Another month has gone by, and its time again for another night of dancing at Soulville (Moorville Hall), in the company of old friends from the Stoke Soul Club.
Friday 31 March 2023
Social-Imperialism and Ukraine - Part 12 of 37
Let us then make this opposite assumption that the majority in the breakaway regions do not want to become separated from Ukraine, and incorporated into Russia, much as the Falkland Islanders did not wish to be separated from Britain, and annexed by Argentina. There is a difference between supporting that right and desire in the abstract, and supporting a war to bring it to effect. In The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up, cited above, Lenin goes on,
“Let us assume that between two great monarchies there is a little monarchy whose kinglet is “bound” by blood and other ties to the monarchs of both neighbouring countries. Let us further assume that the declaration of a republic in the little country and the expulsion of its monarch would in practice lead to a war between the two neighbouring big countries for the restoration of that or another monarch in the little country. There is no doubt that all international Social-Democracy, as well as the really internationalist section of Social-Democracy in the little country, would be against substituting a republic for the monarchy in this case. The substitution of a republic for a monarchy is not an absolute, but one of the democratic demands, subordinate to the interests of democracy (and still more, of course, to those of the socialist proletariat) as a whole. A case like this would in all probability not give rise to the slightest disagreement among Social-Democrats in any country.”
Marxists would then have been opposed to a Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, to enforce a desire for independence from Ukraine, if it, inevitably, resulted in a war between Russia and Ukraine, with a potential to draw in other powers standing behind them, as happened in WWI, but, likewise would oppose a Ukrainian bombardment, or ground assault, on those regions, to prevent them breaking away, which would likewise, likely lead to a Russian military response, as indeed, it did.
Does that mean that Marxists can support no national liberation wars? Clearly not, but it means that each one must be treated concretely, rather than some abstract principle of support being applied. Wars of national liberation, by colonies, for example, could be supported, though, even, here, as the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions states, consistent with the principles of Permanent Revolution, Marxists only give their support in such struggles to the truly revolutionary forces, and insist that where they are forced, by material conditions, to fight in a tactical alliance with other class forces, they maintain a strict organisational and political independence from them. As Lenin puts it, in The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up,
“If we do not want to betray socialism we must support every revolt against our chief enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big states, provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class.”
Trotsky emphasises these points in relation to the Chinese Revolution, and the Stalinist policy, applied there.
“What tasks did Lenin set before the Comintern with regard to the backward countries?
“It is necessary to carry on a determined struggle against the attempt to surround the bourgeois democratic liberation movements in the backward countries with a Communist cloak.”
In carrying this out, the Guomindang, which had promised to establish in China “not a bourgeois régime”, was admitted into the Comintern.”
And, this is similar to the way the USC, dress up the role of socialists in Ukraine, and play down the reactionary nature of the Zelensky regime. In fact, the Stalinists, based upon ideas developed by Bukharin, argued that, because a colonial bourgeoisie was engaged in a struggle against imperialism, it, objectively, became more progressive than the bourgeoisie of a non-colony, or non-annexed country, simply as a result of its anti-imperialist struggle. This is the basic idea that underpins all idiot anti-imperialism, but, as Trotsky points out, not only is it absurd, and has no foundation in Lenin's writings, but, if anything, the opposite is true, and, in his words, such bourgeoisies are “even more vile” than those of the developed capitalist states. Yet, the USC do not even try to base their argument for supporting Zelensky's reactionary regime on that basis, but only on the basis of trying to pretty up just exactly how reactionary it is! Trotsky continues.
“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. In what form, then, did Lenin visualize the alliance with the bourgeois democracy of the colonies? To these, too, he gives an answer in his thesis written for the Second Congress:
“The Communist International should enter into a temporary alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie of the colonies and backward countries, but should not fuse with it and must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement – even in its embryonic form.”
It seems that in executing the decisions of the Second Congress, the Communist Party was made to join the Guomindang and the Guomindang was admitted into the Comintern. All this summed up is called Leninism”.
In fact, Trotsky's quote is not quite accurate, and the full quote is even more damning of the Stalinists, and petty-bourgeois nationalists. The second paragraph should actually read,
"the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form" (emphasis added)
Notice the repeated statement that the only forces we actually support are the truly revolutionary, communist forces, that any alliance they enter into is purely tactical, and temporary, and is with the petty-bourgeois masses not the political parties, and certainly not the bourgeois state, in those countries, for the obvious reason that the struggle is not just against imperialism, but also against the national bourgeoisie, which still represents the main enemy at home!
Trump Indicted
Well, the prediction took slightly longer than suggested, but has proved correct. Trump has been indicted by a Grand Jury, on charges relating to his payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, to keep schtum. But, its notable that the US ruling class has chosen this as its basis to indict Trump, rather than on charges relating to his role in organising and fermenting the failed coup attempt in January 2021, or his other attempts to subvert US democracy. Notable, but not at all surprising, giving everything else I've noted about the role and strategy of the ruling class, when it comes to confronting the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie.
That approach and strategy can be summed up, by examining the Theory of Permanent Revolution. In essence, it comes down to this. The bourgeois ruling class is tiny, much, much smaller, today, than it was even in Marx's day, when he set out the basic ideas of permanent revolution. It could only achieve its political aims in alliance with other classes, originally with the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie, of independent commodity producers, out of which it grew, and a nascent working class, and later, mainly in alliance with the latter, which had grown hugely during the 19th century, whilst the petty-bourgeoisie had shrunk, and become a reactionary drag on further development.
Initially, the bourgeoisie is in alliance with these other classes, against its primary class enemy, the landed aristocracy. But, by the end of the 19th century, the latter had been defeated and subordinate to the bourgeoisie, with which it largely, now merged. As Engels sets out, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, the big industrial bourgeoisie found itself allied with the industrial proletariat, to achieve the conditions required - social-democracy - for its political hegemony. It was no longer the old landed aristocracy that was its main class enemy, but the working-class, with which it had been forced to ally, in order to prevent any rolling back of bourgeois-democracy.
