Ukraine, Bosnia,
Syria, Egypt and Venezuela are all currently flashpoints in the growing rivalry
between the US led bloc of older imperialist powers and the rising Russia/China
bloc of emerging imperialist powers caused by the onset of the global crisis of
falling profits. These flashpoints reflect the life and death struggle of these
imperialist powers to restore their profits at the expense of their rivals.
Ultimately this struggle is downloaded onto the masses who suffer attacks on
the living standards and their lives. The uprisings and revolutions in these
flashpoints represent the mobilisation of the global working class entering the
stage to break free from imperialist oppression and the national bourgeois
regimes that are its lackeys. There can only be one of two outcomes. Either
imperialism destroys the planet and humanity, or the working class overthrows
imperialism and builds a socialist society. For humanity to live, capitalism
must die!
Crisis in Ukraine
Ukraine has provoked much hot air as a crisis flashpoint
between the US/EU and Russia. The bourgeois intellectuals are all trying to
join-up-the-dots. The conservative bourgeoisie are into realpolitik. Stratfor, for example, shows that Russia’s
resurgence is based on economic realities of
scarce resources. This realpolitik view sees the ‘Great Game’ between Russia
(and today China) and the West over oil and gas in Asia as driving geopolitics.
Some draw the one-sided conclusion that rival
imperialists have billions invested in each others’ economies so that war becomes
irrational. This was the conclusion that Karl Kautsky drew from the
bourgeois economists of the early 20th century. John Mersheimer argues that in the post-WW2 period nuclear arms led to a
stalemate in Europe so that economic conflicts stop short of war. Today self-claimed
Trotskyist Louis
Proyect makes this argument when he lists the
overlapping investments of the imperialist powers and sees their common
interest in opposing Islamic radicalism as a barrier to war. This position is
one-sided because it is clear that the two imperialist blocs are already
engaged in proxy wars from Sudan to Syria and actively enlist Islamic radicals
as proxies.
An equally one-sided conclusion is that imperialist
conflict and risk of war results from the irrational
policies of rival political elites rather than the economic laws of
imperialism. These policies lead to corruption as in the case of the misguided
self-interest of the neo-cons or the Russian
oligarchs. We can see both positions on Ukraine argued on democracynow between Snyder and McGovern. Snyder presents the US neo-con
position as that of defending human rights from terrorism around the world. McGovern characterises the neo-cons as part
of a CIA conspiracy to dominate the world. This position is one-sided because while the
bourgeoisie are into power politics, rational or irrational, the revolutionary
left does not reduce economics to power politics – or does it?
Most of the self-proclaimed
revolutionary left in the Western imperialist states see geopolitics as the
result of either US global hegemony oppressing
Russia (or China)
as a semi-colony, or independent capitalist state, in all the flashpoints; or like
the Third
Camp they see Russia (and/or China) as imperialist but not in the Marxist-Leninist
sense of newly emerged state monopoly capitalist rivals to the US led bloc of
imperialists. Both are wrong. The pro-Russia camp makes the fundamental
mistake of defending one imperialist power (Russia or China) against another
(US/EU) ultimately calling for workers to go to war on behalf of Putin’s regime
or its semi-colonial allies like Assad in Syria. The Third Camp which dates Russian
imperialism back to the Stalinist regime in the late 1920s or 1930s or Chinese imperialism to the Maoist
regime in the 1950s. It fails to understand that without the experience of the DWSs
the conditions could not exist to allow these countries to escape the fate of
the semi-colonies and become new imperialist rivals to the US/EU bloc.
Neither camp understands
Lenin’s theory of imperialism as arising out of the export of capital to counter the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
(LTRPF). Imperialism is merely the political competition of rival superpowers. The
pro-Russia camp misses the increasing export of capital by Russia and China,
not to mention the conditions arising out of their history as DWS that have
allowed them to escape domination by Western imperialism. For the Third Camp, modern
imperialism emerged as a political regime in Russia and China where the law of
value was suppressed by the state so that the extraction of ‘surplus-labor’ was
planned rather than realised by a capitalist market. Therefore, the
reintroduction of the law of value in the early 1990s is insufficient to
explain why Russia and China escaped the fate of semi-colonies to become imperialist
today.
On the contrary, for Marx
and Lenin, the activation of the counter-tendencies to the LTRPF requires the
rise of monopoly state capital as a stage in capitalist development in which
imperialist states export capital and compete economically, politically and
militarily to plunder the world. Armed
with this theory we can explain why the US is now trying desperately to defend its
hegemony from the rise of Russia
and China
as new rival imperialisms. As we will see each major crisis embodies the
unresolved previous crises and is a bigger threat to capitalisms survival. So each
crisis is not merely a repeat of previous cycles of crises. Paul
Mason, one time member of the League for Revolutionary Communist
International (LRCI), compares the flashpoint of Ukraine to Russia facing
another ‘1905’- the first Russian revolution against the Tsar.
