Material World: It’s the Economy, Stupid! (2026)

The Material World column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

So said James Carville, a political strategist on Bill Clinton’s successful campaign to win the American presidency in 1992. It was written up on a whiteboard in Clinton’s Little Rock headquarters, as a reminder to campaign workers to remain focused on the recession then affecting voters.

A decade and a half earlier the Italian historian, Carlo M. Cipolla, wrote his essay, ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’. His basic contention was that everyone always underestimates the number of stupid people there are.

Stupidity is generally defined as acting foolishly or carelessly, in an apparently stunned or blank manner, or being ridiculous to an extreme degree. It is important at this point to establish that Cipolla wasn’t using stupidity as a synonym for idiocy or lack of intelligence. But rather it is a human feature of many, perhaps all, whatever an individual’s mental acuity.

Everyone, if they are honest with themselves, will be able to identify personal examples of their own stupidity, indeed they are likely to be many and various. Usually, they do not result in anything too serious, more often nothing worse than inconvenience or embarrassment. Occasionally, though there is injury, or worse

At the Kremlin

Consider two presidents, one Russian, the other American and their current wars. If there is one huge lesson the Second World War should have taught Russia’s present leader it’s that a powerful military force can be thwarted by a determined population.

Stalingrad was thoroughly bombed, shelled and otherwise blasted for over five months. 90 percent of the city was taken by the aggressors with almost half a million military and 40,000 civilian casualties. Yet not only did it not surrender but became the instance from which the invaders suffered ultimate defeat. Four decades later the Russians became the insurgent force in Afghanistan only to suffer defeat and expulsion at the hands of a seemingly inferior military.

So what induces the present Kremlin incumbent to consider victory in Ukraine likely? Dreadful as they are, the missiles and drones launched against the cities are not anything like the razing of Stalingrad. If the intention was to thwart NATO, the consequence has been to strengthen its resolve and expand it. To have expected otherwise, in the face of previous experiences, appears to be an exemplar of stupidity, at an awful and avoidable cost.

In the White House

Meanwhile, in the White House, stupidity seems to be the order of the day. The Vietnam War is not so long ago its conduct and outcome can have been forgotten. B52 bombers that were to return Hanoi to the Stone Age proved far less effective than bicycles down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. America’s own, more recent, experience in Afghanistan, with the eventual return to government of the Taliban should have highlighted how all too easy it is to become embroiled in bellicose misadventures.

The setting aside once more of historical experience has ensnared the Commander in Chief in a conflict he is having great difficulty in extricating himself from. Indeed, it could well lead to the regime in Tehran becoming stronger. Stupidity wrapped in stars and stripes.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to identify any war the outcome of which was an unmitigated success for a winner. For any supposed winner there may be some short-term spoils, but any such resolution is subsequently unravelled by further conflict arising directly or indirectly from that martial discord.

Following leaders

The present system is driven by the accumulation of capital, which requires nation states to compete for resources, trade routes and markets, competition that all too often manifests as armed conflict. Governments of all types have to serve the interests of capital, the unfettered, as far as possible, pursuit of profit. It doesn’t matter what governments or politicians promise their citizens – better welfare at home or conquests abroad – the imperative of profit will be the deciding factor.

There are of course those for whom war is not stupidity writ large, the arms manufacturers. A huge industry worldwide it consumes massive amounts of scientific research time, resources and labour power, as well as the lives of multitudinous casualties military and civilian.

Consider how humanity worldwide would benefit if that effort was focused on meeting people’s needs rather than profiting from their deaths. It must be stupidity to persevere with maintaining a system that cannot be anything other than careless of human need.

Any campaigning against the arms industry is opposed not only by shareholders who want their dividend from the profits, governments covetous of tax revenue and, also, the trade unions of those employed in the industry. Yet the best interests of all, even the shareholders, would be in establishing a cooperative worldwide society that wasn’t riven by nationalism, wars, terrorism and all such manifestations of inhumanity.

However, for as long as people continue to lend their support, via the ballot box or other means, to political individuals or parties while expecting, or hoping for, better outcomes they are denying their own experiences. Rather than accepting the need to play an active part in determining a very different society, they continue to be passive recipients of whatever capitalism deigns to spare them. This is not congenital, but elective, which means it is eminently possible to choose otherwise.

One of the basic laws Cipolla formulated in his pamphlet was ‘A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself deriving no gain or even possibly incurring losses’.

Consider the two leaders referred to above, along with leaders in general, in the light of Ciprolla’s law. How long is humanity to be subjected to leadership stupidity? How long is humanity going to continue the stupidity of following leaders?

James Carville was certainly no socialist, but he unintentionally acceded to socialist understanding. Because it is the economy, the worldwide economy that is ultimately the determining factor of the quality of life to be shared by all.

D. A.

Proper Gander: Reporting on reporting (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Journalist Steve Rosenberg hasn’t chosen the easiest of careers. His appearances on BBC News as their correspondent in Russia raise questions about how free he is to investigate and report on what’s happening there, especially since the war in Ukraine reignited in 2022. The Panorama episode Our Man In Moscow (BBC One) offers an answer by showing what Rosenberg, his producer and camera operator do between the times we see him on air. Their trip to the city of Tver to interview people on the street is interrupted by both the police and state media asking what they’re doing, with the producer saying this could have turned out to be ‘much worse’ than an identity check. The forums and summits which they and other journalists attend are as slickly presented as those anywhere else. Although Rosenberg says that some of the attendees are now reluctant to speak to the BBC, he has put in questions to Putin on a couple of occasions. At an annual press conference, Rosenberg lists some of Russia’s problems then asks Putin ‘do you think you have taken care of your country?’, to which he predictably replies in the affirmative. The following year, Rosenberg asks what future Putin plans for Russia, including militarily, and is told ‘there will be no operations if you treat us with respect’. Rosenberg’s analysis is that the Kremlin’s confidence is fuelled by Europe being weakened because it is distanced from Trump’s America.