But, the main threat for any such rolling back, now came not from the old landed aristocracy, but from the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests were antagonistic to all of those of large-scale capital, which was destroying it at an increasing rate. So long as the petty-bourgeoisie was shrinking, and its heterogeneous nature ensured it was weak and subordinated to other classes, the bourgeoisie could ignore it, and even, when in times of crisis, such as the 1920's, and early 30's, it needed to step on the working-class, when it challenged for power, could resort to the natural political forms of that petty-bourgeoisie - fascism - to unleash against workers' organisations, making sure, of course, that when those immediate aims were secured, it also, then, stepped on the political ambitions of that petty-bourgeoisie as well.
But, since the 1980's, when, particularly in the developed economies, the ruling class became even more divorced from real capital, i.e. large-scale, socialised industrial capital, from whose profits it sucks interest/dividends, as it became focused on simply inflating the prices of assets, so as to obtain capital gains, instead of profits going to accumulate real capital, it was sucked into the purchase of these paper assets at ever higher prices. As large-scale capital failed to expand, and perform its historic task of destroying the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, so that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie filled the void, especially as thousands of former wage-workers joined it, as self-employed workers in a vast range of low value, low productivity, precarious activities. Its increased social weight, was reflected in its takeover of formerly conservative social-democratic parties, such as the Tories in Britain, the Republicans in the US, and so on.
That meant that these parties, when elected, now came under pressure from that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, itself tied inextricably to associated layers of lumpen workers, themselves largely outside the organised labour movement, and infected with these same reactionary ideas, and having to accommodate them. The index of that movement was the progress of the Tory Party, during the 1980's, and 90's, from being a conservative social-democratic party, that reflected the interests of big capital, of EU membership and so on, through the accommodation of the petty-bourgeoisie, in the mid 80's, by Thatcher, to her, growing Euroscepticism, and finally, its complete collapse in Brexitoryism, and reactionary nationalism. But, a similar transition can be seen in the US Republicans, symbolised by first the Tea Party, and then Trump.
The ruling class needs its social allies, of the last two centuries, in the working-class, to again join with it in suppressing the threat presented to it, by the reactionary forces and ideologies of the petty-bourgeoisie. But, the working-class is now the largest class on the planet, it is much better educated than it has ever been, it has access to instantaneous communications and so on. Mobilising that working-class at its side, to defeat the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, presents the same problems for the ruling class it has always done, back to 1848, as set out by Marx, and later by Lenin and Trotsky.
Moreover, even if that ruling class simply wanted to mobilise workers passively, via parliamentarism, it would have to offer them something in return. What exactly would that be that would not also simply pose a challenge to the profits of the large corporations, on which the ruling class is dependent for its interest/dividend payments, which are the basis of its capital gains. And, it would be doing that at a time when the normal operation of the long wave cycle has again asserted itself, after being hibernated since 2010, by austerity, lockdowns and so on, which has led to growing labour shortages, rising wages and interest rates, causing a fall in asset prices, and so to growing capital losses for the ruling class, in place of its expected capital gains.
Under those conditions, for the ruling class to launch a political war against its petty-bourgeois class enemies, would risk waking the sleeping giant of the working-class, and, thereby, threaten its own interests if not its existence. That is why the ruling class has used its main levers of power, i.e. the capitalist state, to try to frustrate the interests of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and its governments, be it over Brexit, or the idiocies of the Trump Presidency. In doing so it simply sows the seeds of future problems, rousing the reactionaries ire even more, enabling their numbers and organisation to grow, and their methods to become even more violent, whilst doing nothing to mobilise an adequate social movement amongst workers to confront it.
Even waging an open parliamentarist war against the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie becomes problematic for the ruling class, because doing so leads to increased political discourse and activity that could provoke an independent response from a newly strengthened working-class, again finding its feet, as employment expands, and its security and solidarity grows. So, the ruling class instead continues to utilise these bureaucratic and roundabout methods to subdue the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, indicting Trump on salacious charges about his relation with porn stars, charging Boris Johnson with the trivia about having held parties in Downing Street and so on, anything other than an open political struggle.
Thursday 30 March 2023
Chapter 2.C Theories of The Medium of Circulation and of Money - Part 6 of 20
The implication of Hume's theory is that neither commodities nor gold and silver have value, but that they simply come into a quantitative relation to each other.
“The fact that gold and silver are money only as the result of the function they perform in the social process of exchange is thus taken to mean that their specific value and hence the magnitude of their value is due to their social function. Gold and silver are thus things without value, but in the process of circulation, in which they represent commodities, they acquire a fictitious value. This process turns them not into money but into value: a value that is determined by the proportion of their own volume to the volume of commodities, for the two volumes must balance. Although then, according to Hume, gold and silver enter the world of commodities as non-commodities, as soon as they function as coin he transforms them into plain commodities, which are exchanged for other commodities by simple barter.” (p 164)
In fact, this barter is more akin to that in the exchange of surplus products, rather than that of the exchange of commodities. The exchange relation is then separated from value and becomes determined solely on the basis of supply and demand for different use values.
“But the world of commodities consists of an infinite variety of use-values, whose relative value is by no means determined by their relative quantities.” (p 165)
Hume believes that, because every commodity forms a quantitative proportion of all commodities, its money equivalent is an amount of gold that represents the same proportion of the total gold in the country. This ideas was developed by Montesquieu.
“The dynamic movement of commodities – a movement, which originates in the contradiction of exchange-value and use-value contained in the commodities, which is reflected in the circulation of money and epitomised in the various distinct aspects of the latter – is thus obliterated and replaced by an imaginary mechanical equalisation of the amount of precious metals present in a particular country and the volume of commodities simultaneously available.” (p 165)
Steuart criticises both Hume and Montesquieu, and arrives at basically a correct understanding of money and its circulation, Marx says, “because he does not mechanically place commodities on one side and money on the other, but really deduces its various functions from different moments in commodity exchange.” (p 165)
Marx quotes Steuart's comment,
““These uses” (of money in internal circulation) “may be comprehended under two general heads. The first, payment of what one owes; the second, buying what one has occasion for; the one and the other may be called by the general term of ready-money demands... Now the state of trade, manufactures, modes of living, and the customary expense of the inhabitants, when taken all together, regulate and determine what we may call the mass of ready-money demands, that is, of alienation.”” (p 165-6)
Marx makes this same distinction between money as means of payment, and money as means of circulation. The two together - “ready money demands” - are equivalent to the Keynesian category of the “transactional demand for money.”
