Paul Mason's campism has led him to its rational conclusion. Campism is based on the twin concepts of “My enemy's enemy is my friend”, and “lesser-evilism”. For Mason, the enemy is Putin and Russia, and so, whoever is the enemy of Putin and Russia, be it the corrupt, anti-working class regime of Zelensky in Ukraine, NATO imperialism, or now Prigozhin, is Mason's friend. If pushed, campists, like Mason, might admit that some of these new found friends are not that savoury, but are a lesser-evil. That's like choosing Satan over the devil!
In his latest missive, attacking Andrew Murray and the Stop The War Coalition - Britain’s tankies react to Prigozhin’s mutiny – Mason sides unreservedly with Prigozhin, and his farcical rebellion of last weekend, echoing Prigozhin's words, in defence of his actions, as though they were the gospel truth. The reason he does so is quite clear, its to try to shore up his narrative, but its the same logic that leads him to ignore all of the corrupt nature of Zelensky's regime, its connections to fascists and white nationalists, its anti-Semitsm and Holocaust denialism, and lauding of WWII Ukrainian Nazis, as well as its current attacks on Ukrainian workers and their organisations, at least for the duration, whilst it represents the “lesser-evil”, and “enemy of my enemy”.
Mason quotes all of Prigozhin's statements about the Russian invasion not being necessary, that there was no NATO aggression, that there was no mass opposition in Eastern Ukraine and so on. Well, for those of us who are not campists, and who opposed the Russian invasion, the first point loses its sting. Of course, being opposed to a Russian invasion is not the same thing as saying that it was unprovoked. Mason uses Prigozhin's statement to suggest that NATO is some kind of global philanthropic organisation with no evil intent whatsoever, and that its expansion up to Russian borders, as with its expansion in the Pacific and around China's borders, is nothing for those countries to be concerned about. That, of course, is nonsense.
When the USSR proposed stationing nuclear missiles on Cuba, in 1962, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the island, and in response, also, to the US stationing nuclear missiles in Turkey, the US blockaded Cuba, and threatened to start WWIII. Speaking of the run up to WWI, Lenin also noted,
“Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims – seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence – with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defence of the fatherland,” “defence of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people. “The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declare war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defence of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.” “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?””
That NATO did not actually engage in an armed conflict, itself, with Russia is besides the point and sophistry. It has been engaging in proxy wars against Russia for decades. Even Blairite, former NATO Secretary General, George Robertson has admitted that they goaded Russia into invading Ukraine! But, for Marxists that is not the issue. We are not concerned about who shot first, who goaded who, and other such moralistic questions, but only with what is in the interests of the working-class as a whole, and that most certainly is not served by a war between Russia and Ukraine, and less still a war that leads to a nuclear conflagration, and the destruction of mankind itself, and so of the working-class. As Lenin put it,
“The objective historical meaning of the war is of decisive importance for the proletariat: What class is conducting it? and for the sake of what? This is decisive, and not the subterfuges of diplomacy by means of which the enemy can always be successfully portrayed to the people as an aggressor. Just as false are the references by imperialists to the slogans of democracy and culture. “... The German bourgeoisie ... deceives the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that the war is being waged for the sake of ... freedom and culture, for the sake of freeing the peoples oppressed by czarism. The English and French bourgeoisies ... deceive the working class and the toiling masses by vowing that they are waging war ... against German militarism and despotism.” A political superstructure of one kind or another cannot change the reactionary economic foundation of imperialism. On the contrary, it is the foundation that subordinates the superstructure to itself. “In our day ... it is silly even to think of a progressive bourgeoisie, a progressive bourgeois movement. All bourgeois democracy ... has become reactionary.” This appraisal of imperialist “democracy” constitutes the cornerstone of the entire Leninist conception.”
(ibid)
And that is the reality of the war between Ukraine and Russia, two developed capitalist (imperialist) states, behind which stands NATO imperialism on one side, and Chinese imperialism on the other. As for there being no mass opposition to the Ukrainian regime in the Eastern Republics, the voting record of those republics, the polling done by various organisations, showing the majority opposition to the Maidan demonstrations, and so on say otherwise. If you want to equate mass opposition with only the existence of large armed groups, then you would rule out mass opposition in the vast majority of cases.
Nor is there any doubt about the fact that after 2014, the regime in Kyiv did pass laws that discriminated against ethnic Russians, and so on. Even the USC has admitted that, but respond only by saying they disagree with those policies that are being implemented by the regime which, they nonetheless continue to support, just as they cannot deny its anti-worker, anti trades union actions. Even Paul Mason has had to admit that the recent conference about rebuilding Ukraine, was really about how Zelensky's regime was going to facilitate US and EU companies going in to pillage the country on the back of a destroyed Ukrainian labour movement!
Mason is forced, like the rest of the western bourgeois media, to big-up Prigozhin's farcical rebellion, and make it into something it never was, in order to continue with the narrative about Russian failure, and Ukrainian success in the war, and the consequent fracturing of the Russian regime. Mason says,
“The Putin regime nearly collapsed because 25,000 mercenaries marched on Moscow and an unknown number of generals and their troops refused to stop them, because they are sick of the meat-grinder war they know they cannot win.
