More Squabbling In The Thieves Kitchen

Its hard to know the details and nuances of the rebellion by Prigozhin's Wagner group of mercenaries, but for Marxists, it makes no difference whatsoever to the general evaluation of the NATO/Ukraine-Russia war as an inter-imperialist war that is reactionary on both sides.  Its just an example of a further squabble inside the thieves kitchen, a bit like the infighting in the Nazis with the Night of The Long Knives, launched by Hitler against the Strasserites.  In similar vein, it may signify a feeling of confidence, by Putin, that the NATO/Ukraine counter-offensive has failed, and they are ensconced sufficiently in Eastern Ukraine, as to be able to take out Prigozhin and his "Dirty Dozen", "Rogue Heroes".  Or it could be a power play by a section of Russian oligarchs tied to Prigozhin, but, if it is seems doomed to fail, given his small forces, and lack of access to long-term supplies.

Whatever, the details it simply further emphasises the reactionary nature of the war on both sides.  For that camp of social-imperialists supporting Russia. it explodes the myth that this is some kind of national patriotic war for the defence of Russia against NATO imperialism.  For the opposing camp of social-imperialists supporting NATO/Ukraine, it emphasises the point that, any defeat for Russia that does not come from a revolution by Russian workers, is itself reactionary, and might only result in a more right-wing, nationalistic regime, even more aggressive in its response to perceived threats on its borders.

The reality of the war has to be set in its global context.  The ruling capitalist class, in the age of imperialism, is a class of rentiers, or as Marx and Engels called them, in Capital and Anti-Duhring, "coupon clippers".  They are owners of fictitious capital, rather than real industrial capital.  In fact, objectively, the collective owners of that real industrial, socialised capital, as Marx describes, in Capital III, Chapter 27, are the associated producers, i.e. the workers and managers within each company.  Objectively, this socialised capital is the dominant form of property, making its owners, the working-class, the ruling class.  But, they have not yet formed themselves into a class for themselves, conscious of their role as ruling-class.

So, control of that capital, remains in the hands of its non-owners, the shareholders, whose immediate interests are antagonistic to that of the industrial capital itself, as, again, Marx describes in Capital III.  The interests of the real industrial capital is to maximise profit, and more specifically, profit of enterprise.  To do the former, the industrial capital, needs to accumulate, and so employ additional labour, which is the source of surplus value, and, thereby, profit.  That also coincides with the interests of labour, as Marx sets out in Wage-Labour and Capital, because it means higher levels of employment, and so wages, living standards, and so on.

One means of doing that, is, also, to remove barriers to the free movement of capital and labour, money and commodities, by removing national borders, and creating a global market.  But, also, having maximised profit, industrial capital needs to minimise the amount going to interest, rents and taxes.  That conflicts with the interests of the ruling class, whose revenues come from precisely those sources, and from capital gains.  Shareholders, from the 1970's onwards, continually increased the proportion of profits going to pay dividends, or be handed back as straightforward transfers, rather than those profits going to accumulate additional capital.  Because only they get a vote on how the capital of a company is used, capital they don't own, and also appoint the company executives to look after their interests, not the interests of the company, they increased these amounts way beyond what a market rate of interest on the money they loaned would have been.

However, because market rates of interest fell, as the supply of money-capital from profits grew, whilst the demand for money-capital, for investment in capital accumulation dropped, and at the same time the amount paid out in dividends rose, the consequence was to push share prices up astronomically.  So, although the payment of interest/dividends rose massively (going from 10% of profits in 1970, to 70% by the 2000's), the rise in share prices meant that the dividend yield, i.e. the amount of dividend per share, fell.  The same happened with bond yields, and with rental yields on property, as all these asset prices rocketed.

The owners of this fictitious capital, then, became hooked on obtaining capital gains on these assets, as their prices rose each year, and the ability to, then, sell a small proportion of those assets, turning the capital gain into money to be used as revenue.  The social-democratic governments, also became hooked on this model, which is why Starmer and Reeves criticism of the Tories, today, over inflation and interest rates is thoroughly hypocritical, because, when Blair and Brown took over, in 1997, they continued this policy, developed under Thatcher, of fostering the illusion that wealth and affluence could come not from real capital accumulation, and new value creation, but simply by inflating asset prices. Hence the way, after 1997, a new UK property bubble was massively inflated, and which is again, now, bursting.

