People attend an anti-war protest in Saint Petersburg, Russia on Thursday after Russian President Putin authorised a military operation in Ukraine. Photo: Reuters/Anton Vaganov
This May Day the workers of the world face once more war between imperialist powers that could easily escalate into a Third world war. The causes of this war are well known to Marxists – imperialism is capitalism in decline, parasitic on workers and nature. When the parasite exhausts its host, nature, there is no way out but to destroy everything it has created including its support system, the biosphere. So the ruling classes of rising great powers challenge the declining powers for hegemony over the ruins of civilization. Humans, the vast majority of which are workers and farmers, are part of nature and they too are expendable. This terminal crisis of capitalism is what has brought us to the war in Ukraine.
In this war we cannot take sides between the warring imperialists without being part of that destruction. Marxists have always seen socialism as rising out of capitalism as its legacy for a classless society. But Marxism itself is in such a crisis that it, like communism, and socialism, has become twisted into a justification for workers sacrificed as cannon fodder to resuscitate capitalism. We say NO! Marxism is the legacy of scientific socialism which empowers workers and farmers to oppose imperialist war with their class war. Workers have the power to smash what is left of rotten capitalism and create that new classless society that restores harmony with nature. But first we must organise to unleash that class power necessary for the task. That is why on this May Day we call for a New Zimmerwald, an anti-war movement that turns imperialist war into socialist revolution! The survival of humanity rests on it!
Why we need a New Zimmerwald today
We are for a new Zimmerwald because the farcical betrayal of Marxism by the fake left today over the war in Ukraine is an echo of the tragic betrayal of Marxism by social democracy on August 4th 1914. Zimmerwald marked the split by the left from the 2nd International over its capitulation to war.
Zimmerwald kept the legacy of Marx alive. It took as its starting point Marx’s view in 1850 that the bourgeois revolution was no longer progressive and must be replaced by the proletarian revolution. Sixty-four years later the Zimmerwald Left made socialist revolution its policy against imperialist war. It explained that the opportunist capitulation to capitalism by the 2nd International majority was rooted in its celebration of bourgeois democracy paid for by the blood and dirt of imperialist exploitation.
A century later we find ourselves repeating this episode as a tragi-comic farce where the opportunist left is now bragging about its open betrayals with even more bankrupt phrases than in 1914. The need for a New Zimmerwald to restore Marxism from its desecration at the hands of this gruesome crew could not be more urgent.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the Western left has been divided over which side to support. Most argue that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine’s national resistance should be backed by the Western nations. Others blame the US for creating the situation which forced Russia to invade Ukraine to defend itself. In effect, the majority of the left supports one or other imperialist power in this war in the name of the national independence of Ukraine. This is a lie. No semi-colony can win national independence until liberated from imperialism and capitalism. The war is an inter-imperialist war which uses workers as pawns in deciding the pecking order of the imperialist powers. We argue that inter-imperialist war prevents the self-determination of nations unless workers transform inter-imperialist wars into civil, that is, class wars and world socialist revolution. Only then will the permanent revolution allow nations and peoples to freely express their right to self-determination. That is why we call for an “independent Soviet Ukraine” now.
Social imperialists
Those who support Russia do it mostly because they don’t see Russia as an imperialist power. For them, Russia is a semi-colony or ‘independent’ state, subordinated to and therefore oppressed by, Western (especially the US) imperialism. Therefore these ‘tankies’ support the right of Russia to defend itself against the expansion of US and NATO in Ukraine. They present Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the lesser evil to US/EU/NATO dominance of Ukraine which has installed a puppet fascist regime. (NTI-CI)
The other social imperialists either see the US/EU/NATO bloc as the lesser evil to the Russian invaders or as not belligerents until they put boots on the ground or planes in the air. For them Russia may or may not be imperialist, but its invasion against Ukraine’s ‘national sovereignty’ makes it an oppressor state. Russia’s defeat, then, even at the cost of Ukraine’s subordination to US/EU/NATO, is seen as the lesser evil. (ITO,Tempest)
Thus, the opportunist left finds itself in the opposing camps of either the US/EU/NATO bloc or the Russia/China bloc. On both sides the left has capitulated to social imperialism, the political position that defends democratic imperialism while benefiting from exploitation and oppression of the exploited and oppressed colonies and semi-colonies.