Steve Rosenberg became interested in Russian culture and language during his teenage years in Chingford. His first visit to Russia was in 1987, when the Soviet Union was starting to open up more to global markets, and he was there a few years later when it broke up. Having lived and worked as a reporter in Moscow since the mid-1990s, Rosenberg is now the BBC’s Russia Editor. He’s nostalgic for the country he saw when he was younger, which he tells us had more optimism. He describes the time when Putin came to power by saying ‘it felt as if this huge black cloud had come over’. Being a journalist there now is compared to walking on a tightrope: ‘You can’t relax, really, for a second. You want to report accurately and honestly about what’s happening, but you don’t want to fall off the tightrope onto the minefield below, and hit a mine’.

According to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, Russia ranks 171st out of 180 countries, making it among the most restricted places for what news is reported, how and by whom. Virtually all media produced there comes from state-owned or affiliated organisations, with controls on its content increased further due to the war. Military personnel are banned from speaking to journalists, and the dissemination of ‘unreliable information’ about the armed forces is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Dozens of critics of the authorities and the war are currently jailed, some for spying charges, and most foreign reporters have left the country. Rosenberg explains that he’s one of the few western journalists remaining in Moscow, as he walks through an empty office which used to be bustling with colleagues.

Rosenberg and his crew have got used to being monitored by the state, learning that it’s safest to calmly present the required documents when approached by the police while out reporting. They are also followed by plain-clothes agents, one of whom denies this when Rosenberg challenges him. These agents wouldn’t be too concerned that they have been rumbled, for the reason that Rosenberg is likely to be more unsettled and restrained being aware that they’re watching him. The authorities will probably watch the Panorama documentary too, which Rosenberg, his colleagues and BBC executives would realise, and so they wouldn’t have included anything too incriminating.

Rosenberg isn’t popular with the nation’s state-owned media either, which depicts him as an anti-Russian propagandist by selectively editing quotes from his reports. We see some Russian journalists questioning him on his reporting, albeit in their role as state lackeys. Television is more prominent as a source of information in Russia than in western countries: nearly two-thirds of its citizens mainly get their news in this way, according to Reporters Without Borders. We see a clip of an angry TV show host calling Rosenberg a ‘conscious enemy of our country’ and (oddly) a ‘defecating squirrel, constantly surprised by things’. Admirably, Rosenberg perseveres with his job despite the tense position it places him in, walking his tightrope. He comes across as professional and sincere, having developed a personal understanding of Russian culture and politics.

While the context Rosenberg works in is different to that of most reporters, it illustrates how journalism isn’t as simple as a dogged pursuit of the truth. In Russia more than elsewhere, the restrictions and threats hanging over journalists will shape their approaches and the words they use. Many have been silenced completely, further limiting awareness and viewpoints. Alongside this, the Russian state’s media has become even more empowered, dominating the market. Legislating speech is an obvious admission by the state that it wants to control the narrative, skewed to promote both the ruling elite and the system which enables it.

Journalism is moulded not only by regulation, but also by what’s acceptable to the organisations which produce it. Being an employee of the BBC, Rosenberg has to work within the corporation’s frame of reference. This isn’t just its editorial guidelines, but its overall ethos as part of the establishment, creating both conscious and subconscious bias in its news output. So, the war between Russia and Ukraine is analysed only on the surface level of capitalist politics, between rival governments. Mainstream journalism, whether in Britain, Russia or anywhere else wouldn’t examine more fundamentally how the war is between factions of the capitalist class for their economic interests, not those of the working class.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Cheating the reaper (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s a dark and ghoulish story for your Christmas-time delight. Back in September, just before the wall-to-wall media orgy of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met up for a big military parade in Beijing, accompanied by their chums Lukashenko of Belarus, Pezeshkian of Iran and Min Aung Hlaing of the Myanmar junta. This self-congratulatory Comic-Con of the Marvel Supervillain Universe was chiefly notable for a ‘hot mic’ moment in which Putin and Xi were overheard talking about the prospects of human longevity. According to reports, the conversation went like this:

Putin (aged 72 at the time): ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing… Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

Xi (also aged 72): ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Ha ha, they wish. One of the few consolations of being an elderly worker in capitalism is that no matter how rich these capitalist bastards are, they can’t cheat death any more than you can. This little soundbite reveals that they are keenly aware of that fact too. It’s just not fair, is it? You go to all the trouble of demolishing democracy, crushing your opponents, cowing your population, and making yourself dictator for life, only to have death pull the rug from under you just like it does for the little people.

It’s not just the autocrats, of course. Donald Trump, while not believing in exercise or healthy food, nevertheless appointed ‘longevity enthusiasts’ including RF Kennedy to key health posts. Rich Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos also harbour Methuselah aspirations, reasoning that if there’s any way to extend life, their money will find it . There are individuals like Bryan Johnson who are so obsessed with longevity that they will put themselves through the most punishing and joyless regimes in order to wring life out to the very last drop. Instead they are likely proof of the old joke that renouncing all pleasures doesn’t make you live longer, it just seems like it .

Though it’s still considered ‘fringe of the fringe’, there is a history of research into longevity, from plasma therapy to fusing old and young mice together, and even injecting pureed monkey testicle into the human scrotum. Instead of seeing death as the great leveller, why not treat it as a preventable disease like any other, for which treatments can be found? The Greenland shark can live for 500 years or more, and only starts dating at 150. There must be sound biological reasons for that, aside from living in a perpetual icebox.

The World Health Organization in 2018 included old age as a disease in its 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, until vigorous protest made them remove it again. For critics, pathologising a universal process involves serious ethical concerns, stigmatising old people as ‘having something wrong with them’ .

And there is the big picture. Death is the reason we exist. If animals didn’t die, there would have been no evolution and therefore no us. If humans became immortal, society might ossify, and you’d have to abolish children. But never mind big pictures and bleeding hearts, think of the profits. ‘They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable… They seemed strangely uncurious [sic] about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’.

