The AWL response to Socialist Appeal says,
“Ukrainian socialists are fighting the subordination of Ukrainian society to Western capitalist-imperialist interests, as well as fighting the Ukrainian ruling class. Unlike Socialist Appeal, they understand that the conquest or subordination of Ukraine by Russian militarism is an even greater and more immediate threat.”
But, again, this is a non sequitur. I can quite accept the argument that Russian militarism is a more immediate threat to Ukrainian workers than is NATO imperialism or the Ukrainian ruling class, without accepting, in any way, that the actual war being fought is not one in which Ukraine is subordinated to NATO imperialism, and that NATO is fighting a proxy war with Russia on its territory. Irish Marxism has set out the arguments against that illogical position – https://irishmarxism.net/2022/11/09/new-left-review-and-the-war-in-ukraine-1/.
And, again, in his article on Social-patriotism in relation to Czechoslovakia, Trotsky makes exactly this point that the general conditions cannot be separated from the real war taking place, or the need to analyse the actual social forces standing behind it.
The response says,
“Concretely, the Ukrainian struggle is less of a proxy for the US or anyone else than, say, the Bangladeshi war of independence (1971) was for the Indian government in its struggle against Pakistan (to a lesser extent the Soviet Union in its struggle against the US and China). Indira Gandhi’s regime supported and helped organise the Bangladeshi resistance to Pakistan from the start, and it only finally triumphed when India invaded.
“So would Socialist Appeal dismiss one of the most significant anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century as fundamentally a proxy for Indian imperialism? If not, why not? Would it have called for India to stop its military support for the Bengalis?”
I have no idea what Attard would say, but I know what Lenin and the Bolsheviks said, in The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, as cited above, which dealt not with abstract concepts of “nations” or “peoples”, but with classes, and saw liberation struggles only in terms of permanent revolution, as an imminent aspect of the struggle by workers for Socialism, i.e., “It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement.”
Which seems pretty clear to me.
Or as Trotsky wrote, in opposing imperialist intervention in the Balkans, under cover of ending the oppression imposed by the Ottoman Empire.
“Democracy has no right, political or moral, to entrust the organisation of the Balkan peoples to forces that are outside its control – for it is not known when and where these forces will stop, and democracy, having once granted them the mandate of its political confidence, will be unable to check them....
The Balkans for the Balkan peoples! This slogan is taken up here by all politicians, both those of the extreme Left and those who serve the dynasties. But the majority of politicians, while quite properly refusing the Great Powers the right to make any claims on the Balkans, desire at the same time that Russia should help, arms in hand, the Balkan peoples to reorganise the Balkans as these leading political personalities would like the Balkans to be. This hope, or this demand, may become the source of great mistakes and great misfortunes. I say nothing about the fact that this approach to the question transforms the Balkan War into a conscious provocation to a measuring of strength on the all-European scale, which can mean nothing short of a European War. And, however dear to us the fate of the young Balkan peoples, however warmly we wish for them the best possible development of cultured existence on their own soil, there is one thing we must tell them plainly and honestly, as we must tell ourselves: We do not want, and we are unable to put our own cultural development at risk. Bismark once said that the whole Balkan Peninsula was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. We too can say today: If the leading parties of the Balkans, after all their sad experience of European intervention, can see no other way of settling the fate of the Balkans but a fresh European intervention, the results of which no one can foreordain, then their political plans are indeed not worth the bones of a single infantryman from Kursk. That may sound harsh, but it is the only way that this tragic question can be seen by any honest democratic politician who thinks not only of today but also of tomorrow.” (The Balkan Wars, pp 153-4)
But it is not at all a matter of indifference by what methods this emancipation is being accomplished. The method of “liberation” that is being followed today means the enslavement of Macedonia to the personal regime in Bulgaria and to Bulgarian militarism; it means, moreover, the strengthening of reaction in Bulgaria itself. That positive, progressive result which history will, in the last analysis, extract from the ghastly events in the Balkans, will suffer no harm from the exposures made by Balkan and European democracy; on the contrary, only a struggle against the usurpation of history's tasks by the present masters of the situation will educate the Balkan peoples to play the role of superseding not only Turkish despotism but also those who, for their own reactionary purposes, are, by their own barbarous methods, now destroying that despotism...
Our agitation, on the contrary, against the way that history's problems are at present being solved, goes hand in hand with the work of the Balkan Social Democrats. And when we denounce the bloody deeds of the Balkan 'liberation' from above we carry forward the struggle not only against liberal deception of the Russian masses but also against enslavement of the Balkan masses.” (p 293-4)
The first Balkan War, as Trotsky described, led on to the second, between those that had fought the Ottomans, and could not be divorced from it. It did not result in an historically progressive result, which only a revolutionary proletarian solution could provide. The same applies to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, none of which escaped from imperialism, nor from continued conflict between each of these states, just as Trotsky also warned would be the case with the Zionist creation of a Jewish state in Israel, which has led to a thoroughly reactionary set of consequences, ever since. Only Zionists and other nationalists, and bourgeois liberals can fail to recognise that reality.
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