Steuart goes on to note that, therefore, only a proportion of the total gold in the country can take the form of money.
““The standard price of everything” is determined by “the complicated operations of demand and competition,” which “bear no determined proportion whatsoever to the quantity of gold and silver in the country.” “What then will become of the additional quantity of coin?” – “It will be hoarded up in treasures” or converted into luxury articles. “If the coin of a country ... falls below the proportion of the produce of industry offered for sale ... inventions such as symbolical money will be fallen upon to provide an equivalent for it."” (p 166)
This is precisely what Marx describes in Capital III, in relation to the expansion of commercial credit, in times of economic expansion.
“The quantity of circulating bills of exchange, therefore, like that of bank-notes, is determined solely by the requirements of commerce; in ordinary times, there circulated in the fifties in the United Kingdom, in addition to 39 million in bank-notes, about 300 million in bills of exchange — of which 100-120 million were made out on London alone. The volume of circulating bills of exchange has no influence on note circulation and is influenced by the latter only in times of money tightness, when the quantity of bills increases and their quality deteriorates.”
(Capital III, Chapter 33)
Wednesday 29 March 2023
The Roots of Social-Imperialism - Part 2 of 4
But, as Hal Draper, points out, in The Two Souls of Socialism, it was not this concept of Marx that ever dominated the labour movement, including those parties that claimed to be “Marxist”, but the ideas of social-democracy, as presented by the Lassalleans, and the Fabians. The epitome of this middle-class, managerial social-democracy, is state socialism, again, therefore, perfectly aligned with the concept of national interest, via the capitalist nation state, which is why it so often appears in demands for nationalisation by the capitalist state, for policies of economic nationalism, such as The Mosely Memorandum, or the AES. It is why, as Draper sets out, the Fabians like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Shaw could become uncritical apologists for Stalinism, because “national socialism” is the rational conclusion of social-democracy. In fact, its not socialism at all, but simply state capitalism.
Unfortunately, for them, even by the end of the 19th century, capital had expanded to such an extent, following the development of socialised capital, and the limited liability company, in 1855, that the nation state had become too small a politico-economic unit for capital in its imperialist form of huge monopolies and oligopolies, requiring similarly huge single markets, within which a level playing field of property laws, taxes, currency and so on existed, as companies became multinational and transnational corporations. The nation state, one of the progressive developments of capitalism in the 18th and early 19th century, and vital for its growth, had itself now become a reactionary fetter on the further development of capital, which also, therefore, made a mockery of the continued economic nationalism of social-democracy, and even more the concept of national socialism, as reflected in the Stalinist theory of Socialism In One Country, that flows from it. Defence of the nation state, and the associated ideas of national independence, national self-determination and so on, were, now, utopian and reactionary, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks set out.
The Second Internationalists, referred to themselves as “Social-Democrats”, and, for the most part of them, this was an accurate description, even though they also claimed to be Marxists, which was not. As part of the Second International, those like Lenin and Trotsky, also called themselves “social democrats”, which, for those unfamiliar with the history, therefore, also adds to the confusion. In 1914, on the outbreak of WWI, this division between social-democracy (national socialism/state capitalism), and Marxism (international socialism) was also violently exposed, and the movement split along these lines, more or less, but not cleanly, because the latter also carried with it the baggage accumulated from years of infection by the ideas of social-democracy and statism.
Its worth pointing out, here, that whilst National Socialism, and specifically its manifestation as German Nazism, is described as “reactionary”, this is not the case. From a Marxist perspective, which analyses social development, objectively, on the basis of class, and property forms, National Socialism, whether of the type of Nazi Germany, of Stalinist Russia, or Mosely's Memorandum, and so on, is the rational form of social-democracy, as statised capital, and its planning and regulation, within national bounds. It adopts those methods and forms, precisely to defend capitalist property, and particularly, capitalist property in its mature form as large-scale, socialised capital. As the mature form of capital, it is progressive compared to earlier forms of capitalism.
To be reactionary, it would have to seek to overturn that mature capitalist form, and return to some earlier less developed form of property, such as the era of small-scale, privately owned capital, and all-out free competition, or independent, small scale commodity production, of the type that existed before the dominance of large-scale industrial capital. Social-democracy, including in its forms as National Socialism, is conservative, not reactionary. What is reactionary, is the demands of those representing the interests of the actual petty-bourgeoisie, who do want to turn back those developed forms of capitalist property, by advocating action to break up monopolies, to support small businesses and so on.
The fact that these voices are also, now, dominant within social-democracy, is a reflection of the material fact that, over the last 40 years, particularly in developed economies, large-scale capital failed to expand rapidly, partly due to it shifting to other parts of the globe, but also, because, conservative social-democracy encouraged the growth of fictitious rather than real industrial capital, as it sought to inflate asset prices bubbles, after the financial crash of 1987, to protect the interests of the ruling class of speculators that now owns its wealth in this paper form, rather than in the ownership of real capital. I had predicted such developments back in 1983.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx sets out the roots of these ideas, and makes this distinction. The bourgeoisie as it smashed apart feudal society had been revolutionary, but, having done so, and established itself, it becomes not reactionary, but conservative, seeking to preserve its new dominant position. For it, it is the end of history. Marx sets out, the economic ideas that flowed from it, in the form of “fatalist economists” such as Adam Smith and Ricardo. They saw any deprivations suffered by workers as temporary, and Marx says, largely, in the first period of capitalist production, the workers saw things that way too, and were right. Following on from them were the humanitarian and philanthropic schools, which seeks to ameliorate the bad side of capitalism, and forms the basis of the ideas of social-democracy. Marx makes clear that these ideas are the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
The matter becomes one of a moral question of “good” and “bad”, of eliminating the bad side of phenomena, and within this can also be seen the roots of the ideas of “lesser-evilism”, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, which characterises the approach of the social imperialists. If the focus is on only eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena, rather than moving beyond the phenomena itself, then its justifiable to align with the less “bad”, the lesser evil for that purpose. But, Marx also sets out the problem of this approach, in responding to Proudhon, whose entire method of explaining history was based upon this moralistic dualism of eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena. It is one continuous series in which, by eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena, a new “bad” arises from the antidote used to eliminate the first. Marx quotes Proudhon to demonstrate this, and in it can be seen the approach of Sismondi, and other moralists, in which ideas divide into two parts, one of “useful effects”, and the other of “subversive results”.
