A look at the arguments of the USC, and its affiliates and supporters shows all the same tactics used by Stalin, in relation to the Opposition. Today, Marxists who oppose the war on both sides, are branded by the USC and pro-imperialists as supporters of Putin, or, even more ridiculously, supporters of the “red-browners” (populist alliance of national socialists of both Right and Left). At the same time, they are branded by the actual supporters of Putin as being pro-NATO imperialists!!!
“Stalin said the Opposition stands in one front with Chamberlain, with Mussolini and Zhang Zuolin. To that I answer: Nothing has facilitated the work of Chamberlain so much as the false policy of Stalin, particularly in China. The revolution cannot be made by halves. The London blow is the pay-off for the Martinovist course in China. On this path, only defeats can be accumulated.” (p 104)
And, the same is seen, today. One reason for Putin's strength is the fact, obvious to everyone in Russia, that NATO reneged on its pledges about not expanding Eastwards. As soon as US corporations started to lose their ability to rob Russia blind, after the fall of its puppet, Yeltsin, the US began to encircle Russia, setting up its bases in the “Stans” of Central Asia, allying with the most barbarous dictators to do so. When Russian workers see even Western socialists denying this reality, and apologising for NATO, it acts directly as a recruiting sergeant for Putin. As Trotsky put it, in relation to a similar situation, prior to WWII,
“Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair, as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, social democracy, and the Comintern was the prerequisite for the successes of fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism...
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.”
And, similarly, the failure of social-democracy to deal with the contradictions inherent in the model it pursued from 1990 onwards, of holding back capital accumulation, so as to boost asset prices, had already led to the growth of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and of the fascists, and nationalist political forces, based upon it, which, also, in the absence of a cogent socialist alternative, drew behind them sections of backward, isolated workers in the decaying urban areas that had been abandoned by the bourgeois workers parties, during all of that previous period.
But, when NATO also introduced its boycotts against Russian oil and gas exports, which caused energy prices, in Europe, to spike massively (though contrary to the Keynesian/Stalinist explanations of inflation as arising from cost-push, the massive increase in liquidity/reduction in the value of the standard of prices, during lockdowns had already seen global primary product prices soar, once lockdowns began to be lifted, and long before the Ukraine invasion etc. Brent Crude went from $25 in April 2020 to $85 in October 2021, for example, with a steady rise throughout 2021), instead of the “Left” mobilising workers against those imperialist actions, large sections of it, instead, called for even more such sanctions, as they threw their weight, such as it was, behind the war drive of democratic imperialism.
Again, disproving the Keynesian/Stalinist narrative of cost-push inflation, a look at EU natural gas prices shows it rose from €5 per megawatt/hr., in June 2020, to €35 in July 2021, long before any invasion of Ukraine, or imperialist boycotts, but consistent with the start of lifting of lockdowns, and surge of the sea of liquidity into circulation, but, also, reflecting the consequence of those later boycotts of Russian gas, by imperialism, it rose to €339 in August 2022. Similarly, UK CPI had risen from below 1 in 2020, to 7%, in March 2022, prior to the invasion, and subsequent imperialist boycotts. The actual inflation, was clearly well embedded, as a consequence of that earlier liquidity injection, and devaluation of currencies, long before, any invasion, and increase in primary product prices caused by the imperialist boycotts. They simply added fuel to the existing fire.
The “Left's” action, as in the 1930's, in failing to provide any cogent alternative, and instead jumping into bed with “democratic imperialism”, as its voluntary (and in some cases paid) apologists, left the field wide open for the forces of reaction, for the actual red-browners, to fill that political void, and, themselves led the protests against those boycotts, and their devastating effects on workers' cost of living.
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