The comment below to a previous post is almost perfect in illustrating the illusions that exist on the role of the state and for which the series of posts were written. It is therefore worthwhile bringing greater attention to it along with my response:
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I would have reservations about what you say about the State and capital relationship. Both sides of the equation seem to be too general, categories that are not specific to time and place. I find the categories of the public sector versus the private sector a little more specific. The key thing here is that there has occurred over the last thirty years a major transformation in the relation between the two sectors. In short hand, there really is no public sector to talk about in the way we once did. One should preface talk about the public sector with the phrase ‘so called public sector’. The public sector has been taken over by the private sector yet throws over this capture an appearance of being in the hands of and being managed in the interest of the public.
When you use the public health service it is easy to believe that you are being served by what used to be known as the public sector, when in fact your are not, most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies. This is just one example of many. It is interesting to see how in Britain many of what you would once have thought of as classic public services are in fact in the hands of private companies like SERCO.
I read the policy documents of the World Economic Forum and everything is dressed up in the clothes of Public Private Partnerships, something designed to deceive. What we mostly end up with, are private companies extracting money from what used to be called the Public Purse. Even the Dole broadly defined is operated by private companies pretending they are public bodies.
In a nut shell it is important to keep up with changes that have only recently occurred, over the last 30 years, not to get stuck using doctrines about State and Capital that are so universal that they pass over the particularities that now prevail.
RTE was once upon a time a part of the public sector, yet the funding came from both the licence fee and income raised from commercials. A model I have to admit I never liked, when I watch it I can’t stop moaning about the deluge of commercials, I have to sit through, more frequent than the those you get with British commercial television, four breaks for ads every hour. So the public broadcaster always had one foot in the commercial private sector. I wonder if State capitalism ever actually existed in the Republic of Ireland. When I travel from the North to the South I am struck by how more commercial the South seems to be, maybe this is too is deceptive.
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You write that the categories of State and Capital “are not specific to time and place” and that “the categories of the public sector versus the private sector [are] a little more specific”, and that the public sector gives “an appearance of and being managed in the interest of the public.” Of course, the opposite is the case.
“Public” and “private” in these contexts are empty abstractions designed precisely to obfuscate the real situation and to give appearances that essentially deceive. So-called public sector organisations are presented as if they serve the public but experience illustrates otherwise, as the posts on RTE demonstrate. The reformist left pretends that failures are due to the corruption of ‘public’ sector ownership by ‘private’ interests but the ‘public’ (however understood) does not own or control it; as we have seen from their sale and from the complete and utter lack of democracy and accountability in their operation.
Even ‘private ownership’ is no longer dominated by single ‘private’ capitalists but by collective pools of capital, including pension funds of workers, as well as pools of money of separate capitalist companies and ultra-rich individuals. Capital is being socialised but is still capital, so operates according to the laws set out by Marx, while the state is not the depository of the ’public’ or general interest but of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Again as set out by Marx.
It is a body separate and above society, which, while it rests on society, has its own interests that are intimately tied to the capitalist system and to various fractions of the capitalist class or to individual capitalists. Precisely in what way permits greater specification of their forms that are “specific to time and place”, which you see as the shortcoming of these categories. The general abstractions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ go nowhere, while the Marxist categories of ‘state’ and ‘capital’ have engendered whole libraries of analysis and empirical studies.
As I wrote on Facebook about the controversy at RTÉ – ‘it wasn’t commercial interests that decided to pay one presenter over €500,000 per year. It wasn’t they who doctored the accounts to hide this. It wasn’t they who cut other RTÉ workers’ salaries and conditions, and it wasn’t these interests who wasted millions by, for example, buying thousands of euros worth of flip flops on ‘barter accounts’. So what is it with “public service broadcasting” that requires so much forgiveness and support?’
Illusions in the ‘public sector’ are deep. Consider these facts:
During the Covid-19 lockdown everyone was invited to clap for the NHS in the North and in Britain when it had closed its doors to other services, with lasting effects we still suffer from, while it spent billions of pounds on useless equipment from the cronies of the Tory Party. Everyone now complains that they struggle to get a GP appointment, and that the service is crumbling, while more and more are signing up for private healthcare if they can afford it. If the ‘public’ sector really was there to serve the public none of this would be happening. If it really belonged to ‘the public’ it could be stopped but it can’t in its present form of state ownership.
The NHS is a bureaucratic monster. We recently learned of the neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby, who murdered at least seven infants and attempted to murder at least six others in her care between June 2015 and June 2016. The worst serial killers in British history have been ‘public sector’ employees paid to care for the public. It would be possible to write these off as tragic anomalies were it not for the fact that such scandals are exposed on a regular basis and are certain to recur. Only when workers and patients have the power to control and make accountable these services will this change, and this will only happen when these services are removed from bureaucratic state control.
You write that “most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies” but this has always been the case. One of my first jobs was processing invoices from these companies in the NHS, from medical devices to food to pest control. The use of agency staff, employed indirectly through private companies, has certainly increased, but this is because the terms and conditions are better in some ways so workers such as nurses would rather work for an agency. In the last year millions of ‘public sector’ workers have gone on strike to get higher wages in defence of living standards ravaged by inflation, in the teeth of opposition by their state employers. Many workers in the private sector have already achieved higher pay increases without even having to go on strike.
You are correct to say that many previous state services have been privatised and often this leads to attacks on workers’ terms and conditions as well as deterioration in services. This often obscures the poor services previously provided under state ownership, as evidenced by telecoms in the South of Ireland. Much of the left opposed the creation of a single water authority in the Irish State, forgetting the failure of the previous mode of state ownership.
While it is correct to oppose privatisation it is no alternative to champion ownership by the state. The use of the term Public Private Partnerships, which you state is “something designed to deceive” is only true in one sense, for those with the illusion that state ownership is on behalf of the public. The purpose of the capitalist state is to protect capitalist ownership of the means of production, which is a sort of partnership. The use of the term Public Private Partnership is therefore not “something designed to deceive” but is actually a more accurate description of the relationship between State and Capital.
The alternative is workers’ ownership and not the belief that capitalist state ownership can be made democratic. This, of course, does not prevent us furthering any democratic changes that are possible without illusion that they are adequate or any sort of solution.
Queuing to look at one rental property in Dublin; pic Conor Finn, Sky News
Ireland suffered effective bankruptcy in 2007-08 through a property boom funded by a massive expansion of credit and crisis of overproduction, illustrated by employment in construction falling from 232,600 in in the last quarter of 2007 to 133,200 in the last quarter of 2017, a fall of 42.7%. Yet the drop was even more precipitous than this: from 236,800 in 2007 to 83,400 in 2012, that is, by 65 per cent. Almost one in every two workers who lost their jobs in the Irish state in the five years from 2007 to 2012 had previously been employed in construction.
The sector went from10.7 % of GDP in 2006 to 1.1% in 2011; going from the sixth largest share to the lowest in a group of around 50 countries during this period. The index of the value of residential construction fell from 751.7 In 2006 to 57.9 in 2012 while the index of non-residential construction fell from 115 to 73.59. The growth in the stock of housing plummeted:
From an unsustainable boom to a collapse and again rapid growth, the boom-slump-boom Irish economy now has capacity constraints only partly made up by immigration, leading to a new housing crisis in which not enough houses are being built, house prices have become extortionate again, and not enough properties are available for rental. To rub it in in, some of the partly finished houses from the boom were left to rot or demolished while the quality of much of what was built has become, or is becoming, uninhabitable because of poor materials or dangerous construction. The banks that workers bailed out in the 2008 crisis are back in profit, having involved themselves in new rip-off scandals, and now criticised for pitiful savings rates while borrowing costs for its customers increase. Despite their profits today their massive losses carried forward are set off against taxes, not a facility available to the working class.
The housing crisis dovetails with other aspects of the malfunctioning of Irish society including health and education. More than 830,000 patients are on hospital waiting lists while staff vacancies are unfiled, including senior medical staff, while there are hundreds of teaching vacancies in schools. Doctors, who in their career development will work for a year or two in Australia, aren’t coming back because they can’t afford houses in the areas they want to live. Executives in US multinationals complain that housing is an issue for their recruitment of staff, thus raising the potential of lost foreign direct investment.
It is tempting to say that only Ireland could go from bankruptcy to growth of 26% in 2015 (and over 12% in 2022), and in some ways this is not just another example of the contradictions of capitalism in general but does speak to the particular character of the Irish variety. Infamously, the Irish GDP figure is often ridiculed, and no longer accurately reflects real domestic economic activity; so although it has been boosted massively by US multinationals’ direct investment, it also reflects the massive impact of transfer of assets and production from elsewhere so that they can be taxed in the Irish State. This has resulted in a massive growth in corporation tax receipts and its concentration in a few multinational companies, with around 60% of receipts come from only ten companies.
What the Celtic Tiger boom shows, and the vertiginous climb out of the following slump, is that even in good times capitalism is a problem and does not discard its contradictions. The traditional Left alternative of spending more money by taxing the rich is not cutting to the root of the problems exposed, which arise from the contradiction of the development of productive forces coming up against the relations of production, which produce crises of overproduction and credit booms and slumps.
The unplanned and uneven development of these forces produces shiny new multinational offices beside small terraced houses that cost a fortune because not enough new housing has been built–in a city like Dublin that has witnessed an abundance of high cranes over its skyline for years.
The Government of the Irish State thus has a housing crisis and a surfeit of revenue. Calls by opposition parties to solve the problem by spending more money and taxing the rich doesn’t recognise that this is not the problem. The Irish state finds it both difficult and easy to spend money. In the first three months of 2023 spending on housing was €80m behind budget, while spending on the new national children’s hospital has ballooned from a budget of €650m to an estimate of over €2bn, although nobody knows how much it will eventually actually cost or when it will be finished, being already years behind schedule.
The ability of capitalist states to waste money, which goes inevitably into the pockets of private capitalists, is not confined to Ireland, but the Irish state does seem to be good at it. However, spending money to build houses requires workers to build them, land to build them on, and raw materials with which to build them.
Many workers and their skills have been lost following the Celtic Tiger collapse, as we have seen, and unemployment is low, falling from over 16% in 2012 to just over 4% now. Land is privately owned and hoarded, and raw material costs have increased worldwide due to general inflation caused by monetary policies to protect the asset values of the world’s ruling class and the dislocation of supply caused by Covid lockdowns and sanctions arising from the war in Ukraine. The Left, or some of it, thinks printing money is a solution, supported even stricter lockdowns, and supports western powers sanctions–so is in no position to parade its solutions.