Much less has been heard from those revolutionaries who are for the defeat of both imperialist blocs in the war in Ukraine. The Leninist position on war between two semi-colonies calls for dual defeat and for the unity of their workers and poor peasants in an anti-imperialist war, i.e. a class war against all capitalist forces. Where semi-colonies act as proxies for imperialist powers, we call for the defeat of both the imperialist ruling classes and their proxy bourgeois regimes. By proxy we mean an imperialist power using a colonial or semi-colonial national bourgeoisie to wage a war as a means of advancing its aims in defeating an imperialist rival. We base our position on Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Trotsky who agreed as the leaders of the Zimmerwald Left in 1915 to oppose workers taking sides in the First World War as a war between imperialist powers.
The Zimmerwald Left
They agreed that in a war between two or more imperialist powers, that is, an inter-imperialist war, workers should be for the defeat of both sides’ ruling classes at the hands of their own working class. Instead of taking orders and going to war to kill one another in the interests of their bosses, workers should regard their own ruling class as their main enemy. This position is called ‘dual defeatism’ meaning that it is in the interests of workers that their own capitalist rulers are defeated.
Most of the left is social imperialist and does not believe in the necessity (or even the possibility) of workers revolution. The petty bourgeois Menshevik intelligentsia tasks itself to lead the workers to this false and demoralizing conclusion. In reality the social imperialist left believes imperialism is a social policy they can tweak to fulfill both the requirement for reforms and lessons in civics for the ‘developing world.’ If pushed from below these petty bourgeois who want to manage capitalism will always blame workers as not ready for ‘the’ revolution.
But imperialist war itself taught workers that killing one another was barbaric, and by 1918 many were ready and willing to mutiny. In line with the war position of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, and the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, they recognised that armed workers had the power to overthrow the old society and create a new one. This created revolutionary situations as armed workers in several states, in particular, Austria Hungary, Vienna and Bavaria (e.g. Kiel mutiny Germany), attempted to take power.
In Russia, workers had already taken power in the Bolshevik Revolution. The workers’ state demanded a ceasefire and attempted to make peace at Brest-Litovsk in early 1918 to spark the German revolution. That propaganda coming out of the successful Bolshevik revolution helped fuel the wave of mutinies in late 1918 that set the scene for revolution.
The fear of the spread of revolution saw the warring imperialist powers quickly arrange an armistice to release troops to put down the revolutions. The revolutions in Hungary and Germany, lacking a revolutionary party, were easily defeated, but in Russia it was the invading imperialist armies that were defeated in the Civil War. The huge war effort saw the Bolsheviks compromise on their program for international revolution, using wartime methods to suppress the national rights of non-Russian republics, specifically Ukraine, which led to the botched armed invasion of Poland in 1920 and the failure to directly support the German revolution.
Sadly, the economic and political damage done by the Civil War, followed by the death of Lenin, encouraged the unreconstructed Mensheviks in the Bolshevik party to take control and the revolution succumbed to bureaucratic degeneration. The survival of the Soviet workers’ and peasants’ state, even in its degenerated form ruled by the Stalinist bureaucracy, became from that point on, the paramount threat to global capitalism and the target of its political, economic and military adventures.
The Fourth International on War
The failure of the first Imperialist War to resolve the rise of competing imperialist powers soon created the conditions for the second Imperialist War. Germany, punished by the Treaty of Versailles to pay war reparations paid for by the working class was in constant upheaval and the Weimar Republic could not stop the threat of revolution. In response, the rise of fascism came to a head when the ultra-left Stalinist 3rd International refused to form a united front with social democracy against fascism allowing Hitler to come to power as Chancellor in 1933. This betrayal of the revolution by the Stalinists prompted Trotsky to declare the 3rd International dead and the Left Opposition began to plan for the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
The new international stood on the legacy of Marx and Lenin marked by the Left Zimmerwald and rallied the healthy forces of Marxism and Leninism around the question of war. The Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution restates Lenin’s theses on war and self-determination. Trotsky puts socialist revolution, including the political revolution in the Soviet Union on the agenda of the day. The fight for national rights is again subordinated to the international class war. Or rather the national war becomes the class war, that is, a part of the wider permanent revolution. Trotsky writing in 1939 just before the outbreak of the Second Imperialist War writes:
“At the beginning of the last imperialist war the Ukrainians, Melenevski (“Basok”) and Skoropis-Yeltukhovski, attempted to place the Ukrainian liberation movement under the wing of the Hohenzollern general, Ludendorff. They covered themselves in so doing with left phrases. With one kick the revolutionary Marxists booted these people out. That is how revolutionists must continue to behave in the future. The impending war will create a favorable atmosphere for all sorts of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece. These gentlemen, who especially love to warm their hands in the vicinity of the national question, must not be allowed within artillery range of the labor movement. Not the slightest compromise with imperialism, either fascist or democratic! Not the slightest concession to the Ukrainian nationalists, either clerical-reactionary or liberal-pacifist! No “People’s Fronts”! The complete independence of the proletarian party as the vanguard of the toilers!” https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/emergconf/fi-emerg02.htm
After the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, the 4th International capitulated on the war against fascism, making democratic imperialism the ‘lesser evil’. The post war-boom reinforced social imperialism allowing a pseudo decolonisation falling far short of national self-determination gaining “flag independence” leaving a comprador bourgeoisie subordinate to imperialism. New imperialist institutions ruled the roost. The Second Imperialist war failed to resolve capitalism’s recurring crises and wars. Stalinism was not overthrown and claimed a greater share in the division of the world by the great powers. The degeneration of the Fourth International adapted to Stalinism and/or third-world ‘revolutionary’ leaders. The healthy forces within the Fourth International were tiny and succumbed to splits and fusions not capable of creating a new international on the program of the Fourth International. The crisis of leadership became the crisis of the Fourth.
