We would like to thank the editors of the blog leftdis.wordpress.com for translating our article in english.
Since the outbreak of the imperialist war in Ukraine we have witnessed the calling of various “internationalist” anti-war initiatives, sometimes incensed in enthusiastic and triumphalist tones … by the promoters themselves, as if they were gatherings with a founding value comparable to that which the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences had during the First World Imperialist War.
Far from flaunting an aristocratic and very un-political “contempt” for some of these initiatives, however, we cannot help but note a whole series of heavy criticisms that lead us to doubt the depth of a proletarian internationalism so insistently flaunted.
First and foremost, and as we have noted before, the very characterization of the war, defined, by political tendencies that also seem to have grasped the basic contrast between the powers of German and U.S. imperialism, as a clash between NATO and the Russian federation, cannot fail to raise perplexity.
One of two things: either the war being fought by proxy by Ukraine, and despite the fact that the military confrontation concerns a power outside NATO (in this case Russia), essentially reveals the occasion of a clash of imperialist interests within the formal framework of a military alliance imposed by the victorious power on the bourgeoisies of the defeated European powers (either directly, such as Germany and Italy, or indirectly such as Great Britain) on the basis of the prevailing power relations at the end of World War II, or it remains decidedly complicated to explain why a NATO war, understood very superficially as a monolithically homogeneous bloc in its opposition to Russia, sees harmed by the current conflict primarily the centralizing aspirations of the European market, the Drang nach Osten [1] and the decades-long policy of friendly political-economic relations with Russia of a NATO member itself: German power. Scarcely understandable in this framework would also remain the role of Turkey, a full-fledged member of the Atlantic Alliance since way back in 1952.
It is hardly possible, in our view, to consider NATO per se as a subject of the ongoing war confrontation in Ukraine, except by assuming that the interests of the member powers of imperialism are identical and of the same weight, or by glossing over the fact that NATO and its eventual enlargement are but a means to certain imperialist ends and not an end in themselves.
Certainly, that of the “anti-NATO” struggle may turn out to be a mosquicide formula with a sure adhesive effect for an entire “antagonist” galaxy, politically reared in anti-Americanism and in the thesis of the Italian power as a “colony” of the U.S.; a galaxy for which highlighting the responsibility of the NATO subject in the current war, at least on one of the two fronts of the conflict, rather than of the American power, is functional to the claim of an exit from NATO itself. A claim entirely internal to the interests of fractions of the bourgeoisie at home, manifestly insignificant today, but which in the past left their ideological sediment in the currently residual but vaporized and widespread “maximalist” political currents.
However, confusion on this issue does not allow for the understanding of the fundamental internationalist goal that identifies the main enemy of the proletariat of all countries precisely in the bourgeoisie of one’s own country. And of no use is a mere verbal recognition of this fact if then the recurring slogan remains that of a “war between NATO and Russia.”
This is indeed a self-excluding goal and formula, since either the main enemy is one’s own bourgeoisie and its necessarily specific interests in the world market, or, on the contrary, one believes that the interests of one’s own imperialist bourgeoisie can merge indiscriminately into those of a supranational imperialist alliance, losing all specificity. Such a formula leaves open an entry point for the ideological positions of those who would like to involve the proletariat in a purely bourgeois struggle for the reaffirmation of the specific interests of “one’s own country,” allegedly nullified by the external imposition of an alliance, and, more importantly, it hinders in the proletariat the understanding of the nature of imperialist alliances – alliances always contracted between adversaries, actual and potential -, thus the understanding of the aims of the alliances themselves, of the real objectives of imperialist wars, and, with that, the setting of a correct revolutionary strategy of the proletariat.
The main enemy of the proletariat in Italy is the Italian imperialist bourgeoisie, whether or not it is allied with the U.S. and whatever front it lends its support to in the war in Ukraine; just as the main enemy of the American, German, French, British, Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is to be found in their respective countries; just as the main enemy of the Turkish proletariat is the bourgeoisie at home, adherent to NATO and to date not directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict. However, it is not indifferent for the conscious proletariat to be able to identify what the lines of demarcation of interests between the various powers of imperialism actually are, even within formal alliances. On the contrary, this identification is crucial in order to be able to recognize the seeds of future conflicts germinating in the soil of these same alliances, ready to blow them up in ways and directions otherwise completely incomprehensible and even surprising.
