Labour Hub published an article by John McDonell arguing the social-imperialist line of supporting the war being waged by the Ukrainian state, backed by NATO imperialism, against Russia. The article was also published on the Shiraz Socialist blog of Jim Denham, of the social-imperialist AWL, where I posted a number of responses. This series of posts takes up those comments and the “response” to them by Denham, as well as dealing with the further post on Labour Hub, also published on Shiraz Socialist, responding to the social media discussion on McDonnell's original article.
My initial responses to John McDonnell's article, and to Jim Denham's replies, can already be seen, via the links above, and so I will begin by examining the latest arguments by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, as contained in the Labour Hub post, and then return to the wider questions, as taken up in my comments on Shiraz Socialist. Of course, I am dealing, here, with my arguments in response to them, and not in any way, as a defence of the arguments against which the USC is polemicising, from Andrew Murray, StW and so on, which, in many cases, as social-pacifist arguments, or worse, I also disagree with.
I will take the arguments as they come in the Labour Hub article.
It begins with a response to Murray, and his comment that Stop The War has always defended the right of Ukraine to defend itself. That would come as a surprise to many, the article says. In fact, the position of StW that Ukraine has a right to defend itself, is an expression of its social-pacifism, and not at all out of keeping with its basic liberal, popular-frontist ideology, and petty-bourgeois nationalism. As much as the social-imperialists of the USC, and its affiliates such as the AWL, Anti-Capitalist Resistance and so on, it fails to talk in terms of class, but, instead talks in terms of abstract “nations”, “peoples” and so on, as though there were, in reality, some such abstract thing as Ukraine, as against its actual existence as a class state comprising different and antagonistic classes, with objectively opposing interests. This should be the ABC of Marxism.
As Marxists, we do not look at the superficiality of a state, and see only an abstract “nation”, or “people” with some supposed common interests, but only this cauldron of opposing class interests, and our prime concern, as socialists, is the interests of the working-class within that state, interests which we see tied inextricably, not to those of the bourgeoisie and other classes within that state, but to the interests of workers in every other country. It is those interests we seek to promote and defend, and that is not achieved by wars fought primarily by those workers against each other, outside the control of those workers, and under the control of, and for the interests, rather, of their own respective ruling class, and its state. That was the fundamental lesson that socialists drew before WWI, and led to the basic principle of the international socialist movement, voiced by Liebknecht that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”.
As international socialists, we do not recognise any right of existing bourgeois states to defend themselves, in the way that both Murray, and the social imperialists of the USC propose, because, any such right simply means the demand that the social-chauvinists raised in WWI and II, of a “defence of the fatherland”. In other words, it means subordinating the class struggle in your own country, in order to unite with your own ruling class, to subordinate yourself to it, via the structures of its armed forces, and so on, in order to take up arms against the workers of other countries, and to engage in a mutual slaughter. That is what happened in WWI and II, and is happening today in the Ukraine-Russia war, and principled international socialists should want no part of it. As with those other wars, it is reactionary on both sides.
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