Paid to Kill (2024)

Book Review from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army. By Jack Margolin. Reaktion Books £15.99.

Mercenaries have existed through much of history, at least since Ancient Greek times. A well-known recent example was the US firm Blackwater, which has since undergone a number of name changes after some of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007 (the killers were imprisoned, but later pardoned by Trump). The term ‘private military contractor’ is sometimes used as supposedly sounding less nasty. Here Jack Margolin recounts the history of the Wagner organisation; his work is diligently researched, though quite a lot remains unclear.

The boss of Wagner was Evgeniy Prigozhin, a thug who had spent nine years in prison for theft but later became a business-owner. After the collapse of the USSR, private military companies began to flourish, often doing the dirty work that state security services preferred to steer clear of. Wagner seems to have originated in eastern Ukraine in 2014, as pro-Russia separatists endeavoured to set up regimes not linked to Kyiv, and it may even have been created by the Russian state.

In 2015-6 Wagner soldiers fought in Syria, defending the Assad government on behalf of Russia but also making a profit from Syrian oil. Many front companies were put in place then and later, and an agreement was signed with the Syrian regime that entitled Wagner to up to a quarter of the revenue from oil extracted at sites they had ‘liberated’. Attention was then turned to Africa, fighting and making profits in Sudan and then the Central African Republic with its sizeable mineral resources. Wagner established a regional hub in Libya and in 2022 its fighters were responsible for a massacre at Moura in Mali, where at least five hundred people were killed and women and girls were raped. It is not possible to put a figure on Wagner’s income from government payments (including the Russian state) and its profiting from resource exploitation.

Wagner probably became most notorious for its part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2022, though it took a few weeks for it to play any role. It was allowed to recruit from prisons, promising amnesty to those who ‘volunteered’. They had perhaps five thousand fighting in Ukraine, most of them convicts, which helped the Putin regime to avoid introducing conscription. Deserters were killed, often with a sledgehammer, which became a kind of symbol of Wagner.

But as the invasion wore on, Wagner and Prigozhin began to distrust Russia’s military leadership, a feeling that was mutual. In June 2023 it was decreed that private military companies would have to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence. This would put Wagner and others in a subordinate role, Prigozhin refused to accept it, and a mutiny or putsch took place. A convoy of Wagner vehicles and fighters occupied the city of Rostov, in the hope that Russian army soldiers would join them. A march towards Moscow started, but this was abandoned after an intervention from Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus (though it is not clear precisely what happened). Wagner forces were evicted from Russia and moved to Belarus. Then in August a plane carrying Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders crashed north of Moscow, killing all those on board. According to Margolin, it is pretty likely, though not absolutely certain, that it was Putin who ordered Prigozhin’s assassination, just as other rivals and critical journalists have been killed.

Margolin suggests that embattled governments may well continue to make use of private military forces, as will rebels too, with the state not having an absolute monopoly on violence. But whoever does the fighting, it will be in the interest of rulers or would-be rulers of one kind and another, and it will be ordinary people who will suffer and be killed.

Paul Bennett

Fighting for Profit (2008)

Book Review from the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘War PLC’, by Stephen Armstrong. Faber and Faber £14.99.

In a world of privatisation and globalisation, it is perhaps only to be expected that combat and security activities should also be outsourced. Private military companies are being increasingly used to guard both people and places.

Oil companies, for instance, are starting to set up their own private armies. Aramco is establishing a security force to protect oil and gas fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia, while the Russian parliament has given permission for gas and oil companies to raise corporate armies of their own. But for the most part it is a matter of private companies that hire their employees out to corporations and governments, companies like Sandline and Blackwater. The latter has its own vast training camp in North Carolina and possesses helicopter gunships and armoured personnel carriers.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has fuelled the growth in private military companies. In 2006 there were 100,000 private contractors (as they’re called) in Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld regarded them as an official part of the US war machine. They have increasingly taken on combat roles, and in September last year a Blackwater convoy killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.