The interests of that global ruling class of coupon clippers is then to see a continual inflation of asset prices, but that model came to the end of the road with the 2008 global financial crisis, and has only continued to have a surreal existence since then, by having central banks print money tokens and engage in QE to a ridiculous level that resulted in trillions of dollars of assets, globally with negative yields, and with repeated administrative measures, such as lockdowns, to physically restrict trade and capital accumulation, so as to hold down wages, and interest rates, so as to avoid further bursting the asset price bubbles.

The modern social-democratic state is, then, schizophrenic.  On the one hand, as with any state, it must protect the dominant form of property, upon which the fortunes of the state itself depend.  That dominant form of property is real, socialised, industrial capital, whose interests require capital accumulation, removal of national barriers and so on (which is why it has resisted Brexit in Britain, Trump and co. in the US).  On the other hand, it is the state of the ruling-class, and that ruling class remains the bourgeoisie, which has now become a class of money lending coupon clippers, whose immediate interests require, growth to be curtailed, so as to reduce wages and boost profits, and, at the same time, to reduce the demand for capital, so as to prevent a further rise in interest rates that will crash asset prices on a larger scale than in 2008.

The global ruling class of coupon clippers are not tied to the real industrial capital of any particular country, as they were in the 19th, or even early 20th century.  They can and do own the shares of global, multinational companies, and the bonds of those companies, as well as of states across the globe.  They own property across the globe.  This is the nature of imperialism, and of the global ruling class.  It shows the futility of those arguments that try to claim that Russia is not "imperialist".  Its ruling class, as a fraction of that global ruling class, most certainly is.  But, it also illustrates the nature of this war, as a war amongst different factions within that global ruling class, and so, not a war in which the workers should have any interest.  Its not our fight, any more than if a bunch of bank robbers, having taken the loot back to their den, begin to squabble over how its divvied up.

And, this further squabble within the Russian faction of that global ruling class makes no further difference to that.  The likelihood is that, as Russia has consolidated in Eastern Ukraine, and the NATO/Ukrainian counter-offensive has fizzled out like a dud, before it even really began, Putin, or his military top brass have decided that Prigozhin and his mercenaries can be disposed with.  Predictably, mouthpieces for Zelensky's corrupt regime, like Paul Mason, have claimed that its a consequence of Russia's failure in Ukraine.  That defies logic and the facts, as Russian forces secured Bakhmut, and even the leaked US Defence Department papers, showed that NATO does not see any possibility of Ukraine seizing back the territories in the East, at least in the next year, which really means never, because after another year of Russian entrenchment, they will have no chance, militarily, of recapturing them. 

Mason, who claimed that Russia was facing imminent defeat more than a year ago, simply parrots Zelensky and NATO propaganda about Russia blowing up the Nova Khakovka dam, for example, just as previously we had USC supporters claiming that it was Russians that had exploded car bombs in Russia, not Ukrainian terrorists, and that it was Russia that blew up the Nordstream pipelines, and were shelling the Zaporizhizhia nuclear power plant and so on.  The latter was ridiculous, because Russian troops were stationed there, so they would have been shelling themselves, and having control of it was necessary for supplying power to the captured areas of Eastern Ukraine.  The car bombings in Russia, it was shown a few weeks later, were, in fact, carried out by Ukrainian agents, and with USC supporters, like Simon Pirani, having gone to great length to try to prove that it was not the US that was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipelines, it now transpires that the US, with the evidence mounting against it, has tried to shift the blame, itself on to Ukraine!

With Russia having consolidated its position in Eastern Ukraine, and with the NATO/Ukraine counter-offensive having proved a dud, Mason's argument that Russia is preparing to blow up Zaporizhizhia, that it blew up the Khakovka dam, and so on, is just more of that same silly propaganda that he has been pumping out for more than a year.  The reality is that we do not know who blew up the dam, but as with those previous instances, there are very good reasons for thinking it wasn't Russia, and that, with NATO/Ukraine's much vaunted offensive going nowhere, there was every reason for Ukraine to have used some of those newly supplied UK Stormshadow missiles, or other weapons, to carry out a modern day equivalent of Britain's WWII, Dam Busters raid.

After all, its known that Ukraine planned an attack on the dam, at the same time it had used HIMAR's to attack other Russian held bridges required for its supply lines.  The Washington Post, in extensive interviews with Ukrainian personnel reported, last December,

"Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.