In so far as it does, it calls upon the state to take direct action to build houses and acquire land. The capacity constraints mentioned remain as does the record of failure of the Irish state. The state itself is aware of this and the government in office has taken a host of initiatives to boost the housing market, mostly with the effect of increasing prices and relying on the private sector. In turn, many private capitalists have suffered, as is the norm, from the workings of their own market.
Out of all this the governing parties decided that they wanted a Housing Commission to advise it on what it should do, including proposals for a constitutional referendum on housing, so that it to be some sort of right that people could refer to. Not surprisingly, this has proven a problem.
It appears that there can be two approaches to putting such a right into the constitution. First, it could be a statement of aspiration, which would involve more perspiration in writing it than any effective action arising out of it. The second is the establishment of some legally enforceable obligation on the state, which the state fears will open it up to multiple legal challenges with all the horrific costs that this would entail. Less money to spend on housing would result, they claim.
And here we come to the Karl Marx bit. Famously, he said that ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.’ In other words, if there aren’t the resources to build more houses the establishment of some ‘right’ to one will make no difference. As one right-wing commentator rightly said, a referendum ‘won’t lay a single brick.’
As Marx also said:
‘Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only . . . one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. . . . To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’
So, to whom would a right to housing apply? Everyone 18 and over, asylum seekers and refugees? What sort of housing would a right entail – apartment, detached, terraced; where would it be sited and of what size? And at what cost? Who would decide all this and what effective remedies would there be for non-compliance with any determined right?
It can be no surprise that Sinn Fein (paywall) fully supports a referendum, and no surprise what its reasons are. Its housing spokesperson advances it because it ‘would restore trust in politics’ and would ‘put in place a basic floor of protection’, and ‘require the State, in its decisions and policies, to reasonably protect that right’; allowing ‘the courts to take the right into account where the State failed, manifestly to vindicate the right.’
However, just as a referendum will not lay a single brick, neither will any judge or judicial decision. As if in recognition of this, the Sinn Fein author, Eoin Ó Broin, endorses the view that “its primary effect may actually be in the sphere of politics, administration and policy’, but doesn’t explain how the current forces prompting action we have noted above are less compelling now. As for ‘restoring faith in politics’, the story of failure and ‘success’ set out above shows that faith in existing politics and the state is something to be overcome, not strengthened.
At the end of his piece the impotence of a constitutional right is acknowledged and then this acknowledgement denied–even on paper Sinn Fein can talk out of both sides of its mouth at the same time: ‘a constitutional right to housing will not, in and of itself, fix our broken housing system. It would, however, place a firm legal obligation on the current and all future governments to realise that right through its laws, policies and budgets.’
The toothless nature of aspirations enshrined in the Irish constitution have been evidenced before: in its previous Articles 2 and 3, which stated that ‘The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.’ And that ‘Pending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the parliament and government established by this constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole territory, the laws enacted by the parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of Saorstát Éireann and the like extra-territorial effect.’ Far from advancing the claimed sacred goal of national reunification the articles became an alibi for not doing anything remotely effective, until eventually they were overturned for something else that isn’t working.
A more recent example illustrates the feebleness of expecting economic and social ‘rights’ to mean anything. A few weeks ago the Ombudsman for Children criticised the state for “profound violation of children’s rights”, so that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had “seriously failed in its duty to uphold the rights of children to the best possible healthcare”. “The examples of rights being ignored are numerous” he said, in a criticism that covered 20 years.
In reply, the HSE said that it had ‘prioritised targeted improvements and investment over recent years.” It couldn’t even be bothered to explain or exculpate itself from the many previous years of failure, never mind guarantee future satisfaction of children’s healthcare needs. Trusting the state or the constitution to deliver social and economic rights, that cannot even be precisely defined, is to trust the state and constitution that protects and legitimises the social and economic system that ensures that they are both needed and cannot be delivered.
People before Profit (PbP) wants an “RTÉ for the people”, but just as the name ‘People before Profit’ invites the question–what people?– so does this new sort of RTÉ. The elision of class in the PbP name pops up here again, where ‘the people’ doesn’t actually mean every person but perhaps only some, perhaps the poor, those not paid enough, or those considered to be suffering or illegitimately aggrieved.
PbP wants “genuine public service broadcasting [which] is more important than ever. But instead of being a valued public broadcaster, RTÉ has been undermined by underfunding by successive governments and by the deeply corrosive effects of advertising and sponsorships.”
But what is this ‘public service broadcasting’ that must be made “genuine”? What service is being provided, by whom and to whom?
In so far as it shapes, and purposively shapes, social and political views, the service provided is the view of the Irish state. This is most obvious when it openly decides to censor alternatives, as in Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act 1960 , which allowed the relevant Minister to direct RTÉ “not to broadcast any matter, or any matter of any particular class”. In 1971 the first such directive was issued to direct RTÉ not to broadcast “any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objective by violent means”. A year later the entire RTÉ Authority was removed over a report on an interview with the then leader of the Provisional IRA, with this censorship remaining in place until 1994.
‘Public service broadcasting’ is supposedly provided for public benefit rather than to serve purely commercial interests, but this entails the common misconception–that socialists are supposed to disavow–that the state can in some way represent the interests of society as a whole. And just as society is to be considered as a whole, and not one divided by classes with separate and antagonistic interests, so apparently we also have a classless ‘public’ just waiting to be served. Hence the burial of the concept of class entailed in supporting ‘public service broadcasting’.
An undifferentiated public is supposed to be serviced by a state that can faithfully represent its interests as against the private interests of “advertising and sponsorships” and of “social media companies owned by billionaires”. However, while it is one thing to oppose privatisation it is quite another to defend state ownership, although PbP gets it even more wrong! It not only supports state ownership but wants to see it massively extended.
It proposes “investment in a comprehensive national public media service, incorporating RTÉ and other public service media e.g. print, local radio, production companies, digital media, etc”, plus “annual public funding . . . increased to €500m, with guaranteed multi-annual funding to enable it to properly fulfil its public service broadcasting remit.” It wants “an additional fund . . . [to] be made available to respond to the long-standing lack of investment in RTÉ and to rapidly up-grade its equipment and technology”, on top of the revenue increase of over 40 per cent.
But, and there is a but, People before Profit only propose this on certain conditions: that pay caps should be applied to the few high-earners; that “proper” pay and conditions should apply to all other workers; that there should be an end to low pay, to bogus self-employment and precarious contracts; and that there should be mandatory trade union recognition and democratisation of RTÉ. And who should introduce this?
Well, presumably it is the proprietors who will ensure the introduction of “genuine public service broadcasting”. Who else could fulfil these conditions but its owners–the Irish state? So bang goes another principle of socialism–that “the emancipation of the working class is to be conquered by the working class itself”. ‘Proper’ pay, greater equality of income, working conditions, union recognition, and a say over the running of the company are all to be provided for workers by the state.
How do we know this is what is meant? Well, all the additional investment is to come through state taxation: “€500m through a 1% tax on all Information & communications companies” and “a further €500m through an additional 1.25% Big Tech Tax on the largest ICT companies.”
Democratisation is to come from “replacement of the current Board with a Board representative of RTÉ workers and civil society”; “the board should not be dominated by people with private industry backgrounds”; there should be “development of additional mechanisms for democratic workers and public input into programming decisions”; and “Board members should be subject to recall.” But who appoints the Board and who would have the power of recall, and recall before whom? Will the capitalist state institute some form of workers’ control; and if it did–how would this be workers control?
These pick and mix proposals have been made up as its authors went along: who is in “civil society”–the province of private interests–but not “people with private industry backgrounds”, and what exactly are the “additional mechanisms for democratic workers and public input”?
It’s as if PbP had never heard of Karl Marx’s strident opposition to relying on the state to support working class encroachment on capitalist ownership. It’s as if in the 19th century he anticipated the People before Profit proposals in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’; were we not already aware that such rubbish has been part of the left for over 150 years and addressed here before in a number of posts.
It’s as if this Left has no idea of what an alternative programme would look like, a question they might find easier to answer if they first asked themselves who they are talking to–who they are addressing their programme to, who is it for? Not the government sitting opposite them in the Dáil during fine speeches; not to a disembodied electorate–seeking votes to save their seats at the next election; and not potential allies like Sinn Fein with whom they want to be beside in the next government.
A socialist programme is addressed to the workers – this is what is meant by ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’. This means that ‘proper’ pay and conditions can only be won by the workers themselves, and only made permanent through their own ruling of society. That union recognition is most powerful if achieved by the workers themselves–thus strengthening the possibility of avoiding a union sweet-heart deal with the employer, and some control over the union organisation itself. Only by doing it themselves will workers learn that the state broadcaster is not ‘theirs’ and will only be theirs if they take it over themselves, which is only likely and possible in a struggle to take over the running of the rest of society as well. That is, only under socialism, which is why we fight for it, because working people’s control over their own lives will only occur upon assertion of their interests as a class and their creation of a new social and economic system, called socialism.
So, when PbP states that “ICTU and the NUJ, in their submissions to the Future of Media Commission, both called for a “‘windfall tax’ on the major digital platforms to help support public interest and public service media”, they should demand that they not implore the state to do what it has already rejected, but that they put forward and implement their own alternative. That is, workers media that give a platform to working class organisations through the skills and effort of media and other workers, and one not strangled by the bureaucrats who run trade unions that make their existing media so boring and irrelevant most workers don’t bother with it (which is certainly my experience).
PbP rightly observe that RTÉ “is a microcosm of the unjust class society we live in”, but instead of pointing the way to how it might be overcome it feeds illusions in the state that exists to defend it. In the next post we will look at another current exercise that does the same thing.
It’s the subject that dominated the news for weeks in June and July and has now returned. The RTÉ presenter Ryan Tubridy is not coming back to the state’s radio station. The broadcaster’s most prominent and highly paid TV and radio presenter has eventually exited following the revelation that his salary was under-reported in the RTÉ accounts by €120,000 between 2017 and 2019 and €150,000 between 2020 and 2021.
A combination of RTÉ management’s concern to impose cuts on the rest of the workforce while keeping the appearance of Tubridy’s payments at under €500,000 a year, and some decidedly dodgy accounting treatment, has led to widespread complaints that RTÉ has been less than transparent and truthful. And to top it off, the controversy also exposed the existence of previously unknown ‘barter accounts’ used to butter up corporate clients, including €5,000 spent on flip-flops for a party, and €4,200 for membership of an exclusive club in London.
