Thursday 20 April 2023

Social-Imperialism And Ukraine - Part 21 of 37

The USC say,

“The best way to ensure that US militarism is pushed out of Europe is to encourage the development of strong, independent countries whose borders are respected by their neighbours, not to view these countries as pawns in an inter-imperialist chess game.”

So, not socialism, or even just a unified struggle by workers across Europe, then, just reliance on the good-will an intentions of “anti-imperialist”, capitalist states! That not only forgets everything that Marxism learned a century ago, and as described by Trotsky in The Programme of Peace, and so on, but basically accepts the line of the petty-bourgeois nationalists of the type that argued for Brexit, and “taking back control”. The reality is that those countries are pawns in an inter-imperialist chess game, and only liberal-pacifist blockheads can fail to see that, and respond with moralistic pleading for the world to be different to the way it is.

The basic means of countries in Europe pushing out US militarism, would be to strengthen the EU, and to have it proceed to the establishment of an EU Army, as an alternative to NATO. Of course, USC supporters like Paul Mason do not want to push out US militarism from Europe, but actually want to strengthen NATO, and have it pursue an even more significant role on the world stage. But, even assuming there is a desire to push US militarism out of Europe, a desire that is utopian given the interests of US imperialism, and the EU's continued subordination to it, that would not end the continual shifting of alliances, between different imperialist blocs, as each seeks to gain advantage, in the same way that before WWI and II, imperialist nation states shifted alliances. All that an EU Army, and separation from NATO would do is to add another element, another pole in a multipolar arrangement of competing imperialisms.

The real way of pushing out US imperialism, but also of not simply replacing it with EU imperialism, is to move away from solutions based upon states, be they nation states or multinational states, such as the EU, and, instead, to build solutions based upon the self-activity and self-government of the working-class, unified across borders, and which recognises the basic fact that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”. But, it is precisely that that the USC rejects.


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