In any case, no one wants to make workers immortal, only the super-rich. Putin, famous for his ludicrous bare-chested-on-a-horse publicity photos, is fixated with being a ‘healthy strongman’, and goes everywhere with ‘an army of doctors’. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and has put billions into anti-ageing research, stem-cell cloning and organ transplant technology. It’s also scurrilously reported that he bathes in deer blood, a traditional Siberian shamanic ‘remedy’. In all this he is no doubt encouraged by his inner circle of hangers-on, who warmly appreciate that keeping him alive is their ticket to staying in power.

What’s the reality behind the hopeful hype? Professor of vaccine immunology John Tregoning points out that you can’t keep swapping out failing organs indefinitely because a) general anaesthetics are a calculated risk that increases with age and each operation, and b) there’s a high risk of MRSA infections, including sepsis, with every transplant op. Putin would be playing Russian Roulette, over and over. Cloned organs are not a thing, so you’d need a lifetime of immuno-suppressants, with an ever-present threat of fatal infections. There is not an endless supply of suitable organs, in fact there’s a world shortage. There is some state-of-the-art work using genetically modified pig organs, but if you survive six months after a transplant, that is considered an ‘amazing feat’.

Meanwhile, Tregoning adds, the rest of your body would still be ageing. The largest organ is your skin, and how would you replace that? ‘Even if you could replace all of the internal organs, you’d need to replace your muscles, your bone, your skin, everything is aging at fairly constant rates…. Just putting a new heart in is like taking a 1980s Ford Cortina and putting a brand new Porsche engine in and expecting it to run fine’.

On top of all that, brain connectivity declines over time too, and there’s no known way to reset that. There is some horizon research into a class of drugs called senolytics, which eat dead cells and scar tissue and may be a way to reboot the human body from the inside out, but for now they only work with fruit flies and nematode worms, and have toxic side effects.

Happily, today’s ruthless autocrats stand no chance of cheating the reaper. But new ones will replace them as long as capitalism survives. The world’s workers need to wield the political scythe where it would do most good.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: The End Of National Sovereignty? (2008)

The Material World Column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalization versus National Capitalism

In 1648 the first modern diplomatic congress established a new political order in Europe, based for the first time on the principle of “national sovereignty.” This principle drew a sharp dividing line between foreign and domestic affairs. Each “national sovereign” was given free rein within the internationally recognized borders of his state. No outsider had any right to interfere. Recognized borders were inviolable. The “sovereign” was originally simply a prince; later the term was applied to any effective government.

National sovereignty facilitated the undisturbed development of separate national capitalisms – British, French, German, American, and so on. Interstate boundaries were stabilized. Governments were able to take protectionist measures to defend home manufacturers against foreign competition.

Even today the principle of national sovereignty is far from dead. It is enshrined in the United Nations Charter: Chapter VII authorizes the Security Council to impose sanctions or use armed force only in the event of a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.”

National sovereignty undermined

But in practice national sovereignty has been deeply undermined – first of all, by the emergence of a global economy dominated by huge transnational corporations. International financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and IMF have largely taken over economic policy making. Indebtedness leaves many states with merely the formal husk of independence.

Some groups of states have “pooled” part of their sovereignty in supranational regional institutions. The prime example is the European Union.

The old interstate system has also been destabilised by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the USSR into 26 new states, four of which lack international recognition. The decision of the West to recognize the independence of Kosovo from Serbia has set a precedent that makes it easier to carve up other states. Of course, the “independence” of Kosovo – occupied by NATO forces, governed by officials from the European Union, its constitution drafted at the US State Department – is purely notional. Russia has now retaliated by recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Although this will encourage secessionist movements inside Russia, blocking Georgia’s accession to NATO is evidently a higher priority (see September’s Material World).

Legitimising aggression

National sovereignty is not only undermined in practice, but also contested in theory.

Thus, in recent years the United States and its closest allies have sought to legitimise their military attacks on other states. True, such attacks are nothing new. What is new is open advocacy of the principle of aggression. The main rationales used are the prevention of nuclear proliferation, counter-terrorism and humanitarian intervention (see August’s Material World).

It is instructive to compare the Gulf War of 1991 with the current war against Iraq. The Gulf War, at least ostensibly, was launched in defence of the principle of national sovereignty, violated by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The elder Bush resisted pressure to “finish the job” – occupy Iraq and throw out the Ba’athist regime – out of concern that it would lead to the breakup of Iraq and, in particular, a new Kurdish state that would destabilise the whole region. Such considerations have not deterred his son.

Globalisation of capital, fragmentation of states

Paradoxically, the fragmentation of states is a natural corollary of the globalisation of capital. From the point of view of the transnational corporations, states no longer have important policy-making functions. It is enough if they enforce property rights and maintain basic infrastructure in areas important for business. Small states can do these jobs as well as large ones. In fact, they have definite advantages. They are more easily controlled, less likely to develop the will or capacity to challenge the prerogatives of global capital.

Global versus national capitalism

All the same, there is nothing inevitable about globalisation. It has lost impetus recently, and may even have passed its zenith. One sign is the disarray within the WTO. Another is Russia’s change of direction: in contrast to the Yeltsin administration, which was politically submissive and kept the country wide open to global capital, the Putin regime reasserted national sovereignty, expelled foreign firms from strategic sectors of the economy, and ensured the dominant position of national (state and private) capital.

Global versus national capitalism has emerged as an important divide in world politics. This divide exists, first of all, within the capitalist class of individual countries. Thus, even in the US, the citadel of globalisation, some capitalists – currently excluded from power – are oriented toward the home market and favour national capitalism. And even in Russia some capitalists support globalisation.

Nevertheless, the pattern of political forces differs from country to country, and as a result the global/national divide is reflected in international relations. Here the “globalisers,” led by the US, confront in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China and the Central Asian states) an embryonic alliance of national capitals bent on restoring the principle of national sovereignty to its former place in the interstate system.