It has been feeding time at the zoo as the Irish media, including RTÉ itself, has reported endlessly over the convoluted unwinding of the story, with Oireachtas committees interrogation of most of the significant actors screened live on TV, and with some pubs streaming it live. Government Ministers have shaken their heads and commissioned a number of investigations and reports. The talk is of RTÉ having betrayed its audience – the Irish people. How could they do it?
So, the light entertainment switches to lots of bloviating by politicians competing to show how clueless they are, and other media commentators showing inordinate zeal in going after Tubridy, giving plenty of evidence of jealousy and excessive professional disdain. However, from the clueless to the haughtily disdainful, they all agree on what really matters – that RTÉ must win back the trust of its audience. To which, the only serious response by socialists should be – oh no it shouldn’t!
RTÉ is the Irish State’s media arm, and abides by what is its own ‘Overton window’, the range of ideas that are considered acceptable for representation and, by default, those that lie outside this narrow range, that are too ‘extreme’, and which therefore must be disparaged when not being ignored entirely. As the state broadcaster this range reflects the nature of the state, its character, and the particular complexion of its Irish variety. Its coverage of the war in Ukraine is not significantly different from that of the BBC. Since the British state makes no secret of its vanguard role in the proxy war against Russia, and the Irish state is supposed to be neutral, this might seem a greater condemnation of the Irish state, although this is not the case, which we will come to in a later post.
To sum it up, socialists do not want the general or specific views of the Irish state to be taken by the Irish working class as either unbiased, objective or truthful. Above all we want workers not to trust the presentation of the world and its events from the point of view of the Irish capitalist state, by firstly recognising that this is what is actually involved. That RTE lied about its ‘star personalities’ while attacking the pay and conditions of its workers should not be seen as some anomaly to be corrected but revealing of its true character.
Unfortunately, this is not the view of those elected representative of the Left who think of themselves as Marxists. Their view is very different:
‘In a world dominated by social media companies owned by billionaires, genuine public service broadcasting is more important than ever. But instead of being a valued public broadcaster, RTÉ has been undermined by underfunding by successive governments and by the deeply corrosive effects of advertising and sponsorships.’
People before Profit quote approvingly the words ofHarry Browne, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at TU Dublin, who attended their press event, saying: “Ireland needs strong public service media. At last, this policy document points a way beyond the politics of scandal and outrage, towards a positive vision for RTÉ and other public oriented media.’ Attached to this is People before Profit’s support for the propaganda arm of the Irish state in the form of a report.
This starts by saying that ‘People are rightly disgusted at what has happened at RTÉ. It is a microcosm of the unjust class society we live in, where the highest paid and richest people are treated as the ‘talent’, while everybody else struggles to get by on low pay and precarious employment.’
Yes, it’s a microcosm of the unjust class society we live in, but its particular role is to spread the word that any injustices can be remedied, and by the state itself, including RTÉ, which has, for example, exposed abuse by the Catholic Church. This Left, by putting forward its support for ‘public service broadcasting’ with reforms, shows that it is part of this consensus.
Where this leaves this Left and the view of Marxists, which they claim to be, that the capitalist state must be smashed, is anyone’s guess. Like their perpetual demands for nationalisation and expansion of the role of the state in almost every area in order to deal with whatever problems capitalism throws up, the glaring contradiction of strengthening the state and the illusions in it, while claiming you’re going to destroy it, doesn’t seem to add up.
We’ll examine exactly what they propose in the next post.
The latest weapons provided to Ukraine, including tanks, missiles and fighter aircraft, are the most recent of red lines previously declared by Western countries but then crossed. Publications such as ‘The Economist’ and ‘The Guardian’ want to go much further because what is involved apparently is a righteous war of good against evil. From neoliberal to bleeding heart liberal the particular variety of liberal politics is of no consequence. They propose actions that, if followed through, would raise the potential of provoking nuclear war, all while blaming Putin for this possibility through threats that they claim he will not make good.
Some ‘left’ supporters of the war and Ukraine support this and present NATO as some sort of defensive organisation that should be supported. In their case the politics is so aligned to the interests of Western imperialism that it can quite accurately be defined as bourgeois.
Yet another section of the supporters of Ukraine reveal all the political customs of the petty bourgeoisie and, like that class, are incapable of an independent political position. This means that despite their proclaimed differences with these pro-NATO allies, they remain in the camp of the supporters of the war and the Ukrainian state. They do so at the cost of incoherence as I have noted in a previous post.
In the latest example of this, their Professor, simultaneously opposes the ‘anti-NATO neo-campists [who] hide behind the argument that the ongoing war is one by proxy between two imperialist camps’ while also stating that ‘anti-Putin neo-campism, on the other hand, espouses the cause of Ukrainian maximalists by deliberately ignoring the fact that Ukraine is clearly being used as a proxy by NATO powers in order to cripple their Russian imperialist rival.’
Out of this dependence of Ukraine on Western imperialism he states that ‘the ongoing war remains at bottom until now an anti-imperialist war of self-defense on Ukraine’s side, even if it is indeed exploited by NATO powers for their own strategic interest.’ He pretends that precisely calibrating the type of weapons supplied to Ukraine can allow him to maintain his position of standing upright while lifting both feet off the ground at the same time. Thus he says that ‘I oppose anything that might tilt the balance toward turning this war into an essentially inter-imperialist one’, as if the weapons used determines its character.
For this political tendency the war has exposed existing weaknesses and errors that its membership would rather cling to, rather than to critically ask themselves how they got themselves into a position of alliance not only with the apologists of western imperialism but with western imperialism itself. The price paid by them, however, in the material terms that might prod some reassessment, is rather puny, which is why they continue to support ‘anti-imperialist’ forces in usually far away countries that are also anti-working class.
Just as Ukraine became a piece on the chessboard of US hostility to Russia and China before the war, so its people are now only so many pawns to be sacrificed now it has begun. The NATO summit in Vlinius informed Ukraine that it will continue to encourage and support it fighting a war that it cannot win in order to join an imperialist alliance that will supposedly protect it, but not until it has been smashed by Russia because the rest of NATO doesn’t yet want the same war with Russia that it is fighting.
Just as Western imperialism led the Ukrainian state into war with Russia as its proxy, and this state in turn threw hundreds of thousands of its citizens to fight on behalf of this imperialism, so the price paid can be measured by the blood, flesh and bones of Ukrainian workers. From the snipers’ massacre at the Maidan in 2014 to the war beginning in February 2022 the Ukrainian working class has paid for the criminal provocations of its own political leaders, its state, its far-right supporters, and the imperialist forces that stand behind them. Following far in the rear comes the renegade ‘socialists’, idiot-like proclaiming their own support for this deadly charade where ‘self-determination’ is held up as the banner behind which the United States propels Ukraine forward into catastrophe.
The duplicity involved is made abundantly clear in the secret meetings between former senior US officials and Russia over the potential for negotiations to end the war. So much for ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.’ Yet still the pro-war ‘left’ refuses to see that this is a proxy war, appearing to believe that the Ukrainian state is sacrificing its workers for ‘democracy’, and that the support from imperialism comes at no real cost.
It refuses to see what is reported every single day in the western media, that the war is part of a world-wide imperialist conflict that stretches to China and Taiwan and that a few weeks ago witnessed the EU attempt to recruit Latin America to the cause at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States summit. More immediately the war threatens to escalate further through Polish and Baltic states’ joining the conflict; conceivable because it has already escalated continuously; Ukraine is losing the war, and the Zelensky regime has shown a predilection for encouraging frightening escalation.
Even were this not to come to pass, and a negotiated agreement arise, any peace deal will be the imposition of the balance of forces between two capitalist blocs and will therefore be neither permanent nor present a road to permanent peace. Satisfaction of the interests and needs of Ukraine’s workers or those of Russia will not be on the table.
In the event of any sort of gain by Western imperialism and its Ukrainian proxy, the settlement arrived at would ensure permanent conflict:
‘Some officials have pitched the commitments as an “Israeli model” akin to the overt military support Washington provides to the Jewish state. The US currently commits to making sure Israel has a “qualitative military edge” in the Middle East and signs memorandums of understanding every 10 years. Officials envision Ukraine could have something similar, putting the country’s defences on a suitable footing.’ (Financial Times 11 July)
‘The idea would be to establish a unique military partnership with Ukraine involving the transfer of high-tech weaponry and intense military-to-military cooperation. The plan, says one US official, is to create a “defence-oriented force that would present too hard a target for any future Russian aggression”. Geopolitical imperialist rivalry thus created the war; is an expression of it, and so will continue after it is ‘settled’.
It is, of course, not the case that the war will not change anything. The destruction will be long lasting, and the bitterness and division created will endure for generations, visible today in the hundreds of thousands of disfigured, injured, and bitter casualties of war.
Support for either Ukraine and its imperialist sponsors, or for the Russian state, considered by others on the ‘left’ (by some act of transubstantiation?) to be ‘anti-imperialist’, will do nothing to bring working class unity any closer. The left has been shattered into these competing blocs, continuing its long degeneration from any attachment to a belief in the potential of the working class to become a relevant actor on the world stage.
For those socialists who still hold to the idea that the working class represents a real alternative, one unfortunately not yet ready to impose itself, the purely temporary character of any end to the war, arrived at by negotiation between the warring parties, proves only negatively that we are right.
Supporters of Ukraine will find themselves supporting its war of ‘national liberation’ while its leaders negotiate a deal that prioritises their interests but will fail to deliver anything resembling ‘liberation’. They will still be championing its ‘self-determination’ even while the US negotiates the terms of its debacle. Just as before the war the Ukrainian state became an instrument of US imperialism, so now is this obvious in a war that would already be over were it not for US and other western support.
The US can now escalate the war again, perhaps with more stooges, in which case the role of Ukraine will be, even more obviously, one of a proxy in a much wider conflict, or its end can arrive sooner in negotiations that define Ukraine’s complete subordination. In either case imperialist competition will define the outcome, at least for the moment.
What other force can promise an end to the inter-imperialist rivalry that is both at the root of this war and its possible endings? Would a victory for Ukraine and NATO be a great step forward for the workers across the world, in Latin America, Africa, Europe etc, or in the US itself? Would a victory for the Russian state signal a step forward for the independent organisation of the working class in China, Russia or the rest of Asia for example? Would the creation of a ‘multi-polar’ capitalism be a step forward or would the world look more like it did in 1914? Or do any of the ‘leftists’ promoting these outcomes believe anymore that Lenin was correct when he said that the end to war could come only from socialism?