This historical analogy
breaks down precisely because it confuses a crisis before WW1 when Russia was a
weak peripheral imperialist power ruled by the Tsar, with Russia today as part
of a rising imperialist bloc emerging out of a DWS. So while the analogy holds
as a prediction that the imperialist war raises the prospect of revolution, it
ignores the global nature of the crisis and the existing proxy wars already
underway in all of these flashpoints. Similarly, those who take the Kautsky
position of ultra-imperialism
as a barrier to war fail to see that despite collaboration in some regions, e.g.
Afghanistan and Syria, the rival blocs have also been involved in proxy wars
from Georgia, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, DPRK, etc. Not only are they taking sides
behind their proxies to grab oil, gas and other resources, in some places they
are also backing rival Islamic sects as their proxies in these, e.g., Syria where the Russia/China bloc including Iran
supports al-Assad while the US and its allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia support
the Sunni bourgeoisie.
That is why the flashpoints we talk about here are places
where the two
major imperialist blocs clash face to face to
re-divide the world and force their rivals and ultimately the workers and
peasants to pay for their policies to restore their profits. As with all crises
the imperialists fear that workers have the potential to rise up and obliterate
their rotten society. So they fund their political ‘cronies’ and paramilitaries
to divide and rule the workers and peasants. This happens everywhere from
Bosnia to Venezuela. The failure of the revolutionary left to enter as an
independent force in these struggles leaves these counter-revolutionary forces
able to divide and rule the masses by appealing to racism and chauvinism. Yet
we have seen that workers are ready and willing to fight. What they need is a
revolutionary leadership. It is time for the self-proclaimed revolutionaries to
take the crisis of leadership seriously and call for international regroupment
such as the Zimmerwald Left which rallied the revolutionaries who did not
betray the world proletariat to the imperialists with the outbreak of WW1.
Imperialism – the
epoch of crises, wars and revolutions
The capitalist world economy is in the grip of a classic crisis
of falling profits and overproduction of capital that characterises the
imperialist epoch. Crises perform the function of destroying value to restore
the rate of profit. By WW1 capitalism was already ripe for overthrow. The basic
contradiction between capitalist profits at the expense of workers living
standards had created the conditions for socialist revolution. War necessarily
opened the road to revolution. But the revolution was betrayed by the reformist
Second International. Even so WW1 failed to destroy enough value to open a
period of sustained new accumulation. Within 10 years crisis reared its head
again in the great depression and WW2.
Again, capitalism survived world war only with the
connivance of the Stalinist Comintern and the isolation and capitulation of the
4th International to Stalinism/reformism. The post-war boom was made
possible by the massive concessions forced on the working class by the war and
the onset of the cold war. It was brought to an end in the late 1960s by the
LTPFT and a new crisis of overproduction. But neither the restoration of
capitalism in the former Soviet bloc nor the neo-liberal re-colonisation of the
semi-colonial world could re-create the conditions necessary to restore
capitalist profitability to the pre-crisis levels of the 1960s.
Each failure to overthrow capitalism in the throes of crisis since WW1 brought
historic defeats for the world’s workers. What was lacking was an international
vanguard party.
What we have got today is the structural crisis coming to
a head as a crisis of overproduction that is causing trade wars and military
wars to resolve the crisis. But unlike the bourgeois reformists, Marxists
understand that trade wars necessarily become real wars as the rival
imperialists fight to defeat their rivals and plunder the global market and super-exploit
the workers. The imperialists drive to destroy
value to restore profits also destroys workers living standards which are
reflected in wider gaps in income. They compete to grab the resources of their
rivals to drive down the value of raw materials necessary for profitable
production.
So who are the main imperialists today and how is it that
we see China and Russia emerging as a power bloc in competition with the US-led
power bloc? What we have in all these flashpoints is a frontline between the US/EU
bloc and the Russia/China bloc. But how
did Russia and China become major
rivals of the US/EU imperialist powers?
