the yearly percentage of WSWS articles using "tensions" compared to the total number of WSWS articles shows a line going upwards, with some fluctuations, from a low of 8% in 1998 to a high of 15.8% in 2016. There is a rise from 2014 till the present when the percentage hovers between 13% and 16% as compared to the relatively stable years between 2005 and 2013 when it stood between 11% and 13%. And prior to 2004 it was lower still, mostly between 10 % and 11% with a couple of anomalous years where it went to 13%.

Here are the year by year statistics rounded up to the nearest tenth of a percent:

1998=    8.0%

1999=    10.0%

2000=   10.7%

2001=   13.0%

2002=  12.9%

2003=  10.4%

2004=  11.3%

2005 = 12.8%

2006=  12.5%

2007=  12.6%

2008 = 12.8%

2009 = 12.3%

2010 = 12.2%

2011 =  11.6%

2012 =  11.4%

2013 =  12.0 %

2014 =  14.2%

2015 =  13.4%

2016 =  15.8%

2017 =  15.2%

The percentage of articles referencing “rising tensions” of various sorts has almost doubled since the WSWS was launched in 1998.

Now it is certainly true in general that inter-imperialist rivalries have intensified in the past 20 years and war has become an increasingly common option of the American bourgeoisie in its efforts to maintain its economic dominance in the face of its deteriorating international position.  This was in contrast to the decade from 1991 to 2001 when tensions actually subsided as a result of Russia being turned into a semi-protectorate of the United States. That ended with the rise of Putin and the emergence of Russia and China as new imperialist powers as well as the events of 9/11. But that does not mean there have been no fluctuations or lulls or attempts to  return to workable agreements in the last 20 years either. None of that is captured in the ever rising tensions clichés of the WSWS authors. Which I suppose is the point of using this cliché in the first place.

I also do not mean to suggest that the WSWS is alone guilty of substituting reasoned analysis with worn out clichés.  The great majority of organizations calling themselves "Marxist"  do the same thing, sometimes with more, sometimes with less subtlety. I select the WSWS as a prime exemplar of this methodology because their 5,000 articles per year and their search engine make it relatively easy to provide some statistical analysis of their work. And their sectarianism and isolation from the real struggles of the working class is a balm that reinforces the worst aspects of left political analysis.

Other left wing organizations publish far less and what they do publish consists of little more than slogans. Their analysis of events is largely confined to manifestos and resolutions that are published once a year or so.  A nice example of the abuse of language, where clichés are interspersed with insults, is this gem from a manifesto of the Spartacist League,

"Unlike the erstwhile Stalinists and other revisionists, joined today by numerous dilettantes and political bandits ensconced in the virtual reality of cyberspace, who rotate through contradictory programmatic positions and even alleged principles in order to conform to changing opportunist appetites, authentic Marxists prize revolutionary continuity and programmatic consistency." 

[http://spartacist.org/english/icldop/index.html]

Nor do I mean to suggest that this butchery of language and meaning is confined to the left. Right wing publications and web sites are if anything far worse than those of the left in this regard.

Mainstream publications like the New York Times and Washington Post are of course far more sophisticated and circumspect, but they too employ their fair share of trite phrases. But that being said, an analysis of right wing and mainstream publications is best left for another occasion.

All this reminds me of a famous essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, written at the end of World War II. Orwell's point was that political writing had become hackneyed and stale due to the increasing tendency of political writers to substitute clichés for genuine analysis. Orwell provided several examples of this trend, from all spheres of the political spectrum, but perhaps the best one is the following that he copied from a publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain,

"All the best people from the gentlemen's clubs and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to found incendiaries, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis"

Orwell comments about this and other examples of political writings,

"The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen house." 

Later Orwell gives a striking example of the kind of rhetoric frequently found in left wing political writing:

"The sole aim of a metaphor [for example, the metaphor of 'rising tensions'  with its numerous permutations as in WSWS writing, or 'rising tide' as in the Stalinist publication] is to call up a visual image. When these images clash- as in the The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming, in other words he is not really thinking." 

(George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda, "Politics and the English Language", p. 270. First Mariner Books, 2009.)

I am not suggesting that left political analysis has no basis in objective reality, whether one is talking about the "rising tensions" metaphor of the WSWS or the "rising tide" metaphor cited by Orwell. Indeed the writers of these tropes are reacting to real events, but "without thinking", ie. impressionistically and shorn of any serious investigation. In the final analysis the butchery of language is a symptom of the butchery of thought.