The view that the tasks that only the working class can carry out can actually be accomplished by a capitalist state, which lies behind the support for Ukraine or Russia, is a continuation of the politics that has been peddled for a very long time by much of the left. The war is a continuation of this politics by other means but these have demonstrated the political bankruptcy of this ‘left’ politics.
The alternative is to oppose the war, oppose both capitalist camps, and seek to create an anti-war movement among the working class that relies not on the outcome on the battlefield, imposed in imperialist negotiations, but on the mobilisation of the working class against the war, against the forces waging the war, and in favour of the imposition of the interests of the working class.
What are we to make of an article from a left web site that starts like this:
‘The supply of cluster munitions by the US to Ukraine must be opposed. Anti-capitalists and internationalists support unconditionally the people of Ukraine in their armed resistance to liberate their country from the Russian genocidal invasion. But the support for Ukraine is not necessarily uncritical. We have been critical of the Zelensky government attack on labour rights in the country and its embracing of neoliberal policies. Now we have to criticise its use of cluster munitions.’
The first sentence might seem to require no comment, but even this is not the case, what does opposition entail?
The second declares that the Russian invasion is ‘genocidal’, which is simply untrue. However bad it is, the point of the invasion is not to destroy the Ukrainian people, and such claims only promote the war: after all, if this is the point of the invasion then there is no point in not fighting to the death, and, given such stakes, the use of old cluster bombs hardly looks excessive.
The truth, however, is that the purpose of the Russian invasion, as the article later acknowledges, is not this, but ‘Ukraine’s de-Nazification and demilitarization and implicitly integration into Russia’s orbit.’ However one understands this, it is far from the destruction of the Ukrainian people, and the employment of the term not only belittles the history the word does apply to, but also shows scant regard to the real nature of the war, what approach should thereby be taken to it, and therefore how it might be ended.
We have been over many times the deception of describing the war as one of ‘the people of Ukraine in their armed resistance to liberate their country’, when the war is waged by the Ukrainian state and the liberation sought includes areas that wouldn’t welcome it. What matters here is the assertion that ‘Anti-capitalists and internationalists support unconditionally’ Ukraine in its war. In other words, all the words of condemnation of the use of cluster munitions will not dent their support for ‘Ukraine’, so simply dissolve into moral handwringing.
How do we know that this condemnation is worthless? Well, because it involves no change in approach, as the article acknowledges. It says that ‘support for Ukraine is not necessarily uncritical. We have been critical of the Zelensky government attack on labour rights in the country and its embracing of neoliberal policies. Now we have to criticise its use of cluster munitions’. So, previous criticism has not dented support and neither will the use of cluster munitions; just as previous claims that the supply of offensive weapons would not be supported, so this red line of the pro-war left breaks exactly at the same time as western imperialism crosses it, in perfect sequence.
If this ‘left’ can support a capitalist state when it attacks workers’ rights and imposes ‘neoliberalism’, by which is presumably meant rabidly pro-capitalist policies, what barriers remain? What could the Ukrainian state do that would lead this ‘left’ to oppose it when its support is ‘unconditional’? In the major geopolitical struggle in the world today, what role does this left play that is in any meaningful way different from western imperialism itself? If ‘unconditional’ means what it says, then there can be no conditions placed on imperialist support for its ally. This ‘left’ has bound itself in a tight embrace not only with the rotten and corrupt Ukrainian state and its ruling class but with their own states and their own ruling classes.
‘It is understandable that Ukraine wants to get all the arms necessary to get a quick and decisive victory against the Russian army’, says the article! Has the author not noted that the war has been going on for 18 months; that the much anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive is stalling and was never expected to achieve much anyway; that the Russians are now advancing as much as the Ukrainians? Does this left accept every stupid statement of the Ukrainian state at face value; and if it does, how does this not invalidate its own qualms about cluster munitions if the possibility of ‘a quick and decisive victory’ is not a reasonable thing to anticipate?
Their lofty and high-minded approach departs further from the real world as it states that ‘whatever the military arguments, opposing the precepts of the Convention on Cluster Munitions will make it harder for Ukraine to argue for the international rule of law. If Ukraine gets weapons that most UN member states (including the UK) are seeking a ban on, it will affect its ability to win solidarity and condemnation of Russia’s illegal occupation by these states.’
What exactly is the ‘international rule of law’, perhaps their ‘left’ version of the imperialist ‘international rules-based order? ‘ Both equally fictitious and utterly irrelevant when conflict becomes a test of strength and power. Who will be affected by the claimed reduced Ukrainian ability to ‘win solidarity’ when this left itself will not be impacted in its own support? Does it believe western imperialism gives a shit about the impact of cluster munitions?
Perhaps it believes that there are sections of the world’s population who will oppose cluster munitions and not hold a position of ‘unconditional’ support to Ukraine; who might then question the virtue of this state and the justness of its war, and might then go on to draw conclusions about it–that it should be opposed, and the cluster munitions-wielding Ukraine should not be supported?
What then for the loyal left, which supports Ukraine ‘unconditionally?’ Surely it would be honour bound to redouble its defence of Ukraine against any possible wavering of support. That, anyway, is the logic of its position, the logic of its ‘opposition’ to cluster munitions.
Of course, in mealy-mouthed fashion it notes that ‘Ukraine has also used cluster munitions, albeit on a much smaller scale. While not used on cities, they nevertheless did cause death and injuries to civilians.’
At this point one might wonder what the point of the article is; this boat has already sailed, so why the advice that ‘If Ukraine wants to maintain the solidarity around the world, it should not break the ban on cluster munitions by over 100 countries’?
Ukraine has not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, so has not and is not breaking from its policy, or previous practice (as in 2014-2015 in Donetsk city for example) and has repeatedly asked to be supplied by them.[i] The pro-war left makes no distinction between solidarity with Ukraine as a state, as a people, or a working class, but in this case it is clearly only the state that can decide not to use cluster bombs. So, it either has to appeal to this state to forego their use, which is hardly likely, or to its population or working class, although this would open up recognition of the difference and invite the conclusion that they are not synonymous and even have separate interests.
It is also a bit absent to dismiss the ‘military arguments’ with a ‘whatever.’ The pro-war left have pointed to the absolute necessity for military support–‘Ukraine also needs a mass solidarity internationalist movement that supports its armed resistance’–and since Ukraine is running out of ammunition, the US has stated it has no choice but to supply cluster munition because it doesn’t have any other.
The whole article is blind to its deception. It reads as the necessity to maintain the reputation of the Ukrainian state, with opposition to cluster munitions entirely secondary. Where, for example, is the appeal for the Russian state not to deploy them, or to the international working class to demand this? But of course, on the coat tails of western states and their mass media, Russia, its people and its working class are beyond the pale.
Human Rights Watch is quoted as documenting their use, but that ‘Ukraine used cluster munitions, albeit on a much smaller scale. While not used on cities, they nevertheless did cause death and injuries to civilians.’ But this is not quite what the report, and one referenced by it, says:
‘Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least eight civilians and wounded 15 more, Human Rights Watch said. . . . The total number of civilians killed and wounded in the cluster munition attacks that Human Rights Watch examined is most likely greater. Russian forces took many injured civilians to Russia for medical care and many had not returned when Human Rights Watch visited.’
‘Ukrainian armed forces reportedly used cluster munitions in attacks on Izium city, Kharkivska region, between March and September 2022, when it was controlled by Russian armed forces, according to the Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. The commission provided three examples illustrating this use of cluster munitions in Izium..’
‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’, that stands over this article, is blind to the reality of this war because it has abandoned a Marxist understanding of what is going on. That is why the article is incoherent. Nothing provides a better example of this than the statement that ‘Reconstruction after the war must be for another Ukraine with economic and social justice, not one where the country’s assets are handed over to western capitalism.’
How this is to be achieved through the arms of western imperialism wielded by a corrupt capitalist Ukrainian state is unexplained. No explanation is possible.
Marx said of his politics that it did not appeal to “an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself” but was based on “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. The reality of the war in Ukraine will not adjust itself, during or after, to the otherworldly moralising of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and the movement that will abolish war is that of the working class, not ‘the Ukrainian resistance’, not ‘a mass solidarity internationalist movement that supports its armed resistance’, and not the supply of only ‘good’ weapons by Western imperialism so that the blushes of ACR can be spared.
[i] These requests follow (according to a report) that ‘Ukraine in 2011 . . . cluster munitions constituted 35 percent of its stocks of conventional weapons, which totaled two million tons of ammunition.’
A Russian soldier walks in the rubble in Mariupol’s eastern side, where fierce fighting takes place between Russian and pro-Russia forces and Ukraine on March 15, 2022.
Maximilian Clarke | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
This is a joint statement, by the authors of Sráid Marx and Boffy’s Blog, on the global crisis of Marxism, which has become manifest in the collapse of many “Marxist” organisations into social-imperialism, in relation to the Ukraine-Russia War. Those organisations have abandoned the independent third camp of the international proletariat, and, instead, lined up behind one of the contending imperialist camps of NATO/Ukraine or Russia/China. They have sought to place the world labour movement back to the position prior to World War I (WWI), which led to the split in the Second International and formation of the Third International, although such a development is not possible, today, if only because no real International exists, making the situation similar to that prior to Marx and Engels establishing the First International.
This crisis of Marxism has been a long time coming. Its roots lie in the nature of what passed for Marxism in the post-war period, a ‘Marxism’ that was, in fact, a form of petty-bourgeois socialism, manifest in its attitude to the state as the means of historical change, rather than the independent self-activity, and self-government of the working-class, and, concomitantly, in its attitude to the national question and nation state. Both of us, with a combined experience of nearly a century in the labour movement, were recruited, in our youth, into different Trotskyist organisations – the International Marxist Group (IMG)/Peoples Democracy in Ireland, and International Communist League (I-CL), respectively – of which we were members for many years, and yet, freed from the barriers to critical thinking imposed by membership of such sects, we have, independently of each other, arrived at almost identical conclusions about the nature of the Left, and on the critical issues of the day for the labour movement.
We have set out below a statement on the fundamental issues we believe lie behind the recent failure of many groups and individuals to develop an independent working class position on the war in Ukraine, and how this very open betrayal is a result of previous errors now compounded into an outright defence of the capitalist state. While both of us have been activists in Western Europe, and our arguments are derived directly from this experience, the issues raised are relevant to Marxists everywhere and the experience of others across the world will confirm this experience and the lessons drawn that we have set out below.
The State
This ‘Marxism’ is fundamentally distinguished from other forms of socialism by its attitude to the state. Not only did Marx and Engels talk about the state withering away under communism, both were intensely hostile to the capitalist state, as the state of the class enemy. In “State and Revolution”, Lenin points out that Marx’s attitude to it was the same as the anarchists.
