Author: Stephen Gowans

Stephen Gowans is the author of The Killer's Henchman: Capitalism and the Covid-19 Disaster (2022); Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform (2019); Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom (2018); and Washington's Long War on Syria (2017). For notification of updates, send an e-mail to stephen.roy.gowans@gmail.com with "subscribe" in the subject line.

Swapping France for Russia in Niger and Lenin for Putin in Edmonton

August 8, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

Kim Il Sung, the Korean guerilla leader and founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, once warned colonized people about inviting the robber lurking outside their house to help evict the robber already in it.

Kim was worried that his compatriots calling upon the United States for help in ejecting Japan from Korea, would lead to disaster. Koreans would swap one imperialist master (Japan) for another (the United States.). Kim’s warning was realized when Syngman Rhee, who had advocated an alliance with the United States to defeat Japanese imperialism, was brought to power by Washington as president of South Korea. Since then, South Korea has been a semi-autonomous state dominated by Washington.

Canadian Communist Alex Boykowich wants Nigeriens to make the same mistake Koreans made.

When French communists repeated Kim’s warning in connection with Niger, pointing out that Nigeriens asking Russia for help in ejecting France from Niger, would amount to accepting Niger’s continued exploitation by an outside power, Boykowich objected.

Boykowich is a member of the Putin Club, a group of self-proclaimed communists and socialists whose grasp of communist history and thought appears to be tenuous, and who believe, as Syngman Rhee did, that alliances with imperialist powers can be a good thing.

The Canadian Communist’s view is that, when it comes to Russia, activists in the Marxist-Leninist tradition should concern themselves with affairs inside their own country, and remain silent on matters in countries in which Russia is trying to extend its influence. To put it another way, Boykowich wants Canadian communists to pressure Ottawa to stop contributing to the US-led project of impeding Russia from extending its influence in Ukraine and Niger, rather than telling Nigeriens it would be a mistake to ally with Moscow.

The alternative, that communists oppose (1) the rivalry of both the United States and Russia to exploit Ukraine and (2) the contest of France and Russia to despoil Niger, is excluded from Boykowich’s and the Putin Club’s way of thinking.

Boykowich’s demand that communists forebear from offering advice, warnings, or encouragement to people beyond the borders of their own country, conflicts sharply with the history of Boykowich’s own political party, the Communist Party of Canada.

In Boykowich’s way of thinking:

  • The scores of Canadian communists who joined the International Brigades to the defend the Spanish Republic should have stayed home, and instead pressured Ottawa to change its policy toward Spain.
  • Canadian Communist Norman Bethune should have remained in Canada to press Ottawa to stop supporting British imperialism, rather than travelling to China to join Mao’s Eighth Route Army and meddle in the affairs of a foreign people.

Che Guevera, an Argentine who involved himself in the struggle of Cuba against US imperialism, is also worthy of condemnation in Boykowich’s manner of thinking.

Lenin, who was forever writing resolutions on how working people across national lines—and outside his own country—should conduct their struggle against imperialism, falls foul of Boykowich’s demands.

As do Hilferding, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg, who, in the Boykowich view, arrogantly lectured workers of countries other than their own on how to defeat imperialism.

If in WWI the SDP wanted to vote for war credits, and German workers wanted to support the Kaiser, who were Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky—all Russians—to object? After all, the conduct of German workers was an internal German matter, to be settled by Germans, without arrogant outsiders obtruding their advice, in the Boykowich view. Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky should have focused on the Tsar, and held their tongue when it came to the question of whether German workers and their political party, the SDP, should have supported the Kaiser. When Lenin condemned the SDP for its betrayal of the working class, he was, as Boykowich sees the world, wrong. “We must deal with our own imperialism first,” councels Boykowich and the Putin Club. We must say nothing about how workers in other countries deal with theirs.  

Boykowich, who seems to admire Stalin, should review the conduct of his hero and docent. The Soviet leader was forever issuing guidance, instruction, advice, warnings, and encouragement to workers around the world, not least in Russia, despite the fact that he was a Georgian. If Boykowich had his way, Stalin would have stayed home in Georgia to organize the Baku oil workers.

As for Marx, the thinker who proclaimed “Working men have no country,” Boykowich must harbor an especial disdain. How can we expect working people to remain silent on what’s happening in other countries if they think they have no country?

The Era of Ultracheap Labor Is Under Threat

Factories in China and Vietnam are struggling to attract young workers, which is bad news for Western businesses accustomed to offshoring jobs at subsistence-level wages.

August 8, 2023

The world’s largest capitalist enterprises, having located their factory floors in low-wage Asia, are running into a big problem: The young people of China and Vietnam, two Asian giants ruled on behalf of Western businesses by Communist parties, don’t want to work in factories at dehumanizing jobs for subsistence-level wages. 

The twilight of ultracheap Asian factory labor is emerging as the latest test of the globalized manufacturing model, which over the past three decades has delivered a cornucopia of profits to wealthy investors around the world. American businesses accustomed to bargain-rate labor in Communist-controlled China and Vietnam might soon be reckoning with higher prices.

“There’s nowhere left on the planet that’s going to be able to give you what you want,” said Paul Norriss, the British co-founder of the Vietnam garment factory, UnAvailable, based in Ho Chi Minh City. CEOs of the world’s largest enterprises are going to have to change their business models.

Workers in their 20s routinely drop out of training programs for low-wage factory jobs.  Those who stay often work for just a couple of years.

“Everybody wants to be an Instagrammer or a photographer or a stylist or work at a coffee shop,” rather than a factory worker who toils long hours doing mind-numbing tasks for survival-level pay.

In response to the crisis, Asian factories have had to increase wages and adopt sometimes costly strategies to retain workers, from improving cafeteria fare to building kindergartens for workers’ children. 

Toy and game maker Hasbro said this year that labor shortages in Vietnam and China had pushed up costs from subsistence-level to barely above subsistence. Barbie-maker Mattel, which has a large production base in Asia, also is grappling with the pressure of higher labor costs in China on corporate profits and bonuses for its hyper-wealthy CEO. Both companies have raised prices for their products, to protect investors’ profits. Nike, which makes most of its shoes in Asia, flagged in June that its product costs had gone up because of higher labor expenses. 

For U.S. businesses that have been accustomed to having low-wage workers as a certain and relatively stable part of their business model, that foundation is going to have to be rejiggered.

Starting in the 1990s, China and then other Asian manufacturing hubs integrated into the global capitalist economy, turning nations of poor farmers into nations of poor factory workers. Labor was available at dirt-cheap wages, allowing businesses to expand their margins and reap a cornucopia of profits off the toil of Communist-led workers reduced to the status of machines for producing surplus value. 

Now those manufacturing nations are running up against a generational problem. Younger workers, better-educated than their parents and veterans of Instagram, TikTok and other social media, are deciding their work lives shouldn’t unfold in dehumanized toil inside factory walls at barebones pay for the benefit of billionaires in New York and Shanghai.

Demographic shifts are playing a role. Young people in Asia are having fewer children than their parents did, and at later ages, which means they are under less pressure to earn a steady income in their 20s. A booming services sector offers the option of less-grueling work as store clerks in malls and receptionists at hotels.

The problem is acute in China, where urban youth unemployment hit 21% in June even though factories had labor shortages. Multinational companies have been moving production from China to nations including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Factory owners there said they, too, are struggling to get young people to sign up.

In the past, manufacturers, scouring the globe for workers deprived of all options but to condemn themselves to lives of ceaseless, demeaning toil at wages incapable of supporting their families in anything but conditions of squalor, might simply have moved to less expensive destinations. That’s not so easy these days. There are nations in Africa and South Asia with large labor pools, but many are politically unstable, or lack good infrastructure and trained workforces.

That’s why China has been so attractive to the world’s largest capitalist enterprises. The infrastructure is excellent, the workforce is trained and disciplined, and Chinese workers can be hired to toil long hours for little pay. The Communist Party of China ensures that conditions are highly favorable to investors by making conditions highly unfavorable to workers.

Clothing brands were stung when they expanded into Myanmar and Ethiopia, only to find operations disrupted by unrest and civil war. Bangladesh has been a reliable base for producing clothes, but restrictive trade policies and clogged ports have kept it from making much beyond that.

India has a huge population, and firms seeking alternatives to China are expanding there. But even in India, factory managers are beginning to complain about the difficulties of retaining young workers. Many young people prefer farm life, no matter how gruelling, to equally gruelling lives in factory dormitories in industrial hubs.

Asian factory owners are trying to make the jobs more appealing, including subsidizing kindergartens and funding technical-training programs. Some are moving factories to rural areas where people are more willing to do manual labor, but that puts them farther away from ports and suppliers and forces them to accommodate rural life, including worker absences during harvest. 

Christina Chen, the Taiwanese owner of a furniture maker that sells to American retailers such as Lowe’s, decided to move her factory out of southern China four years ago, hoping it would be easier to recruit. She first considered industrial zones near Ho Chi Minh City, but she heard nightmarish stories about workers demanding wages above subsistence levels.  How are capitalists to earn fat returns when workers balk at a life of penury?

Young people from developing countries who otherwise might take factory jobs are finding work caring for the growing numbers of the elderly people in developed nations, as well as plugging gaps in those countries’ aging workforces. The pay is low, but above the subsistence-level pay of factory labor back home.

Susi Susanti, a 29-year-old from Indonesia, said she tried factory jobs after graduating from high school. She hated being pressured to work faster by her managers at an electronics factory, and in a second job making shoes. She told her mother she had to do something else.

A six-month training course taught her rudimentary Mandarin, and she set off to work caring for an elderly couple in Taiwan. Her pay is three times as high as she earned in factories back home, she said, and it’s less exhausting. “When the person I’m looking after is doing well,” she said, “I can relax.”

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This article is from The Wall Street Journal of August 7, 2023. It has been edited for class perspective. The original article, written by Jon Emont, is titled  “The Era of Ultracheap Stuff Is Under Threat.”