In it can be seen the method of the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, employed down to today. Proudhon's method posed antithesis as antidote, but, this, then resulted in a new “subversive result”, requiring a new antidote, all of which is assumed to be leading to the resolution of all contradictions in Nirvana. In this can be seen the concept of “lesser-evilism”, adopted by the moral socialist, of picking a side based upon which is seen to be morally superior, at any given point. It was also the basis of the “stages theory” of the Mensheviks and Stalinists.
For social-democrats, it requires workers to always subordinate their interests to those of capital, whose development is seen as the basis of society, and also of the the workers' welfare. It can be seen, today, in the anti-worker/pro-capitalist policies of Macron that lead to increased support for Le Pen!! It is seen in Starmer's failure to support striking workers, trying to defend their living standards, under attack from an inflation caused by the social-democratic policies of liquidity injections over the last 30 thirty years, and its recent policy of boycotting Russian energy and grain supplies that has resulted in global energy and food prices soaring.
Trotsky also described this approach used by the petty-bourgeois Third Campists, such as Max Shachtman, as “practical politics”, which is necessarily unprincipled and opportunist, and leads to wild swings and zig zags as a new practical political position has to be put forward for each new event, even if this position contradicts previous positions, the continuity of which can, then, only be enforced by the use of bureaucratic censorship of dissent, and bowdlerisation and distortion of past positions, i.e. the method of the epigone, not the disciple.
“Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme well-being, the real practical aim, is equality. And why did the social genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because “humanity has successively realized so many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis,” which precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's ideal.”
This is a perfect explanation from Marx, of the point I have made previously about the petty-bourgeois moralism of the Third Camp, as displayed by its different components, such as the SWP, on the one hand, and the AWL on the other. Both employ this method of Proudhon, described by Marx, and, as Marx describes, both start from different hypotheses, different categorical imperatives of the “good” they seek, or “bad” to remove, and, in both cases, socialism itself never enters the equation, other than as something relegated to some distant future stage. The SWP's “good” is “anti-imperialism”, whereas the AWL's “good” is liberal democracy, and its global agent “democratic imperialism”, though they, so far, refrain from the logical conclusion of that, drawn by Paul Mason and others, of advocating support for NATO, and its strengthening and rearmament.
Proudhon assumes that all history is driving towards this nirvana of equality, just as spirits repeatedly reincarnated progress, in each new life, to greater enlightenment.
“He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop – all economic relations – were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement.”
But as Marx points out this idea of equality was not one that pervaded previous periods of history, and modes of production. It was one that only arose as a result of bourgeois society, and the equalisation, via competition, of all labour to a single universal labour, of equal exchanges of value and so on. And, this illustrates another point. Marx points out that far from eradicating “the bad” side of phenomena, it is always this side that is revolutionary. Serfdom was the “bad” side of feudalism, but it was from among the serfs that the independent commodity producers arose, and which differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians, creating the new bourgeois society. The wage labourer is the “bad” side of capitalism, but it is the struggle of the wage labourer that brings about Socialism.
Tuesday 28 March 2023
Social-Imperialism and Ukraine - Part 11 of 37
The USC write, phrasing the question they want to answer,
“Q: When you focus on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, why do you ignore the May 2014 referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk in which 87% of citizens voted for independence, which was met by eight years of bombardment by Kyiv and the killing of 13,000 civilians, largely ignored by the world community?”
They then go on to answer this question, by arguing that the referenda and so on were not free, and do not show a clear desire for separation from Ukraine. On the basis of the argument I have set out, most of this is irrelevant, because the same arguments apply in relation to the independence of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea as apply to any other question of national independence. In other words, our primary concern is the interests of the working-class as a whole, and so, although we support the right of free secession, we argue against that right being exercised, and nor do we support it being exercised where the result would be a war between much larger nations. As Lenin also put it,
“What is the lesson to be drawn from this concrete example which must he analysed concretely if there is any desire to be true to Marxism? Only this: (1) that the interests of the liberation of a number of big and very big nations in Europe rate higher than the interests of the movement for liberation of small nations; (2) that the demand for democracy must not be considered in isolation but on a European—today we should say a world—scale.”
(The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up)
A lot of time, therefore, could be expended to try to prove that these regions either do or do not seek to implement independence, without it taking us forward at all. Either way, the USC do not deny that such bombardment occurred for eight years, by the Ukrainian state, and so it has to be asked whether this was an appropriate response, and whether socialists, should not have been opposing it. A majority in Northern Ireland, opposed leaving Britain, and becoming part of a United Ireland, but most socialists did not support the actions of the British Army in suppressing and oppressing the Nationalist Minority, actions which further drove that minority into the arms of the petty-bourgeois nationalists of the Provisional IRA.
What is interesting, though is to compare this to the position some of those that support the USC adopt, in this respect, compared to that they have adopted in the past, in similar circumstances. Let us assume that these regions clearly do seek independence. Would that justify Marxists defending that right, in the face of a war, between Russia and Ukraine, let alone Russia (and potentially China) and NATO, as this national war became transformed into an inter-imperialist war? Clearly, on the basis of what has been said earlier, the answer is no.
Engels had set out the position.