In the case of the WSWS the writer is "not really thinking" because he or she already has a worked out scenario in advance regardless of the ups and downs of a dynamically changing situation. It's the product of a sectarian mindset that wishes to see everything as a confirmation of a dogma that they call a "science of perspectives"; one that always and everywhere sees tensions rising. So when events such as 9/11 happen, or a retired military leader warns of the danger of nuclear war, this is just grist for their journalistic mill - if I may borrow another worn out metaphor. Other events, that qualify or add nuance or even question their basic assumptions are simply ignored or explained away. Such schematic formalism and cherry picking of ones focus is the very opposite of a dialectical understanding of the forces that shape our world today.

Alex Steiner 

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The working class in fantasy and reality

The working class in fantasy and reality

by Frank Brenner

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras addresses Parliament during stormy debate on the referendum

Two recurrent threats to a revolutionary policy are opportunism and sectarianism. And both entail distorted – read non-dialectical – conceptions of the revolutionary potential of the working class. For the opportunist the working class has a past but no future. For the sectarian the working class has a future but no past.

If you want a textbook example of sectarianism, read the World Socialist Web Site on the crisis in Greece. We already did a breakdown of this political disorder (as Lenin would have called it) back in January, when the latest phase of the Greek crisis began with the election of SYRIZA. (See “Experience in scare quotes”). Back then, the WSWS was categorical in insisting that nothing had changed with that election:“Syriza’s election victory does not express a political development, a step forward, progress or anything of the kind by or for the working class.”

If this were true, then the crisis now gripping Europe makes absolutely no sense. If Syriza were no different than the previous regimes of Pasok or New Democracy, they would have agreed months ago to the latest austerity blackmail measures demanded by the European financial elites.

Of course Syriza is not a revolutionary party, as anyone with even the barest understanding of Marxism could have figured out. But neither is it just more of the same, one more bourgeois regime among others. The difference lies precisely in the role of the masses.

Syriza was elected on an anti-austerity program by the votes of millions of working class and middle class people. For the past six months it has tried desperately to find some middle ground between the financial vampires in Frankfurt and the aspirations of its electoral base. But unlike its predecessors, Syriza cannot totally ignore those aspirations. Which is why, in the end, it had to say no to a deal and call a referendum.

To a revolutionary, this matters enormously because it opens up possibilities for the growth of revolutionary consciousness. Workers are learning THROUGH THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive, and that only an end to the system will bring an end to austerity. For the first time in generations, socialism can come to be seen as a PRACTICAL PROJECT by the masses. The road to revolution in Greece lies through the electoral base of Syriza. A revolutionary party that can exploit the fissures between that base and the Syriza leadership can win mass support for socialism.

But none of this matters to sectarians. The WSWS reaction to the referendum was that it was “a reactionary fraud, designed to lend a veneer of democratic legitimacy to the looting of Greek workers and middle-class people by the banks.” (See the WSWS article "Greek prime minister calls for referendum on EU austerity demands".)

This makes no sense. Having failed to get even the most meager concessions from Eurozone officials, the government has turned to the Greek people and asked them to decide: yes or no to more austerity. There is no indication the referendum has been fixed in any way; if anything, the government is the underdog in this campaign and it may well lose, which would immediately bring about its collapse. In what sense is this a fraud? On the contrary, this is a very rare occasion when bourgeois democracy actually lives up to its hype. Which explains why the European elites are furious at the Greek government: how dare the people be allowed to have a say when it comes to something as important as cold hard cash! The opportunities for revolutionaries to intervene in such a campaign and raise revolutionary consciousness would be evident to anyone not blinded by the sickness of sectarianism.

The WSWS contends that not only is the referendum a fraud but the government is maneuvering to get a yes vote: “Broad sections of the Syriza-led government and of the Greek ruling class as a whole are pushing for capitulation to what Tsipras acknowledged were humiliating demands. After Greece’s central bank came out with a call to remain in the euro, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis stressed yesterday that Greece was doing everything it could to satisfy the 'strange demands' of its creditors and was determined to remain inside the euro zone.”

This too is nonsense. It would be impossible for Syriza to continue to govern if the referendum vote is to accept ongoing austerity. If this really was the secret agenda of Tsipras and company, they could have just made a deal and tried to ignore the outrage on the streets. In fact, reports from Athens say that the cabinet was unanimous in backing a No campaign.

Sectarians live in a fantasy world. Bereft of any dialectical understanding of how political consciousness develops, they change facts to fit their 'perspective'. Here is one such example:"The Financial Times recently reported on a pool party held in the 'leafy, affluent northern suburbs' of Athens and attended by a pro-EU crowd of 'well-heeled businessmen, politicians, academics, and socialites.' For these layers, the FT noted, 'life without the euro is almost unimaginable. The single currency made it easier for them to send children to study abroad and purchase property and luxury goods elsewhere in Europe.' Given that Syriza largely consists of similar affluent middle-class academics, politicians, and socialites, divorced from and hostile to the working class, similar moods are well represented inside Syriza itself.”