Contracting out security tasks supposedly frees up government soldiers to do more actual fighting, though the private forces are, as just seen, getting more involved in combat operations. It is also claimed that they perform a useful service because new states may not at first have properly organised armed forces of their own. They also mean big profits for their owners, partly brought about by hiring cheap labour from Latin America, including former thugs from Pinochet’s Chile. And like other companies, they are concerned about their image: one boss interviewed here says, ‘Even though it was making us lots of money at the time, we took a view of Iraq and the margins and felt it was dragging our brand down.’

If any contractor is killed or injured, the company employing them will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying compensation. The soldier’s family will find their struggle made far more difficult by the complex web of ownership: a person from country X, fighting in Y for a company based in Z but officially registered elsewhere.

Making a profit from war is perhaps the ultimate expression of the profit motive. Armstrong’s book gives a good account of these developments, though notes and/or references would have made it more useful. And the publishers have a nerve charging this much for a 250-page paperback that doesn’t even have an index.

Paul Bennett

Parliament and Private Armies (1974)

From the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

As if there were not enough political lunacy already, we have proposals now to raise private volunteer forces to deal with “national subversion”. The ones which have specially attracted publicity are General Sir Walter Walker’s Unison Committee for Action — “a vigilante body set up to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order in an emergency” — and Colonel David Stirling’s Great Britain 1975. The assertion is that a state of anarchy is at hand, caused by left-wing influence in the trade unions — hence, inflation due to wage demands — and in the Labour Party, and that in this situation a "nationwide body of disciplined men” would maintain public services and direct the population.

It has been taken seriously by many people. In an article in The Times on 5th August, Lord Chalfont asked “Could Britain be heading for a military takeover?” He contended that power is passing into the hands of the unions and bureaucracy, and parliamentary government has been brought into disrepute by Wilson and Heath: consequently “those at the private enterprise end of the political spectrum” have no option but to arrange their own defences. Other writers discounted the idea of a military coup, but agreed on the dangers of the situation. On 23rd August Peace News published documents circulated privately by Stirling, on the organization of Great Britain 1975 and strategies for breaking strikes.

The possibility of military rule has also been raised by left-wing groups. In the enquiries into the June 15th demonstration in Red Lion Square the existence of a special police squad was alleged. A few months earlier, when troops and armoured cars were taken to London Airport in view of a possible bomb attack on a foreign dignitary, this was claimed to be a rehearsal of government plans for the not-distant day when capitalism attacks militant workers with machine-guns in the streets. The Peace News publication presaged the same thing: “. . . ultimately, radical social change will require some showdown between the forces for change and the forces of the status quo.”

What the State is for

The questions posed have a special interest for us. Our case has always been that the establishment of Socialism can be achieved only by parliamentary means: once the working class understands and wants Socialism it will send its elected representatives to take control of the governmental machinery by which capitalism is maintained. We have frequently been told that this could not happen — that, in the face of such a threat, the capitalist class would suspend democracy and use armed force. Can Socialism be prevented by military rule?

The first thing which must be understood is that the “subversive influences” against whom these private armies are mooted are not Socialists. The left, whether trade-union militants or in political groups in and out of the Labour Party, stands for not the abolition of capitalism but a variation of its form. Indeed, given a crisis of the magnitude they think they are talking about, the left would run to heel behind capitalism — as it did in the world wars. Second, political power cannot be transferred to bodies which do not hold it, i.e. do not participate in government. Though it is true that the trade unions have to make bargains with the parties in power, they remain dependent on the law — which is administered only by governments and supported absolutely by courts, police, legal penalties and, in the end, armed force.

It is not a question of saying "Could it exist?”; it is already there. Socialists do not need to have it pointed out or a supposition made over it. On the contrary, it is the fact which our statement of the necessity to gain control of the powers of government recognizes. If the left were correct about the tanks and guns at London Airport, what would the left do about them ? Overthrow them with slogans from behind barricades? Not only do the powers exist, but they have been used — for instance in 1948 the Labour Government’s employment of the Emergency Powers Act (use of soldiers) to break the dock strike, and more recent punitive actions against strike pickets and local councillors. Oddly enough, the leader of Great Britain 1975 recognizes them too. Despite talking about the breakdown of law and order, one of David Stirling’s memoranda is on the need for a "judiciary committee” to advise on the legality of his organization’s actions. One question is:

  Would [trade] Union members who are volunteers, of whom we can expect a great many, be protected by the police against extremist Union efforts at intimidation?