“We must co-operate in the work of setting the West European proletariat free and subordinate everything else to that goal. No matter how interesting the Balkan Slavs, etc., might be, the moment their desire for liberation clashes with the interests of the proletariat they can go hang for all I care. The Alsatians, too, are oppressed, and I shall be glad when we are once more quit of them. But if, on what is patently the very eve of a revolution, they were to try and provoke a war between France and Germany, once more goading on those two countries and thereby postponing the revolution, I should tell them: Hold hard! Surely you can have as much patience as the European proletariat. When they have liberated themselves, you will automatically be free; but till then, we shan’t allow you to put a spoke in the wheel of the militant proletariat. The same applies to the Slavs. The victory of the proletariat will liberate them in reality and of necessity and not, like the Tsar, apparently and temporarily. And that’s why they, who have hitherto not only failed to contribute anything to Europe and European progress, but have actually retarded it, should have at least as much patience as our proletarians. To stir up a general war for the sake of a few Herzegovinians, which would cost a thousand times more lives than there are inhabitants in Herzegovina, isn’t my idea of proletarian politics.”
The role played by Tsarism at that time could be seen as, today, being played by US imperialism.
The argument was pursued by Lenin.
““But we cannot be in favour of a war between great nations, in favour of the slaughter of twenty million people for the sake of the problematical liberation of a small nation with a population of perhaps ten or twenty millions!” Of course not!”
And, of course, not only does that apply to those regions, but to Ukraine itself.
In the case of the Falklands War, there was no doubt about the question whether the Falkland Islanders sought not to be incorporated into Argentina. They clearly did not. Yet, the predecessors of today's AWL, the Majority Faction of the WSL, of which I was a part, in 1982, saw no reason why such clear determination to express this independence, on their part, could possibly justify the war fought to implement it waged by Britain, against Argentina, a war that would divide the workers of Britain and Argentina, and lead to thousands of lives lost on both sides, mostly lives of soldiers, themselves, as in all wars, largely drawn from the ranks of the working-class.
Monday 27 March 2023
A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 2.C Theories of The Medium of Circulation and of Money - Part 5 of 20
One obvious flaw in Hume's method was that he only examined periods in which there were revolutionary changes in the value of gold and silver, and, consequently, the measure of value. The result of this can be seen in the fact that there is only an increase in the prices of those exported commodities, exchanged for gold and silver with countries producing them.
“The price of those commodities, which are measured in gold and silver of reduced value, thus rises in relation to all other commodities whose exchange-value continues to be measured in gold and silver in accordance with the scale of their former costs of production. Such a dual evaluation of exchange-values of commodities in a given country can of course occur only temporarily; gold and silver prices must be adjusted to correspond with the exchange-values themselves, so that finally the exchange-values of all commodities are assessed in accordance with the new value of monetary material.” (p 161)
These changes in prices, according to the new standard of prices takes time to work their way through the economy, Marx says. According to Friedman, it takes around two years for changes in currency supply to work its way through into changes in prices, and, as Marx says, such changes are obscured by fluctuations in market prices, as by changes in commodity values themselves. This same process in relation to prices measured in gold from gold exporting countries, applies to paper money tokens and credit too. Those closest to the source of the increased currency supply are able to exchange it, initially, on the basis of its old value, but as its spreads into general circulation, so this adjustment of all prices unfolds.
Moreover, in considering changes in the supply of money, i.e. gold and silver, it is necessary to consider its value. The cause of higher prices is not an increased supply of gold, but a reduced value of gold. A reduced value of gold is manifest in a greater supply, i.e. for the same expenditure of labour, a greater quantity is produced, but a greater supply, of itself, does not imply a lower value, it may simply be a consequence of employing more labour.
“Because a change in the value of the standard of value, i.e. in the precious metals which function as money of account, causes a rise or fall in commodity-prices, and hence, provided the velocity of money remains unchanged, an increase or decrease in the volume of money in circulation, Hume infers that increases or decreases of commodity-prices are determined by the quantity of money in circulation.” (p 163)
For Hume, money and money tokens are the same, as he regards both as coin. He forgets, therefore, that money, as measure of value, need not be physically present to perform its function, and that large amounts of money is in the form of hoards, rather than in circulation. This leads him to the conclusion that commodity prices are a function of the quantity of gold and silver in a country. In short, this conclusion can be seen as flowing from his polemic against the Mercantilists, but this strange notion was also taken up by Ricardo in his monetary theories, and formed the basis of the 1844 Bank Act.
In fact, its impossible for all the gold in a country to take part in circulation. If the total value of commodities to be circulated is 1 million hours of labour, and the value of a gram of gold is 100 hours labour, the money equivalent of commodities is 10,000 grams of gold. If a gram of old, as currency, has a velocity of circulation of 10, then only 1,000 grams of gold can take part in circulation, irrespective of how much gold, in total, is in the country. The theories, therefore, like that behind the Bank Act, which sought to tie the currency issue to changes in the movement of gold, into and out of the country, were inherently irrational.
Sunday 26 March 2023
The Bond Market Bear Trap
Just over two weeks ago, global bond markets sold off, yet again, sending bond yields to new highs. Back in November of last year, the US 2 Year Treasury Yield had come close to breaching the 5% level, but, then, gradually fell, as the narrative of approaching recession, a hard or soft landing, caused by repeated Federal Reserve rate hikes, took hold, and, as a series of softer inflation figures were used to back up this story. But, the story was always a fairy tale, as I had set out, last year, and again at Christmas. Inflation was not going away, and the employment and unemployment data showed that economies were continuing to expand, labour supplies were getting tighter, wages were rising, and creating conditions for continued rises in aggregate demand.
By the start of February, the speculators were themselves having to accept that reality refuted their hopes of recession, and the conclusion that there would be neither a hard nor soft landing, but no landing at all, as I had set out last year. At the start of March, a hotter than expected inflation number, another strong jobs number, and Jerome Powell's suggestion that the Fed might have to raise rates by fifty basis points, led to the US 2 Year Yield surging to 5.10%, and the yields on other bonds rising in line with it.
