The War in Ukraine Didn’t Split the Left—It Exposed Pre-Existing Divisions

September 13, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

In his latest Berlin Bulletin the Leftist writer Victor Grossman describes “further splits in weak, divided peace and leftist movements around the world” as the byproduct of the war in Ukraine. If the war has, indeed, fragmented the Left (rather than simply exposed pre-existing divisions), Grossman lets us know on which side of the divide he can be found. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, the US expatriate insists, is “primarily motivated by the wish to defend Russia against encirclement, suffocation followed by subservience or dismemberment.” Brendan Simms made the case, explored in a post I wrote yesterday, that Hitler’s decision to invade Ukraine in 1941 was motivated by his wish to defend Germany against encirclement, and suffocation followed by subservience or dismemberment by the far stronger Anglo-American alliance. In other words, the proximal cause of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is precisely the same as the proximal cause of Hitler’s invasion of the same territory. Yet no Leftist, much less a communist, would have adduced this motivation as an apology for an act of aggression. Grossman, however, does.

Notwithstanding Grossman, the war in Ukraine has produced no split in the Left. It has simply exposed a rift that has existed at least as far back as the Second international, and indeed, was the reason for the organization’s dissolution. The split can be described as one of reform vs. revolution, or a disagreement about what the Left should do in times of war: Support one side against the other, or work to bring about the demise of the very system that gives rise to war?

The split can also be described as a disagreement over what causes war and therefore over how war can be brought to an end.  One side says that wars are caused by belligerent states that have an inherent drive to war. To prevent these states from acting on their belligerent compulsion, popular opposition must be mobilized to act as a restraining hand.

Grossman is clearly on this side. Responsibility for the war in Ukraine falls squarely on the shoulders of the US state. He writes,

[M]ost of the violence in the world was a product of the intrigues, the aggression, the weapons managed and controlled by those powerful clusters who maintain such a tight control of congressmen and senators, half of them millionaires, of Supreme Court majorities, almost always of the White House, also of the Pentagon, CIA, NED, FBI and dozens of other institutions.  It is they, a tiny number, less than 0.1%, whose wealth outweighs that of half the world’s population, but who can never be sated. They want to rule the whole world.

In Grossman’s view, it is not capitalism, or the nature of international system, that caused the war in Ukraine, but the US ruling class, which, uniquely, in his view, wants to rule the world. Apparently, neither the Russian or Chinese ruling classes are gripped by the same ambition.

This calls to mind an observation the classicist scholar Mary Beard made about the Romans: They were no more belligerent than their neighbors and no more voracious for the spoils of war. They operated, as did the states with whom they went to war, within a system of international relations in which disputes, usually traceable to the clashing economic ambitions of their ruling classes, were usually resolved by violence. Their belligerence and lust for booty was no different from that of rival states. The Romans, however, were just more successful.

The reality that the US ruling class has had more success than its Russian counterpart in projecting economic, political, military, and ideological power abroad does not explain why there is a war. Grossman might as well say that Muhammad Ali caused the violence of boxing because he was the most successful pugilist.

The opposing position, the classical Marxist view, locates the cause of war in the system of international relations within a capitalist world economy. The Bolsheviks Bukharin and Preobrazhensky developed a succinct summary of this position:  Each “producer wants to entice away the others’ customers, to corner the market. This struggle assumes various forms: it begins with the competition between two factory owners; it ends in the world wherein capitalist States wrestle with one another for the world market.”

Yes, indeed, the US capitalist class wants to rule the whole world. But so too does the Russian and the Chinese.

At the core of the classical Marxist theory of war are two propositions:

  • Capitalism incessantly drives states to seek expanded profit-making opportunities beyond their borders.
  • In a world divided among states, where each competes against the other, war is inevitable.

This view was expressed in the resolution of the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, which Lenin and Luxemburg took a hand in writing. “Wars between capitalist states are as a rule the consequence of their competition in the world market, for every state is eager to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones.”

The theory follows naturally from Marx and Engel’s observation in the Communist Manifesto about the expansionary nature of capitalism. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”  Significantly, all of capitalism’s nestling, settling, and connecting, has been orchestrated by states, each vying with the other.

The classical view was hardly new or unique to Lenin and Luxemburg. It was expressed at the Second International’s London Congress as early as 1896. “Under capitalism the chief causes of war are not religious or national differences but economic antagonisms.” In 1910, the Copenhagen Conference reiterated this view: “Modern wars are the result of capitalism, and particularly of rivalries of the capitalist classes of the different countries over the world market.”

