Its Tsereteli's ideology of “Revolutionary Defencism” that today's social-imperialists have adopted as cover for their social-patriotism. It stands, as it did then, in opposition to the Leninist position of revolutionary defeatism, of The Main Enemy Is At Home.
Today, the social-imperialists do not even make a show of that kind of Menshevism, but offer up, voluntarily, their support for Zelensky's corrupt, capitalist regime. And, out in the open, Zelensky's regime sits in conferences in London with US and EU billionaires, and their political representatives, discussing how the Ukrainian workers can be better exploited, and Ukrainian resources pillaged, when the war ends. That was the offer made to Zelensky and the Ukrainian oligarchs for turning Ukraine into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for NATO imperialism, parked on Russia's borders.
Of course, if Ukraine cannot fulfil its mission of defeating Russia, on NATO's behalf, just as Saddam was unable to defeat Iran, on its behalf, NATO will abandon it, as is already becoming apparent. But, as in Afghanistan, China stands ready to fill the vacuum, and it will not matter to Zelensky, or his replacement, whether he lines his pockets with Yuan rather than Dollars, in exchange for arranging the exploitation of Ukrainian workers and resources.
Meanwhile, those same Ukrainian workers, whose exploitation was being discussed around the table, in London, like the scene at the end of “Animal Farm”, and who are the one's, currently, dying for the greater glory of NATO/Ukrainian imperialism, were conspicuously excluded from those discussions.
Trotsky notes,
“What kind of soviets are the Chinese? If the Chinese Communist Party can say nothing about them, then it means that it is not leading them. Then who is? Apart from the Communists, only accidental, intermediate elements, people of a “third party”, in a word, fragments of the Guomindang of the second and third sort, can come to the head of the soviets and create a soviet government.” (p 297)
And, in fact, that was prescient of the Bonapartist regime established by Mao Zedong, in 1949, not on the basis of proletarian revolution, but of a peasant, guerrilla war, not communism, but Left KMTism. Later, as two competing national socialisms of Russia and China were to come into conflict, the Russian Stalinists were also to make this observation of the class nature of Maoism. But, in his speech, Stalin was to act as the cheerleader of what became Maoism, just as the petty-bourgeois “Left”, subsequently became the cheerleaders of all other reactionary, anti-working-class, nationalist forces.
Trotsky notes,
“Only yesterday Stalin thought that “it would be ridiculous to think” of the creation of soviets in China prior to the completion of the democratic revolution. Now he seems to think – if his five phrases have any meaning at all – that in the democratic revolution the soviets can save the country even without the leadership of the Communists.” (p 297)
That has been the position of the petty-bourgeois “Left” ever since, which has abandoned the struggle for Socialism, and become mere baggage carriers for assorted bourgeois causes, on the basis of moralism and lesser-evilist liberalism. It seeks, in its political activity, merely to mollify the conditions of workers, sinking into economism and bourgeois reformism, cloaked in kitsch Marxian phraseology, with its discussion of Socialism removed to academic discussion at its own internal educationals, Day and Summer Schools, which reflect its petty-bourgeois nature, and natural habitat in studentism and academia. But, as even that theoretical discussion conflicts with its day to day practice, so the theory itself must be repeatedly bowdlerised and grotesquely distorted, as these sects take on the role of epigones. Their ordinary members and recruits must be cocooned from any alternative view, by the creation of safe spaces, and the use of bureaucratic censorship.
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