This is a rather crude example of guilt by association: the quote from the Financial Times says nothing about this pool party being a gathering of Syriza supporters, but somehow in the WSWS article they become exemplars of that party's political base. In any case, this is an article of faith in all WSWS coverage of Syriza: that the party's base is bourgeois and upper middle class.

A pool party in the affluent Athens suburb of Kifisia

But what then becomes of the Greek working class? Who exactly did they vote for in January? If not Syriza, who then? The mainstream bourgeois parties? The fascists? Did the workers not vote at all – were there mass abstentions? To ask such questions is to answer them. But sectarians never ask them.

For sectarians, the only working class that matters is the working class of their fantasies. All this fantasy working class needs to be woken into revolutionary consciousness is the 'magic touch' of the sectarian's propaganda. You might call this a 'Sleeping Beauty' approach to revolutionary politics.

And so, in the end of the article, you get what is a ritual incantation in all WSWS propaganda: “The only way forward for the working class is to set its policy independently of all the factions of the capitalist class, whose social order has utterly failed. The critical task is to prepare to mobilize the working class in Greece and across Europe in revolutionary struggle against the reactionary intrigues of Syriza and the EU.”

How any of this is to happen is a total mystery because this isn't about real Greek workers who really voted for a party called Syriza. Rather it is about a fantasy working class that only exists in the heads of sectarians – a Sleeping Beauty with a glorious future and no past.

Workers who were not invited to pool party in Kifisia reading about referendum at kiosk

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Experience in scare quotes: sectarianism and the Greek election

by Frank Brenner

First cabinet meeting of new government of Greece, presided over by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

On the premise that sometimes knowing the wrong way to do something helps in figuring out the right way, here is a quote from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)  about the victory of Syriza in last week's national election in Greece.

The International Committee of the Fourth International rejects with contempt the political excuse offered by the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left to justify support for Syriza and its pro-capitalist agenda—that a Tsipras government is a necessary “experience” for the working class, from which it will somehow come to understand the necessity for genuinely socialist policies.

Such sophistries are advanced only to oppose the emergence of a revolutionary movement of the working class, a development possible only through a relentless political exposure of Syriza. This task is undertaken by the World Socialist Web Site in order to prepare workers and young people for the decisive struggles they face in Greece and internationally.

(http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/27/pers-j27.html )

This is from an article on Jan. 27. And here's another one posted the next day, making the same point. (In both cases, the underlining is by me).

Another of their arguments is that one must support Syriza, so that the working class can go through these experiences and learn from them. This is pure cynicism. Given the enormous dangers posed by a Syriza government, the task of a Marxist party is to expose the class interests represented by Syriza, to warn the working class against its consequences and provide it with a clear socialist orientation.

This is how the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International participate in the “experiences” in Greece. The numerous pseudo-left groups cling to Syriza because they represent the same class interests as this party. They speak for better-off layers of the middle class, who fear an independent movement of the working class, and who are concerned to ensure their own social elevation within the bourgeois order.

(http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/28/syri-j28.html )

These quotes are both examples of what Marxists call sectarianism. You can read Trotsky's classic diagnosis of this degenerative political disease here.

What I find striking is how in both these quotes the word experience (or experiences) is in scare quotes. The ostensible target of this criticism is other “pseudo-left” groups, but the real target is the masses: it is their experience that is being denigrated (“rejects with contempt”) with these scare quotes. They voted in their millions for a party whose Greek acronym stands for Coalition of the Radical Left. Nothing like this has happened in Europe in more than half a century. The election has also aroused the hopes of millions of other victims of savage austerity in Spain, Portugal and Italy. It marks the upsurge of a mass movement seeking radical social change. If you don't find this important, then you aren't a revolutionary.

Sectarians see things differently. What they see is – to use a prefix much favored by WSWS writers – a 'pseudo' experience. Nothing significant happened in the Greek election. “Syriza’s election victory does not express a political development, a step forward, progress or anything of the kind by or for the working class.” For them political analysis is quite simple: what happened is not a revolution, hence it is reactionary. One bourgeois party replaced another bourgeois party in power: that is their reading of the election.

To be sure, Greece is still a long way from a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but you hardly need the accumulated wisdom of Marxism to see that. What you do need that wisdom for is to properly assess whether or not this experience is a step towards that ultimate goal, and use that assessment as the basis for intervening in the political life of the masses.

Sectarians aren't interested in steps, or should I say “steps”. For them the Syriza victory doesn't count as a step forward. But what would count? Apart from more people reading the WSWS or joining the SEP, these sectarians have no answer for that, and see no pressing need to come up with one.