The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off."

Its likely that Russia would, indeed have mined the dam, to be used in the event that Ukrainian forces were crossing it, but no such event was likely, and blowing it up, now, simply deprived Russia of its own crossing, as well as causing damage to territory now under its control, denying it of hydro-electric power, and potentially water to Crimea.  Again why Ukraine would want to blow it up, besides those reasons, is what was also disclosed in the Washington Post article.

"Russia had to arm and feed its forces via three crossings: the Antonovsky Bridge, the Antonovsky railway bridge and the Nova Kakhovka dam, part of a hydroelectric facility with a road running on top of it.

The two bridges were targeted with U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — or HIMARS launchers, which have a range of 50 miles — and were quickly rendered impassable.

“There were moments when we turned off their supply lines completely, and they still managed to build crossings,” Kovalchuk said. “They managed to replenish ammunition. … It was very difficult.”"

So, its quite possible that either Ukraine intended to blow up the dam to deny Russia a bridge and supply lines, whilst also inflicting this other damage on the, Russian controlled, Kherson region, and Crimea, or that it sought to inflict only partial damage, as in its earlier plans, but that, either the weakened state of the dam from those earlier attacks, and possibly in conjunction with hitting Russian munitions, caused it to breach catastrophically.

Either way, there is little reason to take the word of Ukraine or its NATO backers, as Paul Mason and the USC always do, any more than taking the word of Russia.  In fact, as one of the military pundits on Sky News said recently, if you want a more unbiased assessment, some of the best comes from Russian military bloggers, many of whom are both no friends of Putin, but who have direct contact to members of the military actually engaged on the ground, and so also have no interest in spreading Ukrainian/NATO propaganda.

One of the reasons that Russian General Surovikin withdrew his troops from Kherson last year, was a recognition, and military intelligence, that Ukraine was going to blow up the dam to cut off a Russian retreat.  Surovikin accomplished the retreat in good order, however, before Ukraine could blow up the dam, and, again, that makes it even less likely that Russia would then do so.  Anyone who has played a military strategy game knows you do not blow up your own bridges and infrastructure before any enemy attempt to cross them, but only when they are in the process of doing so!

The nature of the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda/evidence that it was Russia, as with much more of that propaganda, also leads more to the idea that it was Ukraine.  Ukraine has provided a video of a supposed Russian soldier called Yegor Guzenko.  Guzenko, in the video, says that Russian troops had mined the dam, and blew it up to wash away Ukrainian troops downstream.  However, the video, which appeared on the website of a Ukrainian blogger going by the name “Edgar Myrotvorets” - also the name of the infamous Ukrainian "kill list" - has actually featured this supposed Russian soldier on numerous occasions, and with him popping up in all sorts of places, hundreds of miles apart.

Guzenko has popped up on social media on numerous occasions apparently confessing to all sorts of war crimes by Russian troops, including kidnapping civilians, and executing Ukrainian prisoners.  Yet, this soldier, having repeatedly made these admissions, then seems to be able to continue to go about his business in the Russian army, free from any charges by his superiors, or come back from his fellow soldiers, who he has just made accusations against!  Yegor, who is also featured with facial hair, despite it being banned in the Russian army, is almost certainly not a Russian soldier, but Yehor, a Ukrainian impersonator, but western social imperialists are so gullible and desperate as to fall for even the most obvious bit of Ukrainian duplicity.

In addition to the story in the Washington Post about the Ukrainian missile strike on the dam, last year, there is even video footage of the strike, and yet that footage was actually shown, by mistake, following the dam breach, and presented as though it was the actual strike on the dam that caused it to fail.  As with Nordstream, Zaporizhia and so on, there seems little advantage for Russia in such attacks, but everything to gain for Ukraine/NATO.  That isn't proof they did it, but it certainly puts into perspective the claims by western propagandists that it was Russia, or, as with Paul Mason's latest claims that its evidence of Russia about to admit defeat!

Rather, they are more like the kinds of actions that Stalin pushed on the Chinese Communist Party following their defeat resulting from his Popular Front alliance with the Chinese capitalists of the KMT.  They were simply adventures, designed to distract attention from the failure.  As the NATO/Ukraine counter-offensive continues to fizzle, expect more such adventures and terror attacks.