The Personal and Political Agendas of Tokyo Rose and Other World War III Alarmists

August 4, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

I once bet a friend that if he turned up each card in a 52 playing card deck that I could identify all 13 hearts before he turned them up. He thought this impossible and took the bet. He lost. My oracular feat, seemingly brilliant, is only brilliant in the retelling. Yes, it’s true, I accurately predicted when all 13 hearts would turn up, but I did so by guessing that each card was a heart. In effect, I predicted all 52 of the 13 hearts.

Some economists have made a name for themselves by accurately predicting every recession. But they’ve done so by predicting all 95 of the last 10 recessions. It’s easy to predict an event, if your prediction is always that the event will happen.

Some anti-war activists play the same game. They’ve raised the alarm about 73 of the last two world wars. Like religious fanatics who prate endlessly about an imminent Armageddon, fanatics of the imagined ‘peace movement’ keep telling us that WWIII is just around the corner.  The reality, however, is that world wars are rare. But if you keep saying a world war is on the horizon, you might eventually get it right.

The hosts of peace movement podcasts and radio shows often portray every minor incident or escalation of tension between world powers as a prelude to a new world war, as if war is the sole means by which countries resolve their differences, and that if differences exist, they must surely lead to a cataclysmic conflict. The Communist Party of Canada has a penchant for including with every statement it issues on war and military affairs a photograph of a mushroom cloud. If the alarmist’s view of drug use is that marijuana is a gateway to heroin, the party’s view is that every outbreak of tension and every dollar spent on arms is a direct path to the Gotterdammerung. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists keeps moving its clock ever closer to midnight. Like the boy who cried wolf, the fear-mongers who sound these alarms are now mostly ignored—for good reason.

Sometimes alarmism has an agenda, personal, often political, usually both. There are two reasons why Friend of Any US-Enemy, Danny Haiphong—to use an example of one antiwar alarmist—might have an irresistible urge to sound tocsins. The first is to attract followers to his social media, a source of personal income, and possibly Danny’s main source. The horror of an impending world war is far more likely to arouse interest, and bring in dollars, than a discussion of why it’s unlikely that tensions between the United States and China will degenerate into open war. Sensational—and simple-minded—content of the kind Danny specializes in, sells subscriptions and generates YouTube advertising revenue. Secondly, Danny is keen to mobilize opposition at home to US foreign policy measures aimed at advancing US interests against those of China and Russia. As an unthinking partisan of any country that is engaged in rivalry with the United States, Danny works hard at filling shoes vacated in the last true world war by Tokyo Rose. His game plan is simple. Depict all US measures that are hostile to Chinese and Russian interests as the road to Golgotha. 

No one knows whether tensions between Washington and Moscow and Washington and Beijing will escalate into a world war. It’s possible they will, but there are plenty of cogent reasons to believe they won’t. For one thing, periods of tension among competing powers happen often; world wars don’t. For another, nuclear weapons have significantly altered the cost-benefit ratio of major war. Moreover, as the war in Ukraine has amply demonstrated, neither the United States and its allies, nor Russia or China, have the industrial base to produce the sinews of a major war. This isn’t to say that a world war won’t happen, or that factories to produce tanks and artillery shells won’t be built, only that people who make predictions about recessions and world wars—and those who believe them—vastly overestimate the power of mere mortals to foresee the future. However, some things can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy. One is that economists are often wrong. The other is that world war alarmists are almost always wrong.

Our attraction to sensationalism and the alarmists’ exploitation of it, have created a false sense of insecurity. Danny’s warning that US actions are inevitably leading to Armageddon are no different from the alarmist warnings of his propagandist counterparts on the other side, who labor diligently to stoke fears of North Korea and its nuclear weapons. In both cases, political (and personal) agendas motivate what is essentially an exercise in self-promotion and political propaganda.

It’s not only people like Danny Haiphong, crying wolf on behalf of major powers, who raise false alarms, it’s also the major powers themselves. Alarmism about war is part of the psychological warfare rival powers use against each other. Nation-states can threaten war to announce their red lines, or to bluff about where their red lines really lie. Putin and Medvedev continually remind Washington that Russia is a nuclear-armed power (warnings that incomprehensibly led the Communist Party of Canada to raise an alarm about NATO, not Russia, pushing the world down the path to nuclear Armageddon.) Moscow’s reminders of Russia’s formidable nuclear arsenal—the world’s largest—are a warning to the United States not to push Russia too far. The warning, however, does not necessarily mean that Russia intends to use its nuclear weapons, or that the United States has any intention of breaching Russia’s red lines.

Wars, of course, do happen, even if less frequently than the alarmists’ predictions. They happen because humanity is divided into nation-states, and nation-states have differences. The most basic thing that can be done to eliminate wars between nation-states is to eliminate nation-states. The aim of communists, in Lenin’s view, was to eliminate war by eliminating its causes: the division of humanity into nation-states and the division of humanity into classes.

Differences between nation-states arise for many reasons. The key to reducing the likelihood of inter-state violence is to reduce the number of reasons nation-states can have differences about which they may be inclined to resolve through the use of violence. One major source of tension is economic rivalry. Indeed, economic competition lies at the very heart of the tension between the United States and China. It also lies at the root, though less conspicuously, of the conflict between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine. As an integral part of the Russian economy, Ukraine makes Russia—and the business people at the summit of the Russian economy—more prosperous. Russia without Ukraine means a weaker Russia, less capable of competing with the United States strategically, which in turn means that Russian businesses are less capable of vying with US businesses for profit-making opportunities around the world. There are, then, compelling reasons why Moscow favors a Ukraine within its economic orbit and Washington favors one outside of Russia’s ambit.

If the World War III-alarmists are truly interested in averting the possibility of a major war, they should work towards reducing the economic rivalry that often leads nation-states to war. One way is to take up the socialist project of promoting an economic system that isn’t based on two imperatives of capitalism that exacerbate inter-state tensions: (1) competition among capitalist enterprises and therefore among the capitalist states that represent them on the world stage; (2) the necessity for capitalist enterprises to nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and set up connections everywhere and therefore the necessity of capitalist states to ensure that the enterprises they represent are free to scour the world for profit-making opportunities.

Marx said of capitalists that each threatens the existence of the other; that to counter the threat, each capitalist must expand, and that, therefore, the necessity of self-preservation lies at the heart of capitalist expansion.

The same logic applies to nation-states. Each nation-state is a threat to every other nation-state (or, as Voltaire put it, to be a patriot is to be an enemy to the rest of humanity); to counter the threat, nation-states seek to expand their economic, political, military, and ideological powers, either directly, or through alliance with other powers. Thus, the capitalist-driven necessity of self-preservation lies at the heart of rivalry among nation-states.

None of this resonates for the World War III-alarmists. In their view, the drive to war is an imminent characteristic, not of rivalry among nation-states for economic advantage in an anarchic international order, but finds its source instead in an evil inherent in one nation-state alone, the United States. China and Russia, though capitalist societies themselves, have been liberated by the alarmists’ magical thinking from the capitalist imperatives that hold US society in thrall and drive it to try to prevail in economic competition with other states by using violence. We’re asked to believe—despite Russia’s attempt by means of war to topple the government in Ukraine, and despite Russia’s ongoing violent predations against its neighbor— that the United States is the only state that uses force to achieve its goals.

If Marxists of the past looked for the origins of war in economics, the World War III-alarmists look for the origins of war in a bestiary. The bestiary contains ‘the other’—the ‘other’ being the beastly rival of the heroic power with which one identifies. For the alarmists, the heroic powers, China and Russia, are also, like the ‘beast’, bourgeois powers to be sure, but ones whose capitalist ethos must be covered up lest one get it into their head to take up the Marxist view that inter-state conflict is often inter-capitalist rivalry for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, and strategic advantage.

So it is that from the day Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, an infantry of propagandists has spun the silly tale that capitalist Russia is the socialist Soviet Union redivivus.  Honestly, I don’t know whether these people are morons or just scoundrels prepared to utter any sort of nonsense to rally the credulous to their side. Or is it simply a reflection of a human frailty expressed in the observation that if seeing is believing it’s also true that believing is seeing? If you desperately want to believe that Russia is a heroic state, you see it as the continuation of the USSR. If you want to believe that socialism has a great power as its champion, you see China as socialist.

Meanwhile, the self-declared pro-Beijing propagandists who make up The Friends of Socialist China, have taken on the self-defeating task of proving that China, home to an almost complete list of the world’s largest capitalist enterprises—a country where most production is in private hands, and even where it isn’t, is still based on the appropriation of the surplus produced by commodified labor—that this China, appearances aside, is really a socialist state. How do they prove this? They don’t. Indeed, they don’t even try.  As Tesla’s Elon Musk, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and Apple’s Tim Cook traipse to China to be wined and dined by Xi Jinping and showered with tax breaks, subsidies, and access to cheap commodified labor, the Friends merely say that China has lifted numberless people out of poverty, therefore, it is socialist. By this definition, the United States, whose government also wines and dines Musk, Dimon, and Cook, is a socialist state and always has been, for its people are considerably richer than the Chinese. Indeed, the United States, whose millions were raised out of poverty long ago and to a spectacular height, must be uber-socialist.

To shift the discussion of China and socialism from the field of fantasy to one of sober reflection, a case can be made that China is not socialist now, but is being guided toward socialism by the visible hand of a communist party that aspires to achieve socialism at some time in the future, but must use capitalism to build the means of production to a high degree first. And so, Beijing caters to capitalists in order to build the economy of plenty it requires as the basis of a socialist economy of plenty, one to be embedded in a state that is technologically and militarily advanced enough to survive as a socialist state in the face of the anti-socialist hostility of the United States. Fair enough. But this still presents a problem. No matter how genuine the CPC’s commitment to socialism is, China remains today a capitalist society, transiting the bridge to socialism, but not over it, shaped by the same imperatives of profit-making, exploitation of labor, and capital accumulation that shape every other capitalist society. China can’t opt out of labor exploitation, forebear from competing for markets, or decline to secure access to vital raw materials that can only be obtained abroad, without opting out of the bridge it says it’s crossing to socialism. When we talk of conflict between the United States and China it is therefore perfectly legitimate to talk of competition between two states driven by common capitalist imperatives. The fact that Beijing may aspire at some point to achieve a socialist future for China, doesn’t mean that its interaction with the world today is not capitalist driven; it very much is.

