Ukraine & The Corruption of The Global Ruling Class

A month ago, I noted that western countries have been pouring money and weapons into Ukraine at an astronomical rate, and, yet, the much hyped Spring counter-offensive never happened, and the Summer offensive launched has been a very timid affair indeed.  So where had all of the money and weapons gone? The history of the Iran-Contras, of Iraq, and elsewhere, provided the clue. Workers, in those western countries, suffer the consequences of higher prices for things like energy, the slowing effect on the economy, and also see their taxes go to fund these wars, whilst the workers, for example, in Ukraine, who fight these proxy wars for NATO imperialism, lose their lives and limbs. Meanwhile the money finds its way into the pockets of corrupt politicians and officials, a large part of the weapons disappears into the black market, again filling the pockets of those same corrupt officials. Now, we see that Zelensky has sacked all of the heads of Ukraine's regional military recruitment centres, for bribery. But, the fish rots from the head, and this is just another case, seen throughout history of the lower orders being used as scapegoats by the leadership.

The Guardian itself, in 2021, before the war, and at a time when western liberals were not afraid to tell the truth about the vile, reactionary and corrupt nature of Zelensky's regime, noted,

"On the campaign trail, Zelenskiy pledged to clean up Ukraine’s oligarch-dominated ruling system. And he railed against politicians such as the wealthy incumbent Petro Poroshenko who hid their assets offshore...

The Pandora papers, leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with the Guardian as part of a global investigation however, suggest Zelenskiy is rather similar to his predecessors.

The leaked documents suggest he had – or has – a previously undisclosed stake in an offshore company, which he appears to have secretly transferred to a friend weeks before winning the presidential vote."

That was before those same liberals, decided that, at least for the duration of the war, Zelensky was a model of democracy, liberalism and probity, and anyone who said otherwise was just a Putin propagandist!

The reality is there is nothing new or unexpected, here. For all the attempts of those liberals, and social-imperialists to present this war as a “People's War”, a war for national liberation, or for democracy, it is nothing of the kind. It is an inter-imperialist war, reactionary on both sides, as different factions and shifting alliances within the corrupt, global ruling class fall out amongst themselves and jostle for position. Like all such processes, it has its phenomenal form, in the shape of the actual human actors on the stage of history that represent these competing interests that appear like the shadows of a kabuki theatre. On one side we have those like Trump, and the corrupt Putin regime, and on the other Hunter Biden, and the corrupt Zelensky regime.

The nature of the ruling class is, now, and has been, for nearly a century that of a global ruling class. It is a class of speculators, of owners of fictitious-capital (Global shares, bonds, property and derivatives), all of which it can buy and sell in an instant, at the press of a computer key, shifting its wealth from owning the share of US corporations, to German corporations, to Japanese, or Russian companies, or else to the government bonds of different countries, or the ownership of land and property. It has no national home, no affinity to any given state, and simply uses its ability to shift this wealth to influence, sometimes in the most direct manner, the actions of all governments and states to meet its interests. Just look at the way it responded to Liz Truss's government in the Autumn of 2022, for example.

But, like any sizeable group, it is not homogeneous, and, within it, arises different factions, different competing interests. Contrary, to the propaganda of the liberals and social-imperialists, those different interests have nothing to do with morality or questions of supporting “democracy”, as against authoritarianism or “fascism”. As Trotsky pointed out, in the 1930's, those are just labels, masks put on the façade of the political regime that hides the true face of the ruling-class's social dictatorship. They pick up and discard those masks as best suits their needs at the time.

For example, the ruling-class, in Britain and the US, and elsewhere, welcomed the coming to power of Mussolini, in 1922, when it was the means of suppressing a revolutionary Italian working-class that threatened their interests as owners of shares in all of these large companies. So, too, with the coming to power of Hitler in Germany, seen not only as the means of suppressing revolutionary German workers, but also of resuming their attempts to overturn the revolution in Russia, they had been forced to suspend in 1923, with the defeat of their fascistic White allies, by the Red Army.

As Trotsky points out, before, during and after such inter-imperialist wars, the different capitalist interests continually shift their alliances, as they see fit, having nothing to do with moral questions of democracy or fascism. In 1935, Britain entered into the Anglo-German Naval Pact, for example. And, in the second Sino-Japanese War, China was backed by an alliance comprising, the USSR, Britain, the US, and Nazi Germany, before Japan declared war on the US, and Germany allied with it, in 1941. During WWII, the fascist dictatorship of Vargas in Brazil, was also allied to US and UK “democratic imperialism”. Indeed, Vargas had been significantly assisted in his 1937 coup by Britain, following the 1935 Stalinist backed military rebellion.

The global ruling class has no interest in moral questions of democracy, freedom and so on, only the question of cold cash, and the expansion of its wealth and power. As a parasitic class of money-lenders, and speculators, whose wealth comes from draining profits in the form of interest payments, rather than the use of those profits for capital accumulation, and even more destructively, from speculative capital gains from inflated asset prices, which has required it, in the last 20 years, to deliberately hold back capital accumulation, and economic activity, so as to hold down interest rates, to prevent a repetition of the previous asset price crashes, most notably that of 2008, it has now become reactionary even in relation to capital and capitalism, which brought it into existence as a class in the first place.

That its decadence now manifests itself in this grotesque global corruption, and the squandering of human lives for that end, should be enough for us to seek to sweep it away at the earliest opportunity. Yet, we have the disgraceful sight of people who call themselves socialists lining up to back one camp or the other of these leeches. The first step to achieving the former, overdue, task is to drive out the latter from the ranks of the labour movement.