A different perspective

This context clarifies the difference between our perspective as socialists and the attitude of anti-globalisation activists. Being against capitalist globalisation is not the same as being against capitalism in general. We have ample past experience of a world of competing national capitalisms – quite enough to demonstrate that there is no good reason for preferring such a world to a world under the sway of global capital. The main problem with the movement against globalisation is that it can be mobilized so easily in the interests of national capital, whatever the intentions of its supporters.

To be fair, some anti-globalisation activists are aware of this danger. Acknowledging that humanity faces urgent problems that can only be tackled effectively at the global level, they emphasize that they are not against globalisation as such: they are only against the sort of globalisation that serves the interests of the transnational corporations. This then leads them to explore ideas of globalisation of an “alternative” kind. These ideas at least point in the right direction. Socialism is also an alternative form of globalisation – a globalisation of human community that abolishes capital.

Stefan

Something’s lurking around the corner – but it isn’t a world war (2023)

From the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader in Greece has sent us the article below. We publish it as informative and a contribution to the discussion about whether the war in Ukraine is likely to lead to a Third World War.

The devastating one-two punch delivered to the world economy by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war has fuelled fears that World War Three may soon break out. With no other historical event to compare the current crisis to, many take their cue from how World War One killed the first wave of globalisation in 1914 and conclude that the end of our second wave of globalisation is nigh.

Although world trade as a percentage of world GDP is currently down to 52 percent (the same level as in 2009), we are very far from the nadir of 5 percent registered in 1945 at the end of World War Two. Because of the tendency to conflate or confuse the order of historical events, the decline in world trade is incorrectly seen by many to be a harbinger of world war. Yet it was the other way around with the demise of ‘Globalisation 1.0.’ Moreover, World War Two did not erupt immediately after 1918. It took twenty-one years of interwar isolationism, protectionism and the Great Depression to trigger it.

How realistic is the outbreak of a major international war in the foreseeable future? The causes of World War One were imperialism, militarism, nationalism and the alliance system. Although present in the equation today, these factors are considerably less dynamic than they were at the end of the long nineteenth century in 1914. Imperialism has been replaced by transnational organisations and multinational corporations. Militarism is also significantly weaker. If the war in Ukraine is the prelude to World War Three, where is the will to fight on the part of the Russian aggressor? It appears that only the Ukrainians possess this quality. The same may be said about the explosion of nationalism in Ukraine, which is the exception that proves the general rule. Nationalism was necessary for capitalism’s gestation from feudalism with its myriad tariffs and customs barriers that hindered trade. In our technologically connected world, nationalism is an anachronism that has no lasting power against large multinational corporations and transnational organisations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

When Russia’s oil-and-gas-fuelled economic expansion wound up in 2008, President Vladimir Putin put everyone on a daily diet of Great Russian chauvinism and idiosyncratic imperial revanchism. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels had ten years to work their propaganda. Putin has had a good fourteen—and the efforts bore fruit. Ask the average Russian teenager what they know about the 1917 revolution and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Yet like parrots they’ll repeat that Joseph Stalin saved the planet from fascism in World War Two. Never mind that it was the Soviet people who defeated the Nazis—and not Stalin. The Red Tsar’s purge of the Red Army shortly before the war began and murder of the Soviet Union’s top military minds, his myopia over Hitler’s plans and other blunders that cost the lives of millions of people, make his role in the war much less than heroic, to say the least. Nevertheless, under Vladimir Putin the victory of the Soviet Union against the Third Reich was quickly turned into a hypostasis of the Russian state. Quite tellingly in terms of his intention to attack Ukraine under the pretext of fighting Ukrainian Nazis, Putin had legislation passed in July 2021—just six months before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine—that make it a crime to equate Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. In a word, the Kremlin uses Hitler to whitewash Stalin.

Kremlin propagandists speak of a ‘sacred national war’ in Ukraine but most Russians, particularly in St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large cities, are ceasing to be idiots—to use the term in the original, ancient Athenian sense of ‘idiotis,’ that is, an individual who does not participate in the common affairs of the demos, or ruling body of free citizens. Russians are waking up from a 22-year slumber. They see that their grey FSB mouse-turned-emperor is naked—and from the waist down this time. Moscow insists that the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was imperative in order to pre-empt an attack from NATO. However, increasing numbers of people understand that Putin’s real motive was to distract the public’s attention from a tanking economy and gain ratings through a short, victorious war.

The closest parallel in Russian history to what we are witnessing in Ukraine’s snow-covered fields of fertile chernozem, or black soil, is Tsar Nicholas I’s attempt in 1853 to bolster his regime via a ‘short, victorious war’ in Crimea. The results were catastrophic. The war lasted until 1856, the Imperial Russian Army was soundly defeated, the treasury was drained (leading to the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867), and Russia’s influence in Europe was seriously undermined. The humiliation in the Crimean War forced Russia’s educated elites to recognise that rapid modernisation was the only way to recover the empire’s status as a European power. This was a catalyst for social reforms in the 1860s, including the abolition of serfdom and the overhaul of the justice system, local self-government, education and military service.

For a world war to be on the cards, a fight between two opponents must swiftly turn into a fight between many. Russia today is more isolated than she has ever been. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara has more allies than does the pale moth, as Russians pejoratively refer to their president. China is at best a lukewarm ally and even an engagement of NATO forces against Russian troops in Ukraine will not see the Red Dragon leap to Putin’s defence. A war between the United States and China is a non-starter because globalisation has bound the world much more tightly together than it has ever been. Were such a war to start, it would be an armed conflict between a buyer and seller, a consumer and a producer—and all parties would lose. China is a giant with clay feet, as the pandemic of recent protests in cities across the country suggest. Xi Jinping and the elite in Beijing fear worker unrest like death. They know that their privileges—and very survival—depend on their ability to ensure that people are not unemployed.