There is no reason why the problems of banks should be equated with a problem for the economy as a whole. One reason for the problem of the banks is that there are just too many of them, both in Europe and in the US. In the US, particularly, it was amongst the dozens of small regional banks that the falls in share prices, were most notable, and part of the reason for that is not just contagion from SVB, but the fact that the Federal Reserve did not regulate these banks in the way it does the larger banks. Not only are larger banks, relatively better capitalised, but a small number of large banks are much easier to regulate than hundreds of small banks. A rationalisation of banks is inevitable, and as with other industries, such rationalisation, often occurs violently, via a crisis, and many of the firms in that industry going bust, and their capital being taken over, on the cheap, by others.
The speculators claim that the banking crisis means that credit conditions are tightened, because the banks will lend less to businesses to expand capital, or will have to charge higher rates for doing so, and that that is equivalent to a further raising of rates by central banks, meaning the central bank should stop raising, or even cut their rates. But, again, this is largely bunkum. The banks have not been lending large amounts to small businesses for capital investment in previous years, as 90% of that lending went to finance speculation in property of one sort or another. For large companies, if they needed to finance fixed capital investment, they could issue shares, or bonds. In fact, they issued bonds, often not to finance investment, but simply to be able to buy back shares so as to inflate the share price. With bond prices having risen, since the bank crisis, they can, now, again, raise money for investment, at less cost than before it.
But, as I have described, previously, a lot of expansion by firms takes the form, not of fixed capital investment, but of increases in circulating capital, i.e. employing more labour and materials. That is particularly the case with service industry, which, now accounts for around 80% of the economy. A fast food restaurant, does not need to build another restaurant, and buy additional machinery, for example. It can increase its sales simply by using its existing fixed capital more intensively and extensively. Existing restaurants can open for longer, more staff can be employed, and process additional components. But, that is financed by commercial credit. They simply order more from their suppliers, to be paid for in 30 days time, probably long after the money from customers for the food sold in the restaurant, has gone into the restaurants' bank account. Similarly, the workers are paid in arrears.
The bankers and money-capitalists make a big thing out of this, because they have always purveyed the myth that capital is something that its not. They have always presented capital as only money-capital, and the source of this money-capital being capitalists, who continually create it from nowhere and set it to work. Without capitalists we are told, there would be no money-capital to be able to buy factories, machines, materials or to pay wages, and banks are simply the centralising and facilitating means for such capitalists to engage in such altruism, and useful activity. But, that is false. The money-capital required to buy the additional elements of productive-capital does not come from capitalists, who continually pluck it from thin air, nor from banks, but from the realised profits of firms, which is the money equivalent of the surplus product of those firms, i.e. the surplus over and above what is required to reproduce the capital consumed in their own production. It comes from the surplus value produced by workers in production.
Provided this mechanism of enabling the circulation of money, commodities and capital is enabled to continue to function then there is no reason, why, the money-capital, realised in the normal circuit of industrial capital cannot continue to be available to finance the accumulation of capital, of which it is the money equivalent, and that applies also to the money hoards and reserves that have been previously accumulated, as a result of that process, as a result of not being immediately used to purchase other commodities for personal or productive use. The question of interest rates comes down to a matter of those who, in aggregate, hold these money hoards and reserves, as against those, who, in aggregate, seek to borrow them for use in purchasing the elements of industrial capital, and the price of that money-capital, the interest rate, that results from this interaction of demand and supply.
Banks, as commercial capitalists, making profits, as money-dealing capital, from charging a commission to transfer money, including by borrowing money from savers at one rate, and lending money to borrowers at a higher rate, should make bigger profits when interest rates rise, because the absolute difference, the spread, between what they pay to savers/depositors, compared to what they charge borrowers expands. So, the problem for the banks that have experienced problems should not be one of profitability, in relation to their trading activity. It is a problem of lack of capital, and of having relied on using inflated asset prices over a long time as a substitute for adequate capitalisation.
The banks needed to issue many more shares and bonds to increase their capital, but, like most large businesses over the last 30 years, they have sought to minimise the issue of shares, in order to inflate their own share prices, so as to inflate the paper wealth of shareholders. When that has resulted in crises, they have relied on the state coming to the rescue of the banks, and, unlike with other industries, the state has been far more likely to effect such a rescue, by providing the deficient capital, or by substituting additional liquidity for it. That is an indication of the extent to which the state simply defends the interests of the ruling class that owns its wealth in this form of fictitious capital, as against defending the interests of real industrial capital.
The ruling class speculators, and their representatives are convinced that central banks will now have to reverse course, just as they had convinced themselves of that before Christmas. But, they are wrong, and the sharp rise in bond prices, over the last couple of weeks, and fall in yields, will prove to be simply a huge bear trap, that will see those that have gambled on it losing large amounts of their money.
There is a good reason, why some people have bought bonds, illustrated by the UK 1 Year Gilt. Currently, it is providing a yield of 3.8%. Compare that with an interest rate on most savings accounts of around 2-3%, and the attraction of taking your money out of the bank is obvious. But, the speculators, do not buy bonds, shares or other assets in order to obtain these yields (which in real inflation adjusted terms remain hugely negative, with UK inflation running at 10.4%), rather they have rushed into them, in the expectation that the yield will fall massively, as the price of the bond rises significantly, on the back of lower market rates of interest, and falling Bank of England rates.
One thing this also illustrates is the extent to which banks have not been passing higher interest rates on to savers, and part of the reason for that is that, they would also have to charge higher rates to borrowers, the majority of whom are not the beleaguered small businesses we are being told will suffer, but the vast number of borrowers for the purchase of property, whose prices are also massively inflated. What banks and building societies are worried about, as also seen in the aftermath of Trussonomics, is the effect that rising lending rates will have on property prices, which as it also crashes will mean that all of those assets, sitting on banks' balance sheets will also be seen to be actually worth only a fraction of its current book value, and so requiring even greater capital injections.
The ECB, seeing EU inflation still at 8.5%, as against 8.6% the previous month, but, having also risen by 0.8% month on month, confounding predictions of further falls, was led to raise its policy rate by a further 0.5% points. The idea that EU inflation is going to fall significantly this year, or to 2% by the end of 2024, is total fantasy. Excess liquidity created over a long period, continues to wash into the economy, and a look at energy prices, food prices and so on, all rising in high double digits, indicates that prices are set to continue to rise.