How do we know that the Communist Party of China is really leading Chinese society over a capitalist bridge to socialism, and that China’s future is not just one of more capitalism? We don’t, and won’t, unless China actually arrives at the promised land it says is its eventual destination. Is there reason to doubt that the CPC has really set China on the path to socialism? Beijing’s goals—rebuilding China as a great empire, or ‘civilization’ in the preferred language of China-boosters; overcoming China’s century of humiliation; promoting the spread of Confucianism—appear to be more nationalist than Marxist.  Socialism with Chinese characteristics (if China were truly socialist, the modifier ‘with Chinese characteristics’ would be unnecessary) turns out to be the grafting of Marxism onto China’s very un-Marxist culture, and not the other way around. The CPC has taken all recognizable aspects of Marxism and drown them in a sea of Sinicism and capitalist development. Only a Marxist lexicon remains, but the meanings of its words have been turned on their heads. The question of whether Beijing genuinely foresees a future of socialism for China, or simply employs an empty Marxist rhetoric to suggest a continuity between Mao and the China of today, is sub judice. For the moment, however, the reality is that China is a capitalist society and not a socialist one, a fact the CPC, unlike the Friends of Socialist China, concedes.  If capitalism pushes nation-states to war, or at least makes war between them more likely, then it is capitalism that is making war between China and the United States more likely. It’s not some flaw of US society, an inborn tendency to worship Mars that has somehow failed to find purchase in Chinese and Russian society, that fuels tension among these states.

To be sure, capitalist competition is not the only catalyst for war. If its citizens are to live at a high level of prosperity, befitting a socialism of plenty, a socialist China of the future, if one emerges, will need to secure access to vital resources it does not have at home. The necessity of obtaining inputs indispensable to the provision of a socialist society of plenty may drive China to employ the threatened or actual use of violence against other states that have the inputs China requires but not the will to furnish them on agreeable terms. Indeed, we can glimpse a hint of this already, in China’s attempt to bully its South China Sea neighbors into acceding to the nine-dash line marking out China’s claim to the lion’s share of the sea’s territory and resources. Socialism in a world in which humanity remains divided into nation-states may still be a world of inter-state violence.

It may be argued that inasmuch as the United States possesses the means of violence to a far greater degree than either Russia or China, that Washington is more likely to use violence to try to get its way in competitions with its rivals. This is indeed true. But the United States can go only so far. If North Korea, with its rudimentary nuclear arsenal can deter the United States from giving it a bloody nose—the term for a limited military strike on the East Asian country considered and later dismissed by the Trump administration—imagine how much more consequential in staying US violence are the much more powerful nuclear deterrents of Russia and China.

The possession by Beijing and Moscow of a sizeable military nuclear apparatus limits US freedom of action. Moreover, the fact that the United States possesses a greater capability for the use of violence to win competitions with its rivals, does not mean that its rivals are not driven by the same capitalist competition or won’t use violence themselves when they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. Circumstances favor the United States at the moment, but circumstances may change and Beijing may, in the future, find itself with a greater means of violence than Washington. States will use whatever advantage lies at hand to win competitions. There is no reason to believe that were it the militarily superior state, that China wouldn’t behave as the United States does today. The cause of war is not to be found in the character of nation-states themselves, but in the character of the international and capitalist systems and the competition among states that is inherent in these systems.

Additionally, it should be pointed out that the underdog status of China and Russia in relation to the United States does not mean that either state is exempt from the capitalist imperatives that drive the United States. US rivals have simply been dealt a less favorable hand in the capitalist game, but the game is the same for all. Dealt a hand as favorable as that of the United States, China and Russia would behave no differently than their more powerful rival conducts itself today. Anyone who believes that a better hand for China and Russia, and a less favorable one for the United States, will change the nature of the game—this is the hope of the apostles of multipolarity—is in the grips of a delusion. The game is the problem; not the fact that one player has been dealt, by geography, history, and sheer contingency, the better cards.      

To return to the World War III-alarmists. The world may be heading to World War III, or it may not be, just as the US economy may be heading for a soft landing, or not. We can speculate, but no one, no matter the depth of their prognostic hubris, has any reliable insight into whether the present is pregnant with a world war. Danny Haiphong, and propagandists like him, haven’t a clue whether world war is imminent, but they would like others to believe it is, and that, more significantly, owing to the actions of their hated United States in relation to their beloved Russia and cherished China, that world war lurks menacingly on the horizon. Danny and his fellow spin artists treasure Russia and prize China, and at the same time, revile the United States, because in the great contest for opportunities to exploit labor, the former are underdogs and the latter is not. Love of the bourgeois underdog is not a sound foundation for politics—and certainly not for a socialist politics—any more than is love of the bourgeois top-dog.  

Seven years before the outbreak of the first real world war, a resolution on militarism and international conflict, was prepared for the Second International by August Bebel, with amendments by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov. The resolution clearly lays out the Marxist perspective on matters that resonate strongly today.

“Wars between capitalist states are as a rule the consequence of their competition in the world market, for every state is eager not only to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones, principally by the subjugation of foreign nations and the confiscation of their lands.”

“The outbreak of wars is further promoted by the national prejudices systematically cultivated in the interest of the ruling classes, in order to divert the masses of the proletariat from their class duties and international solidarity.”

“In case war should break out … [socialists] shall be bound to intervene for its speedy termination, and to employ all their forces to use the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”

Eight years later, one year into the war, with most socialists having renounced their pledge of proletarian solidarity and aligned with one or other of the bourgeois powers in the conflict, Lenin was compelled to issue a reminder to socialists—one that is as relevant today as it was then. “It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robber to rob the older and fatter bandits, but the socialists must utilize the struggle between the bandits to overthrow them all.”

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Speeches About A Nice Little Peace

By Stephen Gowans

February 16, 2023

The United States provoked Russia into a war by crossing Moscow’s redline when it encroached on Russia’s sphere of influence in Ukraine.

That’s the judgement of Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA operations officer and vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Council, now an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

“Washington denies the validity of any Russian ‘sphere of influence’ in Ukraine while the US itself still maintains its own strong sphere of influence throughout Latin America,” writes Fuller in a recent blog post. “And can you imagine a Chinese military base in Mexico to bolster Mexican sovereignty?”

Fuller’s analysis is sound. Powerful states preside over spheres of influence and don’t like other states encroaching on what they regard as their turf. Washington’s failure to respect Russia’s sphere of influence in Ukraine touched off a war.

But problems arise when Fuller’s “is” statements become others’ “ought” statements.

The fact that large powers have spheres of influence doesn’t mean that spheres of influence are acceptable. It’s not alright for Russia to dominate its periphery because the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere (and much more). On the contrary, it’s unacceptable for either country to maintain spheres of influence.

Others advance a related argument: The key to world peace is mutual respect among great powers for their respective informal empires. People who favor a multipolar world—one divided among a few large countries—are guided by this thinking.  But a world divided into multiple spheres of influence is the very essence of imperialism, at least as understood by J.A. Hobson, Rudolph Hilferding, Nicolai Bukharin, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg—people who fought against the imperialism that preceded, and led to, World War I, and inspired the anti-imperialist movement that followed.  

To these thinkers, war was inevitable because the world was multipolar and the expansionary nature of capitalism meant that multiple powers would be forever jostling for profit-making opportunities in a world completely divided into spheres of influence. The competition would inevitably lead to war.

Unlike today’s self-styled anti-imperialists, the aforementioned thinkers tried to understand the roots of imperialism, in order to eradicate it. If the point of understanding the world is to change it, as Marx said, today’s ‘anti-imperialists’ seek to change the world without first understanding it.  

Revolutionary socialist thinkers believed that the solution to the problem of imperialism, and the wars that attend it, reposed not in peace programs, pacifism, and disarmament campaigns—dismissed contemptuously by Lenin as “simply running away from unpleasant reality, not fighting it.” Instead, it meant changing what made countries go to war.

The idea that great powers are capable of respecting other powers’ spheres of interest is naïve. Large states are under the sway of powerful capitalists, whose survival depends on their ability to access opportunities to exploit labor, land, markets, and natural resources in competition with capitalists represented by other states. Respecting other states’ spheres of influence means turning your back on profit-making opportunities. What capitalist state is going to do that if it has the power to challenge a rival?

Spheres of influence exist because capitalism—an expansionary system—inevitably breaches national borders. And just as much as capitalism compels great powers to breach their own borders to establish spheres of influence, so too does it drive them to breach their own spheres of influence to encroach upon those of rival powers.

One might as well ask rival corporations to respect the others’ market shares as exhort large powers to respect the others’ informal empires.

In the war in Ukraine, there are two questions critical to the origins of the conflict.

  • Will Ukraine be integrated into the Russian economy or the European economy? Russia’s war on Ukraine is intended to keep as much of Ukraine as possible in the Russian sphere and out of the European (and by extension, US) sphere.
  • Will Europe’s economic ties to Russia be weakened (especially in oil and gas) in order to more fully integrate a Europe that occasionally flirts with the idea of autonomy into the US economy? So far, the answer is yes.

Underlying both questions is a single, deeper, question. Whose investors, Russia’s or the United States’, will profit most from the opportunities Ukraine, and, more broadly, the continent as a whole, offer for capital accumulation? In the capitalist struggle for profits, which countries’ investors will come out ahead?

Against this backdrop, Lenin’s contempt for the pious expressions of benevolence that form the stock in trade of what he called “the propaganda of peace” becomes understandable. Against the profits of the few, the voices of the many for peace count for nothing in the halls of power. Roger Waters’ plea to the UN Security Council for peace, sponsored by Russia, fosters the illusion that the world can be changed by “speaking truth to power.” But as Noam Chomsky once remarked, power already knows the truth. Moreover, “power” doesn’t care what you, or I, or Rogers Waters think.