“… it was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it by a new one.”
It is only in this latter sense that Marxists differ from the anarchists, i.e. in the need for the proletariat, after it has become the ruling-class, to establish its own semi-state, to put down any slave-holder revolt by the bourgeoisie. The idea that Marxists can call upon the existing capitalist state to act in its interest is, then, absurd. That opportunist attitude to the state was promoted by the Lassalleans, and Fabians, in Marx and Engel’s generation, and, as Hal Draper sets out, in The Two Souls of Socialism, became the ideology of The Second International. Marx opposed it in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and Engels followed that with many letters, and also in his own Critique of The Erfurt Programme, in which he opposed the idea of a welfare state, National Insurance, and other forms of “state socialism”.
As Lenin says,
“Far from inculcating in the workers’ minds the idea that the time is nearing when they must act to smash the old state machine, replace it by a new one, and in this way make their political rule the foundation for the socialist reorganization of society, they have actually preached to the masses the very opposite and have depicted the “conquest of power” in a way that has left thousands of loopholes for opportunism.”
(ibid)
Stalinism adopted this opportunist attitude to the state. In the post-war period, it was taken on by organisations claiming the mantle of Trotskyism. In Britain, for example, the Revolutionary Socialist League, better known as The Militant Tendency, talked about a Labour Government nationalising the 200 top monopolies, but all these organisations raised demands for the capitalist state to nationalise this or that industry, usually to avoid bankruptcy, and they continue to do so. Even more ludicrously, they combine these utopian demands to the capitalist state with the further demand that it also then grant, to the workers in the industry, “workers’ control”, as though such a request would ever likely succeed, other than in conditions of dual power in society, i.e. conditions in which workers have established their own alternative centres of power, in the form of workers’ councils, enabling them to impose workers’ control, arms in hand.
What such demands also illustrate is a dangerous failure to distinguish the difference between government and state. Governments of different complexions come and go at frequent intervals, as does the bourgeois political regime, appearing as either “democracy” or “fascism”, which are simply masks which the bourgeoisie adopt according to their needs, but the state itself remains as the real power in society, permanently organised as the defender of the ruling class, including against the government if required.
Authentic Marxism, therefore, rejects these opportunist appeals to the state to act in the interests of the working-class. Our method is that of the self-activity and self-government of the working-class, which must organise itself to become the ruling class, and, in so doing, bring about its own liberation. We look to the advice of Marx and Engels and The First International to develop its own cooperative production, rather than to the capitalist state and we advise it, at all times, to take its own initiative in addressing its needs within capitalism. This includes organising its own social insurance, to cover unemployment, sickness and retirement, rather than relying upon the vagaries of state provision, which is geared to the fluctuating interests of capital, and its economic cycles, not the interests of workers.
Of course, as Marx sets out in Political Indifferentism, if the capitalist state does provide such services, we do not advocate a sectarian boycott of them, out of a sense of purity. As Marx sets out in The Poverty of Philosophy, what makes the working-class the agent of progressive historical change is precisely its struggle against the conditions imposed upon it, which results from the limits of capitalism, and to breach those limits by replacing capitalism. Capitalism is progressive in developing the forces of production, via the accumulation of capital. This has led it to maximise the exploitation of labour/rate of surplus value but does not mean that we advocate no resistance to its demands for wage cuts, or lower conditions. We point to the limited ability of capitalism to maximise the rate of surplus value, and so develop productive forces, as well as the limited ability of workers to raise wages, within the constraints of capitalism, and consequently, the need to abolish the wages system itself.
Nor do we advocate a boycott of socialised healthcare, education and social care systems, but point out their limited capitalist nature, the lack of democratic control and so on. We oppose any regression to less mature capitalist forms of private provision, not by defending the existing state forms, but by arguing the need to move forward to new forms directly owned and controlled by workers themselves. Whilst we offer support to workers’ struggles for improvements in existing provision, and for democratic control, we do so all the better to demonstrate to workers that so long as capitalism exists, no such permanent improvement and no real democratic control is possible.
All large scale industrial capital is now, socialised capital, be it state capital or that of corporations, and so properly the collective property of the “associated producers”, as Marx describes it in Capital III. Unlike the socialised capital of worker cooperatives, it is not, however, under the control of the associated producers, of the working class, but of shareholders and their Directors. Short of a revolutionary situation, and condition of dual power, workers cannot force the state to concede control over that capital to them. Even the social-democratic measures, such as those in Germany, providing for “co-determination” of enterprises, are a sham that retains control for shareholders, and simply incorporate the workers in the process of their own exploitation.
Similarly, we do not support the sham of bourgeois-democracy, which is merely a facade for the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and its state, a facade they will drop in favour of fascism if their rule is challenged by workers. We defend the democratic rights afforded to workers – to organise and to advance their class interests – but we do not confuse defence of those rights, which the working class can use, with defence of the bourgeois democratic state that continually seeks to limit, erode and threaten them outright.
We recognise, however, that millions of workers do continue to harbour illusions in bourgeois democracy, and, so long as they do, we must try to break them from it. That is not done by a sectarian abstention, but by utilising it, and demanding it be consistent democracy. For example, abolition of Monarchy and hereditary positions and titles, election of judges and military top brass, abolition of the standing army, and creation of a popular militia under democratic control. We support the workers in any such mobilisation and demands for consistent democracy, but we offer support only as the means of demonstrating the limits to such democracy and the possibility of a higher alternative, so enabling them to shed their illusions in that democracy.
The means by which we seek to mobilise the workers, in all such struggles, are not those of bourgeois society, but those of the encroaching socialist society of the future. We advocate the creation of workplace committees of workers that extend across the limited boundaries of existing trades unions; we advocate, as and when the conditions permit, the linking up of such committees into elected workers’ councils, and the joining together of this network of workers councils on a national and international basis. We reject the idea of reliance on the capitalist state and its police to “maintain order”, or of its military to provide defence of workers, and instead look to democratically controlled Workers’ Defence Squads and Workers Militia to defend workers’ interests, including against the armies of foreign powers, terrorists and so on.
The National Question and The Nation State
The opportunist view of the state differs from the Marxist view, by presenting the state as some kind of non-class, supra-class, or class neutral body, standing above society, whereas Marxists define it as what it is, the state of the bourgeois ruling class. The opportunist view of the state is a petty-bourgeois view, reflecting the social position of the petty-bourgeoisie as an intermediate class, standing between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and which sees its role as mediating between these two great class camps.
It denies the class division of society. The symbol of this denial is the use of phrases such as “the nation”,“society”, “the people” and so on, which subsume the antagonistic classes, in each society, into one “nation”, and then transforms the state into being the state of “the nation”, or “the people”, rather than of the ruling class. This used to be the ABC of Marxism, and yet the Ukraine-Russia War, has seen a large part of the Left collapse into these opportunist and nationalist, as opposed to socialist, ideas.
The logic of this opportunist position flows inevitably from their view of the state as the agent of social change, as against the role of the working-class itself. It is necessarily a petty-bourgeois, nationalist view, as against a proletarian, internationalist view. It demurs from class struggle, in order to privilege and promote the combined interests of all classes within the nation, as a “national interest”, which necessarily sets that “national interest” against the “national interest” of other nations. The interests of workers of different nations are, thereby, brought into an antagonistic relation with each other, rather than with their own ruling class. Again, this used to be the ABC of Marxism, symbolised by Marx’s statement that the workers have no country, and appeal, in The Communist Manifesto, “Workers of The World Unite”.
In WWI, the opportunists in the Second International, continued to repeat these statements, but only as mantras, whilst, in practice, abandoning class struggle, and lining up under the banner of their particular capitalist state, in alliance with their own bourgeoisie. This characterises the positions of much of the Left, in relation to the Ukraine-Russia war, whether they have lined up in support of the camp of NATO/Ukraine on the one side, or Russia/China on the other, under claims of an “anti-imperialist” struggle, or war of national independence/national self-determination.
Marx argued that the workers of no nation could themselves be free, whilst that nation held others in chains. That is why it is the duty of socialists, in each nation, to oppose their own ruling class in its attempts to colonise, occupy, or in any other way oppress other nations. While the formation of nation states was historically progressive, as it was necessary for the free development of capitalist production and its development of the productive forces, the subsequent destruction of nation states, and formation into multinational states, is also historically progressive, for the same reason. But, just as Marxists’ recognition of the historically progressive role of capitalism, in developing the productive forces, which involves it exploiting workers, does not require us to acquiesce in that exploitation, so too the historically progressive role of imperialism, in demolishing the nation state, and national borders, does not require us to acquiesce in its methods of achieving that goal. (See: Trotsky – The Programme of Peace).
In both cases, we seek to achieve historically progressive goals, but without the limitations that capitalism imposes on their achievement, by moving beyond capitalism/imperialism to international socialism and communism. The struggle against militarism and imperialist war is fundamental to presenting the case, and mobilising that struggle for, the overthrow of capitalism, and its replacement by international socialism. We carry out these struggles on the basis of the political and organisational independence of workers from the bourgeoisie and its state, on the basis of Permanent Revolution. (See Marx’s Address to the Communist League, 1850)
This was the basis of the position set forward by Lenin in relation to The National Question. The task of Marxists, in oppressor states, is to oppose that oppression by their own ruling class and to emphasise the right to free secession, whilst the task of Marxists in oppressed states is also to oppose their own ruling class, pointing to its exploitation of the workers, and unreliable and duplicitous nature, and emphasising not the right to free secession, but the right to voluntary association. It is what determines the Marxist position of opposing, for example, Scottish nationalism, Brexit, or other such forms of separatism across the globe. As Lenin put it, we are in favour of the self-determination of workers, not the self-determination of nations.
In 1917, following the February Revolution, in Russia, the Mensheviks, and some of the Bolsheviks, such as Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, also changed their position of opposing the war, and argued that the Russian state had become “revolutionary democratic”, i.e. a non-class state, overseeing a non-class form of democracy. Lenin vehemently opposed that social-patriotism, and threatened to split the party unless it was rejected. However, this position was never abandoned by Stalin, who resumed it after Lenin’s death, making it the foundation of his strategy of the Popular Front, applied in relation to national liberation struggles, for example “the bloc of four classes”, in China, in 1925-7, and in opposing fascism, as applied in France (1934-9), and in Spain (1934-6), and subsequently, in Stalinism’s collapse into what Trotsky called “communo-patriotism” in WWII.