(Peace News Special Issue, 23rd Aug.)

Not-so-funny fools

The New Law Journal in an editorial on 29th August hinted that the Public Order Act would quickly dispose of the private armies — but also that they might be trained as police auxiliaries by putting them to keep the more notorious football crowds in order.

  There is precious little evidence that any of these bodies can manage a whelk stall, still less a general-strike-ridden country (there is a difference, which seems to have escaped many commentators, between commanding NATO or SAS forces and directing a civilian population in peacetime), and a little practice at a task with narrow and limited objectives while keeping strictly within the existing law might produce interesting results.

In one sense this is hitting a nail on the head. The sort of person who may join or support these bodies is the self-important little man wanting to show superiority to the Lower Orders he can’t help belonging to, who was a special constable in the General Strike and Nat Gubbin’s “ironmonger with a commission in the Home Guard” in the war; the New Law Journal is, rather contemptuously, suggesting an activity for him now. (Curiously again, Stirling himself says in effect the same — he looks for recruits from “Rotary Clubs, the Free Masons, certain women’s organizations and so on”.)

 

But underlying the contempt is the knowledge that the only kind of power in society is political power, and without it, the intentions of these organizations can only be talked about. Moreover, it depends on having the support of the electorate — the idea of a coup by a dozen armed men walking into Westminster and thereafter ruling as apolitical dictators is dramatic but unrealizable. All dictatorships require popular support (as was evidenced by the National Front’s unconvincing best-suit-and-speak-nicely TV broadcast in the Election). It may be chilling to recall that the Nazis began as a whelk-stall handful; nevertheless, they were ineffectual until the majority of the German people elected them.

False and Correct Answers

The struggle to change society from capitalism to Socialism has nothing to do with fighting in the streets or organizing strikes. It has to be a political one. The powers of government include and in the last analysis rest on armed force to maintain capitalism in each country. The only logical strategy to abolish capitalism is, therefore, for the working class — not leaders or an élite, but the Socialist working class itself through its mandated delegates — to take control of those powers; so that the protection of capitalism has gone, and no-one can prevent the establishment of Socialism.

In those circumstances, hypotheses about opposition by army officers etc. are not only improbable but define themselves out of existence. If a military-minded group seeks power, it must do so as a political party. For that it requires the assent of the ruled-to-be, which is obtainable only in the absence of Socialist understanding. Even under capitalism, forcible rule without that assent does not work as the ruling class needs. The immediate example is Northern Ireland, where the fact that military occupation has achieved nothing is testified to by the search on all sides for “a political solution”, i.e. a régime acceptable to the population: which is what we were saying. What is much more likely than military resistance to the rapid growth of Socialist consciousness is that the ruling class will offer sops and reforms galore to try to buy it off.

Nevertheless, there is an ugliness in the present situation which cannot be denied. If the would-be Napoleons are pernicious buffoons, they are not the only ones. For the past generation the Labour Party has promised over and over again that it can end strife and bring prosperity to everyone; what it has produced instead is the conviction that parliament is a sham and democracy a failure, while capitalism flounders on the edge of an economic crisis in which the working class will unfailingly be the sufferers. Don’t confuse the nature of political power with the complaint, made by the private-army people and the left alike, that it is not being used “properly” — i.e. to suppress their opponents, who happen to be each other. The left has exactly the same ambitions as Stirling and Walker. The Communist Party at its inception was committed to the idea of “an armed uprising” (Statutes of the Communist International. 1920), and it was only last year that the International Marxist Group was urging workers “to centralize our resources for fighting the police” (May Day pamphlet).

The working class has had ample experience that all attempts to reorganize capitalism fail. What it needs to learn is the reason why, and the alternative in its hands — Socialism.

Robert Barltrop