Waters has taken the side of Russia, which is why the Russian embassy to the UN asked him to address the council. The musician has come to his position on the grounds that (1) Biden is a bigger gangster than Putin and (2) the United States provoked Russia. Both of these statements are true, but neither justify Russia’s aggression, neither provide tenable grounds to side with Russia, and siding with Russia isn’t going to deliver the world from the horrors of war.

Waters is like a person who deplores the violence of boxing, and, after attending a boxing match, blames the ensuing violence on the boxer who threw the first punch. The musician remains to be instructed in the reality that boxing is a violent sport, and that if you want to end the violence of boxing, you have to end boxing, not plead with the boxers to be nicer fellows.

Committed to the idea that capitalism makes war inevitable in a world parceled out among great powers into spheres of influence, Lenin argued that the key to ending war, lay, not in siding with the weaker power (the lesser gangster in Waters’ terms), but in replacing the capitalism that entangles states in a rivalry for economic advantage—that is, in striking at the root of the problem. Radical, from Latin radix, radic- ‘root’, aptly describes Lenin’s approach. Sadly, radicalism has few apostles nowadays.

Were Lenin here today to witness Waters’ Russian-sponsored plea for peace to the UN Security Council, he might summon words little different from those he uttered in 1916. “The German, the English, and the Russian governments only stand to gain from speeches in the socialist camp about a nice little peace, because …  they instil belief in the possibility of such a peace under the present governments.”

Peace, Lenin said on another occasion, “must be sought for and fought for, not in … a reactionary utopia of a non-imperialist capitalism, not in a league of equal nations under capitalism,” both of which he saw as illusions, but in a radical solution to the problem.

The horrors of war will not be eliminated by speeches about a nice little peace, nor by raging against one war machine and not another, and nor by failing to recognize that the war machine is capitalism (and not only the US expression of it.)

Neither will war and all its terrors be ended by practice untethered from a coherent theory of war.

Can France still afford a retirement age of 62?

January 20, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

French president Emmanuel Macron wants to raise his country’s retirement age from its current 62 to 64.  According to the French Jupiter, the retirement age must increase, if France is to avoid higher taxes and growing debt.

The Wall Street Journal thinks he has a point.

Reporter Noemie Bisserbe writes that “as people live longer and the population grows older, the ratio of workers to retirees has decreased, putting the system under growing stress and forcing the government to increase its spending on pensions.”

Macron’s move, then, appears to be demanded by demographics. Except it isn’t. The argument Bisserbe offers for the assault on French workers is a Malthusian fallacy.

Malthus feared that the decreasing ratio of arable land to mouths to feed would lead to mass starvation. He reasoned that because the amount of arable land is finite, that as the population grew, the strain on a society’s ability to feed its people would increase.

Needless to say, Malthus was wrong. The world’s population kept growing, but so too did the supply of food—at an even greater rate. The future beheld not mass starvation, but growing plenty. Why? Because, owing to advances in science, technology, and technique, agriculture become stunningly more productive.

Just as agricultural productivity grew, so too did industrial productivity. The secular trend in France’s national income per person is upward, spurred by gains in productivity. That means that while the ratio of retirees to workers is increasing, France grows ever wealthier, and is likely to continue to grow wealthier as advances in science, technology, and technique make workers more productive. Increasing productivity easily offsets the decreasing ratio of workers to retirees, just as growing agricultural productivity offsets the decreasing ratio of land to people.

But here’s the trouble. For decades, productivity gains have been monopolized by the wealthy few. According to the OECD, since the turn of the century “the aggregate growth of real wages was significantly slower than that of aggregate productivity,” including in France.

Data from the St Louis Fed shows that “For a long time, the share of payments to labour relative to total payments to all factors of production was relatively stable. In recent decades, the share of payments to labour has been trending down in many countries,” France among them.

 It’s as if all the increased food produced by advances in agricultural productivity was set aside for the sole enjoyment of the rich, while the government distributes the remaining fixed amount of food among a growing population of workers and retirees.

Malthus’s argument makes sense, if you ignore advances in productivity. Likewise, Bisserbe’s explanation make sense, if you ignore the reality that French workers are being denied the benefits of growing productivity.

What’s Wrong with the Argument that Russia Isn’t Imperialist? A Critique of Desai et al’s “The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism”

January 19, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

….peace must be sought for and fought for, not in … a reactionary utopia of a non-imperialist capitalism, not in a league of equal nations under capitalism, but in the future, in the socialist revolution of the proletariat. — Lenin, The Peace Program, 1916

Abstract

Two years after Russia annexed Crimea, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky argued in “The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism” that while the term imperialism continued to be an appropriate description of the pattern of Western actions, it was not so for that of Russian ones. In their paper, the trio drew on thinking about imperialism that comported with the views of Rudolph Hilferding and Nicolai Bukharan, popularized by V.I. Lenin, that imperialism is competition among capitalist states to impose their respective wills on other territories and populations in response to the needs of their capitalist class. However, they abandoned this thinking when they set out to answer the question: Is Russia imperialist? Rather than following the Hilferding-Bukharin view to its logical end, an exercise that would have identified Russia as a participant in a system of rivalry among capitalist states for economic territory, they constructed a scale of capitalist powers from weakest to strongest and then drew an arbitrary dividing line to separate imperialist capitalist states from a class of non-imperialist ones, which included Russia. The approach, based on the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, conformed to no external standard, except the authors’ acknowledged desire to arrive at a characterization of Russia that avoided demonizing Moscow or giving “theoretical dignity to the ambitions of US-policy makers.” In doing so, the authors went to the opposite extreme of offering an understanding of the world that dovetailed nicely with Russia’s denial of its imperialist aims and gave theoretical dignity to the ambitions of Russian-policy makers. The role of Marxist scholars is not to act as court philosophers for one bourgeoisie in its confrontation with another, as Desai and her coauthors did, but, as Lenin argued, to assist in the project of using the struggle between competing capitalist classes to overthrow all of them.

Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky wrote “The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism,” [1] in 2016, before Russia, with the aim of installing a puppet government in Kyiv, invaded Ukraine, but after Moscow annexed Crimea. Their intention was to argue that the latter event did not mark Russia as an imperialist aggressor.

While a major aim of their paper was to show that Russia cannot be characterized as imperialist, at no point did the authors define imperialism. While they offered brief, superficial sketches of various Marxist theories of imperialism, they did not commit to any definition of the phenomenon, but all the same, a broad definition lurked within some of their arguments. Their failure to provide a clear definition of imperialism at the outset of their paper was highly problematic.

The word imperialism means different things to different people. Marx and Engels used it to refer to the spread of capitalism to non-capitalist territories. Because they regarded capitalism as the bridge to socialism, and progressive relative to less dynamic modes of production, they viewed imperialism favorably. Speaking of Britain’s role in India, Marx remarked that “whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history,” for she established in India the preconditions for an advance to socialism. [2]    

This contrasts with the way imperialism is understood today. As Bill Warren argued in Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, “Current popular usage has tended to equate modern imperialism with the prevailing relationships of domination and exploitation between advanced capitalist and underdeveloped economies.” [3]

Echoing Warren, John Weeks noted that,

“The most common use of the term is in narrow reference to the economic and political relationship between advanced capitalist countries and backward countries. Since the second world war the word imperialism has become synonymous with the oppression and exploitation of weak, impoverished countries by powerful ones.” [4]

While the current understanding is similar to that of Marx and Engels in emphasizing the relationship between the metropole and periphery, it is different in condemning imperialism where Marx and Engels welcomed it (even if they did acknowledge its crimes.) “Many of the writers who present such an interpretation cite Lenin as a theoretical authority,” noted Weeks, while pointing out that this view is traceable to Karl Kautsky and not Lenin who, in fact, vehemently opposed it. [5]

Rudolph Hilferding, Nicolai Bukharan, and VI Lenin viewed imperialism as a system of rivalry among capitalist powers for economic territory. In their account, the world had been completely divided into colonies and spheres of influence, and the only way capitalist powers could expand under the lash of the capitalist compulsion for accumulation was to encroach on the economic space of other powers. That space included not only the territory of agrarian states, but the national territory of industrialized powers themselves.

In contrast, Kautsky argued that advanced capitalist states might give up competition for cooperation in exploiting the periphery. Imperialism, understood at the time as rivalry among capitalist states, would be succeeded by ultra-imperialism, a common front of capitalist states against the periphery. It is surely this view of imperialism—in contemporary terms, one of G7 countries, led by the United States, jointly enslaving and exploiting the rest of the world—that is generally understood by the term ‘imperialism’ today. [6] In Lenin’s time, the very suggestion that capitalist states could settle into a Kautsky-style ultra-imperialism aroused vehement hostility from the left.” For Lenin and his colleagues, including Stalin, who railed against this view as late as 1952 [7] “inter-imperialist rivalry leading to war was the very essence of imperialism.” [8] Thus, while many Marxists often cite Lenin as the source of the idea that imperialism is the exploitation of the periphery by metropolitan powers, “Lenin sharply criticized Kautsky for defining imperialism in this way.” [9] As Lenin argued,

“The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agricultural regions but even highly industrialized regions, because (1) the fact that the world is already divided up obliges those contemplating a new division to reach out for any kind of territory, and (2) because an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between a number of great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory.” [10]

Russian propagandists allude to the current understanding of imperialism as Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism when they invoke the concept of the “golden billion,” a reference to a US-led alliance of high-income countries representing a population of roughly one billion of the world’s total population of eight billion people, who are presented as jointly oppressing the remaining seven-eighths of humanity. The view also lurks in the concept of multipolarity, the idea that the poorest seven-eighths of humanity, led by China and Russia, is rising to contest the hegemony of G7 ultra-imperialism. The multipolarity theory casts Russia and China, not as capitalist powers that compete with G7 states for economic territory, driven by the needs of their own capitalist classes, but as leaders of a great movement of emancipation against Western ultra-imperialism. The argument resurrects the theory advanced by Tokyo in the 1930s that Japan’s competition with the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands for economic territory in East Asia and the Pacific, represented, not Lenin’s view of inter-imperialist rivalry, but Japan leading the East to challenge its thralldom to the ultra-imperialism of the West. At the same time, it should be noted that the idea of the “golden billion” and the theory of multipolarity significantly depart from Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism in arbitrarily counterposing China and Russia and other emerging capitalist states against the G7, as Japan in the 1930s, a significant capitalist state, counterposed itself against Western capitalism. From Kautsky’s perspective, we would expect that Russia and China, as significant capitalist states, would combine with their North American, European, and Japanese counterparts to jointly oppress the periphery, rather than compete against G7 states. Instead, exponents of the “golden billion” and multipolarity views portray capitalist Russia and capitalist China as imperialist Japan portrayed itself in the 1930s—as champions of peoples oppressed by an ultra-imperialist coalition of US-led bourgeois states.