The famous Lenin/Clausewitz quote — “War is a continuation of politics by other means” — works both ways. The Putin regime is fragmenting because Russia is losing and sections of the oligarchy are looking for a way out.”
Even the bourgeois military pundits on Sky News admitted that Prighozin did not have 25,000 men to march on Moscow. Wagner may have had 25,000 mercenaries, but most of them were spread across the globe, mostly in Africa. Only about 10,000 were in Russia, and many of them had been killed. Half of what was left of that were available to “march on Moscow”, at best around 5,000. Compare that to the 4.5 million men that Russia has under arms, and the farcical nature of Mason's claim can be seen. Prigozhin's force was outnumbered 1000:1! Even just taking the Russian forces permanently defending Moscow they were outnumbered more than 100:1.
Prighozin's forces were no real threat, they were like a gnat bite, and would have been swatted like a gnat had they actually tried to fight. That is why there was no real fighting, and why they turned around within a few hours of setting off without Prigozhin getting a single one of his demands met, with it ending in him having to go into hiding in Belarus, with his top commanders facing prosecution for treason, at best, and the mercenaries having to either join the Russian army, or themselves go into exile. If it really was a matter of him having tacit support from Russian troops who know they cannot win - despite having already won in their objective in Eastern Ukraine - why didn't they continue and simply oust Putin? The notion is clearly absurd.
What seems to have happened is this. The Wagner Group was used like the Nazis used the stormtroopers in Germany. They were recruited from similar elements of society, criminals and lumpen elements. In Ukraine, they have fulfilled their function, as Russia has been able to consolidate its position, in the East, over the last nine months. Putin either voluntarily, or under pressure from his generals, decided it was time to move against Prigozhin, in the same way that Hitler moved against the Strasserites in The Night of The Long Knives. Prigozhin represented a smaller threat than the Brown shirts, and so he and his organisation were simply told that they must sign contracts and be absorbed into the Russian army.
As one expert put it, that was tantamount to saying to Prigozhin, mutiny or be destroyed. So, he organised the mutiny, but with absolutely no chance of it going anywhere, and hence its farcical nature. But, Mason, like the western bourgeois media in general needed to turn it into something it wasn't, to cover the fact that the Ukrainian counter-offensive they promised for months, when it eventually arrived, was a damp squib. Mason quotes Prigozhin again,
““As of today the Russian Army is retreating in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia directions. The Armed Forces of Ukraine is pushing the Russian Army. We’re washing with blood. No one is giving the reserves. There is no control. Same hysteria… Thus what is being told to us is a complete lie”.”
But that is as baseless and self-serving as the rest of Prighozin's rant, designed to big-up his own role and importance. Even Zelensky, sounding ever more like a desperate fantasist has not claimed any significant advance by the Ukrainian forces. At best they have recaptured a few square miles of territory in strategically unimportant areas, and even that at great cost. Even in a limited offensive in the last couple of weeks they seem to have lost more than a thousand men, and more than a dozen of the much vaunted Leopard II tanks, and US Bradleys, some of which were also captured. As Irish Marxism has noted,
“While this offensive is not exhausted, and the Ukrainian armed forces (UAF) still have the majority of its prepared forces available, it is clear that they cannot be assembled in such a way as to achieve the necessary mass and force to make significant advances. Instead, it would appear that they have suffered many casualties with reports of some surrendering rather than take part in what they have called suicide missions, with prisoners condemning their commanding officers.”
And, although Mason talks about ecocide by Putin and his army, presumably referring obliquely to the blowing up of the Nova Khakovka dam, the only real evidence of anyone having attacked it is the evidence that Ukrainian forces attacked it with missiles in December last year, as the Washington Post reported.
That poses huge problems for NATO, and for those pro-imperialist supporters of NATO like Paul Mason and the USC that have bet the farm on massive NATO armaments to Ukraine being decisive, and Russia being defeated, leading to a break-up of Putin's regime. Of course, whatever Mason might say, the reality is that, it does indeed matter what happens were Putin's regime to fall, and what kind of regime might replace it. The reality, currently is, as with Lenin's quotes about the run up to WWI, and as Trotsky wrote about the run up to WWII, everything that NATO is doing, and that the NATO campists like Mason are doing, is firstly strengthening the position of Putin, but also of those to his nationalist Right!
“The democracies of the Versailles Entente helped the victory of Hitler by their vile oppression of defeated Germany. Now the lackeys of democratic imperialism of the Second and Third Internationals are helping with all their might the further strengthening of Hitler's regime. Really, what would a military bloc of imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? A new edition of the Versailles chains, even more heavy, bloody, and intolerable. Naturally, not a single German worker wants this. To throw off Hitler by revolution is one thing; to strangle Germany by an imperialist war is quite another. The howling of the "pacifist" jackals of democratic imperialism is therefore the best accompaniment to Hitler's speeches. "You see," he says to the German people, "even socialists and Communists of all enemy countries support their army and their diplomacy; if you will not rally around me, your leader, you are threatened with doom!" Stalin, the lackey of democratic imperialism, and all the lackeys of Stalin —Jouhaux, Toledano, and Company — are the best aides of Hitler in deceiving, lulling, and intimidating the German workers.”