While a world war may be necessary to kill Globalisation 2.0, it is not an imperative for socialist revolution. In the early 1920s, for instance, a massive workers’ movement developed in Germany. Organised in councils (Arbeiterräte), these people were devoted to a general struggle against exploiters and the seizure of economic power by associations of worker collectives. They opposed patriotic defensism (defence of ‘their country’) and were hostile to all governments, including their ‘own’ leaders in Berlin. The workers’ councils rejected political parties and trade unions, which they regarded as fundamentally anti-democratic because they invariably have leaders who make all the important decisions and followers who do as they are told.

This was also true in Russia, where workers’ councils, or soviets, first appeared in the Revolution of 1905. Unlike political parties or trade unions, they answered to no one but their own collective and their elected representatives were recallable by the majority. The councils held de facto power in working class neighbourhoods in St. Petersburg and Moscow after Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate in February 1917. The rest, as they say, is history. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party came to power on the rising tide of soviets, then quickly swept the workers’ councils off the political stage and replaced them with its own dictatorship—which then morphed in the thirties into Stalin’s personal tyranny. Naturally, the USSR presented itself as anti-capitalist. From the standpoint of capitalists the world over, this was confirmed by the supposed abolition of private property and the free market. From the perspective of Soviet workers themselves, however, their government, though endlessly spewing Marxist phraseology, was in fact a harsh exploiter. This was also felt by the workers in the Communist Bloc, especially when the Soviet Union ordered an armoured division into East Berlin in 1953 to crush a rebellion by East German workers—which set a precedent for the armed interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Whether the Soviet Union was state capitalist or a ‘deformed’ or ‘degenerated’ workers’ state, as some argue, it certainly was no paradise for most people. The USSR had very little in common with socialism, if of course by socialism we mean a society without exploitation and classes. Not for nothing did many Russians call their country the ‘land of the great lie.’ The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was neither a union (Moscow ruled despotically over the regions), nor soviet (the workers’ councils were eliminated), nor socialist (workers’ self-management was destroyed), nor republican (there were no free elections). Every word in this “USSR” was a bald lie.

War is not a necessarily condition for anti-capitalist revolution. Most analysts neglect to mention or are simply unaware of the fact that the revolution in Russia might very well have broken out before the guns sounded in August of 1914. Analysis of the extensive data collected by Tsar Nicholas II’s Factory Inspectorate for the period from 1900 to 1914 shows a sharply rising strike wave, particularly in the empire’s capital, St. Petersburg. In the first six months of 1914 alone some 2 million people went on strike—and their demands were political rather than strictly economic. If anything, the outbreak of WWI seriously dampened the workers’ movement, which picked up again in a big way in 1916 following Russia’s Pyrrhic victory against Austria-Hungary during the Brusilov Offensive.

Recent history is peppered with efforts by workers’ councils to challenge the establishment (both capitalist and ‘communist’) during peacetime. Among others, these include Poland in 1956 and 1980-81 (rady rabotnicze), Mexico in 2011 (comités trabajadores), Hungary in 1956 (szovjetek), Italy in 1968 (consigli di fabbrica), Spain in 1936-37 (comites trabajadores; although formed during a war, this was a civil war), France in 1968 (comités d’entreprise), Czechoslovakia in 1968 (zavodnie rady) and Iran in 1978-79 (shoras).

Neither Moscow nor Kiev can win the war in Ukraine. A prolonged, bloody stalemate is much more likely. This of course is pregnant with grave dangers, and not just for the leaderships of the two belligerent countries. During the early interwar years one hundred years ago, the philosophy behind the League of Nations’ use of sanctions against a recalcitrant Germany was based on the observation during the Great War of how the British naval blockade had led to anti-war demonstrations and strikes in Germany (activities which the Nazis would later deem a ‘stab in the back’). The idea was that by making the Germans suffer economically, they would rise up against their government—as they had in 1918, when Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and escape to his relatives in Holland. However, the Ruhr Crisis in 1923, and the insane hyperinflation in Germany that ensued, threatened to have quite the opposite result. American trepidation that a socialist revolution might rip Germany asunder and lead to the replacement of the centre-left Weimar government by one openly friendly to the USSR, showed the limits of economic sanctions. In other words, it is far from inconceivable that the current sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s regime may actually trigger unrest and revolution in the West and around the world.

The consequences of this war are enormous and will end up weakening rather than strengthening NATO. The world’s ‘middle class’ is receiving its coup de grace and poor countries will suffer terrible privations, including famine. Social stability will be shattered and there will be anger and polarisation everywhere, especially in China and the United States, where inequality is extreme. Sky-high energy prices and inflation work as a counterincentive to the strengthening of NATO. Most member nations—including the United States, which has clearly forsaken its role as the world’s policeman—do not want to spend more money on keeping the organisation alive.

Instead of the beginnings of a new world war, what we are witnessing is the stage setting for global turmoil and revolution with people in many countries challenging their establishments and demanding drastic change.

Evelpidis Economakis

World View: The sinking of the Kursk (2000)

From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

At 10.31am on Saturday August 12, a rocket-propelled torpedo on a Russian submarine misfired during the launch routine, and its highly volatile fuel exploded. A desperate effort was then made by surviving crew members to bring the damaged and endangered vessel to the surface. But just two and one quarter minutes later, a second catastrophic blast with a force of two tons of TNT blew the bow apart when the torpedo warhead detonated, and sea water plunged in. That massive explosion sent the Kursk to the bed of the Barents Sea, where it had been participating in summer exercises.

This, according to American spying activities, appears to be what happened. But while that Saturday morning brought the end for all on board, for relatives, friends and a news-aware Russian working class, it was to become the beginning of a tragic drama of common solidarity, and a striking demonstration of the power of a largely unrestricted post-Soviet media.

For families of Kursk submariners, energetic media probing of the tragedy exposed official deceit, misinformation and confusion. After two days of silence, the navy said there had been a “malfunction”. That the Kursk had “descended voluntarily”. That “contact with the crew had been established”. That “everyone on board is alive”. That a “foreign” submarine caused a collision. Perhaps worst of all, relatives and the public were led to believe that the Russian navy was making serious attempts to save any survivors by sending down their own submersible rescue craft. But it transpired that this was futile from the outset, because deep-sea divers were essential to help guide this craft by hand over the Kursk’s rescue hatch so the mini-sub could properly lock on to it, and the cash-strapped navy had disbanded all these specially trained diving teams.

Four days were lost before Putin asked for outside help, and days more before it arrived. Even an agonising wait by sailors’ families to learn whether or not their own fathers, brothers and sons were on board the Kursk only ended when the tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published the names, after bribing a high-ranking navy officer with 18,000 roubles (£450) for the list stamped “Top Secret”. There was also public anger that president Putin remained on holiday in Sochi on the Black Sea, while loved ones were imagined to be struggling for air as the submarine’s oxygen ran out.

The reality was that the huge onboard explosion killed most of the Kursk’s crew quickly, though it is possible some survived a short while longer in the stern, before the entire submarine became flooded due to structural damage making watertightness impossible. The pressure of deep water outside the submarine would have caused more blast energy to be directed internally, causing increased hull and bulkhead damage.

To make matters worse for Putin—who won the presidential election by portraying himself as a revitalising strongman who would improve Russia’s armed forces, crack down on crime and restore stability—August brought not only the Kursk’s sinking. A terrorist bomb exploded beforehand in Moscow killing 12 and maiming dozens. And afterwards, the capital’s prestigious Ostankino television tower caught fire, disrupting the viewing habits of ten million Muscovites. These events together, and Russian journalists’ recent ability to comment freely no doubt account for much of the media’s fierce and sustained criticism of the President, but many were already unhappy with the leader because of a crackdown on media organisations which had followed negative comments about Russian fighting in Chechnya—something which damaged the government during the last such war.

Furthermore, some media barons and business tycoons no longer see eye to eye with Putin, and may be concerned that a politician they empowered and made their puppet, just might harbour a notion to sever his strings. Putin has sought to blame the “oligarchs” for the Kursk tragedy, accusing them of having robbed “the army, navy and the country blind”. If the public, who already despise the super-rich businessmen, can be led to believe that their greed has crippled and endangered the armed forces, then Putin will have scapegoats, popular and military support, and the power to exert more control over privatised assets at the very least. Perhaps even order a change of ownership if so inclined.

Orgy of self-enrichment

In the eight years since Russia followed Western advice from free market touts to establish a private banking system and start privatising the state assets, a small number of people with links to officialdom became phenomenally rich. During Boris Yeltsin’s early years in power, they were preoccupied with making money. But as the 1996 presidential election approached, Russia’s new capitalists grew fearful that their orgy of self-enrichment might end. The “Communist” party candidate had a real chance of winning, so they poured money into both Yeltsin’s campaign and an anti-“Communist” media offensive, and successfully got their man into the Kremlin. When Yeltsin was coming to the end of his reign, and was intent on protecting himself and his family’s sizeable amount of grasped wealth, he had to choose both a loyalist successor and someone acceptable to the nabobs.

Enter Vladimir Putin, who hours after becoming Prime Minister was asked by the Kommersant newspaper about his relationship with the asset-owning rich, and replied “I have never quarreled with any of the oligarchs”. Clearly, someone who knew where real power then lay, and who he had to curry favour with in order to improve his career prospects. But having achieved presidential power, Putin has sought to strengthen the Russian state and reassert Kremlin control of its 89 regions and republics, where nepotism, corruption and crime abound.

One of his first decrees ordered the resurrection of compulsory military training. More money has been promised to the armed forces. He has expressed admiration of the KGB, and last August appointed a former KGB colonel as Prime Minister. He recently unveiled a plaque honouring Russia’s war heroes which had Stalin’s name listed foremost. A commemorative coin bearing Stalin’s face has also been issued, and a new bust of the Soviet tyrant is planned for Russia’s main war memorial. This increased militarisation of society, tributes to authoritarianism, centralising of power, bonding with military chiefs and tendency to see others as being either state or anti-state—just as in the USSR era when everything was categorised as Soviet or anti-Soviet—might mean President Putin has a desire to return to Stalinist-style oppressive rule. If so, the power and privileges presently enjoyed by the oligarchs could shift Putin’s way, as he and his own associates became the next capitalist elite.

But is there not a contradiction between Putin’s expressed detest of the oligarchs, and his simultaneous commitment to improve the armed forces? After all, just whose valuable assets and territory is the Russian military defending and favouring these days? Which brings us to why armed forces and their barbaric weaponry even exist in a supposedly civilised intelligence-valued twenty-first century. It is because, just as governments compete economically to help their own nation’s businesses (keeping wages, taxes and welfare low, weakening trade unions etc), so they must compete militaristically, if they are to avoid others obtaining easy commercial advantages through armed intimidation and attack. Hence, 500 odd submarines from different countries lurk and stealthily traverse the world’s oceans today.

Training for tomorrow’s wars

What were those “exercises” the Kursk was taking part in actually for, if not training to fight tomorrow’s wars which today’s capitalism make a serious possibility? It is true that by strengthening the armed forces, Putin can also gain some electoral advantage from nationalistic prestige and pride engendered in the population, but the overriding purpose of military units and armaments is to assist the possessors of productive assets. Witness Uncle Sam’s ability to inflict the greatest level of death and destruction of all, which has meant that American capital can—does get—what it wants in the global market.

As for the Kursk, much press comment concentrated on how, after becoming a basket-case economy, Russia now has very little money to safely maintain its armed forces or decommission the growing armada of rusting nuclear submarines lying in ports of the Kola peninsula in north-west Russia. But this implies that much more cash would improve things. But is having a greater number of efficient nuclear warships in service, ready to deliver mass murder when so ordered, and enriched uranium from old sub reactors recycled into new nuclear weaponry, really a better situation? Far better to remove what brings about these killing machines and the instructions to use them.

However Putin rules in the future, the Russian people will continue to suffer from exploitation, poverty, deprivation, early deaths and assorted other troubles—including further dead sailors, soldiers and pilots. They and their weaponry only exist because there is minority ownership and control of manufacturing, utilities, natural resources and the like. What a few possess—and benefit greatly from—they wish to defend, capitalise on and add to through intimidation, and violent force if necessary. Hence, the reason murderous vessels like the Kursk come to be made. So when Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, commander of the Northern Fleet, said “I will strive all my life to look in the eyes of the man who caused this tragedy” (Independent, 23 August), he need only locate and peer into the nearest mirror, for as a military leader acting together with others in maintaining minority possession of productive property, he certainly carries some of the blame.

Because there are groups of these capitalists all over the world, there are groups of armed forces all over the world, and populations are encouraged to see one another as “us” and “them”, or “the enemy”. One day, you have John Spellar, Britain’s armed forces minister, saying that “we” are sending a rescue vehicle to the Barents Sea because Britons “are delighted to be able to assist in trying to save sailors from an awful fate and one that is of concern to all right thinking people all around the world” (Guardian, 17 August). Another day, another year, and “us” and “them” may be unleashing great death and destruction upon each other. Surely it is “of concern to all right thinking people” that we avoid that particular “awful fate”?

So we can, by disempowering all the presidents, the admirals, the generals, the ministers, the tycoons and any other minority who wants ownership and control of resources and people, choosing instead to possess and run these means of living ourselves. No more propertied class. No more leaders. No more us and them. No more Kursks.

Max Hess

Putin, power and women (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the media frenzy concerning another spectacular but predictable demise of a British Prime Minister begins to subside there will be those who will try to divine a meaning in all of the populist bluster of the last few years. Like Trump in the USA his attempt to bypass and disregard the political establishment was a resounding failure. The most powerful office of state seems, in the end, to emphasise its weakness when confronted by the real power of the ruling elite. All of the millions who were conned into thinking that voting for populist candidates like Boris Johnson would change anything are forced to the realisation that their votes are meaningless if they attempt to thwart the ruling class and their need for ‘business as usual’. Perhaps Johnson was surprised at just how little power the office of PM brings with it.

A vision of him holed up in a fortified No. 10 defended by the hordes of his northern ‘red wall’ supporters paralleling the Trump militia’s storming of the Capitol building is both comical and disturbing. That the man had no moral compass or political integrity is no surprise to socialists but what we do find unforgivable is his warmongering activities on behalf of NATO in the name of the Ukrainian people. One of his more incoherent statements concerned his assertion that if Putin was a woman he would not have invaded Ukraine. Does he have no memory of the Tory heroine Thatcher glorying in the Falklands War? She may not have instigated the invasion but she loved every moment of it. Indeed many feminists at the time seriously asserted that she was not really a woman at all. So what is the real nature of political power and are female leaders instinctively more benign and less belligerent than their male counterparts?

A friend once insisted that she had no interest in history because it was merely a record of ‘boys’ power games’. Whilst it is true that the nature of the evolution of private property societies and their warrior ethos has promoted patriarchy there have been examples of powerful and belligerent female leaders. From Boudicca and Cleopatra in the ancient world to queens of England including Matilda, Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I. There is no record of Queen Victoria objecting to her other title as ‘Empress of India’. Benazir Bhutto, Golda Meir, Tansu Ciller and Chandrika Kumaratunga are all female leaders of the modern era who could hardly be called pacifists. Condoleeza Rice in her role of National Security Advisor in the US played a significant role in prosecuting the illegal war in Iraq and the instigation of the use of torture. The characteristics needed to be a successful politician within the capitalist context are the same for both men and women and gender seems to make no significant difference. Like leading men within the mainstream political parties their primary role is to protect the power and wealth of the parasitic elite. If war is needed to do this they will have no hesitation in beating the drum.

Vladimir Putin has become demonised in the West as a maniacal imperialist despot. But the truth is that his actions would be duplicated by many other capitalist leaders if they felt they had been systematically lied to and threatened by a rival and enemy. Putin represents the pride that Russia once felt in its supposed imperial heyday as the ‘Soviet Union’. Promises undertaken by the US not to expand their empire (NATO) any further east have been broken and rightly or wrongly the Russian elite feel they have been betrayed and insulted. They proclaim that Ukraine was the gateway to the invasion of their country by Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler and that they will never allow this to happen again. Meanwhile members of the working class on both sides continue to murder each other in the name of their respective national oligarchs. The idea that this is simply ‘Putin’s War’ rather than an inevitable result of national rivalries and the economic objectives that they serve is just tabloid propaganda.

An unlikely candidate for the role of female peacemaker came in the form of German leader Angela Merkel who, apparently, begged George Bush Jnr. not to continue to pressure Ukraine to join NATO since she plainly foresaw the conflict that this would unleash. The momentum of history has little regard for the illusion of power that leaders try to project. As Merkel’s ‘illustrious’ predecessor Otto von Bismarck once remarked with unusual humility: ‘The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to his coattails as he marches past.’ If we substitute the word ‘progress’ for the reference to God this has an almost Marxian quality to it. Bismarck also knew that a united Germany was inevitable and that his efforts to maintain Prussian hegemony were doomed – it seems that those who are most successful as statesmen/women recognise how limited their power really is.

An analysis of the power of individuals and groups through history leads socialists to believe that leaders are a political anachronism that have no place in the modern world. The global working class must act as a united political force to finally eliminate the mythology of ‘great men and leaders’ and the tribal interests that they represent. Only then can humankind’s true historical destiny be fulfilled.

Wez.

Ukraine: whose side are we on? (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been following opinion pieces and subsequent heated correspondence as responses to the war in Ukraine through the online columns of left wing/supposedly socialist publications. As schismatic as ever, the authors adopt a political redoubt firmly buttressed by their personal interpretations founded on Leninist thinking.

In essence there are two positions with a wide variety of nuances. One is that Ukraine is being subjected to nationalist, possibly imperialist, aggression by Russia. The invasion and indiscriminate shelling and bombing of Ukrainian cities is damning evidence of this.