Other Marxists, citing Lenin, understand imperialism as a stage of capitalism, specifically its monopoly stage, in contrast to what Lenin understood as a non-imperialist period of free competition preceding it. To these Marxists, imperialism is a system of rivalry among capitalist states, rather than a set of characteristics that distinguish imperialist states from non-imperialist ones. They make the argument that when Lenin presented his now famous list of five imperialist characteristics in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1917, that his intention was to describe the landscape of the latest stage of capitalism, not to propose a set of criteria by which to distinguish capitalist imperialist states from capitalist non-imperialist states. Indeed, it is abundantly evident in an earlier (and more clearly written) 1915 version of the now widely misinterpreted list that Lenin had in mind the features of a system.

The present war is of an imperialist character. This war is the outcome of the conditions of an epoch when capitalism has reached the highest stage of its development; when the greatest significance is attached not only to the export of commodities, but also to the export of capital; when the combination of production units in cartels, and the internationalization of economic life, has assumed considerable dimensions; when colonial politics have brought about an almost total apportionment of the globe among the colonial powers; when the productive forces of world capitalism have outgrown the limited boundaries of national and state divisions; when objective conditions for the realization of Socialism have perfectly ripened. [11]

There is no doubt that Lenin is describing “the conditions of an epoch,” not the characteristics of individual countries. He is not, for example, saying that countries that export more commodities than capital are not imperialist, as some people believe.

If the epoch is imperialist, is the concept of a non-imperialist capitalist state even admissable in Lenin’s view? Lenin saw the world economy as an integrated system, a network of interrelationships in which all states are entangled. The monopoly character of the system compels its capitalist states to compete for raw materials, markets, investment opportunities, and strategic territory. The competition creates multiple frictions that tend to escalate to war. There are no exemptions—no capitalist states which are not driven to expand their economic territory; no capitalist states which operate above or outside the competitive fray. Some states thrive in the competition while others are out-competed and fail, but those that fail have not elected to sit out the competition as pacific, non-imperialist states; they’ve just been bested by stronger states.

None of this is to endorse every aspect of Lenin’s theory. There is much about it that is problematic, including the fact that it’s not even his theory. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which many Marxists revere as Lenin’s masterwork on the subject, is only a “popular outline” of Hilferding’s Finance Capital and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, supplemented with ideas from John Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study. Lenin’s unique contribution to the theory of imperialism was to develop a theory of the labor aristocracy and to link it to the rise of monopoly capitalism as a means of explaining the Second International’s betrayal of socialist internationalism in the First World War.

In considering Lenin’s popular outline of Hilferding’s, Bukharin’s, and Hobson’s thinking, it’s important to draw two sets of distinctions. The first is between imperialism as a phenomenon and theories of imperialism as explanations of the phenomenon. When we say “Lenin defined imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism” we confuse Lenin’s explanation of imperialism with his definition of it. Lenin wasn’t saying that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, only that monopoly explains the scramble for colonies that he believed was coincident with and driven by the emergence of monopoly. This then invites the question of exactly what phenomenon Lenin, or more precisely, Hilferding and Bukharin, were trying to explain. The answer is the intense competition among capitalist powers for economic territory that emerged with the scramble for Africa and continued into the conflagration of World War I.

The second important distinction to draw is between motive and means. A theory of imperialism should specify both the cause of the phenomenon, and how it’s carried out. It is clear in the Hilferding-Bukharin view, as outlined by Lenin, that the motive of imperialism is economic territory, to be acquired in competition with other capitalist states. The theory stumbles, however, in failing to recognize that the means by which capitalist powers integrate economic territory into their national economies is not limited to formal annexation. Gallagher and Robinson, in their article “The Imperialism of Free Trade” [12] and later in Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism [13] showed how Britain built its vast empire less by coercion and annexation and more by finding willing collaborators to collude in the integration of territories into the expanding British economy. The historians likened the British empire to an iceberg. If one looked only at the part that was visible above the surface, as they said Lenin had done, one would miss its true dimensions, the bulk of which lies below the surface and is invisible. The history of the British empire had shown that informal means of extending imperial supremacy have been preferred to direct rule. The guiding principle was: informal control, if possible; formal control, only if necessary.

Jo Grady and Chris Grocott have used the insights of Gallagher and Robinson to explore how the United States has used both formal and mainly informal methods of control to build and maintain its own empire. [14] Based on the work of Gallagher and Robinson, they argue that the break Lenin saw between a non-imperialist period of free competition and a subsequent imperialist stage of monopoly capitalism was actually a transition from an imperialist period in which mainly informal methods of control were used (and thus the imperialist character of the period was difficult to discern) and a period in which methods of formal control became necessary (and imperialism, expressed mainly in formal annexation and colonialism, became easier to see.) Formal control became necessary at about the time Hilferding, Bukharin and Lenin said that capitalism had entered a new monopoly stage. Dominated populations were beginning to bristle under the weight of informal control exercised from abroad and capitalist states were beginning to expand into territory in which willing collaborators, who could impose informal methods of control, were difficult to find. Before capitalism reached its monopoly phase, capitalist states had relied heavily on European settler populations as the willing collaborators who would integrate foreign territory into expanding metropolitan economies. Increasingly, however, the territories not yet claimed by expanding capitalist states, in Africa mainly, were ill-suited to European settlement. Willing collaborators accepted capitalist values and institutions and were keen to trade with the metropolitan centers. But these values, institutions, and this desire were alien to indigenous populations. As a consequence, formal control, though undesired, became necessary as the only feasible alternative to integrating the remaining territories of the world into expanding capitalist economies. Completing the division of the world would thus depend on the increasing use of violence.

This points out a weakness of the Hilferding-Bukharin-Lenin view. According to these theorists, two crucial things happened in the late nineteenth century. “The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers” was completed, as Lenin observed in Imperialism. And capitalism entered a new stage, that of monopoly, which transformed capitalism from peaceful competition to imperialism. But if capitalism had only now become imperialist, how do we account for the fact that the world had already been divided among the capitalist powers? Grady and Grocott argue that capitalism has always been imperialist. What Lenin called peaceful competition was actually competition among capitalist states to integrate the world’s territory into their expanding economies largely by informal, i.e., peaceful, means. In Lenin’s highest stage of capitalism, competition among capitalist states for economic territory carried on as it always had, except that now it was pursued mainly through violent means, because the peaceful methods of the previous period, the imperialism of free trade as Gallagher and Robinson called it, was either breaking down under the rebellion of subject peoples or was no long suitable for expansion into the territory that remained. In this latter sense, the word “imperialist” becomes synonymous with violent expansion. The important point is that it is not monopoly that makes capitalism imperialist, and it was not monopoly that forced capitalist states to use violence in the service of expansion; instead, imperialism, in the sense of competition among capitalist states for economic territory, is always present in capitalism. The motive, rooted in capitalism itself, doesn’t change; only the methods do. Each capitalist is a threat to every other capitalist, and each capitalist state is a threat to every other capitalist state. To counter the threat, capitalists and capitalist states need to expand the territory over which they have influence and control. The necessity of self-preservation forces them into a competition for economic territory. They use both informal (peaceful) and formal (violent) means of projecting their influence, with a preference, however, for informal control where the circumstances allow.

To some Marxists, then, imperialism means the spread of capitalism to non-capitalist territory as a desirable development; to others, the exploitation of the periphery by the metropole, either as the outcome of a rivalry among capitalist states for economic territory or as a collaboration among capitalist powers in a Kautskyist ultra-imperialism; to still others, imperialism is the struggle among great powers to redivide a world that has already been divided into colonies and spheres of influence. The trouble with arguing, as Desai et al have done, that Russian actions cannot be characterized as imperialist, is that imperialism means different things to different people. In what sense of the word ‘imperialism’ is Russia not imperialist?

At two points in their paper, Desai and her coauthors define imperialism indirectly as a state imposing its capitalists’ will on other territories and populations.

  • “It is never impossible that the contradictions of capitalism will lead the Russian state to seek resolutions for them … beyond its borders by using the means at its disposal including its international power.”
  • “…the Russian state can be used to impose its capitalists’ will on other territories and populations.”

Thus, imperialism, in this formulation, is the process of a state imposing its will on other territories and populations. Its motive is to protect and expand the interests of its national capitalists beyond the state’s borders. The definition has two parts: A definition proper: The imposition of the will of a state on other territories and populations. And an explanation: States impose their will on other territories and people in response to the needs of their capitalist class. It’s clear from this definition and other points they made that Desai et al viewed imperialism as capitalist driven. They referred to “capitalist drivers of conflict,” of an intimate connection between capitalism and imperialism (“the left has long recognized that capitalism and imperialism have always been intimately linked”), and criticized what they describe as the Schumpeterian view that capitalism does not need imperialism, thereby implying in their criticism that capitalism does, to the contrary, need imperialism.

Desai and her coauthors also indirectly advanced a view of imperialism as a system of rivalry among capitalist states. They argued, contra Kautsky, that “competition between capitalist states never disappears,” and that capitalist states always face the “threat that a rival capitalist power will step up to the plate and take their place.”

