Joe Biden has looked like one of those series of geriatric soviet leaders, in the 1980's that doddered on and off the political stage, as they shuffled off their mortal coil, to make way for the next. It was a time when nuclear Armageddon looked to be imminent, and later we found that, it was closer than we thought, as bombers on a number of occasions had been launched, and missiles readied due to technical errors suggesting one side or the other had already launched an attack. Like them, Biden is also, now, on his political deathbed, but he seems to want to blow up the world, by starting World War III, before he dies.
No doubt, Starmer, and other European suppliers of Storm Shadow and other long range missiles and weapons, thought they were safe, in giving Zelensky permission to use those weapons to strike deep into Russia, because without the US giving its permission, no such strike is possible. The US dominates NATO, and its subordinates in Europe, not only politically and strategically, but, also, by its supply and control of vital component technologies, as well as its control of the necessary satellite guidance systems. US imperialism, has no desire for an immediate nuclear war with Russia, which would destroy both. Besides, its main target is not Russia, but China. So, Starmer et al, no doubt thought that no such approval would be given by the US. Biden, with nothing, personally, left to lose, has upset their plans.
US imperialism itself has sought to simply grind down Russia, in a prolonged trench war, draining Russian economic, political and military resources, using the blood and bones of Ukrainian workers to achieve that end. The longer it went on, the better that was for US imperialism, much as with the role of US imperialism in World War I and II, which it stayed out of supplying weapons and finance, until both sides had degraded each other, leaving the US to come in at the end, to tip the balance in favour of its own geo-strategic goals.
That is consistent with the nature of imperialism, and its main political representative, social-democracy. Its no coincidence that the US has fought most of its imperialist wars under Democrat rather than Republican governments, or that Britain has fought most of its imperialist wars under Liberal, and Labour governments, rather than Tory governments.
As Marxists, we oppose all such wars. We support the right of free secession for oppressed nations, and oppose the use of force to prevent it. But, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks set out, in that document, even, in that case, we do not advocate or support demands for such secession. We are for the removal of borders, and breaking down of existing divisions, not for creating new ones, not the creation of new bourgeois states! We support revolutionary struggles against imperialism, but only as revolutionary struggles of the oppressed, struggles undertaken by revolutionary workers, drawing revolutionary masses behind them, not struggles of one national bourgeoisie against another, whether cloaked in claims of "national liberation" or not.
"The interests of the working class demand the amalgamation of the workers of all the nationalities in a given state in united proletarian organisations—political, trade union, co-operative, educational, etc. This amalgamation of the workers of different nationalities in single organisations will alone enable the proletariat to wage a victorious struggle against international capital and reaction, and combat the propaganda and aspirations of the landowners, clergy and bourgeois nationalists of all nations, who usually cover up their anti-proletarian aspirations with the slogan of “national culture”. The world working-class movement is creating and daily developing more and more an international proletarian culture."
Moreover, this right of free secession, as with the
bourgeois-democratic demand for
"national self-determination", can never be privileged above the struggle for proletarian revolution, which is one reason we are in favour of
"revolutionary defeatism", on the basis that
"The Main Enemy Is At Home". As with any of the bourgeois-democratic demands, which we support in the abstract, the revolutionary nature of such demands comes from the context, and the class content of the forces fighting for it, not the form of words contained in the demand itself. We support the freedoms provided to workers lyingly and fraudulently presented in such demands, only in order to mobilise the workers still in thrall to those concepts, in order to enable them to move beyond them, in revolutionary struggle, as they see those lies exposed. We support not a bourgeois-democratic struggle for them, but a revolutionary proletarian struggle, utilising revolutionary proletarian, not bourgeois-democratic means, via workers councils, factory and peasant committees, workers militia and so on. In other words, we propose the transitional method of
permanent revolution, as set out by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.
Even where, on this basis, a revolutionary struggle was possible, Marxists have to set it, within the wider context of the interests of the global working-class, as against the interests of the particular working-class. As Lenin described, if such a revolutionary struggle would risk a wider conflict between large bourgeois states, let alone two nuclear armed imperialist blocs, which would lead to the devastation of millions of workers, Marxists would oppose such a struggle.
““But we cannot be in favour of a war between great nations, in favour of the slaughter of twenty million people for the sake of the problematical liberation of a small nation with a population of perhaps ten or twenty millions!” Of course not!”
The war in Ukraine was, however, never even a war about this bourgeois-democratic right to national self-determination (a right which is itself, in the age of imperialism, a utopian and reactionary fantasy, as with Brexit), let alone a right to free secession - secession from what? - but was clearly a question of two huge imperialist blocs - NATO and China~Russia - butting heads against each other, much as happened,
in 1962, in Cuba, when, another Democrat government, that of John F Kennedy, threatened to send the world into nuclear oblivion.
The social-imperialists have tried to blind the labour movement to the reality of this inter-imperialist war, by pretending that it was about the bourgeois-democratic right to national self-determination, and so, also, fraudulently sought legitimacy for their class treachery, in the words of Lenin and Trotsky. It was never that, and even if it were, would not have justified support for the Ukrainian oligarchs and their state, as against support for a revolutionary struggle by Ukrainian workers against them, and against the Russian oligarchs, drawing into that struggle revolutionary Russian workers.
As the lies of the social-imperialists about the class nature of the war became increasingly exposed, they looked for even more flimsy excuses for their position, such as claiming that the war had a dual nature of being both an inter-imperialist and national liberation war, of which they were only supporting the latter, as though this was in any way possible given their size as against the power and role of NATO imperialism, which simply used them as its useful idiots, much as Putin did in relation to those that threw themselves into an idiotic defence of his invasion.
But, at each stage, as Ukraine inevitably proved itself unable to push Russian forces out of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, despite the huge military and financial support given to the Ukrainian state, by NATO, the response was to simply call for even more weapons, to be able to expose the true nature of the conflict as an inter-imperialist war, as the demands to strike into Russia with those devastating weapons grew louder and louder.
But, the social-imperialists in the West have tied themselves to the mast of NATO, just as the social-chauvinists in Ukraine have done, as they capitulated at the feet of their own imperialist ruling classes. Most of them will not recant or undertake any self-criticism as their betrayals - and we have to describe them, now, as betrayals rather than simply mistakes - become glaringly exposed. They will double down on their demands and betrayal, as Biden seeks to drag the world into a nuclear armed WWIII, in his final days, before Trump replaces him.
It is an indication of the surreal nature of the current state of politics when even Trump looks more rational!
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