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| La France en flammes |
And, the same was seen in the UK, where even the headline rate of inflation rose from 10.1% to 10.4%, confounding the assertions that inflation had peaked. The trades union bureaucrats that persuaded their members to take lower than inflation pay rises, i.e. to take a pay cut, at least partly on the basis of government assurances that inflation was going to fall rapidly, will have to answer to those members, as UK inflation continues to rise above wages. Currently, workers are gaining bigger increases in their wages by simply moving jobs – average increase around 14% - than unions are getting for them, in annual pay negotiations, other than in the private sector, cases like Rolls Royce, where workers won a 16.9% rise. That is likely to mean, as it did in similar conditions in the 1960's, a further radicalisation of workers, and demands from them that their unions pull their finger out. We will need a dramatic democratisation of the unions, and new more militant union leadership in coming months.
The US, also saw the Federal Reserve raise rates by a further quarter of a point, last week, though before the recent events, a half point increase had been possible. But, as with the EU and UK, the idea that US inflation is going to fall significantly in the next couple of years is a fantasy, and the further liquidity injections in response to the bank crisis makes that even more certain. US jobs numbers continue to rise significantly, and again, the weekly initial jobs claims came in at historically low levels, confounding the speculators continual hopes that the economy would slow, and unemployment rise. It will not, as we are in a similar period to that of the early 1960's.
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| May '68 barricades in Bordeaux |
In the last couple of weeks, bonds have behaved more like meme stocks, with huge movements in prices. The speculators have convinced themselves that central banks will have to stop raising rates, and even cut them. They are wrong. Inflation may moderate, slightly, but only to rise again, as it ebbs and flows in waves, with all the data showing underlying inflation still persistent, and even rising. Central banks, as I set out last year, will continue to inject liquidity, whether its to simply enable firms to raise prices to protect profits from rising wages, or in large tranches in response to crises of pension funds, or banks, and the consequence is a further devaluation of the standard of prices, and rise in inflation.
What the central banks should do, if they really wanted to reduce inflation, is to speed up QT, to remove the excess liquidity. If they provide liquidity to banks, to prevent bank runs, they should compensate by selling more bonds off their balance sheet. But, they will not do that, because it would prevent firms raising prices to protect their profits, and would cause bond prices also to fall much more, causing the paper wealth of the ruling class to evaporate, as well as exposing the under-capitalisation of financial institutions to an even greater degree.
It is chickens coming home to roost, after 40 years of conservative social-democratic attempts to protect the interests of the fictitious-capital of the ruling-class, at the expense of real capital, and the real economy. It weakened the material base of social-democracy itself, founded upon large-scale socialised capital, and massively strengthened the position of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose numbers expanded from the 1980's onwards, in defiance of the long-term trajectory of its dissolution, and descent into the ranks of the proletariat. As a result, it strengthened all of those reactionary tendencies that go with it, of nationalism, populism and bigotry, as witnessed by their take over of conservative social-democratic parties like the Tories, victory of Brexit and so on.
Sharp class struggles are approaching as occurred in the 1960's, and the world labour movement is very ill prepared for it, as the collapse of what remains of a very confused, and misguided Left into social-imperialism, in relation to the NATO/Ukraine – Russia~China war, illustrates. Most of it is going to be rolled over and swept away like so much petty-bourgeois effluent, by workers who are finding their feet once more, but who will rapidly have to take advantage of the new material conditions that present themselves, via new technologies, to rapidly educate and organise themselves, and build the revolutionary party, and institutions required for their success. In the process, they make it impossible, as France is showing, for the ruling class and its state to revert to the old solutions of the last 40 years. When the ruling class speculators begin to realise that, as central banks are led to have to continue raising their rates in face of continued inflation, those bond markets are going to sell off on an even greater scale.
Saturday 25 March 2023
The Roots of Social Imperialism - Part 1 of 4
The labour movement, globally, is dominated by social-democracy to an extent it has not been for more than a century. That social-democracy, always the dominant ideology of the ruling class, since the second half of the 19th century, is, itself, not only more conservative, but, in many instances, appeasing petty-bourgeois reactionary ideas, as with the UK Labour Party's collapse into Blue Labour nationalism, Brexitoryism, and flag-waving jingoism. The “Left”, itself a vague term, comprising a tiny number of actual Marxists, mostly outside the many micro-sects of faux-Marxists, centrists, Stalinists, anarchists, and left reformists, that make up the rest, is so small as to be essentially irrelevant. The actual Marxists continue to pursue the position of international socialism that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, whereas the rest of what comprises that tiny Left act as cheerleaders and ideological cover for the opposing capitalist camps.
Large sections of the social-democratic leadership of the labour movements of Western Europe and North America have jumped on the bandwagon of supporting NATO militarism's war, against Russia, in Ukraine, whilst a much smaller section of those labour movements has attached itself to supporting the militarism of Putin's war, against NATO, in Ukraine. The arguments for doing so, by both of these capitalist camps, are identical, but simply a mirror image of each other. Both argue that they are supporting national independence.
The same arguments, and the same mirror images appeared prior to WWI, with French social-patriots arguing that it was necessary for workers to support their capitalist state, and its war with Germany, so that France's independence was not denied, by Germany, with German social-patriots saying the same in reverse. The same arguments were raised in WWII. These ideas that infect the labour movement do not appear from nowhere, they are based in material conditions, and class interests.
The basic source of these ideas infecting the labour movement, and which lead it to subordinate its interests to those of its main enemy, the bourgeois ruling class of its own country, is the petty-bourgeoisie, or more precisely, the professional middle-class. The ideas that dominate the labour movement, are not those of Socialism, but of social-democracy. Here, clarification of terms is required, because the term social-democracy has been intertwined with the term socialism for a long time, and needs to be unravelled.
Marx made sure, to refer to himself and the ideas he promoted not as social-democratic, but as communist. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he set out his definition of social democracy.
“The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.”