Consistent with these arguments, they could have defined imperialism at the outset of their paper as competition among capitalist states to impose their respective wills on other territories and populations in response to the needs of their capitalist class. Having undertaken this basic task, they could have then proceeded to address their main question: Is Russia imperialist? However, had they done this, they would have immediately run into difficulty. If imperialism is competition among capitalist states for economic territory, then the question itself becomes nonsensical. The only question that makes sense within the context of this definition is: Does Russia participate in the system of competition among capitalist states driven by capitalist needs? Since according to Desai et al, “Russia remains capitalist in a meaningful sense,” the obvious answer is yes. All states that are “capitalist in a meaningful sense” must be imperialist since all capitalist states are driven by the inner workings of capitalism to compete for profit-making opportunities anywhere in the world, and all capitalist states are therefore driven to impose their will on foreign territories and populations to secure opportunities for their capitalist class at the expense of other capitalist classes.

Russia’s imposing its will on other territory and peoples in annexing Crimea (and subsequently attempting  to impose its will on the remainder of Ukraine by dint of an invasion) meets the trio’s first order definition of imperialism, as the process of a state imposing its will on other territory and populations. Even if the question remains moot as to whether these actions were undertaken in response to the need of Russian capitalists to access Ukraine’s profit-making opportunities at the expense of European and North American capitalists, it remains the case that Russia’s actions in Ukraine are imperialist by the definition Desai et al adopted indirectly of a state imposing its will on foreign territory and populations.

Having developed this line of thought, the trio began quickly to backpedal as they homed in on their main question of whether Russia is imperialist. Where initially they argued that capitalism and imperialism are intimately connected and that capitalism needs imperialism, they shifted tact midway through their paper to argue that imperialism is only a possible outcome of capitalism and not an inevitable one. “It is never impossible that the contradictions of capitalism will lead the Russian state to seek resolutions for them … beyond its borders by using the means at its disposal including its international power,” an awkward way of saying that Russia might act imperialistically, but then again it might not. In effect, they fashioned an escape hatch through which to smuggle Russia from the category of ‘imperialist’— a category to which the Hilferding-Bukharin argument they were developing would inevitably assign Russia.

So, why can Russia not be characterized as imperialist? While Desai et al conceded that Russian is capitalist, that capitalism needs imperialism, and that there is an intimate connection between capitalism and imperialism, they concluded that Russia is not imperialist for the following reasons:

  1. The EU represents a greater threat to Ukraine sovereignty than does Russia.
  2. There are domestic political constraints on the “extent to which the Russian state can be used to impose its capitalists’ will on other territories and populations.”
  3. Western powers are stronger. Compared to the West, Russia’s capacity to undertake foreign adventures is tiny.
  4. “While Russian capitalists may be inclined to use their state in order to project their power outwards, the ability of the Russian state to perform this role is constrained…both by the large number of other powers of greater or equal economic weight, and by the pull which their capitalists exert in the heart of the Russian economy.”
  5. Russia’s capitalist holdings abroad are small in comparison to other countries.

Let’s examine each argument in turn.

1) The EU represents a greater threat to Ukraine sovereignty than does Russia. This can be dismissed immediately as irrelevant. The threat posed by the EU to the sovereignty of Ukraine has no bearing on the question of whether Russia also poses a threat to the sovereignty of Ukraine, or the question of whether Russia has encroached on Ukraine’s sovereignty, as it unquestionably did when it annexed Crimea and also did later when it mounted an invasion of Ukraine‘s remaining territory with the intention of establishing a puppet regime.

2) There are domestic political constraints on the “extent to which the Russian state can be used to impose its capitalists’ will on other territories and populations.” There are political domestic and other constraints on the extent to which any capitalist state can be used to impose its capitalists’ will on other territories and populations. Constraints are not unique to Russia, and if they are more numerous or stronger in the case of Russia, without conceding they are, this would represent a difference of degree, not type. The reality that political constraints can affect the actions of the US state does not negate the United States’ imperialist character. Nor should it negate Russia’s. It should also be noted that in pointing to constraints which limit the extent to which the Russian state can be used to act imperialistically, Desai and her coauthors conceded that the Russian state can be used imperialistically. The fact that it had been used imperialistically to annex Crimea, and has since been used to attempt to impose Moscow’s will by means of an invasion on the remaining parts of Ukraine’s territory, demonstrates empirically that what the Russia state can do, it does do.

3) Western powers are stronger. Compared to the West, Russia’s capacity to undertake foreign adventures is tiny. This argument confuses quantity with quality. All states differ in degree. The question is, do they differ in type? Fascist Italy’s capacity to undertake foreign adventures compared to that of the USA and Britain was tiny. That didn’t mean that Fascist Italy wasn’t an imperialist aggressor. Desai et al may just as well have said that pregnant women in their final trimester are much bigger than pregnant women in their first trimester, therefore women in their first trimester are not pregnant.

More to the point, regardless of Russia’s capacity to undertake foreign adventures, it has undertaken foreign adventures, and had at the time Desai et al wrote their paper. It had annexed Crimea. Russia has since demonstrated that its more modest capacity to undertake foreign adventures compared to its Western rivals hasn’t prevented it from undertaking foreign adventures in Ukraine or committing the supreme international crime.

4) While Russian capitalists may be inclined to use their state in order to project their power outwards, various factors prevent this from happening. Again, this totally ignores the reality that despite the constraint on it, the Russian state projected its power outward into Ukraine when it annexed Crimea. Its invasion of the remaining parts of Ukraine is nothing but the projection of Russian power beyond its borders with the aim of imposing Moscow’s will on a foreign territory and population.

5) Russia’s capitalist holdings abroad are small in comparison to other countries. This is a return to the argument that Russia cannot be imperialist, despite its acknowledged capitalist character, despite the acknowledged intimate connection between capitalism and imperialism, and despite the acknowledged inclination of Russian capitalists to use their state to project power outwards, because Russia is a smaller capitalist power than the United States. Again, Fascist Italy and Shintoist Japan were much smaller capitalist powers that the United States and Britain in the 1930s, but few people any more would say that they weren’t imperialist aggressors (although there were people at the time, who did.)

The sum and substance of the Desai et al claim that Russia is not imperialist was this: G7 countries are imperialist. G7 countries are stronger economically and militarily than Russia. Therefore, Russia is not imperialist. In effect, the trio conceptually organized capitalist powers along a scale from the strongest to weakest. They then arbitrarily established a cut-off that divided capitalist states into two classes: imperialist and non-imperialist. The dividing line placed Russia on the non-imperialist side and G7 countries on the other side, or to put it another way, Desai and her coauthors affixed the label ‘imperialist’ to the G7 countries and affixed the label “non-imperialist’ to Russia. This approach broke fundamentally with the Hilferding-Bukharin-Lenin model to which they had earlier paid homage. It did so by creating a category of capitalist states that are non-imperialist—that is, states that are outside the system of rivalry for economic territory that is driven by the capitalist compulsion to accumulate. If capitalism and imperialism are intimately connected, and capitalism needs imperialism, how can a capitalist state not be imperialist? But even if we accept, arguendo, that this break is legitimate, an obvious question arises: At what point does the hill become a mountain? When does Russia become strong enough economically and militarily to pass the imperialist threshold? When would a pregnant woman become pregnant enough for Desai and her coauthors to call her pregnant? “Russia,” they concluded, “has a long way to go to enter the select world league of imperialist robber nations.” But they were silent on the criteria one should use to determine when a state had joined this select group. Refusal to set a target in advance of analysis is the fundamental characteristic of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The Texas sharpshooter fires his gun at the side of a barn. He then draws a circle around the bullet holes, and declares the circle the target. This is the crux of the Desai et al argument. They define imperialism post facto to exclude Russia. Thus, they fill 19 pages of print with an argument that reduces to just nine words: Russia is not imperialist because we say it isn’t. 

To sum up to this point, Desai et al embarked on a project of deciding whether Russia is imperialist without first defining what they meant by imperialism. At no point did they say either that “This is what we consider imperialism to be,” or that “This is the benchmark against which we’ll judge whether Russia is imperialist.” Instead, while they paid lip service to the thinking of Hilferding, Bukharin, and Lenin, which sees imperialism as intimately connected to capitalism, they introduced a concept foreign to the thinking of these Marxist theorists, namely, that imperialism is only a possible and not an inevitable feature of capitalism. As such, some capitalist countries can be imperialist and others non-imperialist. (In this, they shared the thinking of Karl Kautsky, who viewed imperialism as a policy choice, not a necessary outcome of capitalism.) Their decision as to which capitalist states are not imperialist reduced to: Is the state strong enough to impose its will on other territories and populations? If not, it is not imperialist. Hence, rather than seeing imperialism as a competition among capitalist states for economic territory whose tensions can escalate to war, Desai et al constructed a classification which divides the universe of capitalist states into two categories: large capitalist states, which are labelled imperialist, and smaller ones, which are labelled non-imperialist. Size is important so far as it is correlated with the ability of a state to dominate others. Since large capitalist states are more likely to have the means to impose their will on other states, they are labelled imperialist, while those states which lack this ability are called non-imperialist. But even by this highly restrictive definition of imperialism, Russia must be classified as imperialist. In imposing its will on Ukraine, first by annexing Crimea in 2014, and by launching a general invasion in February 2022, Russia demonstrated that it has the capacity to dominate foreign territory and populations. Therefore, even by the authors’ own highly restrictive definition of imperialism, Russia is imperialist.

