Further intervention, in Russia, by imperialism, was deterred, not by the Stalinists adopting a diplomatic and timid response to it, but by the defeat inflicted on it by the Red Army, the strengthening of the workers' state, and, by the growth of revolutionary parties in the imperialist heartlands, taking the fight to it. Weakening any of that could only act to embolden imperialism, and make further intervention more likely. The same was true in China.
“Only a revolution on whose banner the toilers and oppressed write plainly their own demands is capable of gripping the feelings not only of the international proletariat but also of the soldiers of capital.” (p 64)
That is, again, true, in relation to Ukraine and Russia, today. If the camp of social-imperialists that back Ukraine truly sought to protect it from attack, and imperialist intervention, they would abandon their cringing sycophancy to Zelensky, and his NATO imperialist backers, and call for a revolutionary programme, to organise Ukrainian workers against them. If the opposing camp of social-imperialists, backing Putin's Russia, truly fear, and seek to avoid, imperialist intevention in Russia, they would abandon their sycophantic support for Putin, and, instead, propose a revolutionary programme for Russian workers, to oppose Russia's war, and to overthrow Putin's right-wing capitalist regime. That would be a basis to build genuine international workers' solidarity for such socialist rather than nationalist struggles, and to spread that revolutionary movement across the globe, thereby, keeping the imperialists occupied at home.
“The compromising and traitorous leadership did not protect Nanking from destruction. It facilitated the penetration of the enemy ships into the Yangtze. A revolutionary leadership, with a powerful social movement, can make the waters of the Yangtze too hot for the ships of Lloyd George, Chamberlain and MacDonald. In any case, this is the only way and the only hope of defence.” (p 64)
The function of Marxism, Trotsky says, is to foresee what is to come, based upon an understanding of social laws, and how they are currently unfolding in the real world. Einstein commented that the definition of stupidity is performing the same experiment over and over, and each time expecting a different result. Put another way, those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed to relive them. When it comes to leaders of the labour movement, it is not only, or mainly them that suffer the consequences, but the entire working-class. The reformists, opportunists and centrists, of course, always refuse to learn these lessons, because their politics is always based on the idea that each event is unique or discrete and unconnected to other events.
The whole basis of opportunism, or practical politics, is to try to gain short-term popularity, which translates into votes – usually votes in elections to parliamentary bodies, but also in union, student and other such elections – by tailing the prevailing majority public opinion, in the given social milieu. Hence Starmer, the arch-Remainer, of yesterday, becomes the champion of Brexitism, jingoism and sovereigntism, today. It is politics devoid of any anchor in principle, derived from a scientific analysis of social movement. It is also why the opportunist rails against the idea of external interference or criticism of their position, insisting that only they understand the national peculiarities that mean that “this time its different.”
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