Another element that cannot help but raise doubts about the actual authority of certain “internationalist” assemblies is the nature of the sponsoring and participating organizations.
We confess some difficulty in believing that a coherent and clear-cut internationalist position on the part of Stalinist groups is plausible, and to speak of their being “inspired” by Stalinism only reveals a clumsy attempt to depotentiate what in reality can only be a clear and unequivocal identity.
We also regard as decidedly sly attempts by heterogeneous groupings of self-declared “anti-Stalinists” to justify their increasingly close collaboration with Stalinist organizations by citing alleged “rethinking processes” under way on the part of the latter. “Rethinking” about one’s counterrevolutionary history on the part of political organizations-assuming it is within the realm of possibility-is either a radical, open rejection, without compromise or distinction, manifested through a political battle leading to an abrupt break, not merely formal but in content, with one’s sphere of origin, or it is merely a matter of “nuance” concealing perhaps exclusively a sly reshaping of the same content in deference to a general climate and for contingent political goals.
It is the very conception of socialism of these organizations that necessarily makes them counter-revolutionary. And it is for this fundamental reason that the recognition of the capitalist nature of Soviet “false socialism” is an inescapable issue for any organization claiming to belong to the camp of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. State capitalism smuggled under the ideology of “socialism in one country” is not compatible with internationalism. And this is not an opinion. Only those who habitually practice principle-trading in order to count a few dozen more adherents can relegate this issue to the role of a mere “historical disquisition,” or wafflingly postpone the unraveling of this knot to a “later date” in the face of apparent convergences on agendas deemed to be of more pressing priority. What can be more of a priority for any trend that wants to be revolutionary than establishing which direction one wants to go? What can there be less deferrable than rigorously establishing one’s revolutionary, internationalist, class identity? The “second moment” to which one would like to entrust the necessary clarification-if it ever arrives-may come too late to run for cover-as the history of the workers’ movement has too often tragically illustrated-and what has been improperly deemed a surmountable “past,” ridiculously claiming to assume a pedagogical role with an Enlightenment flavor, may become a dramatic present for which the working class would once again pay the price.
Nothing, therefore, can be more diriment and less procrastinable than clarification of the conception of socialism and the social nature of the USSR or the so-called “socialist countries,” not even the formal “internationalist” recognition by Stalinist organizations of the “imperialist nature on both fronts” of the present war on Ukrainian territory.
It is more than evident that a Stalinist organization consistent with its own conception of “socialism” could very hardly recognize in present-day Russia the connotations of that “leading state” which the USSR was for it, just as it is evident that the old “disagreements” of Russian state capitalism with Maoist China and the Chinese “reforms” of the early 1980s make it perfectly plausible that the most consequential of today’s Stalinists lack any sympathy for the latter. There is thus more than enough to explain their eventual definition of the current war as imperialistic even on the Russian side and their eventual refusal to recognize China as the bulwark of a nonexistent “anti-imperialist front.”
In this regard, it hardly has the flavor of a mere “rehashing of the past” to recall that Stalinists around the world defined World War II as “imperialist on all fronts” from 1939 to 1941, at least until the entry of their “lead state” into the conflict “suddenly” changed its nature, transforming it overnight into a “war of democracy against fascism.” In the absence of a “lead state” to support, it should not cost the most astute of today’s Stalinists much to recognize the imperialistic nature of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
A further critical issue found in the current “Zimmerwaldians” in sixteen is the compulsive frenzy to accumulate and put on display evidence of international “contacts,” especially from countries militarily involved in the current imperialist conflict in Eastern Europe. The overall impression is that of a very unselective collection of statements, manifestos, and testimonies from organizations or groups that can recall, on a very superficial reading, an internationalist position on the war, in order to credit themselves as “catalysts” and “reference points” of a real anti-war movement at the international level.