While spreading nonsense about Russia, the trio also spent a good deal of time articulating an equally risible view of China. They created a false dichotomy between the neoliberal policies of the West and “China and other emerging economies,” as if China operates at a remove from the US economy and its neoliberal policies. The shift in “the world’s center of gravity away from the West and towards China and other emerging economies” of which Desai and her coauthors wrote, is little more than the integration of China and other low-income countries into G7 economies as low-wage manufacturing centers–what is called the world’s, i.e., the G7’s, factory floor. The “emerging economies” are emerging precisely because they have been integrated into the US-superintended global economy. The communist parties of China and Vietnam act as willing neoliberal collaborators in creating highly attractive investment climates for an almost complete list of the world’s largest Western capitalist enterprises, which are invited to exploit cheap and highly disciplined Eastern labor. That’s not to say that Beijing doesn’t also seek to build an economy that is independent of the G7 countries, but Desai et al completely ignore Beijing’s collaboration in the neoliberalism of the West as an important factor in China’s development. In large measure, the shift in the economic center of gravity from the West to China is nothing more than the logical working out of neoliberal policy. One could wonder on what planet Desai and her coauthors had lived for the past 40 years when they asserted that “China’s economic growth in recent decades is precisely the outcome of a consistent refusal to accommodate the Washington Consensus.” On the contrary, China’s economic growth in recent decades is precisely the outcome of a consistent willingness by Beijing to collude in the demotion of China’s land, labor, and markets to a means of gratifying the avarice of the West’s largest capitalist enterprises.

Had Desai et al an ulterior motive for arguing, against even their own very restricted post facto definition of imperialism, that Russian is not imperialist? The authors said they deplored characterizations of Russia as an imperialist aggressor because the description dovetailed “nicely with Western demonization of the Putin regime.” Their concern, they said, was that these characterizations would give “theoretical dignity to the ambitions of US-policy makers.” Yet the question of whether their analysis would give comfort to the US bourgeoisie or the Russian bourgeoisie should have awakened no apprehension in Marxist scholars whose principal concern should have been the class interests of the proletariat. What’s more, in openly deploring one possible answer to the question of whether Russia is imperialist, they, themselves, raised the question of whether political considerations guided their analysis. The evidence suggests that Desai and her coauthors entered the arena of debate, not with the intention of understanding the world as it is so it can be changed to the benefit of the proletariat, but to present an understanding of the world that dovetailed nicely with Russia’s denial of its imperialist aims and gave theoretical dignity to the ambitions of Russian-policy makers, i.e., as court philosophers of the Kremlin. In light of the authors’ admitted leanings toward Moscow in its conflict with Washington, the answer to the question posed above about how high they would set the threshold for admitting Russia into the world league of imperialist states is high enough that Russia would never enter. Indeed, we can imagine that the criteria for entry, in the hands of Desai et al, would unremittingly shift to exclude Russia as circumstances dictated. To do otherwise, would be to create a characterization of Russia that would dovetail nicely with Western vilification of the country, an outcome the court philosophers explicitly indicated they wanted to avoid. If George H. W. Bush would never apologize for America, then Desai and her colleagues will never apologize for Russia. This, along with their relying on the Texas sharpshooter fallacy to make the case that Russia isn’t imperialist, shows their analysis to be an exercise in political perjury, not Marxist scholarship. The court philosophers’ preference was to limit condemnation to Washington rather than to the bourgeois order or the capitalism of which imperialism is the necessary consequence. Not only did they absolve Russia of imperialist guilt, they absolved capitalism of imperialist guilt, describing imperialism as only a possible and not an inevitable outcome of capitalism. They are not scholars, much less Marxist ones, but merely political prize fighters for the Russian capitalist class and the bourgeois order of which it is a part.

There are four conclusions the authors might, whether by design or accident, have us draw from their pro-Moscow, pro-bourgeois argument.

  • The historical mission of the proletariat is not to bring forward the new socialist society with which the old bourgeois order is pregnant, but to support weaker bourgeois states that fight the stronger US bourgeoisie.
  • The enemy of the proletariat is not the bourgeoisie that enslaves and exploits it, but only the largest bourgeoisie, the ones with the greatest foreign capital holdings, or more specifically, foreign capital holdings greater than those of Russia and China.
  • The task of the proletariat is to side with any weaker bourgeoisie that fights the stronger US bourgeoisie.
  • The proletariat should celebrate its enslavement and exploitation so long as the enslavers’ headquarters is not Wall Street, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Paris, or London.

The pro-Russia intelligentsia, so committed to invoking Lenin as grounds for mobilizing support for Russia in Moscow’s struggle with the United States over Ukraine, is deaf to Lenin’s dictum: “It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robber to rob the older and fatter bandits, but the socialists must utilize the struggle between the bandits to overthrow all of them.” [15] Desai et al would likely agree with this, but not before arbitrarily excluding Russia from the list of bandits, ipse dixit. 

The US hegemony of today was preceded by an Anglo-American hegemony, the latter of which aroused the enmity and moral indignation of the Axis powers, the emerging capitalist states of their day. The Axis states complained bitterly that the United States and Britain, through their vast control of the world’s resources and markets, hindered the economic development of the Axis powers, denying the peoples of Middle Europe, the Mediterranean, and the East their day in the sun. Intellectuals who supported the Axis project, spoke of the necessity of liberating humanity from Anglo-American domination. Exponents of multipolarity today, Desai and Freeman among them, are the modern equivalent of the Western intellectuals who argued that rather than competing with Germany, Italy, and Japan, Washington and London should allow the Axis powers to establish their own regional hegemonies. This was advocacy of a Kautsky-style ultra-imperialist division of the world into a series of regional empires, a new multipolarity.

Advocates of multipolarity fight, not for the end of hegemony, but for the end of US efforts to prevent Russia and China from expanding their regional empires—hence, for the end of US world hegemony and the emergence of Russian and Chinese regional hegemonies. Multipolarity is an imperialist project, even if its advocates use anti-imperialist rhetoric and themes to cloak its true identity. This is not to say that US hegemony is more desirable than a multipolar series of regional hegemonies, only that imperialism in any form, multipolar or unipolar, is equally objectionable and equally inimical to the class interests of the proletariat. Would the international working class of the 1930s have been better off in a multipolar world in which London, Paris, and Washington ceded Central and Eastern Europe to Germany, the Balkans to Italy, and East Asia and the Pacific to Japan? For Marxists, the key question is not whether three capitalist centers should divide the world amongst themselves—the United States, China, and Russia, in preference to only one, the United States. Is enslavement and exploitation by Chinese and Russian capitalists more desirable than enslavement and exploitation by US capitalists?  The key task is to bring the enslavement and exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, regardless of the exploiters’ nationality, to an end. The job of socialists, according to Lenin, is to end war by ending the division of humanity by class and nation. That won’t be accomplished by exercises in political perjury, where the nature of Russia as an imperialist aggressor is covered up by intellectuals who think Marxism is rooting for the weaker bourgeoisie in an inter-imperialist conflict.

1.  Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman & Boris Kagarlitsky (2016) “The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism,” International Critical Thought, 6:4, 489-512,

2. Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in James Ledbetter, ed., Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, Penguin Books, 2007, p.219.

3. Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, Verso, 1985, p. 49.

4. John Weeks, “Imperialism and World Market,” in Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Publishing, 1991, pp. 252-256.

5. Ibid.

6. Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Study, Routledge, 1990, p. 130.

7. Joseph Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, “Chapter 6, Inevitability of Wars Between Capitalist Countries,” 1952. Stalin wrote, “Outwardly, everything would seem to be “going well”: the U.S.A. has put Western Europe, Japan and other capitalist countries on rations; Germany (Western), Britain, France, Italy and Japan have fallen into the clutches of the U.S.A. and are meekly obeying its commands. But it would be mistaken to think that things can continue to ‘go well’ for ‘all eternity,’ that these countries will tolerate the domination and oppression of the United States endlessly, that they will not endeavor to tear loose from American bondage and take the path of independent development.” 

8. Brewer, p. 130.

9. Weeks, p. 252.

10. V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, International Publishers, 1939, p. 91-92.

11. V.I. Lenin, “Conference of the Foreign Sections of the R.S.–D.L.P.” in Collected Works of V.I. Lenin Volume XVIII: The Imperialist War, International Publishers, 1930, pp. 145-146.

12. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1953), pp. 1-15.

13. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, MacMillan Press, 1983.

14. Jo Grady and Chris Grocott, eds. The Continuing Imperialism of Free Trade: Developments, Trends and the Role of Supranational Agents, Routledge, 2020.

15. V.I. Lenin, “Socialism and War” in Collected Works of V.I. Lenin Volume XVIII: The Imperialist War, International Publishers, 1930, pp. 223-224.

“People should be awake to this tactic, and refuse to be fooled by it”

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The Multipolaristas’ Theory of Ultra-Imperialism Doesn’t Fit a Multipolar World

December 27, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr. Putin” is “convinced Russia’s Western enemies” are “seeking to yank Ukraine from Russia’s orbit.” Clearly, the United States and Russia are locked in a struggle over Ukraine; each wants the territory in its own orbit—that is, in its own empire. US efforts to yank Ukraine from the Russian orbit have been largely successful. Russia is yanking back, but it’s unlikely to win the tug of war.

The idea that the war in Ukraine is but one battlefield in a larger war between two empires is difficult to grasp for people whose understanding of imperialism is influenced by dependency theories developed in the immediate post-WWII period. That period was characterized by one capitalist empire, that of the United States, absorbing most of its former capitalist rivals into its orbit. Under US supervision, the now combined powers, once rivals, jointly exploited the periphery.

People who subscribe to this view, whether consciously or through osmosis, look at the world through a lens whose purpose, when the lens was crafted, was to explain the international system at a time when neither Russia nor China existed as capitalist powers and rivalry among capitalist powers was muted by US primacy. Glimpsed through this lens, Russia and China appear as what they once were, but are no longer: socialist counterweights to a capitalist metropolis.

This, to be sure, is a view of a world that expired 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union was succeeded by a capitalist Russia, and China was at least a decade along the path of capitalist development and integration into the US economy as a low-wage manufacturing center.

Today, Russia and China are capitalist powers. But if they appear to some, not as metropolitan powers keen on integrating regions into their own expanding economies, but as powers lying outside the metropolis, as opposed to merely outside the US empire, it’s because they are understood incorrectly as being what they once were, rather than what they have since become. Both powers are external to the US empire (to some degree; China is so only partially), but the US empire is no longer equal to the metropolis; it is now only one part of it.