The solutions to the problem of war differ between Grossman’s analysis of the cause of war and that of Lenin et al. If the causes of war are, as Lenin argued, the division of humanity into classes and nations, then the solution to war is to overcome the divisions which set humanity against itself, beginning with the socialist revolution. That’s why Lenin and his colleagues always maintained that the problem of war should be met, not by choosing sides in disputes between bourgeois states, but by overthrowing them all.

If, on the other hand, you believe that war is caused by bad actors following their bad urges, then the solution to war lies in pressuring bad actors to behave more congenially and erecting guardrails to prevent disputes from getting out of hand.

Here’s Grossman:

The world needs to drop a curtain on this confrontation, increasingly threatening in Ukraine, increasingly dangerous in East Asia. Regardless of differences it must be halted. … Such a cease fire and successful negotiations must be the world’s immediate and urgent goal. Ultimately it must face a deeper imperative; not only reining in the super-rich, super-powerful intriguers – but, as they are an outdated but constant source of danger and dismay, their total banning from the world stage.

There’s little substance here. Grossman’s endorsement of a cease fire and successful negotiations is nothing more than an expression of pious benevolence. Who doesn’t want a cease fire and successful negotiations? Everyone wants a resolution to the war—but on their own terms, which is the problem. Cease fires and negotiations, are, then, never ends in themselves, but means to ends, and wishing they weren’t, won’t make them so.

Grossman’s hope that the “super-rich and super-powerful intriguers,” i.e., the US ruling class, will be restrained, and then banned, is utopian nonsense. How will it be restrained, and then banned? By moral suasion? If it can be restrained, haven’t we the power to ban it? And why only the US ruling class? Brecht’s observation that the bitch that gave birth to fascism is still in heat, can be extended: the bitch that gave birth to war is still in heat, which is why wars, like the one in Ukraine, continue to happen. Grossman seems to think that the bitch only gives birth to American pups.

The split in the Left over the war in Ukraine is reflected in the world’s Communist parties.  The European Communist Initiative, a grouping of European Communist and Workers parties, recently dissolved over differences related to the war in Ukraine, but the differences go much deeper than the war itself. The Greek Communist Party (KKE), which vigorously champions the classical Marxist position, objected to the positions taken by some member parties. In the party’s view:

Positions were expressed that limited imperialism to the USA and its foreign policy and disputed that each capitalist state participates in the imperialist system according to its economic, political and military power, in the context of uneven development.

A number of Parties sided with capitalist Russia in the imperialist war. They justified and supported the Russian leadership and the invasion of the Ukrainian territory by claiming that this war is anti-fascist, opposing the position that the war is imperialist, expresses acute capitalist rivalries and is waged for the control of markets and wealth-producing resources, for energy and transport routes, leading the peoples to the slaughterhouse of war.

Furthermore, some parties presented China as a socialist state, while capitalist relations of production have long prevailed in China and the exploitation of the working class and of man by man, which is the very definition of capitalism, is intensifying. Chinese monopolies are leading in the international market, exporting capital and commodities, while China and the USA are competing for supremacy in the capitalist system.

The split recapitulates a division within the Second International circa 1914—one  which led to the creation of the Third International and the Communist parties to which the current internal communist movement is its nominal heir. 

Last year, Eliseos Vagenas, a member of the KKE’s central committee, argued that the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn’t foster a split in the international communist movement; the split had existed long before the Russian invasion.

According to the Greek communist, communist parties had been split for some time on a least five questions, summarized below. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the parties moved to support or oppose Moscow, based on their pre-existing orientations, defined by either approach 1 or approach 2.

Two questions are critical to the positions the various ICM parties have taken on the war in Ukraine:

  • What causes war?
  • Is peace achievable in a capitalist world?

Communist parties that have either leaned toward outright support of Russia or greater condemnation of the United States and NATO, tend to view war in a manner that departs significantly from the classical Marxist view and have developed an understanding of how to end war that revises Marx and borrows from liberalism. These parties see war as developing from the aggressive foreign policy of one capitalist state, the United States (and its satellites), and regard Russia as a victim of a US drive to war. For them, the term ‘US imperialism’ is redundant, because imperialism is a monopoly of the United States.

What’s more, these parties tend to equate imperialism with war, and reject the notion that it has other dimensions, including peaceful capitalist competition, diplomacy, and even international security architectures. (Ask the North Koreans whether the UN Security Council is an expression of imperialism.) For these parties, imperialism is US war-making and little else. 

In contrast, parties that view the war in Ukraine as an inter-imperialist conflict cleave to the classical Marxist view of imperialism. For them, imperialism is a system of cut-throat competition among states in which each is compelled to expand the territory over which it has influence and control in order to guarantee its access to markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and strategic territory and thereby to ensure its self-preservation and that of the capital accumulating enterprises it represents. The competition is expressed in multiple ways, including war, but not limited to it. It may be, and has more often than not been, expressed in trade and investment agreements. See, for example, Robinson’s and Gallagher’s The Imperialism of Free Trade.

Kenneth Waltz’s review of the split in the socialist movement precipitated by WWI, which he presents in his classic Man, The State, and War, calls to mind the current split in the international communist movement as identified by Vagenas.

Parties which support Russia in its war on Ukraine tend to embrace, as Waltz puts it, “the techniques of the bourgeois peace movement—arbitration, disarmament, open diplomacy” as well as the belief that popular opinion “can exert enough pressure upon national governments to ensure peace.” This, Waltz argues, is a revision of Marx’s view, which “points to capitalism as the devil.” The “socialism that would replace capitalism was for Marx the end of capitalism and the end of states,” and it was the end of states, for Marx, that meant the end of war. An anti-war movement founded on the notion that popular pressure and international security architectures can ensure peace, is a tradition that Waltz identifies as originating in the Second international as a revision of Marx.

Waltz elaborates: Members of the Second International “were united in that they agreed that war is bad, yet they differed on how socialists were to behave in a war situation. … Jean Jaures and Keir Hardie eloquently urged a positive program of immediate application. Socialists, they said, can force capitalist states to live at peace.”  

In contrast, some “French and most German socialists argued that capitalist states are by their very nature wedded to the war system; the hope for the peace of the world is then to work for their early demise.” It is not, to bring the argument up to date, to support the weaker capitalist states in order to balance the strongest in a multipolar system. Indeed, this view is anti-Marxist in the extreme. For Marx, war ends when states end, not when weaker states balance the strongest and the world becomes multipolar.

The precursors of the Third International, Communists avant la lettre, argued that wars “are part and parcel of the nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system declines, or when the sacrifices in men and money has become so great as a result of the increased magnitude of armaments that the people will rise in revolt against them and sweep capitalism out of existence.”

Compare this view with that of Vagenas, advocating for approach 2 as presented in the table above: The “capitalist world cannot be ‘democratized’.” It “cannot escape from wars no matter how many ‘poles’ it has.” War can only be escaped through “the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, for the new, socialist society.”

Approach 1, then, looks very much like that embodied in the deeds of the Second International, while approach 2 resonates with that of the Third International (and the words of the Second). It is regrettable that some Communist parties have suffered an ideological drift toward positions that the founders of the international communist movement, Lenin and his colleagues, repudiated. Indeed, it can be said that there is no coherent international communist movement, except the one that comprises parties that have kept faith with Lenin’s view and have rallied around the KKE. As to the others, they have willingly become (to borrow Lenin’s phrase) playthings in the hands of belligerent powers and apologists for capitalism.

Colonizing Others to Pre-Empt Your Own Colonization

By Stephen Gowans

September 12, 2023

Brendan Simms, a Cambridge University professor who specializes in the history of international relations, has written an article for The New Statesman that comports in large measure with positions I’ve taken in connection with the war in Ukraine. Given the resonance of Simms’ views with my own, I wanted to build on his article by presenting his major themes through a Marxist lens.

The history of relations among states is a history of ruling classes attempting to expand the domain over which they accumulate wealth and appropriate the product of others’ labor. Imperialism is Janus-faced. Every ruling class strives to encroach on the wealth-accumulating sphere of other ruling classes, but at the same time acts to defend its own sphere. This means a state can be both anti-imperialist (defending itself against the encroachment of other ruling classes) and imperialist (impinging on other states). Indeed, a ruling class may even seek to enlarge its domain (act imperialistically) in order to more successfully defend itself against the imperialist designs of other ruling classes.

In discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’ve pointed to parallels with Imperial Japan. The Japanese developed and articulated an accurate critique of Western imperialism, and used its critique to present itself as a leader of oppressed peoples in the struggle against Dutch, French, British, and US imperialism in East Asia. But Japanese anti-imperialism was at the same time imperialist: East Asian countries that had been exploited by the West would be folded into a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership. That Japan’s anti-imperialist rhetoric was no more than a cover for its own imperialist machinations, was revealed in its use of the word “leader.” As the self-appointed leader of the oppressed peoples of East Asia, Japan elevated itself above the countries it claimed to be liberating. In reality, Japanese imperialism would simply replace the imperialism of the West.

Simms’ focus is not on the parallels between Russia’s use of anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify its own imperialism and the commensurate conduct of Imperial Japan, but on the similarities of Putin’s foreign policy with that of Hitler in its aims and methods. Unfortunately, because the zeitgeist understands Hitler as sui generis (in a class of his own), comparisons with the Nazi leader tend to be dismissed out of hand. That’s unfortunate, for while the magnitude of the genocide Hitler perpetrated against Jews, Slavs, and Roma may be unprecedented, genocide, conquest, plunder, and aggression are hardly unique. History abounds with Hitler-like figures, almost of all whom remain, unlike Hitler, greatly admired, among them Alexander the Great, Julius Caeser, and Napoleon.  Saint Augustine accurately described Alexander as a rogue with a global appetite for plunder. Dante relegated him to the seventh circle of his Inferno along with other thieves, murderers and tyrants. Julius Caeser and Napoleon, both of whom admired Alexander and measured themselves against him, fit in the same class. One reason tyrants who plunder and murder on a grand scale are admired is because we’ve come to accept tyranny, genocide, and conquest as a Hitler-monopoly, with the consequence that the grand crimes of his equivalents and epigones tend to be overlooked.

That’s not to say that Putin sinks to anywhere near the depths of Alexander, Caeser, Napoleon, or Hitler, and nor does Simms say he does. Instead, Simms is concerned only with examining the similarities in foreign policy and use of anti-imperialist rhetoric between Putin and Hitler. Simms thesis is that “both Putin and Hitler were anti-colonial colonisers. Their treatment of Ukraine has a common root: they saw – or see – themselves as colonising others to pre-empt their own colonisation.” Both used anti-colonial rhetoric.

Putin recently “told the assembled Brics dignitaries and delegates from the Global South that his attack on Ukraine had been a response to Western ‘neocolonialism – the same colonialism in a new package’.” Simms observes:

We tend, for good reason, to think of Adolf Hitler as the quintessential coloniser. In fact…not only was Hitler also an anti-colonialist (of sorts), but his imperialist project was driven by his fear of being colonised. Throughout the early 1920s, Hitler repeatedly claimed that Germany had been “enslaved” by the Jews, the forces of international capitalism and the victor powers, especially the “Anglo-Saxon” British and Americans. He claimed that they sought to break down “national states” because they represented an obstacle to “international money powers”. “World enslavement”, Hitler said, meant “world stock exchange”. 

Hitler’s concerns anticipate Putin’s anxieties about defending national states and traditional values against globalists, liberalism, and international money powers.

The “‘left-wing’ Strasser faction of the Nazi Party saw Germany as leading a ‘League of Oppressed Peoples’ in alliance with Russia, Morocco, Persia, India and other victims of Western imperialism. ‘The fragmented, martyred, exploited and enslaved Germany,” Otto Strasser argued, ‘was the natural protagonist and ally of all national liberation fighters’, whether they were ground down by ‘French tyranny, British imperialism [or] American financial exploitation’.”

We hear echoes of Strasser in many leftwing voices today, not least Caleb Maupin’s Strasser-like Patriotic Socialists, who believe that because Russia is against French tyranny in Africa, British imperialism, American financial exploitation, and the US military alliance NATO, that it is the natural protagonist and ally of all national liberation fighters, and cannot, therefore, be an imperialist state itself.

Simms continues:

Hitler, by contrast [to Strasser], saw Germany’s salvation not in solidarity with the other wretched of the Earth, whom he despised, but in establishing its own colonial project. He envisaged an overseas empire not in the Anglo-French style as attempted by Wilhelmine Germany, but as a vast land grab in eastern Europe contiguous with the old Reich. This, he argued, would give Germany the critical mass and resources necessary to survive against the force of Anglo-America and international capitalism. The demand for “living space” or Lebensraum – which Hitler first voiced in the mid-1920s – was thus both a colonial and an anti-colonial project.