However, so long as the Soviet Union, and China to a lesser extent, survived, they kept alive the possibility of a new society superior to that of capitalism. And even when the cold war to defeat ‘communism’ seemed to be victorious in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the fall of soviet Russia and China did not end the fear of a return of ‘communism’. For one thing while the restorationists in Russia around Yeltsin made much of the end of communism, in China the ruling CCP claimed that socialism adapted to the market was still ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
For the Western imperialists, who lack confidence in the ability of the ‘leadership’ of the proletariat to suppress revolution, the cold war must be revived against the ghost of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’. They ignore the fact that Putin is also in favour of ‘de-communisation’ in order to exploit the cold war ideology to confront not only the fear of communism, but the rise of Russia and China as new capitalist imperialist powers. The object is to re-colonise what was lost to global capitalism as the result of socialist revolutions, and pass this off as a continuation of the cold war against ‘communism’. This brings us to the present war in Ukraine, which can now be seen as a continuation of that cold war, but one which has taken the turn towards hot war.
Dual defeatism in Ukraine
The bourgeois doctrine of self-determination of nations means the democratic right to elect governments to create a national market for national capital. As we know, the limits set by national borders to capital accumulation was the cause of capital export and the rise of imperialism more than a century ago. As capitalism overflowed the limits of national markets (inevitable as capital must expand or die), the stronger nations colonised the weaker nations until the world was divided between the big powers and their ‘spheres of influence’. This has led, several world depressions and wars later, to the current situation in which the US bloc and their client states (NATO, ANZUS etc) are in a zero-sum fight to the death with the Russia/China bloc and their client states (BRICs, SCO etc).
The fate of semi-colonies (politically independent but economically oppressed) and colonies (still ruled by imperialist powers), is to be occupied, partitioned, and turned into client states of whichever great power wins the political, economic and military wars. Which means when imperialists are competing to dominate semi-colonies to expand their sphere of influence, no one imperialism is more or less evil than the other. They are equally oppressive in search of their privileges. And so is the opportunist social imperialist left desperate to hold onto its privileges. In Ukraine, the right to self-determination, as with all bourgeois rights, emphatically facing the terminal crisis of capitalism, can be realised only by permanent revolution. Lenin, writing in 1914 a few months before the outbreak of war states:
“To the workers the important thing is to distinguish the principles of the two trends. Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation….The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support, at the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc…we firmly uphold something that is beyond doubt: the right of the Ukraine to form such a state. We respect this right; we do not uphold the privileges of Great Russians with regard to Ukrainians; we educate the masses in the spirit of recognition of that right, in the spirit of rejecting state privileges for any nation…In this situation, the proletariat, of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights, for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind, of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organisations, amalgamating these organisations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness…Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/
In the Ukraine today, the proxy war of the national bourgeoisie retains no democratic content, led by the regime resulting from a fascist coup, embarking on a ‘de-communising war’ against the right of Donbass to self-determination, and incorporating fascist militias into its national army. National self-determination today, meaning independence, and economic equality, like all bourgeois rights, cannot be won by a militarised ‘peoples’ front’ as the proxy for US imperialism. It is possible only as the result of the armed workers and small farmers, led by a revolutionary party, overthrowing the capitalist Bonapartist regime, imposing their program, forming a workers and small farmers government, imposing their ‘workers democracy’, overthrowing the ruling classes, ending the imperialist war, and allowing the right of self-determination of all peoples to be realised through political and economic unions or federations of socialist states.
For a New Zimmerwald and a new International based on the method and program of the 4th International!
For a United, Free and Independent Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Ukraine!
– International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment