24.02.2022

Blindness to empire

As Russia invades Ukraine Britain’s social-imperialists rally to side of Nato. But for socialists the main enemy is at home, argues Paul Demarty

Update: This article was submitted on Tuesday February 22, after Vladimir Putin recognised the independence of the Donbas 'people's republics' and the 'republics' invited Russian troops. Since that time, things have obviously changed dramatically. Neither I nor my polemical targets in this article expected a full scale invasion, but that is what Putin has done. We publish this article as-is since its core arguments - that the present conflict is unintelligible without reference to the provocations of the US and Nato over decades, and that the main enemy remains at home - are sound. But it no longer makes sense to describe Russia's strategy as 'defensive', and its war against Ukraine is a dangerous escalation with potentially terrifying consequences, which should be roundly condemned - PD

At this point in the endless Ukraine crisis, we are entitled to ask, who is more slavishly obedient to the dictates of American foreign policy: the British government, or the world’s most dubiously self-styled Trotskyoid group, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty?

Sure, apparently alone among European powers, the UK has adopted a truly swivel-eyed mania over Vladimir Putin’s ‘invasion’ of Ukraine - which, as I write, has reached no further than his recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics in the Donbas. The build-up to this, which consisted largely of American provocations and sabotage of diplomatic efforts, was assisted eagerly by our own functionaries. Our own spooks invented a truly preposterous coup conspiracy; Boris Johnson declared that this will be the biggest European war since 1945, which sounds rather apocalyptic, but - peace having been the rule, excepting the Balkan wars of the 1990s - is rather like being the tallest bungalow in Berkhamsted. Johnson’s front bench - almost all talentless cronies, as exemplified by Liz Truss’s farcical meeting with Sergei Lavrov a couple of weeks ago - do their best to look very, very concerned; and, following Russia’s recognition now that deployments have started, sanctions are to be thrown around (since it seems to be the aim of the US and UK that only Russians and Ukrainians should die in the name of this folly).

Yet there is at least the whiff of narrow self-interest about all this. For all his furious cod-statesmanship, Johnson must feel at least a little gratitude towards Putin for choosing this time of year for his annual provocative military drills on the Ukrainian border, and for finally being bounced into serious escalation in eastern Ukraine. Johnson’s job was on the line a few weeks ago, but now he gets to play Churchill again, and the best ‘her majesty’s opposition’ can come up with by way of response is to say that proposed sanctions are too weak, that the Tories are in the pocket of Russian oligarchs, and so on - petulant swipes easily batted aside by a far more plausible ‘patriot’ than Sir Keir.

The AWL, by contrast, does not really get anything out of its use of substantially the same (at best) one-sided analysis of the situation - except, perhaps, the rather meagre prize of a ‘unique selling point’ among left sects. What was once an occasional habit of slaughtering a sacred cow, usually in the course of a cynical recruitment raid on some other organisation, has bedded down deep: god help them, they must really believe it at this point.

Foil

There are two articles of interest on the subject in the last number of Solidarity. One is an editorial and front-page article under the headline, ‘For Ukraine, against Putin’; the other is an op-ed by LabourStart’s Eric Lee, a perennial guest columnist in the paper. Lee’s role is as a kind of foil to the AWL core leadership - he is vigorously, openly and unashamedly pro-imperialist, and by comparison to his rantings, the AWL line might just seem like the voice of Marxist moderation and common sense. So it is in this case: Lee takes Bernie Sanders to task for criticising “the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must ‘show strength, ‘get tough’ and not engage in ‘appeasement’”. “I disagree,” writes Lee:

Showing strength and getting tough are not terrible strategies for dealing with bullies, be they schoolyard toughs or nuclear-armed aggressor states. And ‘appeasement’ was not a good strategy back in 1938, and it’s not a good strategy today.¹

Lee goes on to conclude that, contra Sanders, Nato is a very good thing. It “was founded with the strong support of the British Labour government in April 1949. Social democratic and labour parties across Europe have long supported its existence.” We should not indulge the idea that tiny and/or poor states on the eastern fringe of Europe are a threat to Russian security: “The only threat worth talking about is Russian aggression - and the answer to that threat is a stronger, not a weaker, Nato.”