Marxists use a category like “bourgeois party” to understand political reality more deeply, but in the hands of a sectarian such a category becomes devoid of content, and little more than a form of name-calling. Thus we are told by the WSWS that in “its origin, social composition and politics, Syriza is a bourgeois party” comparable to Barack Obama and the Democrats. In fact, the core of Syriza comes from the Eurocommunists who split from the pro-Soviet wing of the Communist Party in the late 1980s. Stalinist parties are not revolutionary parties, but Trotskyists have never simply labeled them bourgeois because this distorts their origin and the specific nature of their relationship to the working class.

Syriza eventually evolved into an umbrella organization for 13 groups, including social democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, left ecologists and liberals. Again this is not a revolutionary party but neither is it a conventional bourgeois party: to that extent at least, the featuring of Radical Left in its name is not false advertising. And that matters because millions of voters came to identify their aspirations with Syriza precisely because they saw it as a radical departure from the mainstream. Nor are those aspirations just for vague promises of hope and change a la Obama: they are very clearly for an end to austerity.

Such distinctions are important for revolutionary Marxists but not for sectarians. “Sectarians are capable of differentiating between but two colors: red and black. So as not to tempt themselves, they simplify reality. They refuse to draw a distinction between the fighting camps in Spain for the reason that both camps have a bourgeois character” (Trotsky).

Another way of saying this is that sectarians have a kitchen-sink approach to politics. A good example is the constantly used epithet “pseudo-left” on the WSWS. If you unpack this phrase, what it means is that everyone else on the left isn't left at all, they're all just “pseudo-left”. This includes any and all parties calling themselves Marxist or Trotskyist or revolutionary socialist. The only truly left party on the planet is the SEP. Everyone else belongs in the sink of “pseudo-leftism”. Here the rhetoric gets so far removed from reality as to become delusional.

Sectarians have only contempt for “experience” but they have enormous faith in propaganda. In their view, it is “sophistries” to say that the Greek working class needs to go through the experience of a Syriza government “from which it will somehow come to understand the necessity for genuinely socialist policies.” What the workers really need is “a relentless political exposure of Syriza”, which is to say, propaganda by the WSWS. The second quote hammers home the same point: it is “pure cynicism” to imagine that “the working class can go through these experiences and learn from them”. Instead, “the task of a Marxist party is to expose the class interests represented by Syriza, to warn the working class against its consequences and provide it with a clear socialist orientation” ... in other words, propaganda.

Which raises an important question – how does the working class learn? Does it learn primarily from propaganda, no matter how “relentless”, or does it learn primarily from its own experiences, with or without scare quotes? The SEP, which is vehemently materialist in its stated philosophical views, is actually idealist when it comes to its politics: propaganda matters, experience not at all.

But this isn't how the real world works. Nor is it how Marxists have traditionally understood their task as revolutionaries. Marxists aren't contemptuous of the experience of the masses; on the contrary, they do everything possible to engage with that experience. What does engage mean in this context? Trotsky addressed this in The Transitional Program: it means finding a bridge between the present situation – in Greece, the fight against austerity – and the fight for socialism.

Of course this involves propaganda for socialism, to the widest extent possible. And it means not pulling any punches in criticisms of the new government, particularly any concessions it makes to the domestic bourgeoisie or the European financial elites. A major political upsurge of the masses creates great dangers as well as great opportunities. We already have an example of this in Greece, with Syriza forming a government with a right-wing populist party. But sectarians see only the dangers and “reject with contempt” the opportunities. They do “not understand the dialectical action and reaction between a finished program and a living – that is to say, imperfect and unfinished – mass struggle.”

In the case of Greece, engaging with the masses means putting demands on Syriza which can mobilize broad support. Employment in particular seems to be what in American political parlance is called a “wedge issue” – an excellent phrase that revolutionaries should adopt. In Greece we need a program of demands addressed to “wedge issues” – demands designed to drive a wedge between the deep desire of the masses to end austerity and the obscene wealth of the elites who cannot accommodate that desire. Such a program would work to activate mass struggles and create the conditions for workers and young people to learn from their own experiences that only socialism will bring an end to austerity. This really would be a  revolutionary policy, in stark contrast to the pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric of sectarianism.

Engaging with the masses also means listening to them, not just hectoring at them. Take for example Syriza's alliance with the right-wing populist Independent Greeks. For a sectarian this is just an 'I told you so' moment. But this isn't how revolutionaries operate. Here is a Syriza supporter, in fact writing a comment reacting to one of the WSWS sectarian diatribes:

“The cooperation between SYRIZA and the 'Independent Greeks' was a necessary evil in order to make an anti austerity coalition in order to form a government. The Communist Party of Greece will not even speak to SYRIZA and the 'River' party, although claiming to be what you would call 'pseudo left' is more for maintaining the economic status-quo than the other parties and the PASOK is completely sold out so not much room for choice. The expressed line of the IGs are anti-austerity and their actions have shown this to be so.”