It is indeed paradoxical for those who deem themselves worthy of adopting the name of internationalist to publicly boast of links with Ukrainian or Russian groupings that dismiss apertis verbis the Soviet repressive and concentrationist universe as well as the catastrophic Ukrainian famine of the 1930s as pure “bullshits.”[2]
For “anti-Stalinists” who do not flinch or think it possible to dialogue with those who call the hell of the gulags, which cost the freedom and lives of thousands of genuine internationalist revolutionaries before even a hardly calculable number of other victims of Stalinist counterrevolution, “bullshits.” who even honor with the appellation of “comrades” those who call the millions of deaths from starvation, hardship and disease caused by the ruthless demands of the original capitalist accumulation in a backward economy that accelerated its pace under the thrust of world imperialist contention; for them, the bloody names of Vorkuta and Kolyma should burn on their tongues like a scorching brand every time they utter the word “internationalism.” As far as revolutionary communists are concerned, Stalinists can never be called “comrades” but only class enemies who have slaughtered the revolutionary proletariat, besmirched for decades past and still to come the name of communism, devastated among the world’s working class the very perception of communism as a prospect of the future and against whom they wage a tireless struggle.
For genuine internationalists, the admiring and justificatory mention of the risks Stalinist organizations and groups face in facing repression by other political forms of bourgeois rule, whether in Ukraine or Russia, is not an argument in the slightest sufficient to mitigate the strenuous struggle against the current political and ideological expressions of the worst form of counterrevolution in history.
The Stalinist parties that fought the Nazis with undeniable courage and valor in the second half of World War II, even paying a high price in blood, are the same parties that, in deference to the dictates of the “leading state,” bargained, negotiated and made alliances with the Nazis; the same ones who handed over hundreds of German communists who had taken refuge in the USSR to Hitler’s Gestapo as a pledge of good will on the sidelines of the imperialist partition of Poland in 1939; the same ones who, attributing to themselves the names of maquisards, franc-tireurs or partisans, cowardly murdered Trotskyists like Pietro Tresso in France and internationalist militants like Fausto Atti and Mario Acquaviva in Italy.
Stalinism is not a deficiency of the materialist critique of social relations, it is, on the contrary, the political expression of certain social relations, of social relations characterized by state capitalism, and it is the expression of the interests of social strata materially linked to it or that consider state capitalism the ultimate goal of their political action.
The anchoring by militants of Stalinist political groups to a very precise and false vision of socialism cannot be belittled or derubricated with the harmless and all in all benevolent definition of “nostalgia,” unless at bottom one shares it or considers it all in all “compatible” with one’s own. A vision of socialism that is not ashamed to call “equality among workers” the wage disparities, the Stachanovist emulation systems with rewards and punishments, favoritism, espionage among workers, blacklists, fines for low performance, and restriction of freedom of movement even within one’s own country that characterized state capitalism in the countries of the USSR and those under its sphere of influence.
There can be no confrontation about the present, much less can there be any prospects for common struggle, if one does not really “settle accounts” with the past, with the social nature of the USSR. At least not with political forces organized on the basis of these assumptions.
As much as various episodes of spontaneous workers’ protest have occurred and are occurring in Ukraine and Russia as well – episodes about which very significantly our own social-imperialists, proponents of the “Ukrainian national liberation” struggle, are silent, embarrassed by an economic struggle of the proletariat that erupts despite all appeals to the union sacrée – these are unfortunately phenomena lacking the anchorage to an organized theoretical consciousness, even if only of slender minorities. This is a dramatic fact that cannot be bypassed with comfortable displays of “optimism of the will.”
Acknowledging that in the present state of affairs there unfortunately still seems to be nothing traceable with which to interrelate is unacceptable only to those who cannot resist the opportunist anxiety of self-promotion and immediatism without principles. An anxiety that compels one to square a raffish sampler of international contacts from the “hot zones” to be exhibited to an audience considered in the same way as a mass of possible “customers,” whom one would like to dazzle with merchandise of more than dubious value.
Recognition of reality, however difficult and bitter this reality may turn out to be, is the first step in putting the working class in a position to transform it in the future. The rest is all smoke and mirrors.
NOTES
[1] In German, “Push to the East.”
[2] See Nostra intervista ai compagni del Fronte dei lavoratori dell’Ucraina (m-l), blog “il pungolo rosso”, July 5, 2023.
circolo internazionalista "coalizione operaia" 