We will not address in detail Lee’s argument, but highlight firstly that he supposes the weakness of, say, Lithuania or Ukraine is a reason to laugh in the face of the idea that Nato expansion poses a threat to Russia. This is a bizarre non sequitur - Nato membership for these countries binds their military fate to that of the United States. It turns them into a threat. Russia would prefer them out of Nato for that reason. Secondly, we note the ‘social democratic’ spin he puts on Nato, as if the right wing of European social democracy did not enjoy extensive material support from the US state and intelligence apparatuses during the cold war. To ignore the imperialist role of Nato, it is necessary to blind oneself to the agency of the American state.

Blindness

So, while the AWL’s editorial (as usual) departs from Lee’s open pro-imperialism, it shares his analytical blind spots - which at this point are less blind spots than inoperable cataracts.

The AWL at least did not share the fantasy, popular among the more deluded Anglophone journalists, that the likely form of any ‘invasion’ would be a tank-rush to Kiev and the installation of a puppet government. Instead there will probably be a “limited action which aims to expand the territory of the LPR and DPR [Luhansk and Donetsk]. The Russians would like to join up these regions with Crimea.”²

This presumably would involve capturing very large swathes of territory south of the Dnieper, so “limited” is not quite the word. Why the Russians would want to ‘join things up’ this way when it has perfectly good land borders with both the breakaway Donbas statelets and the Crimea is unclear. But, as in all its writings on this crisis, the AWL is incapable of describing a plausible motive for Russian aggression on this point. This is not because there are no plausible motives - there certainly are, but they are matters about which the AWL must remain silent.

They proceed, instead, to a discussion of the Minsk II accords, which would have ended the long-running civil war in eastern Ukraine by the acceptance of regional autonomy for the Donbas republics. These accords, brokered by the European powers in 2015, have proven impossible for successive Ukrainian governments to deliver; and now, by unilaterally recognising the ‘people’s republics’, Putin has essentially abandoned the accords. For the AWL, Ukrainian hatred of them is simply because they represent a national humiliation and tilt heavily towards Russia. They quote Chatham House to the effect that Minsk II would

in effect destroy Ukraine as a sovereign country. The DPR and LPR would be reincorporated into Ukraine, but as distinct political, economic and legal entities tied to Russia - thus … prevent[ing] the authorities in Kyiv from running the country as an integrated whole.

Needless to say, the bona fides of Chatham House are not questioned for a second. What is necessary, so far as the AWL is concerned, is the same thing demanded by Chatham House, and the US blob, and all the rest: full territorial integrity of Ukraine, including the Donbas and the Crimea. The wishes of Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas republics - never mind the wishes of the population of the Crimea, who found themselves in the Ukrainian Soviet republic due to a grand gesture by Khrushchev, and which has no historic connection to the Ukrainian nationality at all - plainly do not enter into the equation.

The AWL does not critically interrogate Ukrainian nationalist claims about its territorial sovereignty, since it has no desire to see the reality: a border that happens to be where it is simply because that is where things lay when centuries of bureaucratic tweaks within a unitary tsarist and then Soviet state happened to come to an end in 1991.

But we should return to the US, which the AWL’s article barely discusses at all. From its presentation, you would never know the global hegemon had taken any interest in the affair. There are only the plucky little Ukrainians, “training with wooden weapons”, likely to suffer vast casualties; and big bad Vlad, about to crush them with armoured divisions, artillery and air power. Nato is not mentioned until the very end of the article, and then only to denounce others on the left who dare to think it matters at all: “Nato is not threatening Ukraine’s right to self-determination nor assembling a massive invasion force on Ukraine’s borders,” the authors piously tell us. “The problem for Ukraine is Russian imperialism, not Nato.”

But this brings us back to the one question the AWL cannot ask: why is Putin acting like this? (Why, indeed, did he remake himself as a ‘strongman’ over roughly the decade starting 2003?) Because there is only one plausible answer. The US broke its informal promise to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand Nato east of Germany after reunification. Since the mid-1990s it has expanded the alliance to the Baltic and Poland. It formally invited Georgia and Ukraine to apply for membership in 2008. Russia’s current policy of brutal assertiveness in its near abroad can really be dated from that: first the South Ossetian war of that year, which took Georgia out of the Nato picture for the foreseeable future, and then the response to the so-called Maidan revolution of 2014, which got us to the Ukrainian mess we see before us today.

The AWL is incapable of seeing these military interventions as what they are: strategically defensive; and the expansion of Nato as strategically aggressive, encircling Russia. The north-eastern border of Nato is now around 100 miles from St Petersburg. To say that Russia is acting defensively is not to suppose that it is acting gently (anyone who crossed paths with the psychopathic Chechen irregulars Russia used in the 2008 war could tell you that), or that a serious escalation in eastern Ukraine would not come at great human cost, mostly among Ukrainians. It is, however, to highlight that it takes (at least) two to play at geopolitics, and the refusal in principle of the US to countenance any gaps in its ‘sphere of influence’ all the way to the Russian border is just as much a provocation as drilling 150,000 soldiers just over the border, or even recognising the independence of sympathetic breakaway statelets.

Platonic opposition

At this point, the AWL’s writers descend into self-parody: “Of course, in general, we are against Nato,” they write. “We could not possibly be for Nato.” Perish the thought! The violence done to the words ‘for’ and ‘against’ here is considerable, but not unprecedented in the pages of Squalidarity. In their own minds, AWL leaders can be against Nato “in general”, while taking sides with it in every individual initiative it undertakes. I know someone who is on a diet “in general” - but not at breakfast, when they like a fry-up (or at lunch, when they have a Big Mac and fries) …

AWLers will, of course, proclaim that they are anti-imperialist; after all, are they not condemning “Russian imperialism”? I will leave aside the question of whether it is correct to call Russia imperialist, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is. Still, this kind of ‘anti-imperialism’ reduces it to a matter of sentiment; we decide who to ‘support’ like a neutral football fan trying to work out which of the two teams in a match is the underdog.

The AWL even has a whole theory which justifies this reasoning: a sort of Platonic hierarchy of sub-imperialisms, paleo-imperialisms and so on, in which any power with any regional clout can be said to be acting imperialistically to any lesser neighbour, with the global hegemon characterised as a sort of corrupt cop, not to be supported ‘in general’ but perhaps tolerated in some specific scenario in the same way that one would not stop a corrupt cop from breaking up a domestic fracas (this turns out, mysteriously, to be the character of every specific scenario).

But this is to miss the entire point. The only practical importance anti-imperialism has - for those of us in imperialist countries at any rate - is to orient our attitudes towards our own state. We have the choice: do we consent to the endless escalation of rhetoric in the corridors of Downing Street and the foreign office? Do we consent to sanctions (effectively siege warfare by financial means)? And, given Britain’s total dependence on the Atlantic alliance, do we consent to the aggressive expansion of US-dominated military alliances? Do we support the dispatch of hundreds of millions of dollars of ‘lethal aid’ - to use the latest euphemism - in order to tool up fascist militias for war?

If our only propaganda is against “Russian imperialism”, or indeed if that is the main thrust of our propaganda, then we unavoidably do consent to these things, for our practical policy is to demobilise opposition to our own states - denounced by the AWL writers as the diversionary work of “Putin’s idiots”. To take such a line is to be no more an anti-imperialist than Winston Churchill (who, after all, was a firm critic of German imperialism …). It is, like it or not, to be a garden-variety jingo.

Not for the first time, we almost wish the AWL had the courage of its correspondent, Eric Lee, and would just reconcile its self-image to its practical activity. Instead, it continues on its 40-year course of slander, self-deception and casuistry.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk