Fine, but it is linked with support for the Russian anti-war movement, uncritically, and with no questions asked about the politics of those involved in it. Again, its the idiocy of the idea that “My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend”, and lesser-evilism that Trotsky tears apart in his article “Learn To Think”. Just because Navalny, and others, are enemies of Putin, certainly does not mean that they are not thoroughly unsavoury characters themselves, and people that socialists should stay a million miles away from!
In fact, to the extent that any such individuals have any connection with NATO, and other western, bourgeois-democratic forces, Marxists should stay well clear of them, for the reasons already outlined. That is all the more necessary, in Russia, given the role of the CIA in financing and organising opposition movements, as the basis of staging coups, such as that they organised in Ukraine in 2014. The only progressive force capable of removing Putin and his vile regime is the Russian working-class, and if we wish to gain their ear, and begin to mobilise them as such a force, we cannot do that, as Trotsky said, in relation to Germany, if we have any taint of connection to NATO imperialism, whose agenda in relation to Russia – and China – is well known. Indeed, the latest statements coming out of NATO in relation to China, seem to confirm that its has adopted the positions of Trump in that regard.
As I have written many times, in the past, Putin and his regime, have been instrumental in supporting reactionary petty-bourgeois, nationalist movements in the West, and in their own dirty tricks, via the use of hackers, bots and trolls, for example, in supporting Brexit and those reactionary forces inside the Tory Party, UKIP etc., involved with it, as well as supporting the Trumpists, Le Pen and so on.
If Marxists, in the West, want to play their own positive role in bringing about the downfall of Putin, then they should do so by focusing their attention on destroying the supporters of Putin, and that reactionary, petty-bourgeois agenda, in their own countries. By all means uncover the financial and other links between the Kremlin kleptocarcy and Trump, Brexit and so on, and focus attention on bringing to book all those involved in it, in our own countries. That is one more aspect of the principle “The Main Enemy Is At Home”. But, that would mean bringing down some of those, like Boris Johnson and the Tory Party, who are currently being appealed to, and looked to, to provide weapons and support for the Ukrainian oligarchy, and kleptocracy that also has not been shy in trying to intervene in some of those movements.
As for support for desertion and so on, again that is the position of liberal pacifists not Marxists. We want revolutionary socialists inside the Russian army, conducting revolutionary activity and propaganda – indeed in all armies – in the way the Bolsheviks did in WWI, so as to work towards getting those forces to turn their guns on their own ruling class. As Trotsky put it, at the start of WWII,
“As for the escapists – including those in our own Party – we must speak about them with full contempt. They are deserters. Likewise with the conscientious objectors who accepted everything in peacetime but don’t want to accept war. Escapists are deserters from their class and their revolution.”
(Writings 1939-40)
We are not pacifists but revolutionary, international socialists.
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