In the post-war period, it was not only social-democrats, reformists and Stalinists that adopted this class collaborationist Popular Front approach. In place of the Marxist principle of the self-determination of the working-class, the petty-bourgeois Left, including those that described themselves as “Trotskyist”, threw themselves into supporting struggles for national self-determination and did so, not on the basis of simply opposing the role of their own ruling-class, but of actively supporting the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces engaged in those struggles.
Indeed, not only were the forces involved the bourgeois class enemy of the proletariat, but, in many cases, as in, for example, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria and so on, they were aggressively anti-working-class forces with which Marxists should have had no truck whatsoever, and against which Marxists should have been warning the workers, and against which they should have been aiding workers to defend themselves. (See: The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions). Again, the petty-bourgeois socialists had adopted the mantra of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, identifying imperialism as the enemy, and so the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists fighting that imperialism, as their friend. This was even the case where these forces violently suppressed Trotskyists within their own country. Today these forces have presided over or opened the door not to workers’ power but to capitalism.
This was never the position of Marxism, as set out, for example, in the Comintern’s Theses On The National and Colonial Questions. It is a perversion of that position introduced by Stalinism, and later adopted by the petty-bourgeois Left, in part under pressure from Stalinism, but also from peer pressure in the petty-bourgeois, student milieu in which it became embedded, and from which came much of the movement in support of these national liberation struggles, and from which it sought to recruit new members. In line with the principles of Permanent Revolution, first set out by Marx in his 1850 Address, not only was it necessary to ensure the political and organisational independence of the proletariat, and to arm it to defend itself against the national bourgeoisie, but, in so far as the proletariat was led to form any temporary tactical alliance with the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, it was on the basis of an alliance with those masses, and not with the parties representing those classes, and certainly not with the bourgeois state.
“Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie.”
This is in stark contrast to the position of the Left, in all national liberation struggles, in the post-war period, and in its position in relation, now, to the Ukraine-Russia war.
The Russia-Ukraine War
Like WWI, the Russia-Ukraine war has become an acid test of the Left. As with WWI, most of that Left has failed the test. That the Left social-democrats, the reformist socialists, and Stalinists should fail only repeats their failures going back to WWI, but for those that claim the mantle of Trotskyism to fail it indicates the crisis of Marxism, and that the nature of that Left, as described above, is actually petty-bourgeois.
It is no surprise that those that have collapsed into becoming cheerleaders for one or other of the two contending imperialist camps have done so by using the arguments that opportunists used in WWI, and in WWII, based upon arguments of national self-determination, and “anti-imperialism”. But, nor is it a surprise that the Stop The War Coalition, which opposes the war on both sides, does so not on the basis of Marxism and Leninism, and the principles of class struggle and revolutionary defeatism, but on the basis of opportunism and social-pacifism.
The Marxist position is not only that the war is reactionary on both sides, and so we oppose the war; it is also a recognition that such wars are not inexplicable events, or caused by fascist megalomaniacs, but flow from the nature of imperialism, its drive to create a global single market, dictated by the needs of large-scale capital itself. It is inevitably led to do this by the violent competition of nation states (and alliances of such states), each seeking to assert their dominant position in any new international formation. Simply appealing for peace is therefore utopian, and ultimately reactionary, just as much as appealing for capitalist enterprises to stop competing against each other or forming larger monopolies and cartels.
We do not argue for an end to capitalist competition or monopolies, but for workers to take over those monopolies, and, thereby, to be able to replace competition with increasing cooperation between them, as part of a planned organisation of production and distribution. That is the real basis of class struggle, not economistic, distributional struggles for higher wages within a continuation of capitalism. Similarly, we do not argue for an end to wars between capitalist states, or the destruction of nation states and formation of larger multinational states, such as the EU, as part of forming a world state, but for workers to overthrow the existing capitalist states and establish workers’ states, as the only permanent means of ending wars, and rationally constructing a single global state, based upon voluntarily association. That is the basis of class struggle at an international level, of the concept of revolutionary defeatism, as against utopian demands for peace, the demands of social-pacifism.
The Marxist position of revolutionary-defeatism, in relation to the Russia-Ukraine War, as with any such war, is not simply about opposing the war, but about explaining to workers that these wars are fought using their blood, but not for their interests, and that they will continue to suck their blood so long as capitalism continues to exist. In the same way that Marxists intervene in strikes to explain that workers will continue to have to strike for decent wages, so long as capitalism exists, and that such strikes will not, ultimately, prevent their condition in relation to capital deteriorating; so they intervene in imperialist wars to explain that they will continue so long as capitalism/imperialism exists, and so the answer is not a utopian demand for peace, but a class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism/imperialism itself, to turn the imperialist war into civil war!
In the post-war period, the petty-bourgeois Left became engrossed in the rash of “anti-imperialist” and national liberation struggles that erupted as the old European colonial empires collapsed, in part under pressure from US imperialism that sought to break open all of the monopolies and protected markets of those colonial empires, in order to give free access to US multinational corporations to exploit vast reserves of labour. At the same time, Stalinism encouraged the development of support for such movements, as agents of the global strategic interests of the USSR, in competition with US imperialism. As in China, in 1925-7, it sought to ally itself with the national bourgeoisie, and subordinate the interests of workers and poor peasants in these former colonies to that of the national bourgeoisie, which it sought to draw into its orbit, as symbolised by the Third World Movement. This same, class collaborationist, Popular Front approach, was adopted by the Stalinists in the formation of the various Solidarity campaigns established to support these “anti-imperialist”, national liberation struggles.
Whilst the “Trotskyist” Left continued to repeat the mantra of opposition to Popular Fronts, in practice, and seeing large numbers of students drawn to the campaigns of solidarity with this or that national liberation movement, nearly all of which were bourgeois in nature, and many of which were particularly authoritarian and anti-working-class, as with the Algerian NLF and Viet Cong, it joined in, and promoted these kinds of cross-class, popular frontist organisations. It did so for fear of isolation and losing out in the potential for expanding its contact lists of possible new members in its rivalry with competing sects.
The Ukraine Solidarity Committee is just the latest in a long list of such cross-class, Popular Frontist organisations that throws their support behind, and so acts as useful idiots for, some reactionary national bourgeoisie, which is the enemy of the workers of the given state. In the past, these Popular Front organisations often gave a pass to the USSR and its allies, whereas, today, the USC gives a pass to, and allies with, NATO imperialism and its associates in the EU, G7 and so on. On the other side, those social-imperialists that have thrown themselves into a cross-class alliance in support of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, on the basis that they are being threatened by NATO/US imperialism, are simply the mirror image of the USC.
What Is To Be Done?
As two individuals, we do not suffer the hubris of thinking that we have the answers to this modern crisis of Marxism, but we do believe that such a crisis exists when self-proclaimed Marxists openly support one capitalist state in war against another, each backed by one or the other of the two largest capitalist states in the world A similar condition exists today as that in the early days of Marxism, with only a handful of authentic Marxists, amidst a sea of petty-bourgeois sects that portray themselves as Marxists while peddling reformist programmes; a still not insignificant number of Stalinists and other Left reformists; and with mass workers parties that have reverted to being simply openly bourgeois parties, much as with the British Liberals and German Democrats of 1848.
Indeed, the British Labour Party, under Starmer, has declined even more than that, becoming dominated by the reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism promulgated by the Tory party. Yet, in the absence of mass socialist workers parties, the working-class continues to engage in its own struggles, for increased wages to counter inflation, for example, but also to look to these bourgeois workers’ parties (or simple bourgeois parties) as their political representatives, and Marxists cannot ignore this reality. Our task is to work alongside the working-class, in and out of struggle, and break it from the current delusions in those parties, and in bourgeois-democracy itself.
Appeals to create yet another Marxist sect, or to create some new Workers Party have proven to be pointless. Engels advised US socialists to work with the existing workers parties, and, likewise, prior to the creation of the Labour Party, advised Eleanor Marx and her associates to work with the Liberal Clubs, rather than the existing sects such as the SDF or ILP. As he noted, in 1848, he and Marx and their supporters had joined the German Democrats, and operated inside it, as its organised Left-Wing.
Our fundamental principle, as set out by Marx in his 1850 Address, is to maintain the political and organisational independence of the working-class as it seeks its self-emancipation. But, as Marx and Engels showed, that is not incompatible with working inside existing mass workers parties. Whether that is done openly or covertly is only a question of tactics, determined by what is possible at the given time. The existence of the Internet to produce online publications and networks makes that much easier today than it was even 25 years ago.
In the 1930’s, when the forces congregating around him and his supporters were very small, Trotsky advised them to join the various socialist parties, so as to operate within them, as an organised Left-Wing, and, thereby, to begin to build the required numbers for the creation of new mass revolutionary parties. It was the formation of an undeclared United Front with those rank and file workers. It is again forced upon us given the tiny forces of authentic Marxism. Our goal is not some Quixotic attempt to capture those parties, but simply to build the required numbers of authentic Marxists to be able to create effective revolutionary workers parties as alternatives to them, and, then, to move from an undeclared United Front with the rank and file of those parties to an open and declared proposal for a United Front, exposing the leaders of those parties and drawing ever larger numbers of workers to the banner of international socialism.
That is in the future, but the first step is to establish a network of authentic Marxists, much as Marx and Engels did with the Communist Correspondence Committees, and as Lenin and Plekhanov did with the Marxist discussion circles that over time laid the basis for the creation of the RSDLP.
If you are in agreement with the principles set out above, in this joint statement, whether you are an individual or organisation, we ask you to contact either of the authors via the comments sections of these statements on our respective blogs. If you have a social media presence, then give us the details so that we can share it with our readers, and we would ask that you do the same, for everyone else as part of an expanding global network of authentic Marxists, each supporting, in whatever way they can, the work of the others, and facilitating a discussion and development of authentic Marxist ideas.
In 2013 the President of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) wrote in the Washington Post that ‘Ukraine is the biggest prize’ and its ‘choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents’, and therefore a critical step toward regime change in Russia. NED is an Non Governmental Organisation funded largely by the US government and intended, as its name suggests, to promote ‘democracy’ around the world. Democracy, that is, only when it is subservient to US interests and supported only in so far as these are respected.
So, we have a non-governmental organisation funded by government, claiming to be independent of it but boasting of leading the way in its foreign policy. In 2018 its National Defence Strategy defined ‘the re-emergence of long-term strategic competition’ with Russia and China as the ‘central challenge to US prosperity and security.’