Marxists would disagree that the alliance with the Independent Greeks was a “necessary evil', but it's not enough just to dismiss such an argument or denounce it. The points about the other parties are entirely true, and the voters who backed Syriza wanted them to form a government. Under these circumstances, it would seem that a minority government would have been possible, and that the Syriza leadership opted for a formal alliance, including handing the crucial Defense Ministry to the Independent Greeks, to give themselves some political 'wiggle room'. This raises a crucial question: can you fight austerity and yet be pro-capitalist, as the Independent Greeks are? This person still seems to think that's possible, and no doubt he is far from being alone in this regard. If Greek revolutionaries are ever to get a hearing from such people, they will have to inoculate themselves against sectarianism.

The Transitional Program is still offered for sale at the  online bookstore affiliated with the WSWS

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The SEP on the nature of Russia and China

Vladimir Putin

On Sept. 4 2014 we posted a comment on a resolution coming out of the recently concluded "Third Congress" of the SEP.   ( A comment on the resolution of the SEP on the fight against war.)  The "unanimously approved" resolution titled, "The Fight Against War and the Political Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party"   among other things excoriated anyone who thought that Russia and China were imperialist powers. Since the SEP's condemnation lacked any analysis on the nature of those societies, one section of  our critique challenged the SEP to tell us what exactly Russia and China were.  

Our piece elicited several comments including two that were sympathetic to the SEP's position.  Yet in no case could anyone produce a statement by the SEP on the nature of Russia or China. That is, until today.  This afternoon we received a comment by a reader, Michael, who did some research into the position of the SEP on Russia and China.  I am reprinting the entirety of Michael's comment below followed by my own comment:

________________________________________________________________________________

Michael said...

I did a search on the WSWS regarding the issue of russian or chinese imperialism.

Here's what i found (may be incomplete):

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/06/pers-j06.html:

Notwithstanding the attempts of imperialist propagandists to liken it to the Kaiser’s Germany, China is not an imperialist power. It operates within a world economy and financial system dominated by the imperialist powers, the US above all.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/12/sher-m12.html:

Unlike Germany in 1914, China is not an imperialist power. Rather it is a cheap labour platform, completely dependent on foreign investment and technology.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/04/03/germ-a03.html:

Russia is not an imperialist country.

https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2014/03/06/pers-m06.html (German):

Russland ist kein imperialistisches Land, sondern vom Weltimperialismus abhängig. Putin vertritt die Interessen einer Plutokratie, die das gesellschaftliche Eigentum plündert, sagenhafte Vermögen zusammenstiehlt und in internationalen Banken versteckt, während die große Mehrheit der Bevölkerung in bitterer Armut lebt.

Translation with Google translator:

Russia is not an imperialist country, but is dependent on world imperialism. Putin represents the interests of a plutocracy that plunders the social property, robs fabulous wealth and hides it in international banks, while the vast majority of the population lives in abject poverty.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/sepa-m14.html:

The fact of the matter is that while China’s economy is indisputably capitalist, it is not an imperialist power. German imperialism’s economic dynamism at the beginning of the 20th century stemmed from its consolidation of a large internal market and the emergence of giant trusts and corporations, based on its pioneering role in the manufacturing and chemical industries. The Chinese economy’s expansion, on the contrary, has been the outcome of the operations of huge transnational corporations and international finance capital and their insatiable appetite for cheap labour. Domestic consumption in China amounts to just 35 percent of GDP, compared with 65–70 percent in the US and the UK. Foreign capital dominates the Chinese economy. In 2013, foreign invested enterprises (FIE) numbered more than 440,000 and accounted for 47 percent of China’s exports and 45 percent of its imports. Consequently the Chinese economy is extremely vulnerable to foreign investment flows and to the state of its export markets. While its economy is the world’s second largest, the International Monetary Fund ranks China by per capita GDP at 85th, between the Maldives and Iraq. Nor does China have colonies or semi-colonies. Its enormous demand for raw materials and energy constantly runs up against the domination of every part of the globe by the major imperialist powers.

-------------

Hm, some of these arguments seem problematic to me.

For example the first one: Isn't this true for nearly *every* country on earth (even the US itself)?

And for the last one: Would - according to most of these criterias - the old czarist Russia qualify as an imperialist country?

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Michael deserves credit for doing this research and he is absolutely correct in pointing to the threadbare quality of the SEP's "arguments" in supporting their thesis that Russian and China are not imperialist powers. What strikes me about these statements that are gathered together from different news articles is their eclectic and impressionistic quality.  China, it is claimed, is not an imperialist nation because  "It operates within a world economy and financial system dominated by the imperialist powers."  Michael  is correct to note that this criteria can apply to practically any country. Moreover if you parse that statement, it is actually a tautology. If you exclude China from membership in the club of imperialist powers, then it follows by definition that it is not one of the members of that club and therefore "operates within a world economy...dominated by the imperialist powers." 

Another statement  provides yet another reason why China is not an imperialist nation - it is because  "it is a cheap labour platform,"   True, China is a source of cheap labour for many of the world's largest and most profitable corporations such as Apple.  But is that all there is to the Chinese economy? It seems rather arbitrary to isolate one part of the Chinese economy and use that as a definition of the entire society. Even Proudhon did better than that.  Furthermore, why does the fact that China is a source of cheap labour imply that it is not an imperialist power?  Have there never been imperialist powers that also provided cheap labour to the international market?  In this respect one can cite Czarist Russia.  Prior to the October Revolution, Russia was a source of cheap labour for German capitalists, who invested heavily in Russian industry.  Of course those investments were hardly on the same scale as those we see today in the global economy.  But all attempts to pigeon-hole China's relationship to the world economy into one distinct category must fall flat on its face given the complex nature of China's interaction with the world market.  China is the second largest creditor nation in the world today, behind Japan but fast approaching number one. At the same time huge sections of Chinese industry are heavily dependent on foreign investments making them debtors in the world economy.  It is both a source of raw materials for Europe and North America and a large importer of raw materials to feed its ravenous industries.  

Michael also located an article that cites several statistics,  none of which point to anything more than that the vast majority of the population remain mired in poverty and the economy is heavily tied to and dependent on foreign investments.  But one of the defining characteristics of social relations in China today is the vast disparity between the new enriched capitalists and middle class and the rest of the population.  While it is true that the ruling class and upper middle class is a small percent of the population, given the enormous size of China, that layer still comprises tens of millions of people. And that layer of Chinese society dominates China politically and are the driving force behind its imperialist ambitions. 

Xi Jinping

One last argument made in the pages of the WSWS is that "China does not have any colonies or semi-colonies."  Even if that were true, it ignores the fact that imperialism in the 21st century functions largely without "having colonies" as was the case in the 19th century and the earlier part of the 20th century.  New forms of imperialism have arisen to replace the old colonial system that was once dominated by Great Britain.  The United States, the worlds' number one imperialist power, functions largely without any formal colonies except for a few small islands in the Carribean. In any case, the statement that China does not have colonies is only true if you ignore China's occupation of Tibet and its insistence on keeping several national minorities within the boundaries of China despite the desires of those ethnic groups to be independent.  It is true that these are not colonies in a formal legal sense but then again neither were the countries that were absorbed by the old Czarist Empire.  In fact  there are many parallels between China today and Czarist Russia including the fact that like Czarist Russia's rivalry with the dominant imperialist powers of a hundred years ago, China is a minor imperialist power compared to the dominant one of the 21st century, the United States. 

So much for arguments about China not being an imperialist nation.  The WSWS doesn't even venture to provide a coherent argument as to why Russia should not be considered an imperialist power. 

The branding of Russia and China as mere victims of imperialism, while a fiction from the viewpoint of the Marxist theory of imperialism, has a very practical purpose.  It enables the SEP to side with Russia and China in the inter-imperialist rivalries that have broken out between those countries on the one hand and the U.S. and Western Europe on the other, as if Russia and China held the same status of clearly oppressed nations such as Bangladesh or Peru. In our previous comment on the SEP's resolution, we called this the Politics of As If.  And this fictitious identification of these countries with the oppressed nations of the world becomes the justification for the failure of the SEP to formulate an independent role for the working class within these conflicts.  Instead the SEP has championed a form of anti-imperialism that is divorced from socialism and adapts itself to the Chinese and Russian ruling classes. 

And we are still waiting for an explanation from the SEP as to what exactly Russia and China are. If they are capitalist countries - which the SEP acknowledges - but not imperialist powers - then what exactly are they?  

Alex Steiner 

  

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A comment on the resolution of the SEP on the fight against war

The word "war" appears 97 times.

The word "imperialist" appears 23 times.

The word "imperialism" appears 36 times.

The word "pseudo", as in "pseudo-left", appears 6 times.

The word "fight" appears 13 times, usually coupled with the word "against".

The word "ruthless" appears 3 times, the latter 2 instances not as a disparaging adjective describing the enemy but as a positive characterization of oneself.

The resolution, titled, "The Fight Against War and the Political Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party",

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/25/reso-a25.html,

was, as usual, passed unanimously.

We have previously commented on the SEP's practice of passing resolutions "unanimously" and we note that their "Third Congress" did not represent a departure from this practice. ( http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/distorting_history.pdf) Likewise, we have also commented on the idiosyncratic accounting system by which the SEP keeps track of which Congress they are convening. (http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/search/label/founding_congress)

Of course one expects lots of references to war and imperialism in a resolution on the fight against war,  but in this case there is very little content behind those words.  The SEP sees imperialism in 2014 as a return to 1914 and are convinced that history is repeating itself complete with a tense summer of international incidents reprising the tension of the summer of 1914.  But imperialism while it continues to plague the planet is very different today than it was 100 years ago. For one thing, the use of military power to back up economic interests, while certainly still in play,  is embarked upon with much greater reluctance today, as witnessed by the obvious paralysis of the Obama Administration toward the events in Syria, Iraq and now Ukraine.  What the SEP sees as the increasingly bellicose foreign policy of the Obama administration is seen by virtually every other analyst as the largely incoherent policy of a weak administration unsure of what to do and reluctant to get involved in any long term military escapades aside from some easy pickings through the employment of drones with its minimal commitment of U.S. military resources.  Even the Republican hawks opposing Obama have not yet dared to advocate the use of American ground forces in Syria or the Ukraine.  This could change of course, especially if the Republicans regain the White House,  or for that matter a Democratic hawk like Hillary Clinton, but for now the SEP's outcry over the preparations of the U.S. for a new World War strikes one as manufactured hysteria rather than rational analysis.

This is perhaps most obvious in the SEP's analysis of the Obama Administration's "pivot to Asia".  The numerous references to this policy in the pages of the SEP's online publication, the World Socialist Web Site,  depicts it not as an exercise of American policy toward Asia aimed at increasing its economic and political influence against its rivals, but as an outright preparation for war with China.  Of course economic and political rivalries can under certain conditions lead to war but it is one thing to warn about the dangers of such policies and quite another to proclaim their inevitable consequence being all out nuclear conflagration. The latter interpretation, which has been hinted at more and more openly, especially by the Australian SEP, represents a form of politics that can be characterized as "crisis mongering". To cite one recent example, the following article from the WSWS repeatedly makes references to the "U.S. war preparations against China" as if this was already an accomplished fact and mobilization was just around the corner. (http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/16/nzpl-a16.html) Rather than educating the working class about the nature of imperialism and the dangers of war, crisis mongering is meant to frighten the masses into making a choice on the spot between "absolute evil" and "absolute good". Such methods of recruitment are more characteristic of a cult than a serious revolutionary movement. Contrast this with the patient approach taken by Trotsky in 1934 in the document, War and the Fourth International:

"77. To conquer revolutionary positions in the trade unions and other working-class mass organizations, it is necessary to break pitilessly with bureaucratic ultimatism, to take the workers where they are and as they are, and to lead them forward from partial tasks to general ones, from defence to attack, from patriotic prejudices to the overthrow of the bourgeois state."

(https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/06/warfi.htm)

"Bureaucratic Ultimatism" is a good description of the stance of the SEP toward the working class.  They have long ago abandoned the Transitional Program and any conception of taking workers in their day to day practice from where they are to the tasks required for a social revolution. Rather workers are berated to either join their movement or live with the guilt of enabling the counter-revolution. Word War and counterrevolution are depicted as inevitable - unless millions of workers suddenly join the SEP. The SEP document contains no programmatic demand to be implemented by the working class other than the demand to join the SEP!  This means that in order to do anything at all you must already be convinced of the truth and validity of the entirety of the SEP's analysis.  It is an all or nothing proposition, one that is characteristic of ultra-left sectarians.

As for the actual "analysis" of the SEP, once one get past the boiler-plate rhetoric the meager substance in places degenerates into incoherence. This is particularly true of their statements about Russia and China. The resolution here states,

41. One mechanism through which pseudo-left forces are seeking to legitimize US and European aggression is through the false characterization of Russia and China as “imperialist” countries. This characterization, which tears both Russia and China out of all historical context, is aimed at conditioning public opinion to accept ever more dangerous provocations by the imperialist powers in both Asia and Eastern Europe. It is bound up with the theory that the Soviet Union and China after the 1949 revolution were “state capitalist,” and that the immense transformations that took place with the restoration of capitalism did not represent a change in the social foundations of the regimes. The destruction of nationalized property relations in both countries was connected to the efforts by finance capital to reduce them to colonial status, not with their rise as new centers of imperialist power.