Karl Kautsky developed a theory of ultra-imperialism. Kautsky argued that the stress might shift from conflict between imperialist powers to maintenance of a world system of exploitation, i.e., conflict between the metropolis and periphery. It is surely the latter, the worldwide exploitation of colonial peoples by the metropolitan bourgeoisie, observed Anthony Brewer, which is generally understood by the term ‘imperialism’ today. At the time, the very suggestion that such a shift was possible aroused vehement hostility from the left. For the left, inter-imperialist rivalry leading to war was the very essence of imperialism. The concept of imperialism has shifted its meaning between then and now, but the emergence of a multipolar international system, or of great power rivalry in Washington’s terms, means that the understanding of imperialism now lags developments in international relations. Contemporary international relations now bear a greater affinity with the classical Marxist theory of imperialism than with Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism.

None of this is to say that theories about metropolitan exploitation of the periphery are wrong, only that the notion that Russia and China are external to the capitalist metropolis is mistaken. The former socialist giants have joined the metropolis, not as a part of a Kautskyist ultra-imperialism led by Washington, but as rivals of the USA, EU, and Japan.

Is there a better theory?

In its emphasis on rivalry among capitalist powers, the classical Marxist theory of imperialism comports more fully with contemporary developments than dependency theories. If we accept that the contemporary international system is marked by an emerging multipolarity, and that the principal powers in the multipolar system are capitalist, then the world of today bears a much stronger resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to which the classical Marxist theories of imperialism referred, than it does to the 20th century period of US-led ultra-imperialism.  

That’s not to say that the classical Marxist theory is without its problems. But it does say that despite its problems, the classical theory is a better fit with an emerging multipolar world than theories which were developed to explain a world characterized by a US-led metropolis exploiting a periphery, opposed by a socialist Russia and socialist China.

Continuing to see Russia and China as socialist powers that lie outside the metropolis, when they are now large capitalist powers with unconcealed projects of integrating regions into their own economies, is tantamount to applying the geology of the desert to the rainforest, and on this basis, declaring that trees (i.e., an imperialist Russia and an imperialist China) don’t exist.

To summarize, here are four errors that are made by seeing the contemporary multipolar world through a Kautskyist ultra-imperialist lens.

  1. Adopting the now extremely dated view that Russia and China are socialist, rather than capitalist.
  2. Seeing Russian and Chinese opposition to the US empire as rooted in socialism, rather than capitalist rivalry for economic territory.
  3. Perceiving the US empire as equal to the metropolis, rather than as only one part of it, along with Russia and China.
  4. Regarding the periphery as exploited by the US empire alone, rather than by Russia and China, as well.

There Are No Lesser Evils in Imperialism

December 19, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

According The New York Times, the US arms industry is profiting handsomely from the war in Ukraine.

  • The Pentagon has awarded at least $6 billion to arms companies to resupply weapons sent to Ukraine.
  • Raytheon has secured $2 billion in contracts to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.
  • Lockheed has secured nearly $1 billion to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine.
  • The share prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have jumped more than 35% this year.
  • US arms sales to foreign militaries—many of which have boosted military spending in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—total $81 billion this year.

In response I tweeted the following.

Had Moscow not pulled the trigger on war in Ukraine, the conditions would never have been set for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to swim in a sea of new orders.

This elicited the following reply: “The bigger thanks goes to all the people who have blocked or refused to negotiate to end this war. Like the state department, Biden etc.”

Why would we expect the people who desired the war, viz., “the state department, Biden etc.”, to have the slightest inclination to want the war to end, when its clients—the US arms industry, the US oil and gas industry, and US industry generally—profit handsomely from it? Expecting Washington to negotiate the end of the war is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians—especially when the wolves have discovered a toothsome feast.

Did I mention that with Europe looking for a new energy supplier, after Washington pressed the EU to wean itself off Russian energy in the wake of the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine, that the United States has become the world’s leading exporter of liquid natural gas? It is also the planet’s top petroleum producer.

At the same time, we wouldn’t expect Russia, the party that instigated the war and has failed to achieve its war aims, to have much desire to bring its assault to an end. It too is a wolf, with a hunger for sheep, so far unsated.

The notion that either the Russian wolf or a lupine Washington have, at this point, strong motivations to end their hunt for Ukrainian sheep is Quixotic.

The additional notion that the Fata Morgana of “the antiwar movement” can pressure “the state department, Biden etc.” or Moscow to negotiate an end to the war is equally illusory.

In the West, there exists a farrago of Washington-haters who call themselves antiwar but are merely anti-US. They flatter themselves that they are the nucleus of an antiwar movement. If capitalist imperialism is one of the greatest causes of human misery, they don’t know it. The critical problem, in their minds, is the people who run US foreign policy. If only the right people were elected, or the current set of leaders were pressured by popular opinion to conduct the country’s foreign policy differently, all would be well.

Almost to a person, this group of activists argued vehemently before the war, and with unbridled certitude, that Moscow would never invade Ukraine. In their astigmatic and decidedly un-Marxist Weltanschauung, military aggression, like imperialism, is a US monopoly. Russia would never, therefore, behave in so scurvy a (US) manner. To US warnings that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, they thundered scornfully, “US propaganda!” Despite Putin providing them with ample reason to revise their view of Moscow’s nature and capabilities, and notwithstanding the egg that still drips from their faces, they cling tenaciously to the now discredited theory that Putin’s Russia is not imperialist. They have discovered a multitude of reasons why it was obvious from 2014 that an invasion was not only predictable but desirable…and un-imperialist, of course. But if before the war they denounced the claim that Russia was capable of launching a war of aggression on its neighbor as a slander against Moscow, viz., that Moscow would never carry out so heinous an act (after all, wasn’t Moscow a member of the now forgotten Friends of the UN Charter?), how is that they have so quickly come to regard what they once saw as heinous as justifiable and even desirable?

If states were free to act just as they pleased, Russia could end the war now by reversing the act that instigated it. But true to their inability to see beyond Washington to rivalry among states as an immanent characteristic of the capitalist world economy, and one with a high probability of ending in war, the Friends of Neo-Imperial Russia demand Biden negotiate an end to the war, not that Russia do the same, and not that Putin withdraw his forces from Ukraine. They believe implicitly that the Kremlin is champing at the bit to negotiate a peace, out of a strong devotion to international harmony, and all that prevents the flower of peace from blooming is Washington’s intransigence. What they fail to mention is that the peace Putin aspires to is a peace in which Russia is allowed to digest those parts of Ukraine it has already gobbled up. In other words, it wants to achieve at least some of its war aims, and then to be left in peace to enjoy them. It is a commonplace that all belligerents want peace. What’s rarely acknowledged is that they want peace on their own terms. Peace preferably; war if necessary.

An antiwar movement, if one existed in either the West or Russia, would seek to end the war in order to lift the burden it has imposed on ordinary people. People everywhere, in Russia as much as Europe and North America, struggle to make ends meet as the war sends energy, food, and housing costs soaring.

Instead, Westerners who say they are against the war, but are really against the US part in it, seek fecklessly to mobilize energy for an antiwar movement based on the following arguments:

  • Putin’s cause is just.
  • The war escalates the risk of a nuclear exchange.
  • A world where Russia and China, and not just the United States, can throw around their weight, is desirable.

The trouble is that the power of any of these arguments to arouse opposition to the war is approximately zero, which is why there is no antiwar movement.

First, it is difficult enough to justify a war of aggression with good arguments. But the arguments for war offered by Moscow have been so risible that no one, except Russian chauvinists and a few mental defectives in the West, have taken them seriously. If we accept the argument that Russia has been provoked by escalating NATO military threats and that Moscow’s efforts to project influence into Ukraine through diplomatic means were rebuffed by Washington and NATO, there remain two objections: (1) Being provoked is not a legitimate reason for war; and (2) imperialist goals achieved through diplomatic means are still imperialist goals; they are no more acceptable for being achieved through soft power than hard.

Second, the threat of nuclear annihilation is a constant. People have learned to live with it. It will not move them to action and the intensity and scope of this war has not been great enough to meaningfully escalate the risk of a nuclear exchange.

Third, you can put lipstick on the idea of Russia and China having as much clout as the United States by calling three-power imperialism “multipolarity”, but the idea remains a pig no matter how much lipstick the sow is forced to wear. Anyone who thinks it’s possible to mobilize large numbers of people under the banner “we need three strong imperialist powers instead of one”, is detached from reality.

But what if people were mobilized for reasons that resonate with their suffering to oppose the war in numbers large enough to pressure governments to act? Would the movement not also be large enough to bring about a social revolution to overcome the very roots of the problem, namely, capitalist-driven competition for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and strategic territory? In other words, wouldn’t a movement large enough and powerful enough to end a symptom of the disease also not be large enough and powerful enough to end the disease itself? Should the goal be to end this particular war, or to significantly reduce the probability of war by overthrowing the conditions that conduce to it?

Finally, is there much point in calling for an antiwar movement here, and not one there? The war affects all working people, Russians as much, indeed more than North Americans and (Ukrainians excepted) Europeans. An antiwar movement ought to unite, across international lines, all people affected deleteriously by it against the class that wills it and the system of capital accumulation that demands it. It must be international, not confined to one side.

People who call for Washington to negotiate an end to the war, but not Russia to reverse the act that instigated it; who argue that the ultimate responsibility for the war lies with US foreign policy and not the global capitalist economy (like saying flu is caused by a sore throat); whose reasons for opposing the war having nothing to do with the effect it has on ordinary people, and only on the effect it has on the imperialist aspirations of Moscow; and who call, not for a union of antiwar voices across international lines, but an antiwar parochialism confined to the West, are arguing for the side of the Russian ruling class against that of the United States.

Marxism, socialism, the workers’ movement, are not movements against US foreign policy alone, but against the capitalist class, no matter what its postal address. These movements are also for something: Not the rise of two great capitalist powers, Russia and China, against a third, the United States, but for socialism and workers of the world uniting. They are for an end to the division of humanity into classes and nations, and not, as the bogus antiwar activists would have it, the persistence of class and the rise of great nation states.