Similarly, Putin is attempting a vast land grab in Eastern Europe contiguous with the Russian Federation and commensurate with the old Russian Empire to give Russia the critical mass and resources necessary to survive against the forces of what Putin calls “the collective West”, international capitalism, and the liberal order.

Today, the supposed heirs of Marx and Lenin see international relations more as Hitler did than as Marxists have. “For Hitler,” observes Simms, “the battle against the British empire was an international class struggle, which pitted classes of nations against each other, rather than a Marxist conflict between transnational classes,” the latter perspective being one Hitler was resolved to expunge for all time (my emphasis). Many contemporary Marxist-Leninists likewise see the war in Ukraine as a war between two classes of nations (the United States as imperialist and Russia as anti-imperialist) and are as dismissive as Hitler was of the view that conflicts between states are conflicts between transnational classes. They tend to dismiss the Marxist view of the war as Trotskyism and accept the Hitlerite view as anti-imperialist (which, indeed it is, though in the Hitlerite, and not Marxist, sense.)

Then as now, there was “no solidarity between working classes.” Instead, many Marxist-Leninists today, as Hitlerites did then, promote “a common cause between the ‘have-not’ nations against the ‘haves’,” that is, between the BRICs against the US-led West, as part of a project of promoting “multipolarity.” “The Second World War was thus framed not just as a German war of national liberation against British domination of the Continent, but as a global insurrection against Anglo-American capitalism and imperialism,” just as Russia’s war on Ukraine is framed today as a Russian insurrection against US capitalism and imperialism. The Axis powers, with Hitler in the lead, were as much advocates of multipolarity as are many Marxist-Leninists today.

In June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. The invasion of the Soviet Union was avowedly colonial in design because it envisaged the seizure of land, particularly in Ukraine, to be settled by German emigrants. But the attack was also anti-colonial in conception because Hitler believed that only possession of an empire of its own would enable Germany to emancipate itself from Anglo-American and international capitalist subjection. It was, in his mind, a case of dominate or be dominated.

Simms argues that like Hitler, Putin employs anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify Russia’s own imperialism.

Over the past 15 years or so, [Putin] has inveighed against the ‘imperialism’ of the ‘collective West’ and sought to preserve Russian power and sovereignty in the face of what he regards as the West’s universalising claims in favour of democracy and human rights. In Putin’s eyes the protection of Russia requires hegemony over her neighbours; the emancipation of Russians means the subjection of others.

At first, he sought to dominate the wider Eurasian space through a combination of market measures, such as the establishment of a Eurasian Economic Union, and military interventions such as the invasion of Georgia. More recently, the Russian president moved to direct territorial aggression, beginning with the annexation of Crimea and culminating in the attack on Ukraine last year.

The imperial nature of the invasion was clear for all to see. Putin justified it by simply denying the nationhood and sovereignty of Ukraine, an internationally recognised state. In a series of speeches leading up to and following his attack, the Russian president declared the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one and the same. He attributed any suggestion to the contrary to the evil machinations of outside powers. Yet the wider context to his move was the desire to defend Russian sovereignty against supposed Western imperialism.

In Simms’ view, the parallels between Putin and Hitler are striking.

Both considered or consider themselves to be in a life-and-death struggle with Western capitalist imperialism, and in particular with the “Anglo-Saxons”. Both reject the Anglo-Saxons’ claims that they are imposing universal values, and both dismissed or dismiss the “rules-based” order – of the League of Nations and the liberal international order respectively – as self-serving hogwash. In response, both articulated projects that are both colonial and decolonising.

“You might think that the real Global South, then and now, would have given these ambitions short shrift, but you would be wrong,” remarks Simms. To this we could add that you might think that Marxist-Leninists, whose ideological forebears developed a detailed analysis of imperialism and the use, by imperialist leaders, of anti-imperialist rhetoric, would have seen Putin’s war and rhetoric on Ukraine for what they are, but you would be wrong.

The Nazi and Putin projects were and have been widely taken at face value by “subaltern” (in the post-colonial sense) actors for whom the main enemy was the West in both its imperialist and international capitalist guises. They had and have at least a sneaking regard for Hitlerist or Putinesque challenges to the prevailing order, which they felt and continue to feel shortchanges them. Many educated Arabs, Africans or Asians who had an issue with Western imperialism in the 1930s and early 1940s either welcomed the humbling of the British empire by the advancing Wehrmacht, or at least felt a frisson of satisfaction at the discomfiture of their masters.