China/Russia bloc
As we have seen since the
early 20th century the imperialist powers have gone to war to
re-divide the world market so that the stronger benefit by defeating the weak. But
once the imperialist epoch had arrived at the turn of the 20th
century and the world market was divided among the existing powers, no new
states could escape colonial or semi-colonial servitude to arise as new
imperialist states. Orthodox
Trotskyists assume that the restored workers states must become
semi-colonies of existing imperialism. The Third Camp as as have seen think
that Russia and China developed as imperialist powers outside the sphere of the
capitalist world market. But it cannot account for their resistance to
imperialist domination and rapid growth after their re-entry into the world
market. We argue that this was made possible because of their history as DWSs. That is, their economic ‘independence’
from global capitalism allowed the centralised state apparatus developed under
the DWS to be ‘taken over’ by the new bourgeoisie as the apparatus of the
monopoly capitalist state to retain overall control of capital restoration and accumulation.
Hence it was its history as a DWS that allowed the Russian
state to capitalise on former workers' property not only in cheap resources
from devalued state enterprises, but also science, technology and military
hardware. These are forces of production developed by the DWS that allowed
Russia to escape re-colonisation by the existing imperialist powers and align
itself to China (which was able to undergo the same process) in a new bloc
rivalling the US/EU bloc. This is the only explanation for the developing global
faceoff in many hotspots between the declining US/EU bloc and the rising
Russia/China bloc. The bourgeois liberal and pseudo-Marxist explanations are
based on empiricism. As Trotsky pointed
out in his In Defense of Marxism empiricism takes only surface impressions of events and
fails to see them as a living whole and part of a contradictory process of
change.
Thus facing the current crisis, there is no prospect of
any capitalist semi-colony e.g. SA, Brazil and even India, of escaping
semi-colonial dependency and making the transition to imperialism. Unlike the
DWSs they never expropriated the bourgeoisie and were unable to maintain a
relative independence from the capitalist world. While the liberal left got
excited about the BRICS
is now obvious that when these states got exposed to the GFC of 2008 only
Russia and China had the capacity to continue accumulating capital while,
Brazil, India and South Africa went into decline. This has allowed Russia and
China to emerge as new imperialist states and form a global bloc against the US
and EC.
This analysis alone explains
why the US/EC are pushing against this bloc in a number of hotspots where their
interests clash, as in Ukraine,
Syria or in Africa (Sudan) and Asia (DPRK). There is a global face off between
the two blocs in a new struggle to divide the world economy to stave off their
decline and fall and with it the capitalist system. Without this Marxist analytical
framework it is not possible to arrive at correct analyses of the class
interests at stake in any flashpoint, nor produce a revolutionary program to
guide the struggle for socialism. We can demonstrate this by looking at each
flashpoint in turn.
Bosnia
Bosnia is one of the longest suffering colonies fought
over by rival imperialisms. Trotsky documents this in “The Balkan Wars: 1912-13: the War
Correspondence of Leon Trotsky”. Here we have the story of a colony ravaged by
imperialism in three historic crises; WW1 WW2 and most recently the current
structural crisis that began in the 1970s accompanied by the cold war and the
collapse of the Soviet bloc. With the
collapse of the USSR and other DWSs in the late 80s and early 90s, Yugoslavia
was once again Balkanized by US and EU imperialist powers backing their proxy
states. The war in Bosnia was provoked by imperialism to breakup
Yugoslavia into capitalist semi-colonies. The Dayton Accords in 1995 redrew
its borders as a UN protectorate opening it up to imperialist plunder of its
industries and workforce.
Today, nearly 20 years later Bosnian workers are now
mobilising on a multi-ethnic basis to take back the privatised industries. We
have to unite with them to break from imperialism and their imperialist puppet
regime. This includes Russia and its
interests in the Balkans. Like Kosovo, Bosnia is a US protectorate as part of
the US-EU (NATO) expansion into Eurasia to make a bridgehead to break-up the
new Russian empire in Central Asia. At
the same time Russia is pushing back into the Balkans with its South Stream gas
pipeline that branches into Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia and on into Italy [see
graphic].
Ukraine
Ukraine gained its independence with the breakup of the USSR
in 1991. Since then has balanced between
EU and Russia. Late in 2013 the US/EU bloc gave an ultimatum to Ukraine to turn
its back on Russia and sign a free trade agreement. This ultimatum included IMF
and EU policing of economics, politics and law designed to strip
Ukraine of its wealth. It was no surprise that
Yanukovych balked. Apart from its historic connections, Russia has much at
stake in Ukraine, including the gas pipelines that takes Russian gas to Europe
and $billions in bonds. It co-owns with
EU capital the planned South Stream pipeline that will go across the Black Sea close to the
Russian Naval Base in the Crimea due for completion in 2015. China has also
increased its economic
stake in Ukraine to push its investment
strategy in Eastern Europe, notably a
major port development in the Crimea that will cut 5000 miles off the new ‘silk
road’ between Asia and Europe.
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric in the West, and Russian
sabre clinking in Crimea, the US/EU and Russia/China have
an interest to do
a deal here to keep Ukraine intact and split the
booty at the expense of workers and poor farmers. Boris Kagarlitski thinks so too. “The sheepskin is not worth dividing up”.
Russia depends on Ukraine’s pipelines. France is delivering a helicopter
carrier. Germany has strategic
economic ties with Russia. In fact the EU and
Russia have integrated economies. Stratfor concludes: “In the long run, most of Russia's
levers are intact. Central and Eastern European nations are still dependent on
Russian energy, and the lingering economic crisis in Europe still makes Russian
investment attractive -- especially if it does not come with the conditionality
that defines loans from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
Moreover, the political fragmentation in Europe and the lack of cohesion in
NATO predate the Ukrainian crisis and will still influence decisions by Central
and Eastern European nations long after the current crisis in Ukraine is over.
Even if we currently see strong rhetoric coming from Central and Eastern Europe,
these countries will return to their original strategy of seeking accommodation
with Moscow after the Ukrainian crisis is over.”
The pro-Russian and Third Camp left has to be exposed. Both
fail to understand the threat the Russia/China bloc poses to the US/EU bloc. We
also have to expose the Mensheviks and Mandelites that argue for a new
Constituent Assembly which is a popular front with imperialism. Revolutionaries
are for mobilising all independent working class forces into a revolutionary
party, into councils and militias to resist
both imperialist blocs and their Ukraine proxies and fight for a workers
and farmers government.
Syria
Syria has to be seen as key to revolution in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) because of the
prolonged armed struggle linked to the Palestinian struggle. At the same time Syria brings all the
contradictions to the surface in the form of inter-imperialist rivalry. We have
argued in an earlier
article on the Arab Revolution that Syria is the site of proxy wars between the two
imperialist blocs. We showed how in MENA both blocs want to keep the status quo
to share the booty and suppress the Arab Revolution. They learned that in Libya
where they failed to disarm and contain the rebels that there was no payoff in
terms of oil contracts for either bloc. As yet there is no pro-imperialist
regime able to reap the oil profits for either bloc unlike Iraq where oil
contracts have been shared and Afghanistan where China reaped the largest copper
mine in world. On the contrary it is reported that the rebels in the East are selling
oil to the DPRK!
Thus the Syrian revolution is microcosm of the balance of
forces in the world situation. We refer you to a good analysis of how all imperialists are ganging up on the Syrian
revolution and doing deals to keep the workers down and share the spoils. The
bourgeois factions are all fighting to prove to ALL the imperialists that they
can destroy the popular revolution and stabilise the region. They can only do
this because the imperialists embargo arms to the fighters while they use their
proxies–Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States on the one side, and Iran on the other
–to arm their respective
bourgeois factions. The key to the Arab
revolution in MENA is that the rival imperialist blocs fear escalating proxy
wars into open inter-imperialist wars will risk the uniting the uprisings from
Tunisia to Syria into wider armed regional uprisings.
The tragedy in Syria is that the pro-Russian camp and the
social imperialist Menshevik camp have abandoned the revolution, isolating the
small revolutionary forces confronting the bloody slaughter of the al-Assad
regime as well as the reactionary Jihadists. We must overcome this great
betrayal by the Western so-called Marxist left and fight to unite the Syrian
and Palestinian struggles with those all across MENA, and in particular that of
Egypt where the revolution is still alive and kicking.
Egypt
Egypt is decisive in the completion of the Permanent
Revolution in MENA as it has a strong and militant labor movement capable of
rising to the task of overthrowing the military regime now in place. The
uprising of January 2011 arose out of years of workers strikes. It was never
going to succeed in splitting the ranks of the army from the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and
overthrowing the regime without firmly basing itself on organised workers and mounting
a general strike. The SCAF is the most powerful force in Egypt and the dominant
bourgeois fraction owning more than a third of Egyptian business. It has
traditionally been a proxy for US capital. The uprising of 2011 forced the SCAF
to make concessions in deposing Mubarak and holding elections. It did a deal
with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) regime which proved unpopular with the masses. Morsi
had tried to appeal to China to stave off economic bankruptcy. But
despite China’s military and other investments Morsi was forced to
impose tough austerity measures. His break with al-Assad in Syria failed to win
further US backing and doomed his regime. Under pressure from a mass uprising
of millions, the SCAF deposed Morsi and proved that it was not a neutral
champion of the Egyptian people but the dominant bourgeois force in Egypt
prepared to smash the revolution in return for economic backing from both
imperialist blocs.
The SCAF has failed in this aim as despite heavy
repression the revolution has deepened and a major strike wave has spread
across Egypt, uniting in a new union federation. This is the proof of what we
said last July about the revolution
deepening. The deposing of Morsi was
not a decisive defeat of the working class. It was not a ‘coup’ in the sense of
that of Pinochet or the Brazilian junta since it was immediately met by mass
resistance of the MB supporters and the revival of a mass strike wave. The sectarian
attempt by the SCAF to turn the labor movement against the MB as ‘terrorists’,
has failed. Now that the revolution has returned to its base in the labor
movement, the unity of the working class on a non-sectarian basis behind a
revolutionary party and a transitional program to break from the SCAF is the
order of the day.
This will bring the revolutionaries up against the misleaders
of the pro-Russian camp who will declare al-Sisi’s new relationship with Russia and China as the ‘lesser evil’ in relation to
the US/EU camp. It will also expose the misleaders of the Menshevik camp that subordinates
labor struggles to the call for a popular
front with the ‘progressive’ bourgeois, for yet more constituent assemblies and
more elections. Neither is capable of mobilising the working class as the
revolutionary force to overthrow both the national bourgeoisie and its
imperialist masters in both blocs. It vindicates our revolutionary perspective
we held since 2011 that the revolution that does not base itself on the working
class in industry will not succeed. Our program is to build from the strike
waves towards a general strike based on workers councils and militias that will
forced a split of the ranks of the army from the SCAF and open the way to the
revolutionary insurrection and a Workers and Peasants’ Government.
Venezuela
On the surface the flashpoint in Venezuela is unlike those
in Europe and MENA. However, beneath the surface we can see the two main
imperialist blocs engaged in a fight for control of Latin America. Long the
‘backyard’ of the US, China has stolen a march on the US since 2008 to become a
major rival
in Latin America. As we proved in our Cuba Sold Out article, China has played
the key role in restoring capitalism to Cuba. Not only that, China now
bankrolls ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) aligned with China against
the US-led regional associations such as
the Organization of American States (OAS). The current struggle in Venezuela is
therefore in the last analysis the fight between the US to roll back ALBA, and
China to protect its investments in Latin America. It appears that the US is
opening up a serious attack on Venezuela to break China’s hold over ALBA
including Cuba. It was the US puppet regime in Panama that called for the OAS
to ‘mediate’ in Venezuela, spurring President Madura to sever relations with that US puppet state
which could be detrimental to its trade with China.
The US is backing the anti-government opposition in
Venezuela and using is proxy states in the OAS to further destabilise the
Bolivarian revolution. Revolutionaries must defend Venezuela against this US
trade wars, internal disruption, and attempted coups, without given any
political support to the Bolivarian bourgeois regime or its alliance with
Chinese imperialism. Most of the Latin American Menshevik left supports the Bolivarian
states and their popular front regimes as progressive against US imperialism.
But as we have shown, these regimes are bourgeois
Bonapartist regimes balancing between the masses and both US and Chinese
imperialism. Our program is for the formation of independent workers and peasant
organs to break with the Bolivarian regimes and their links to both imperialist
blocs. It is necessary to fight for workers councils and militias capable
of uniting the working class around a revolutionary program for workers power
to overturn the bourgeois state and impose Workers and Peasants governments in
a federation of Socialist Republics of South and Central America!
Conclusion
Against those who see geopolitics as driven by rival power
elites dragging nations and peoples into their irrational wars, we see
geopolitics as the necessary expression of the laws of motion of capitalism in
the imperialist epoch. We understand that in this epoch capital is concentrated
into the banks of a small number of imperialist powers where only the strongest
survive at the expense of the weakest. Today, Russia and China have escaped the
fate of semi-colonies and are testing their strength as rival imperialists against
the US/EU bloc. Each bloc must win over the other to offset the LTRPF in its
own camp. This is already sparking numerous conflicts and proxy wars. But as
they are dragged into these conflicts workers begin to fight back, starting
with the struggle to defend basic democratic rights against dictatorial regimes.
These struggles are met invariably by state repression which in turn forces
workers to unite and organise. But there is no prospect of workers currently
trapped in national struggles, isolated and desynchronised, of uniting across
national, ethnic or other divisions as an armed revolutionary force without a
revolutionary Marxist program. And that program requires an international
Marxist Party that can unite the most class conscious workers around the world
to make a victorious socialist revolution.
We urgently need an
emergency international conference of revolutionary Marxists committed to build
a new ‘world party of socialism’ based on the 1938 Transitional Program and Trotsky’s
Transitional Method.
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