As we have repeatedly noted, the position of the Left that supports Ukraine, not coincidentally, is almost identical to the position and even arguments of the governments and mass media of Western capitalist states.
Both justify their position on the basis that Ukraine is defending democracy, for itself and for others. The pro-war Left highlights ‘Russian imperialism’ and the role of Putin (but then, so does the NED), and it also supports regime change, without seeming to wonder what sort of regime change would be effected by the victory of western imperialism.
Of course, this left also claims to oppose western imperialism and will claim that it seeks a different sort of regime change. Except it has supported western imperialist intervention in support of Ukraine and in doing so has objectively supported exactly the sort of regime change that western imperialism wants. It thinks irrelevant to the cause of the war that NATO was to be enlarged so that Ukraine could potentially be the site of missiles only 5 minutes from Moscow, and wonders not what this implies for the possibility of nuclear war.
This expansion means nothing to them in understanding the motivations and objectives of any of the actors and therefore the nature of the war. No consideration of this is allowed to question why socialists should support the self determination of a state that has eagerly sought this position. Instead, the foreseeable and foreseen consequences are made irrelevant by free-floating moral concerns that Marxists reject precisely because they are divorced from the real world. Whatever ideas populate their heads, with whatever motivations, are irrelevant, and it does not matter what people call themselves or what they think they are.
Political programmes have objective effects independent of intention, which is precisely the point of seeking their implementation. It matters not only to state what you are opposed to (e.g. Russian ‘imperialism’) but what you are for (workers liberation) because this determines what means are excluded (NATO arms to Ukraine) and what objectives are to be opposed (including Ukrainian and NATO victory). Only the belief that some moral case stands above such considerations can justify support for Ukraine and of western imperialist backing for it; but if this is the case we have far departed from a materialist and Marxist understanding of politics and war.
How far we have was revealed in a Facebook exchange of views with a supporter of Ukraine who asked rhetorically ‘do people seriously believe that if Ukraine did not get weapons from NATO then the war would be brought to a peaceful end?’ As if with weapons to Ukraine it would! He states that ‘the people of Ukraine need and deserve our support and reveal a level of empathy, of basic humanity that appears sadly lacking in those who see the main problem as Ukraine receiving the means for the continuing existence of their independent state.’
We are asked for ‘empathy’ and ‘basic humanity’ so that weapons can be supplied that will wound and kill humans who must, it seems, not be deserving of empathy or considerations of ‘basic humanity’. And all this because we must support the provision of weapons so that the people of Ukraine receive ’the means for the continuing existence of their independent state.’
But since when did capitalist states belong to their people? Who is the ‘their’ in ‘their independent state’? What sort of state is the state of Ukraine? The same one that walked its people into a war through its pursuit of NATO membership against the wishes often of a majority of its people? How independent is Ukraine now, when it relies completely on western imperialism in order to continue the war? How ‘independent’ will it be when the war is over and it becomes subsumed under the imperialist alliance with an economy destroyed, millions of its people in exile and up to its neck in debt to western countries and their vulture financial institutions?
The only explanation for such stupidity is the belief in vacuous moralistic claims divorced from the real world that none of the parties at war are themselves stupid enough to believe.
These moralistic illusions rest on one event–the Russian invasion on 24 February last year. This is meant to be not only the grounds to explain everything but also the explanation itself, and by itself the imperative to support the Ukrainian state. But of course, one event explains nothing, requiring explanation itself, never mind mandating the correct socialist response. Even a series of events are in themselves no explanation of anything, but simply a series of happenings.
The pro-war left is compelled to go beyond this event themselves by insisting that the issue is one of Russian imperialism and self-determination of Ukraine, although by deriving their understanding solely from the Russian invasion they are unable even to account for this event, previous Ukrainian actions, or the subsequent actions of Western imperialism. And this is before we even consider just what is meant by Russian imperialism; the nature of the Ukrainian state and its actions and policy; and the strategy and actions of western imperialism before the invasion.
These latter issues have been dealt with before; it should be enough to note here that we face a proxy war by western imperialism, through the Ukrainian capitalist state against the Russian capitalist state, for us to determine that the working class has no interest in supporting either. The actions of all these actors are selectively presented by the pro-war left in order to bolster their pre-determined support for Ukraine, with the emphasis on the mental state and ideological declarations of Putin filling in for the lack of empirical support for the victimhood of the Ukrainian state, the progressive role of western imperialism and just why the Russians decided they needed to invade when they hadn’t done so before when it might have been easier to do so.
The point then of this series of posts has been, not to argue that the facts and events enumerated in themselves determine the correct approach to the war, but that they rebut the pro-war left’s support for Ukraine and western imperialism. This support is based not on Marxist analysis of the political forces but a litany of events that are meant to present a tidy narrative that comfortably brings one to express sympathy and solidarity with the ‘Ukrainian people’; without real life complications of people being divided into classes and ‘Ukraine’ being constituted by a state that, being a state, is actually separate from its people.
Along the road of this narrative the character of the Ukrainian state does not appear on the stage, and its manipulation of the Ukrainian people is absent. The character that is on stage is of the Ukrainian ‘people’, which substitutes for the many characters of the classes that inhabit Ukraine, including the Ukrainian working class, that might, if given the floor, express its own interests. The character of western imperialism simply arrives at the climax with sword and shield to defend the actor called ‘Ukraine’, although this role too is largely hidden. The Western saviour simply gives his sword and shield to the Ukrainian with the implication that they are to fight to the death, either theirs, the Russians or both.
This type of dramatic theatre, descended from the ancient Greeks, takes the audience from point A to point B, from invasion to support for ‘the resistance’, along the way filling it with emotions and sensations, of sympathy and outrage, earnestly hoping for a purgative resolution, a sort of happy ending for those suffering, in so far as one can be envisaged.
To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht; when asking whether one should feel the torment of someone suffering, he had his character respond that to do so ‘I must know why he is suffering’. Knowing why requires more than awareness that there was an invasion; that people are dying; that a perverted version of Lenin’s slogan of self-determination is the right answer, and that the biggest warmongers on the planet–out of character–are somehow doing the right thing.
One of the problems with the view that the war in Ukraine is unprovoked is that it erases much of history, wipes clean western imperialist actions, supports the idea that this imperialism is democratic, and robs the working class of the knowledge it needs to orient itself in the world.
Far from being unprovoked the war is a result of repeated provocations that we can outline, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, when the Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze made this “reasonable proposal” to James Baker, the US secretary of state: “Let’s disband both NATO and Warsaw Pact.” It hardly needs saying what the reply was and how it relates to the current war; unless of course you belong to the band of ‘socialists’ who blame Russia in toto.
There was nevertheless an obvious problem for western imperialism, and the United States in particular: how to justify the existence of NATO as a ‘defensive’ alliance when the enemy no longer existed. Further to this, the problem was couched in the context of a possible Soviet Union offer for quick unification of Germany in return for leaving NATO and declaring neutrality. This was even further complicated by the knowledge that this offer would have “widespread support among the members of the public in both East and West Germany”, as the German chancellor Helmut Kohl later admitted. Polling showed that 84 per cent of West Germans wanted to denuclearise their country and leaving NATO in return for German reunification would win widespread support across the country.
The US and NATO has portrayed its expansion into central and Eastern Europe as an exercise in democracy–’all the countries joined of their own free will’–but the German events are only one example of the dismissal of the views of local populations that was repeated later in Ukraine. This includes Soviet offers to get rid of nuclear weapons that the US rejected but that, if we follow the logic of the pro-war left, we should now endorse. Not that this left currently follows its own reasoning to its conclusion. It is just that it has no logical claim to reject it, and leaves the working class in the West open to the argument that the problem is an aggressive Russia and the solution a suitably armed NATO with nuclear capability to prevent Russia from doing what it wants.
The US faced the additional problem that the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly supported the idea that there should be no expansion of NATO to the East, something repeated on several occasions. The US was bitterly opposed, as one US official stated in an internal memorandum, this “would forfeit the prime assets . . . that have made the United States a post-war European power.” However, when Gorbachev stated that any expansion of the “zone of NATO” was unacceptable, US secretary of state James Baker stated, according to Gorbachev, that “we agree with that.” This, of course, was a lie, one that became particularly controversial and the focus of repeated complaints by the Russians that are still routinely derided by the western media today, but was repeated by Kohl in relation to the territory of the then East Germany.
While the German chancellor was saying that NATO would not expand its territory eastward into East Germany, Genscher repeated the position that “for us, it is clear: NATO will not extend itself to the East”. The secretary general of NATO, Manfred Worner, also asserted that the fact it would ‘not deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees.’
After agreement to German reunification the problem then became how to remove Soviet troops without also having to remove NATO ones. Proposals by Gorbachev for the Soviet Union to join NATO were rebuffed, as were later attempts by Yeltsin and still later ones by Putin for Russia to become a partner of western imperialism; something that discomforts both supporters of ‘Russia is to blame’ and ‘Russia is to be supported’ camps today.
The weakness of the Soviet Union at this time was exposed by its requests to Germany for funding for its troops stationed in the country, a weakness that the West, and particularly the US, exploited when it promoted the shock therapy applied to introduce capitalism into Russia. Throughout the NATO expansion, Russia was too weak to resist, and the US was able to proclaim a “new world order” that included this expansion and wars against Iraq and Afghanistan plus others. It might seem impossible to separate this history of imperialist aggression from the war in Ukraine, but that is exactly what supporters of the war must affirm if it is to be seen as uniquely free from Western complicity.
However, as early as 1992 an official of the US State Department had contacted the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington to urge Ukraine to join NATO, while in the following year the Ukrainian deputy foreign minister was stating that it was “unacceptable for NATO to expand without Ukraine becoming a full member.” Russian leaders were meanwhile saying that it should be first.
In 1994, Ukraine was the first post-Soviet country to conclude a framework agreement with NATO through the Partnership for Peace initiative, a road by which Central and Eastern European countries could join NATO, and was its most enthusiastic participant, seeking to join exercises and contributing 400 troops to the Implementation Force in Bosnia in 1995. The next year its Foreign Minister discussed the potential to become an ‘Associate Member’ of NATO while Russia made it known that this would be considered an ‘unfriendly policy’ with ‘all the resulting consequences.’
In 1997 the Ukraine Foreign Minister went further in stating the strategic goal as complete integration into NATO. Later he voiced concern that this might involve the deployment of nuclear weapons in Ukraine’s western neighbours and proposed a nuclear-weapons free zone, which NATO rejected.
