We publish the intervention of the comrades of Prospettiva Marxista on recent events in Russia. Thanks to leftdis.wordpress.com for the english translation
Right on time came the ritual reminder of the mythology of the “stab in the back.”
When the leaders, rulers, and military commands of the ruling class grapple with the most traumatic and unmanageable limits, difficulties, consequences and implications of the exercise of their class power, they never fail to point to the “traitors,” the “enemy within.” They are the ones, they must be the ones responsible for failures, defeats and crises that cannot, must not have their roots in the objective dysfunctions of the social order and less than ever in the unpreparedness and shortcomings of the political and military expressions of the ruling class itself. It is more convenient, it is a deresponsibilizing formula, it is the invocation of the scapegoat by which the power of the ruling class seeks to compact the entirety of the social body around itself, while at the same time leaving in the shadows those real, deep contradictions from which originate the sufferings that befall the exploited masses.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has obviously been no exception.
Put under pressure by the near march on Moscow undertaken by Wagner Group mercenaries, he promptly denounced the shady maneuvers of those in the rear who are sabotaging the otherwise victorious war effort in Ukraine. Nor should the now regular, almost obsessive, reference to the annus horribilis, 1917, come as a surprise. The apex of political power in Russian imperialism, weakened and struggling on multiple fronts, posing as a continuation of history and (dubious) tsarist greatness, is understandably uncomfortable with the memory of this crucial year.
Was he referring, Putin in his speech, to General Kornilov’s attempted military coup against Kerensky’s Provisional Government in August 1917 (as has been suggested in the international press by observers evidently more historically savvy than authoritative pens of our own press, now prone to the bleakest, Manichean and phony oversimplifications when it comes to dealing with developments in the Russian Revolution and especially its culminating Bolshevik phase)? More likely, and more in continuity with previous “historical” outings by the Kremlin leader, that Putin’s barbs were aimed at October or generally at the revolutionary and defeatist action of the Bolsheviks. Once again, there would be nothing to be surprised by. Nor would we be surprised at the gross historical falsification inherent in the rhetoric of the upper echelons of Russian imperialism. That the Russian armed forces were ineluctably on the march to victory in 1917 and that only the intrigues and backstabbing of “traitors” “stole” victory from them (The Guardian, online edition June 24) is both a historical fraud and an exaggerated attribution of capacity to intervene and room for action to revolutionary political subjectivity. Revolutionary action was able to deploy its disruptive work on the czarist and bourgeois regime because Russian society was shot through with lacerating inequalities and conflicts, was undermined by very deep contradictions and marked by terrible unresolved knots, because the Russian ruling classes had demonstrated a gigantic, shameful, fierce inadequacy. Because the slaughter of the war had even more violently exposed all these realities, making them unbearable for the proletariat and the peasant masses, the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy was able to materialize, to find real spaces and conditions to unfold because, as Trotsky recalls in his History of the Russian Revolution (a work that remains of a strength and ability to penetrate historical facts unmatched by the scribblers who go crazy on the Italian media scene today, re-proposing the fairy tale of the Bolshevik coup that never reached the true dignity of revolutions, those that must obtain the placet of the ruling class to be such…),
“The only thing the Russian generals did with élan was to extract human flesh from the country. Beef or pork was processed with incomparably greater economy.”
Not surprisingly, 1917 and the historical similarities to some of the conditions that made that year’s upheavals possible stir the sleeps of Putin and the Russian bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, we must reassure them today: the Russian proletariat is not showing signs of impatience and responsiveness as it manifested then, and there is no revolutionary force even remotely comparable to the Bolsheviks. The near march on Moscow by a formation of mercenaries fully integrated into the squalid and bloody picture of the Russian bourgeoisie is a turmoil, an internal move in the struggles and feuds of this class of exploiters and slaughterers of proletarians.
But if Putin and all bourgeoisie, from all states engaged more or less directly in the imperialist war in Ukraine can today breathe a sigh of relief because the revolution, the real revolution, the revolution of the dominated class against the ruling class, is not yet on the horizon, it is good to remember that in the depths of the dehumanizing capitalist society, of the ferocious imperialist dynamics, a far different reckoning is ripening than those that have been staged among the various black souls of the Russian bourgeoisie. It will be the showdown imposed by a proletarian class that today is still providing flesh for exploitation and cannon fodder. Which is filling the trenches and mass graves of a conflict between imperialist alignments along the Ukrainian fault line.
It will come, and neither the toxic historical exorcisms of the czars in the service of capital nor the democratic excommunications of the priests of the dogmas of “free” imperialism can avert it. Free, too, of course, to exploit, to deceive, to conscript, to murder proletarians.
circolo internazionalista "coalizione operaia" 