Today, many educated Arabs, Africans and Asians, along with many Western Leftists, who have a legitimate grievance with Western imperialism, have either welcomed the advancing Russian army, or at least felt a frisson of satisfaction at Washington’s discomfiture.

As I have, Simms likens those who align with Russia on the grounds that Moscow is challenging US imperialism to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Subhas Chandra Bose.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem…was so outraged by British plans for Palestine that he endorsed Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and urged Arabs to collaborate with the Third Reich. Further east, Subhas Chandra Bose, a long-standing critic of British rule in India, set up a legion that was eventually deployed to fight for the Germans in north-west Europe. Across the Middle East, Caucasus and South Asia, hundreds of thousands heeded these calls to serve the Axis powers militarily or politically and millions more sympathised with them.

“The ironies of the situation were and are obvious, even to the protagonists themselves,” writes Simms. “Anti-colonial agitators such as Bose and the Mufti knew perfectly well that Hitler held them in contempt, just as their successors today know that the nationalist discourse in Putin’s Russia is virulently hostile to people of color, and that his regime is far more murderously behaved towards Muslims and other groups in its neighborhood than the West, which it so persistently criticizes. In both cases, though, the overriding imperative was or is to confront the common Western enemy.”

We might add that the ironies of the situation ought also to be obvious to Putin’s Marxist-Leninist supporters, whose theory, practice, and aims Putin holds in contempt. The Russian leader reviles Lenin and the Bolsheviks, going so far as to blame the war on Lenin, yet some communist ignoramuses see Putin as the second-coming of the Bolshevik leader—a reflection of their predilection for understanding international conflict through the Hitlerite lens of the clash of different classes of states rather than the Marxist lens of the clash of different economic classes.

The Communist Party of Canada has has rejected the Marxist-Leninist perspective on the war as “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.” As Hitler viewed his own aggression as an effort to preempt Germany’s colonization by Anglo-American forces, the CPC, not alone among many Leftist voices, favors the view that Putin’s aggression is an effort to preempt Russia’s colonization by the US empire. It is not only sad but deplorable, and a measure of how deeply parts of the Marxist-Leninist movement have decayed, that they not only align with, but celebrate a figure whose foreign policy stands in the same tradition of that of Hitler, and who, at the same time, dismiss the Marxist-Leninist class perspective theory of imperialism.

Xi Jinping and His Republican Party-Style Contempt for Socialism

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From Lenin to Bourgeois Pacifism

August 15, 2023

Stephen Gowans

People’s Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada, published an article on 2023 August 1 calling for “comprehensive nuclear disarmament” and Canada’s exit from all “aggressive, imperialist military alliances.”

As an explanation of how Canada, as a non-nuclear power, supports the nuclear weapons strategy of the United States, the article does a creditable job.

But it misses the point.

If our concern is to spare humanity the mass destruction of global war, it is not nuclear warfare alone that is the problem, but industrial-scale warfare of which nuclear warfare is only one possible part. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not, contrary to popular opinion, the greatest instances of mass destruction in history. That distinction belongs to the March 4-5, 1945 US firebombing of Tokyo.

“In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world.” In a campaign leading up to the atomic bombings, 66 “cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.” According to historian Ward Wilson, “The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke.”

The first to be attacked was Japan’s major city, Tokyo. On March 4 and March 5, wave after wave of US bombers dropped conventional incendiary bombs on the city, killing as many as 150,000 people. That incident, not Hiroshima, “remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war.”

Three weeks earlier, US and British bombers had incinerated Dresden, the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. According to Yuki Tanaka, “During the 14-hour long raid, massive quantities of incendiaries burnt large areas of this city, that housed no military facility, and killed many civilians. The estimated victim toll varies between 70,000 and 135,000, the majority being women, children and old people.”

Estimated number of people killed

  • Firebombing of Tokyo, 70,000 to 150,000
  • Atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 90,000 to 146,000
  • Firebombing of Dresden, 70,000 to 135,000
  • Atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 60,000 to 80,000

Approximately 100 million people died in the industrial-scale warfare of the two world wars. Some 200,000 people, 0.2%, died from atomic bombing. Eliminating atomic bombs alone won’t eliminate the massive destructive power of conventional warfare. This is true, a fortiori, when we consider that developments in conventional armaments since WWII have increased the destructive power of these weapons by orders of magnitude. There are now conventional bombs that approach the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It is not nuclear weapons that need to be eliminated, but war fought on an industrial scale.