Ukrainian President Kuchma continued steps to join the European Union and in 2002 established a schedule for meeting accession requirements by 2011, while the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council also discussed the need to “start practical implementation of the course to join NATO”. Ukraine continued to pass parliamentary resolutions stating its objective of joining NATO until mid-2004, sending 1,650 troops to support the US occupation of Iraq. In 2005 the new President, Yushchenko, sought a NATO Membership Action Plan, and in 2008 the Ukrainian government’s aspiration that Ukraine would become a member was approved at the NATO summit in Bucharest, pushed by the United States against some European reservations.
Yet opinion polls regularly recorded that there was still not majority support within the country for membership, with opposition reaching over 60 per cent in one poll, a result confirmed and reported in others here and here. One other from Gallup reported as its conclusion that ‘Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO, Residents more likely to view NATO as a threat than protection.’
As one of these argued: ‘As for public opinion, NATO membership should generally not be a matter of broad public acquiescence, but of a conscious geopolitical choice by a consolidated national elite. As part of NATO’s post-Soviet expansion, only Slovenia and Hungary have held referendums on membership – and Hungary’s was nonbinding. Slovakia’s 1997 referendum was declared invalid, as it gathered only 10 percent of eligible voters.’
Opinion polls in Ukraine repeatedly demonstrated majority opposition to NATO membership, or at least major division, even after the Ukrainian government approved ‘a four-year, $6 million “information campaign” to improve NATO’s image.’ The article quoted above argued that ‘While the jury is still out regarding its effectiveness, even with the best of PR campaigns and outreach programs, the West by now has generally accepted the uncomfortable fact that NATO may never gain broad popularity among Ukrainians, especially in the eastern regions of the country.’
We now know, of course, that the United States never gave up intervening into Ukrainian politics with the objective of moving the country into NATO. The author of these lines showed remarkable naivety in believing that popular opposition was anything more than an obstacle to be overcome rather than a democratic wish to be respected. The price to be paid to overcome this obstacle was forecast right from the start, as we see below.
Russia reaffirmed its opposition to NATO expansion, and in particular into Ukraine and Georgia, on the grounds of violation of the principle of equal security and the creation of new dividing lines in Europe. While Putin claimed that Russia had ‘no right to interfere’ with Ukraine foreign policy’, and if it wanted to restrict its sovereignty (by joining NATO) ‘that is its own business’, Foreign Minister Lavrov stated that “Russia will do everything it can to prevent the admission of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO’.
In the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ the American columnist Charles Krauthammer stated that ‘this is about Russia first, democracy only second . . . The West wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east . . . The great prize is Ukraine’. As Putin complained, they “have lied many times’ and in Ukraine “have crossed the line”. “Everything has its limits.” The Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov was even more blunt in stating in 2011 that “NATO expansion into Ukraine is something Russia would view as absolutely unacceptable because it then becomes a vital threat. In political jargon, this kind of threat means war.’ (The quotations not referenced are taken mainly from. ‘Not One Inch, America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate’, M E Sarotte, Yale University Press)
* * *
At the start of the invasion I commented on Facebook that the Russians had warned that Ukraine could not join NATO and that this was a red line, only to be rebuked that, in effect, I was saying that Ukraine ‘was asking for it’. I replied that this was, as a matter of simple fact, what had just happened.
Facebook is not a great medium for political debate so it should be elaborated here that, as we can see, the Ukrainian state played its own role in advancing the war through its repeated attempts to join NATO, even voting to place it as a constitutional imperative in 2019. So, while the Ukrainian people did not invite war, its political leadership and its western backers certainly did. How tragic is it then to now rally to the defence of the state that walked you into war and rely on western imperialist forces that led you there?
Even in 2012 only 28 per cent of Ukrainians supported membership of NATO. What we see here is thus a sterling example of the old socialist maxim that ‘the main enemy is at home’; in this case the main enemy of the Ukrainian working class was its own capitalist state for whom it is now fighting and dying. How much more obvious must it be that this should be opposed by all those who claim to be socialists and Marxists? How obvious is it now that if they don’t, their claims to express any sort of socialism must be repudiated?
On February 24 2022 the US President Joe Biden condemned Russia’s invasion as “a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity” and a “flagrant violation of international law.” Putin he said, “rejected every good-faith effort the United States and our Allies and partners made to address our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and avert human suffering,”
Boris Johnson pronounced that ‘President Putin has chosen a path of bloodshed and destruction by launching this unprovoked attack on Ukraine’, while then foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said she had summoned the Russian ambassador “to meet me and explain Russia’s illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”. The British Government website continues to have this as its leader – ‘The UK and our allies condemn the Russian government’s unprovoked and premeditated war against Ukraine.’
The Irish Government as part of the EU has repeatedly supported its sanctions, even demanding they go further, joining Poland and Baltic states in calling for more. Upon the invasion Tánaiste Leo Varadkar stated that whilst Ireland is militarily neutral, “in this conflict, Ireland is not neutral at all”, stating its “unwavering and unconditional” support for Ukraine.’
This Wikipedia entry sets out a whole list of States responses in which the word ‘unprovoked’ appears 29 times at my last count.
The media followed suit: the New York Times described it as ‘an unprovoked invasion’; the Financial Times a ‘naked and unprovoked aggression’; the Guardian ‘an unprovoked assault’, while the Economist thundered that ‘Russia’s president has launched an unprovoked assault on his neighbour.’
On 14 October 2022, Defenders Day in Ukraine, the US ambassador issued a video message saying:
‘The United States, our partners and allies, will continue to support Ukraine to hold those who commit war crimes accountable and to work to bring together the world to maintain pressure on the Kremlin until it ends its brutal, unprovoked war against Ukraine and our shared values. And we will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.’
The position of much of the Western Left, certainly in Britain, is much the same, with a recent Ukraine Solidarity Campaign statement also calling for ‘a week of action’ against ‘the brutal and unprovoked invasion’. It sees no provocation; absolves western imperialism and the Ukrainian state and regime of any responsibility; supports ‘Ukraine’s freedom, presented as ’self-determination’; has failed to oppose sanctions while mouthing hypocrisies about not supporting them either; sets no political limits to its support – that is ‘unconditional’; and supports western supply of arms, which along with sanctions and financial support are the main western imperialist interventions.
If anything, the political resources required by the support of the pro-war Left for Ukraine might seem to be much greater than that of the various capitalist states, politicians and media. It has faced opposition from those socialists opposed to capitalist war, something that has been a principle of our politics at least from the exemplary case of the First World War, the character of which has recently been graphically exposed by the film “All Quiet on the Western Front’. The pro-war left has had to face this opposition–which capitalist Governments and its bourgeois media are not of course concerned with–and reject its arguments, sometimes claiming how comfortable it is for its critics that they take such a position!
However, because it claims the mantle of socialism its position very quickly became dishonest, confused, as well as reactionary. Consider the exchange of views in Britain between Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR) and the Stop the War coalition (StW). Like many organisations not interested in principled politics, ACR argues the prime necessity for action and berates Stop the War for putting up conditions to joint activity.
We have dealt with what sort of anti-war movement is required before, so suffice to say here that its own insistence on the absence of certain demands, such as opposition to NATO, is also a precondition. The point of a political campaign is to fight for particular objectives that are directly relevant and to raise the consciousness of the working class. To exclude certain demands is to avoid fighting for these objectives and failure to raise political consciousness around them. Lack of concern for political principle leads to this obvious truth being passed over.
Since it is impossible to hide the political differences, it quickly became clear that those such as ACR calling for a broad approach, ‘designed to build the broadest possible movement against the war’, were not actually against the war but for it, war until Ukrainian victory. This is where the pro-war position is dishonest.
ACR refuses to support demands opposing NATO, rejecting the view that ‘NATO’s expansion has “contributed to the war”’, stating that ‘this is not clear at all. It could equally be argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an act of unprovoked imperialist aggression.’ Having said that it could equally be argued that the war was the fault of Russia, what ACR really means is that Russia was wholly at fault, and the problem with the StW coalition is that it is not ‘engaging with the central issue: the unprovoked war on Ukraine.’
ACR wants to oppose an ‘unprovoked attack on Ukraine’, oppose the war and ‘to organise constructively against it – not in a way that fans the flames of war – which is why the demand “No to war” is included – but in a way that solidarises with the plight of the Ukrainian people.’ It thinks, or perhaps pretends to think, that you can demand solidarity with one of the sides waging without supporting war and without fanning its flames, all while supporting a greater and greater supply of weapons. This is where the pro-war position is (shall we say?) confused.
In their exchange of views the StW coalition raised the question of opposing arms expenditure as an urgent issue, but ACR regarded this as belonging to ‘a whole range of other criticisms’ that can be parked and not form part of the movement. But this identification of the issue by the StW coalition turned out to be very prescient: the British Trade Union Congress voted shortly after to support increased ‘defence spending’, more honestly stated as spending on war. The ACR position would have left, and still would, any supposed anti-war position silent in this debate. Since, in any case, the ACR defends the arming of Ukraine by the British state this is a perfectly logical position for it to take. This is just one case in which the pro-war position is reactionary.
As the argument supported by ACR shows, the stance of the pro-war left rests, like that of western imperialism in general, on the view that the Russian invasion was unprovoked. Of course, provocation does not equate to justification or automatically follow from it. In the world of capitalist state competition provocation may be seen as sometimes inevitably resulting in war, but that does not require socialists to support either the provocation or the response. In fact, opposition to both is clearly a principled socialist approach.
But this would not be enough for the pro-war left because admission of western imperialist and Ukrainian provocation would require taking this principled position. Both western imperialism and Ukraine would then be seen as playing their own part in causing the war; Ukrainian agency as they call it, and having responsibility for it, in which case defending either would be anathema. The pro-war left cannot concede this reality; let’s call it the homage that treachery pays to principle.
The pro-war left denies reality when it absolves western imperialism and Ukraine of any provocation and therefore any responsibility. In doing so, in denying recent history and current reality it signs up to an infantile view saturated with bourgeois morality in which Ukraine is Good and western imperialism Innocent; innocent of acting on its essential nature.
The reality of capitalist war becomes instead a morality tale of heroic resistance, and the messy reality is only so much noise – unpleasant, unwelcome and better drowned out. The unpleasant nature of Ukrainian nationalism for example, that shades into the relatively large constituency for fascism; or the fact that there are a large number of Ukrainians who support Russia, are just irrelevant noise to signal.
Instead, they can fight for what is Good; while other socialists fight in opposition to their own capitalist state and capitalist class, watching and reading mass media propaganda about the ‘unprovoked’ war.
Sráid Marx 