The USC, many of whose members correctly attacked the Stalinist advisors of Corbyn, for proposing such appeasement, of the Right, now implement the same false strategy on steroids, with their policy of tying the workers to their own social-imperialist support for Zelensky's right-wing, Bonapartist government and its NATO backers. Their position is overtly that of the Stalinist Popular Front, of lesser-evilism, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, argued against by Trotsky, in his writings on the Chinese Revolution, and later in “Learn To Think”. They justify their alliance with NATO and Zelensky purely on the basis of opposing Putin.
The Stalinists abased themselves via the ARC, and responded to the Opposition by noting that the British government also wanted to destroy the ARC, just as today, the USC talk about Putin's desire to destroy support for Ukraine, and the Ukrainian capitalist state. But, this is simply an example of the logic of “My enemy's enemy is my friend”. That Putin is the enemy of Ukrainian capitalists and their state, does not make those capitalists and their state, nor NATO, our friend, any more than it was prior to this war. Baldwin did not fear the TUC leaders, but feared the potential of left moving British workers being influenced by the experience of the Russian workers, and support for them by Russia. They pressured the TUC leaders not to accept money from the Russian trades unions, and so undermined the strike of British miners.
“In exercising its pressure upon the General Council, the British bourgeoisie, through it, exerted pressure upon the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and at the Berlin Conference obtained from the latter’s representatives an unprecedented capitulation on the fundamental questions of the class struggle. An Anglo-Russian Committee of this kind only serves the British bourgeoisie (cf. the declaration of The Times). This will not hinder it from continuing its pressure in the future upon the General Council, and demanding of it a break with the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, for by such a policy of pressure and blackmail the British bourgeoisie wins everything we lose by our senseless and unprincipled conduct.” (p 58)
In the case of Ukraine, its not pressure from Putin or NATO that leads the Ukrainian government to accept support from the USC, and other such social-imperialists, in and out of Ukraine, and so leads those social-imperialists to abandon class struggle in order to ally with it. The betrayal of the class struggle by those social-imperialists is purely a voluntary act of their own, much as was the case of the Stalinists in their support of the KMT.
The Stalinists even tried to claim that the Opposition and Chiang Kai Shek were in alliance in seeking to remove the communist influence in the KMT. They based their argument on selected “quotes” from Chiang that he agreed with the Opposition about communists not joining the KMT. This is an early example of the use by the Stalinists of the “amalgam”, by which comments by their Left opponents were tied to comments by reactionaries, and some kind of formal alliance between the two tacitly or overtly implied from it. Trotsky argued that the document from which the quotes were taken was, in fact, an indictment of the Stalinist strategy in China, and that the whole document should be circulated. It never was.
“The school of Martynov draws from this the conclusion that the policy of the Opposition “generally” serves the reaction. This accusation is not new either. The whole development of Bolshevism in Russia proceeded under the accompaniment of Menshevik accusations that the Bolsheviks were playing the game of the reaction, that they were aiding the monarchy against the Kadets, the Kadets against the SRs and Mensheviks, and so on without end. Renaudel accuses the French Communists of rendering aid to Poincaré when they attack the bloc of the radicals and the Socialists. The German Social Democrats have more than once pretended that our refusal to enter the League of Nations plays the game of the extreme imperialists, etc., etc.” (p 60)
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