What good would come of eliminating nuclear weapons, if 100 million people or more were killed in future wars with conventional weapons? The capability to lay waste to much of the world by conventional warfare is well within the means of humanity. Indeed, some analysts favor the spread of nuclear weapons precisely because they fear that without the weapons’ formidable deterrent power, humanity will be repeatedly led down the path of mass destruction by conventional means. In light of this, two questions need to be asked:

  • What are the causes of war?
  • What must be done to eliminate them?

The Second International, a multi-country organization of socialist and labor parties, had answers to these questions. The sum and substance of the organization’s diagnosis of the cause of war, and prescription for its elimination, was expressed in a series of resolutions on militarism and international conflict. One of these resolutions, prepared by August Bebel, with amendments by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov, is emblematic of the Second International’s thinking on the cause of war and its elimination.

Bebel et al. anticipated that large-scale wars in the modern era of capitalism would be wars among states driven by capitalist imperatives. Wars would break out as “the consequence of … competition in the world market.” Every state, the resolution noted, “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 Bolsheviks Nicolai Bukharin and Evgeni Preobrazhensky expressed this point this way in their ABC of Communism. Each “producer wants to entice away the others’ customers, to corner the market. This struggle assumes various forms: it begins with the competition between two factory owners; it ends in the world, wherein capitalist States wrestle with one another for the world market.”

The solution to capitalist-driven wars, in the view of these Marxists, was twofold. First, socialists would lead workers of all lands to join hands against war. Second, they would “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.”

Lenin insisted that it was not the business of socialists to help one set of states against another, but to use the struggle between them to overthrow them all. Unfortunately, the Second International, while paying lip service to this view before the war, quailed at the decisive moment. This galvanized Lenin to spearhead the creation of the Third International, from which the CPC emerged. The new international’s aim was to carry through the commitments the Second International accepted in words but renounced in deeds.

As the nominal successor to Lenin in Canada, it might be expected that the CPC’s orientation to questions of peace and war would bear the stamp of Lenin. Sadly, this isn’t the case. Indeed, in one statement on the war in Ukraine, the party dismissed the approach of Lenin as “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.” It seems the party inspired by Lenin, has moved on from Lenin.

Had it not, it might have called on the working people of all lands, of North America, Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, to join hands, in connection with the war in Ukraine, to work for the war’s speedy termination. Instead, it campaigns against NATO alone, insisting dishonestly and unconvincingly that as a Canadian party it must deal only with Canada’s capitalist class. The mendacity of the party’s position is revealed in its zeal for demonstrating in front of the US embassy and US consulates. Evidently, the party regards US capitalists as much their own as Canada’s—but not the Russian or Chinese.

The truth of the matter is that the party’s rejection of the Leninist response to war, lies in its rejection of the Leninist understanding of the origin of war.  The party’s view is that the roots of the war in Ukraine lie, not in capitalist rivalry, but in a drive to war that is unique to the United States and its NATO allies.

In contradistinction to the CPC, Lenin argued that socialism “will remain faithful to itself only if it does not join one or the other imperialist bourgeoisie, if it says that ‘both are worst’, if it wishes the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country.” In its conduct, and often in its words as well, the CPC refuses to say “both are worst” and wishes only for the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie of the US orbit.

Without the foundation of a Leninist analysis, it comes as no surprise, then, that the party is devoted to what Lenin denounced as bourgeois pacificism, the idea that disarmament treaties and leagues of nations can create a world of peace among cut-throat capitalist competitors.

In this vein, the party calls for Canada to sign and ratify a treaty that prohibits non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons and which additionally requires nuclear-armed states to phase out their nuclear arsenals, a treaty much like the existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Canada is already a member of the NPT. The NPT is proof that nuclear weapons treaties neither prevent proliferation, produce disarmament, or reduce the risk of major war. In fact, one can argue, along with Pyongyang, that North Korea’s exit from the NPT is the major reason why the United States has not undertaken an overt war against the DPRK.

Inasmuch as Ottawa does not develop, test, produce, stockpile, station, transfer, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons (since it has none to do any of these things with), Ottawa’s joining the treaty would be a matter of no significance. It would commit Ottawa to not doing what it already doesn’t do.

What’s more, Canada’s withdrawal from NATO would not be so consequential as to meaningfully reduce the risk of war.  Much as the CPC would like to think that Canada plays in the big leagues, its withdrawal from NATO would hardly be noticed. The war in Ukraine would continue unabated, as would the rivalry between the United States and Russia and the United States and China. As for the capitalist womb in which wars gestate, that too would be left intact. Canadians are as likely to be incinerated in a global war with their country outside NATO as inside it.

