As Trotsky wrote, in relation to the Balkan Wars, it is impossible to control the actions of imperialism when it has engaged in such military campaigns, and so, also, it was typical of the liberals and moral socialists that they wanted to distance themselves from the Second Balkan Wars, which flowed inexorably from the first.
“Well, but who are the allies of yesterday liberating now?...
Don't you agree that between this 'disgraceful' war and the war you called a 'liberating' war there is an indissoluble connection? ... The emancipation of the Macedonian peasantry from feudal landlord bondage was undoubtedly something necessary and historically progressive. But this task was undertaken by forces that had in view not the interests of the Macedonian peasantry but their own covetous interests as dynastic conquerors and bourgeois predators. A usurpation of historical tasks such as this is not at all an exceptional happening. The emancipation of the Russian peasant from the fetters of the village community of the epoch of police rule and serfdom is a progressive task. But, it is not at all a matter of indifference who undertakes this task and how. Stolypin's agrarian reform does not solve the problems set by history, it merely exploits these problems in the interests of the gentry and the kulaks. No, there is consequently no need to idealise the Turkish regime or the regime of Russia's village community in order to express at the same time one's uncompromising distrust of the uninvited 'liberators' and to refuse any solidarity with them.”
(ibid p 325)
The capitalist state is not some class neutral, functionalist mechanism, as the social-democrats and the Narodniks/moral socialists believe, but is an instrument of class rule – the instrument of the capitalist class. Asking it not to ask in that way is like the turtle asking the scorpion not to sting it as it carries it across the river. As Kautsky put it,
“If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.
The state has never carried on the nationalising of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded, nor will it ever go further than that. So long as the property-holding classes are the ruling ones, the nationalisation of industries and capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat.”
(Kautsky - Erfurt Programme)
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