Idiot Anti-imperialism, The Falklands and Ukraine - Part 1 of 8

The Material Basis of Petit-Bourgeois Nationalism

Its now 40 years since the Falklands War. Back in 1982, the Falklands War provided an acid test for the Workers Socialist League, which was the fused organisation of the International Communist League, of which I was a member, and the Workers Socialist League of Alan Thornett. In the run up to war, both parts of the organisation remained committed to the international socialist principle of “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, which meant that socialists could give no support to either Argentina or Britain, and we called on the workers of both countries to turn their fire on their own ruling class, which represented their main, and immediate enemy.

Alan Thornett

When the war started, the new organisation divided almost exactly down the middle into its original components. The Thornett group, like most others on the Left, argued that, on the basis of “anti-imperialism”, it was necessary to defend Argentina, whilst the I-CL component argued, correctly, that, though we oppose Britain's war, that did not, at all, require us to support Argentina. Others on the Left, particularly the Left social-patriots like Michael Foot, did what such elements always do, and simply fell in behind the demand to rally around the flag. Foot led Labour into backing Thatcher's war in the Falklands, just as today they line up behind NATO.

The victory of British imperialism led to a carnival of reaction. The Tories who were looking like they were a one term government, rallied support around the flag.

As warships returned home during a rail strike, banners on the ships read “Call off the rail strike, or we will call down an air strike”. It set up the Tories to take on the labour movement and win, imposing another 15 years of austerity and social destruction.

Replace Argentina with Ukraine, the Falklands with the DPR/LPR, and Britain with Russia, and the current war between Russia and Ukraine is almost exactly the same as the war between Britain and Argentina in 1982, and the position of revolutionary socialists should be the same too. The only difference is that, today, NATO imperialism stands behind Ukraine, making the conflict more like the traditional war between imperialist powers. 

I wrote several documents, as part of the internal discussion, in support of the majority/I-CL position, and spoke at several conferences organised on it. In fact, on the very day I was due to go on holiday, I was called to speak at a specially convened conference on the war, being shuttled off, rapidly, after having done so, on the back of a motor bike, to get back to Stoke to join my wife and baby, just in time to catch our flight to Spain. I have all of the internal documents, minutes and correspondence from my time as a member of the I-CL and WSL, including the documents I wrote on the war, in my archives. Going over that debate is useful, now, in relation to the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Stalinism - petty-bourgeois nationalism -
national socialism - social patriotism -
social pacifism

In 1982, a large part of the Left held to positions that amounted to petty-bourgeois nationalism. It is even worse, today. The material foundation of this petty-bourgeois nationalism was the existence of the USSR, and the role of Stalinism globally, which acted as its gatekeeper. In turn, that flowed from the Theory of Socialism In One Country, adopted by Stalin in 1924, as he sought to distinguish himself from Trotsky, and the Theory of Permanent Revolution, which Lenin had also adopted with his April Thesis in 1917. The Theory of Socialism in One Country, meant that Stalin wanted breathing space to construct “socialism” in Russia, by trying to persuade imperialism not to invade it, as it had done in 1918. It meant that Stalin would, in return, commit to not supporting socialist revolution in other countries. Indeed, it soon became a commitment to actually sabotage such revolutions.

In other words, Stalinism formed an alliance with the bourgeoisie, which took the form of the Popular Front. Leaving aside the interregnum of the Third Period, that has remained the position of Stalinism. The exact manifestation of it, is determined, in each case, on the basis of lesser-evilism. In relation to less developed countries, often referred to, at the time, as the Third World, that meant that Stalinism nurtured not revolutionary socialist movements of the proletariat and peasantry, but national liberation movements of the national bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, which mobilised the proletarian and peasant masses as their foot soldiers. In terms of global politics, and the strategic games played by the USSR on one side, and NATO imperialism on the other, it even took institutionalised form as the so called Third World, or Non-Aligned Movement.

Given that the period of the 1950's and 60's, was the period of the greatest national liberation struggles, and of the achievement of political freedom for large numbers of ex-colonies, this obviously played a huge role in shaping the basic ideas of a whole generation of young radicals and revolutionaries. One after another, there was a cause to be fought for the liberation of this or the other colony, and the Stalinists framed the nature of the dialogue, supported by a whole swathe of liberals, whose ideas, in this regard, were indistinguishable from them. The most prominent British campaigner against apartheid, for example, was the Young Liberal, Peter Hain. It took the form of an open alliance inside the student movement at the time, and a large number of those on both sides of this Stalinist/Liberal student alliance have since become the leading lights of Blairism/Starmerism, in all walks of life. Its perhaps, also, worthwhile pointing out another reason for this alliance between Stalinism and the Liberals, and that is the ideas of Stalinism in relation to imperialism itself.

As with most of its ideas, Stalinism bowdlerised the ideas of Lenin in relation to imperialism, and the basic theory of imperialism, at the time, accepted by the Stalinists, but also by large swathes of the Left, many of whom had come from inside the CP's, or YCL, was that set out by Lenin in his 1916 polemical pamphlet, “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism”. A large part of the data included in that pamphlet was taken by Lenin from the Liberal Hobson. Lenin emphasises that it is no part of a Marxist approach to support opposition to monopolies, by seeking their break-up, and a return to less developed forms of capital, even if, as Hobson claimed, monopoly involves a holding back of innovation and so on. (In fact, that claim, is bogus anyway, though oft repeated by liberals and Stalinists).

The Stalinists, like the Liberals, however, do oppose monopoly and propose “anti-monopoly alliances”. They want monopolies broken up, so that there is a return to less developed forms of capital, and increased competition. As Lenin and Trotsky point out, imperialism is just an extension of the development of monopoly to the global economy as a whole, and the need for ever larger states. Whatever attachment moral socialists might have towards the rights of small or weak states, just as they have an attachment to the rights of small companies against monopolies, the reality is that the small or weak states are reactionary and doomed, meaning they are either absorbed by big states, or else must themselves merge with other small states so as to create their own big state. As such, imperialism is historically progressive, even if the means it uses are not ones that Marxists advocate.

So, when the Left came to consider each of these national liberation struggles, this is the framework within which it did so. A large part of the dialogue was framed by this petty-bourgeois, liberal/Stalinist concept of opposing big, monopoly-capitalism/imperialism. The same thing is seen today, not just in the position of the Stalinists in, again, raising the demands for an “anti-monopoly alliance”, but of the wider “anti-capitalist” movement, which focuses its fire on the large oligopolies, and demands for higher taxation of them, and so on, all of which actually amount to a reactionary petty-bourgeois, liberal campaign in support of small scale capital, rather than recognising the progressive nature of monopoly and large-scale capital, and a socialist orientation to it, in the form of demands for workers control over it.

It amounts to workers foregoing their own struggle for Socialism, and instead simply becoming foot soldiers of the petty-bourgeoisie, in its struggle against large-scale capital, just as, in relation to national liberation struggles, the Left abandoned the revolutionary socialist position of fighting for the interests of an independent revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, and, instead, became champions for the national bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, in opposition to “imperialism”, with the workers and peasants required to delay and subordinate their own interests and struggle to some point in the undefined future, and, meanwhile, to simply form a Popular Front with the former. It was the adoption of the Menshevik/reformist stages theory as against the theory of Permanent Revolution, even though large elements of the Left gave lip-service to the latter.

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