Lenin complained that advocacy of disarmament instils “in the workers the idea that the present bourgeois governments of the imperialist powers are not bound to each other by thousands of threads of finance capital and by scores or hundreds of corresponding secret treaties (i.e., predatory, plundering treaties, preparing the way for imperialist war).”

“It is sheer bourgeois deception to preach reforms,” wrote Lenin, “as a solution for problems for which history and the actual political situation demand revolutionary solutions.”

A cogent analysis, but then, the party, for whom Lenin’s thinking is no longer “a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment,” moved on from Lenin long ago. It basks these days in the warm embrace of bourgeois pacifism and proposals whose effect in saving the world from another global conflagration if implemented would be largely meaningless.

“Socialist” China and Its Many Illusions

Growth that depends in large part on US cooperation goes away when you no longer fulfil the prerequisites of US cooperation.

By Stephen Gowans

August 9, 2023

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “U.S. to Ban Some Investments in China,” and relatedly, China’s recent economic tribulations, prompted the following thoughts on what was not too long ago presented by Sinophiles as the world’s paragon economic model.

The take-off Sinophiles celebrate as the outcome of China’s so-called ‘unique’ economic paradigm, began soon after Beijing decided to transition from its role as communist competitor of the United States to capitalist economic partner of its former enemy.

Deng Xiaoping’s “If you can’t beat them, join them” project, opened the gate to US, European, and Japanese investment, which drove the country’s development.

China was—and remains—an investors’ dream. It offered a vast pool of educated, disciplined, low-wage workers, a stable political environment, a government eager to cater to foreign investors, and a huge market—all the ingredients that investors needed to pull in huge returns.

What made the model unique was China’s history, size, and demography, as well as its Communist Party, which had the legitimacy and Washington’s backing to mold China’s vast population—at that time the largest in the world—to its will of catering to foreign investment. The model couldn’t be transferred to other places, because other places lacked the combination of education, political stability, infrastructure, size, proximity to sea routes, and willingness to collaborate with the United States, that made China the world’s premier investment opportunity.

Times have changed.

Having used Western investment to vault to the first ranks of the global capitalist economy, Beijing has embarked on a second transition, this time from US economic partner to US economic competitor. Chimerica, the integration of China into the US economy, with the US as the union’s finance, R&D, and marketing arm, and China as its manufacturing base, has yielded to China 2025, Beijing’s plan to dominate the industries of the future, provoking Washington’s counter-measures to stop it.

As China challenges US supremacy, its once torrid growth has slowed. Direct U.S. investment into China has hit a 20-year low. U.S. venture-capital investment has hit a 10-year low. Without US commitment to building China as the factory floor of the US, EU, and Japan, China’s economic prospects are no longer as sanguine as they once were.

People’s China, contrary to a myth perpetrated by Sinophiles and apostles of multipolarity, didn’t develop in a world of its own making, insulated and kept separate from capitalism, neo-liberalism, US leadership, and the US economy. It developed precisely because it willingly became a part of all these things.

Now that it’s trying to extricate itself from its former submission to US economic leadership in order to vie with US capital for economic supremacy, foreign and venture capital investment is drying up and China’s torrid growth has disappeared in a puff of political reality, viz., growth that depends in large part on US cooperation goes away when you no longer fulfil the prerequisites of US cooperation.

China’s economic model is not so different from the state-led capitalist development of Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Meiji-restoration Japan that we should regard it as unique; we certainly shouldn’t regard it as socialist.

Nor, given that China’s rulers have adopted a state-led capitalist development model, guided moreover by a nationalist ambition to restore China to the great civilization it once was, should we harbor illusions about the political project of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not the worldwide proletarian revolution, nor even, it would seem, the proletarian revolution in China, but the vaulting of China to supremacy in the world capitalist market—the same ambition of every other capitalist power with heft.

We should not, therefore, regard the political primacy of the communist party in China as investing the country’s rivalry with the US and EU with a character any different from Germany’s earlier rivalry with Britain for supremacy in Europe or Japan’s erstwhile rivalry with the United States for pre-eminence in the Pacific and East Asia.

China is not a paragon, a model for other countries to emulate. It is just one more capitalist power vying for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, strategic territory, and the power to shape the global economy to its advantage.

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.”

The Putin Club

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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.