So, whatever Paul Mason might say about his wish for Russian workers to rise up against Putin, the reality of his actions, in supporting NATO imperialism, and seeking the defeat of Russia, not by its workers, but by the forces of NATO imperialism, does exactly the opposite. But, then, that also flows from his failure to understand basic Marxist concepts, such as that of revolutionary defeatism, or else his willingness to completely bowdlerise their meaning in support of his narrative. Describing revolutionary defeatism he writes,
“the whole point of the Leninist “defeatism” tactic is to collapse your own regime under pressure of war, in order for a progressive government to replace them.”
Completely false. The principle of revolutionary defeatism is not to actively seek the defeat of your own state in war, but is to not demur from seeking the overthrow of that state, simply on the basis that doing so might result in its defeat during war. The goal is not to simply look to the conditions of war to undermine the state, which, on its own, could result in any number of reactionary consequences, but is to build the forces of proletarian revolution, and, thereby, enable a progressive alternative to the existing state, by arguing against the war conducted by the capitalists' state, pointing to its reactionary nature, and so on. As Lenin put it, as quoted by Trotsky, in the earlier article,
“With the outbreak of the war in August 1914 the first question which arose was this: Should the socialists of imperialist countries assume the “defence of the fatherland”? The issue was not whether or not individual socialists should fulfil the obligations of soldiers – there was no other alternative; desertion is not a revolutionary policy. The issue was: Should socialist parties support the war politically? vote for the war budget? renounce the struggle against the government and agitate for the “defence of the fatherland”? Lenin's answer was: No! the party must not do so, it has no right to do so, not because war is involved but because this is a reactionary war, because this is a dogfight between the slave owners for the redivision of the world.”
Paul Mason says, he believes,
“the Russian people, given the right circumstances, are fully capable of launching a mass democratic movement against oligarchic rule. Maybe not yet, and maybe with chaotic results, and maybe with no real feeling of solidarity towards Ukrainians but out of a desire for self-preservation…but surely that’s what the left should be working for?”
Yes, absolutely that is possible, but as Trotsky and Lenin point out above, those “right circumstances” do not include a situation in which they see NATO having expanded up to its borders, and with “socialists” in the West standing shoulder to shoulder with that NATO imperialism against them, just as the social-patriots did in WWI, and as they and the Stalinists did in WWII.
“If revolutionary and progressive movements beyond the boundaries of ones own country could be supported by supporting ones own imperialist bourgeoisie then the policy of social patriotism was in principle correct. There was no reason, then, for the founding of the Third International.”
(ibid)
Finally, the full reactionary conclusion of Mason's campism becomes manifest as he ends up in the camp of the neo-cons, and that old mantra of the 1980's, “Better Dead Than Red”. Back then, it meant that the neo-cons would rather see the world destroyed in a nuclear holocaust than it be taken over by communists. For Mason, not even the former catastrophe is required to justify turning the world into cinders, merely, that the defeat of Zelensky's corrupt, anti-working-class regime should be prevented. He says, opposing Murray's comment that a defeat for Putin could leave nukes in the hands of someone worse, and so we should oppose the war,
“To the contrary: the safest thing Ukraine can do to protect its people and uphold its territorial sovereignty, is to drive Russians out, before Putin commits even greater acts of ecocide and mass murder. And the best thing we in the West can do is send them more arms and more solidarity.”
Really? Safest for who? Safest for which Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian workers, the Ukrainian petty-bourgeoisie, or the Ukrainian oligarchs who are not doing the fighting, but, as in all wars, profiteering, whilst having Zelensky's government pass further anti-union measures? And what arms? For example, if Ukraine can't retake the Donbas, should it be given ever more sophisticated weapons, up to and including tactical nukes?
So, Mason wants Russian workers to overthrow Putin, at the same time as driving those workers into Putin's arms by supporting NATO imperialism, but he does not want Ukrainian workers to overthrow the Ukrainian oligarchs, who are indistinguishable from their Russian counterparts, by mobilising against Zelensky/NATO's war, and against Zelensky's corrupt, anti-working class regime, because, his primary objective is not the interests of workers, be they Russian, Ukrainian, or any other nationality, but only the military defeat of Putin at the hands of NATO!
He writes,
“Of course, every life lost between now and the war’s end is tragic. And nukes in the hands of fascist madmen are an existential danger to the world. But the only way we, the democratic peoples of the world, now have to mitigate those dangers and shorten the conflict is the defeat of Russia.”
And, so much, therefore, for his earlier pious words about believing in the power of progressive change from below. Instead, he simply falls foul of his own description of campism,
“Here we come to one of the most fundamental “tells” of 21st century campism: absolute despair at the possibility of progressive change from below.”
Which is precisely the position of Mason, which leads him into a policy based not upon the principles of international socialism of opposition to militarism and imperialism, but instead to the most craven abasement at the feet of the camp of NATO imperialism, and its war against Russia.
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