42. Leon Trotsky, writing in 1929, anticipated with great prescience the socio-economic consequences of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. Far from becoming “imperialist,” he noted, “A capitalist Russia could not now occupy even the third-rate position to which czarist Russia was predestined by the course of the World War. Russian capitalism today would be a dependent, semi-colonial capitalism without any prospects.” [10] The Socialist Equality Party is implacably opposed to the bourgeois regimes in both China and Russia. Representing the interests of a tiny layer of capitalists and oligarchs, they have no genuine independence from imperialism and are incapable of principled opposition to the machinations of the US and Europe. Our opposition to these regimes, however, is rooted in the fight to mobilize the working class as an independent political force, on the basis of a socialist program.

Now it is true that the restoration of capitalism in Russia and China "was connected to the efforts to reduce them to colonial status" but did that effort succeed? While capitalist restoration has undoubtedly brought about increasing misery for the working class, neither Russia or China have in fact been reduced to colonial status and their native bourgeoisie have ideas of their own independent of the wishes of finance capital in Europe and North America.

There is also no logical connection between the designation of these countries as "state capitalist" by groups that broke from Trotskyism decades ago and their designation as imperialist countries today.  If Russia and China are not imperialist powers then what exactly are they? To be sure both Russia and China are minor imperialist powers when compared to the U.S. or Germany.  They play approximately the same role vis a vis the major imperialist powers today as Czarist Russia did in relation to Great Britain 100 years ago. Furthermore, Russia's interests are primarily of a regional character rather than a global one, seeking to secure its hegemony over a swath of territory that marked the boundaries of the old Czarist empire. One cannot say the same thing about China, which has taken aggressive actions internationally to ensure a continuous flow of raw materials to feed its economy. Amazingly,  though the SEP resolution is ready to condemn those who consider Russia and China imperialist nations, the SEP never tells us what they think Russia and China are.  Neither the SEP resolution, nor any of the numerous articles in the WSWS ever provide a theory of the nature of Russia or China.   All we are ever told is what they are not. They strongly infer, without saying so, that Russia and China have the same status as oppressed colonies. But this is obviously absurd which is apparently why the SEP falls short of actually saying so. To be sure China has become the main supplier of cheap labor to all the major international corporations who have outsourced their manufacturing facilities to that country.  But China also exercises enormous leverage on the entire world economy as a result of its huge investments abroad and its key role in propping up the dollar. And China's military power marks it as indeed a powerful rival to U.S. interests in Asia.

Similarly, the SEP hints that Russia is in some way still a workers state without actually coming out and saying as much.  They don't say that because it is obviously an absurd position to suggest that the Russia of Putin and the oligarchs still represents, even in a distorted manner, the heritage of the October Revolution. ( The absurdity of this position did not stop groups like Spartacist from advocating it for many years after capitalism was restored in the former Soviet Union. )  But although the SEP admits that capitalism has been restored in Russia it still treats Russia in many ways AS IF it were still a workers state and worthy of being defended against imperialist aggression. One could call this the politics of AS IF!  All their rhetoric about their "implacable" opposition to the bourgeois regimes in Russia and China cannot hide the fact that the SEP has consistently adapted itself to the maneuvers of Russia in relation to the Ukraine and have no independent perspective for either the Ukrainian or the Russian working class.

And of course there is nothing in this document about how the SEP intends to raise the consciousness of the working class.  Here is what they write about this subject:

46. The SEP must strive through persistent political work to educate and raise the consciousness of the most advanced sections of the working class. In doing so, it must combat the endless stream of falsifications and propaganda emanating from the media and the mouthpieces of the ruling class. It must seek to inoculate the workers against all forms of nationalism and chauvinism, encouraging solidarity with the struggles of all workers in every country. The defeat of imperialism is possible only through an international movement, but the building of an international party means the fight in every country to win the working class to an international program and perspective.

We are waiting for a representative from the SEP to articulate their protocols for "inoculating" the working class.

Contrast this empty rhetoric with the concrete proposals put forward by Trotsky in the document War and the Fourth International:

70. The first prerequisite for success is the training of party cadres in the correct understanding of all the conditions of imperialist war and of all the political processes that accompany it. Woe to that party that confines itself in this burning question to general phrases and abstract slogans! The bloody events will crash over its head and smash it.

It is necessary to set up special circles for the study of the political experiences of the war of 1914-18 (ideological preparations for war by the imperialists, misleading of public opinion by military headquarters through the patriotic press, the role of the antithesis defence-attack; groupings in the proletarian camp, the isolation of the Marxist elements, etc., etc.).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/06/warfi.htm

"General phrases" and "abstract slogans" is exactly what we get from the SEP resolution.

And at the end of the day we cannot help but notice that in this document that lays such emphasis on "inoculating" the working class against bourgeois ideology the word "dialectics" does not appear once.

Alex Steiner

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