Its not the vast array of British shopkeepers, or the other 15 million people that comprise the British petty-bourgeoisie of self-employed window cleaners, gardeners, small traders, small capitalists and their families that infect the labour movement with these ideas. On the contrary, they largely stand outside it, hostile to it, and make up the foot soldiers of reaction, now manifest in their takeover of the Tory Party. Rather, today, it is those elements that Marx refers to above, who can more easily be identified as a professional middle class of managers, whose sole social function is to mediate this antagonism between capital and labour, to convince workers that no such antagonism exists, and that the interests of workers and their own capitalist ruling class are the same, and can be managed by sensible negotiation, usually based on national interest. Social-democracy, as the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, in the age of imperialism, not only always promoted social-patriotism, but, as proponent of the interests of its own bourgeoisie, was almost invariably to be found supporting the colonial and imperial adventures abroad of its own ruling class too.
Even, where that is no longer tenable, and small states, like Britain, are led to join with other states, in the EU, these same elements continue to operate, on the same basis of promoting this common “national interest”, jockeying for position, on that basis, which is why the EU has not progressed quickly to becoming a unified state, but remains hamstrung as a confederation of separate nation states. The US required a civil war to bring about that change more quickly, and, as Engels pointed out, even that was not fully completed, leaving it with a Federal State, rather than a one and indivisible, unified state, which continues to plague it to this day.
That professional middle-class comprises the day to day managers of businesses, and their counterparts in the trades union bureaucracy, and given that the Labour Party was created by those trades unions, that ideology was embedded in it from the beginning. It is founded on a bourgeois ideology of managing capitalism more efficiently, and equitably. The same ideology is what allowed those trades unions, before that, to work happily, with the representatives of industrial capital, in the Liberal Party.
The ideology of Marx, of communism, is the abolition of the wages system, and ownership and control of the means of production, directly, by the working-class, via worker cooperatives, as set out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, or as in Marx's Programme for the First International, and in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, thereby, the overthrow of bourgeois society and bourgeois-democracy, and its replacement by communism, the self-government of the working-class, having liberated itself from the shackles of capitalism. The programme of social-democracy, however, is defence of capitalism, and of bourgeois-democracy, and merely to bargain within the system for a bigger share of the pie for labour, whilst always recognising that, in the end, it is the growing of the pie by capital that must come first. In the age of imperialism, based upon large scale socialised industrial capital, in the form of oligopolies, whose mature, rational form is ultimately state capitalism, the epitome of its outlook is such state ownership and control.
As Marx put it in Wage Labour and Capital,
“And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production – the productive capital – increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer.”
This was the inevitable result of the economics as set out by Ricardo, and which formed the basis of the ideas of the Ricardian socialists, but, as Marx sets out, this is only true so long as you accept that capitalism represents the end of history. If, like Marx, your analysis of the world, as it already existed, at the end of the 19th century, is one in which industrial capital has already become socialised capital, collectively owned by workers, although only controlled by them in the cooperatives, then this is no longer true, because different economic and social laws apply to such society, in which the workers, as collective owners of the socialised capital, employ themselves.
The application of surplus value/surplus product, as additional means of production, is, then, no longer determined by the ability for it to produce additional profit, but by its ability to produce more wealth for society, to lighten the labour of workers, and so on. The living standards/wages of workers are, then, no longer determined by the ebb and flow of demand for labour-power by capital, but by the conscious decision of workers, themselves, of how much of what they produce they wish to consume, as opposed to how much they wish to use to expand their production, and so on.
As Marx put it in Value, Price and Profit,
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"”
Friday 24 March 2023
Social-Imperialism and Ukraine - Part 10 of 37
The USC say,
“This is not to deny that Ukraine has a huge problem facing up to the role played by some of some of its citizens in the Holocaust, as is the case in Poland, Romania, Russia and other East European states. The political elite are split on the issue.”
You don't say, and as the WW reported last year.
“Eighty years ago, they [Ukrainians] rescued Jews,” president Zelensky told the Israeli Knesset last week - words that caused members to turn away in disgust. “If Zelensky’s speech was given … in normal times,” one noted, “we would have said it bordered on holocaust denial.”
And that pretty much sums up the approach of the social-imperialists who have apologised for the reactionary, and anti-Semitic politics of Zelensky and his regime, many more instances of which are given in the WW article, as soon as they heard the sound of gunfire, in a way that they would never – hopefully – have done in other circumstances. War is politics by other means, and any politician that adopts a different position simply on the basis of the commencement of shooting is an opportunist, and not deserving of the name socialist.
The USC continue,
“It should be added that there are marked fascistic features in the so-called breakaway ‘People’s Republics’, where the dominant ideology is Orthodox, conservative, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma in orientation.”
That is simple whataboutery in the service of apologism. Its trying to excuse the reactionary nature of the Ukrainian regime to which it has offered unconditional support, by trying to claim its not as bad, or no worse, than other reactionary regimes and forces involved in the conflict, as though that is of any relevance at all to the position that any principled socialist should adopt! It sums up their idiot anti-imperialism, lesser-evilism, and adoption of the mantra “my enemy's enemy is my friend”.
The whole point of the Marxist position is a recognition of the awful, anti-working class nature of nearly all of these different forces, formed into two opposing capitalist camps, and consequently a refusal to support any of them! Our task is only to support truly revolutionary forces both in Ukraine, in Russia, and in the breakaway republics, and to insist on the need for them to maintain independence from these other groups. Those revolutionary forces are tiny, and with their backs up against it, but that is all the more reason not to paint the enemies of those forces in false progressive, let alone revolutionary, colours.
The same is true with the USC's response to the racist measures banning the use of the Russian language. The most it can say is that socialists oppose it, but unfortunately for the USC, and this apologism, socialists have very little role or influence within the Ukrainian regime, and even less within the Ukrainian state! The question is not whether a small number of Ukrainian socialists do what you would expect in opposing such a law, but what it says about the nature of the Ukrainian state, and regime itself, a state and regime which the USC is giving unconditional support to! The argument of the USC, in this respect, is reminiscent of the argument of the Lexiters within the EU referendum, as though their feeble voice could ever be heard above the din of the reactionary bandwagon to which they have attached themselves.
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