The counter-argument appears to be that by allowing itself to become a proxy for NATO’s anti-Russian imperialist ambitions, Ukraine has become subject to an essentially defensive Russian response. Claims of Nazi influence in the Ukrainian state are based on references to the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion does sport the Wolfsangel insignia, previously adopted by divisions of the Waffen-SS. In June 2014 the battalion (re)captured Mariupol from pro-Russian separatists and actual Russian forces. There lies the justification the Russian state employs.

Those adopting a sympathetic view of the Russian position, even if condemning the brutality of its methods, insist the real cause is provocation by NATO. Certainly, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has indeed closed in around Russia’s borders, which to an extent explains a response of sorts, without in any way justifying it.

The media, as ever in such bellicose situations, simplifies the cause as being the unreasoned, even lunatic, ambitions of one man. Single-handedly he brings his nation into armed confrontation with the essentially peaceable alliance that only desires international security.

This, arguably, is the Hitler fallacy. Firstly, identify the dictator – Saddam Hussain/Vladimir Putin – make references to the former German Führer and Nazis, then launch an actual or proxy military response to bring him down. In 1914, it had been the Kaiser.

The moral high ground adopted by the USA, Britain et al, justifying the supply of armaments to Ukraine requires political amnesia. It is less than 20 years since these paragons of virtue were launching bombardments of Iraqi cities with the inevitably high death toll of civilians.

The reality is that war is organised slaughter, surgical strikes are a lie and collateral damage is the premeditated killing of children, amongst so many other non-combatants. It is competitive capitalism in its bloodiest garb.

Those on the other side who seek to justify Russian action to a greater or lesser extent resort to the largely ad-hominem argument of guilt by association. If you don’t lend support, even qualified support, to Russia then you are, by default, somehow supporting NATO. This remains so even if you condemn both sides.

NATO is the imperialist tool of the world hegemon, the USA, so those who resist it are by definition anti-imperialist and require understanding at least, not condemnation, or so goes the argument. Those who position themselves on the left, but condemn Russia, are supposedly social-imperialists.

Taking an active pro-Ukraine stance against Russian aggression is to become a perhaps unwary ally of a virulent nationalism. The history of nationalism around Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other neighbouring states is murky and bleak.

Present borders have been drawn by the forming and reforming of states throughout the twentieth century. The conflict between the state capitalism created by the Russian revolution and the more laissez-faire version (with varying levels of state involvement) in the West has been the driver of these reformations.

The present war in Ukraine is another episode in the on-going rivalry between capitalist formations. Wars are usually portrayed as discrete and almost self-contained between set dates: World War One 1914 to 1918, World War Two 1939 to 1945, Cold War (with hotspots) 1945 to 1989/90-ish.

Just as the Hundred Years War was not a continuous battle, but a series of armed encounters, so there is one protracted dissonance endemic to capitalism caused by competition. It is a feature of capitalism in its ceaseless pursuit of profit. It cannot be otherwise for as long as capitalism exists.

Supporting one side or another, however critically, is actually only selecting which capitalist formation to favour. In the Hundred Years War, choosing either France or England would have done nothing to change the underlying feudal order, only which king sits on the throne.

In all the articles we have read that employed a great deal of polemical invective, there have been very few references to the working class. Those who self-identify as socialists must surely come to recognise that no nation, or group of nations, acts, or can act in the interests of the working class. Workers’ role, as ever, is that great capitalist tradition of being cannon fodder, with civilians as mere collateral subject to damage.

To say otherwise is a non-sequitur, like asking which is most beneficial for the working class, Ford or Nissan? Nationalism, however it expresses itself, is inimical to the interests of the working class. Even when paused between armed conflicts, nations only value peace while it is profitable.

The tragedy of Ukraine is that workers have again been drawn into killing each other at the behest of others, those few who profit. In Britain the Ukrainian flag is being commonly flown. There is an understandable sympathy for those under near incessant bombardment, and exemplary generosity in trying to help refugees from the battlegrounds.

The irony is that while national flags continue to fly war will be perpetuated. Until workers generally look beyond the heart-rending media portrayals of the present war to see that it is virtually identical to all the other news coverage of war wherever it happens, whoever is involved, then even if this conflict is resolved, that’s only another pause before the next one.

Anyone who doubts that capitalism is the root cause of war should consider that every bullet and shard of shrapnel, and the weapons that fired them, are commodities like baked beans, hybrid cars or movies on Netflix, manufactured and supplied for profit.

While well-meaning people organise coffee mornings and collections to raise a few hundred pounds to help desperate refugees fleeing the conflict, munitions manufacturers are making billions from creating the conditions people are trying to escape from, killing those who don’t or can’t run.

Whose side are we on? The side of the vast majority of people, the ones who create the world’s wealth only for a significant proportion of it to be destroyed killing those self-same workers. The side not to be taken is either one of the combatants.

A worldwide truly democratic and leaderless society based on meeting people’s needs and collaborative working is the only way the surely common aspiration for peace can be realised. The working class needs to harness its sympathy and efforts on behalf of those enduring the privations of war and transform them into focused action to vanquish capitalism. Then the competition, that all too readily becomes armed competition, can be replaced with co-operation.

Dave Alton

Bird’s Eye View: Memory hole (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Memory hole

‘The Russian Education Ministry has announced plans that will require children as young as seven to study history, as part of a wider push to promote “patriotic” education amid the war in Ukraine. “Historical education will begin in schools from the first grade,” Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said at the opening of an exhibition called Everyday Nazism which is due to be shown at a nationwide schools forum, The Power is in the Truth. “[In our teaching of history], we will never allow it [to be written] that we somehow treated other nations – our fraternal nations of Ukraine and Belarus – poorly. We will do everything in our power so that historical memory is preserved.” The plans will lower the age of children taking compulsory history lessons by three years, and will see historical education incorporated into existing parts of the school curriculum. Kravtsov also said that from Sept. 1, schools will start each week by singing the Russian national anthem and raising the Russian flag’ (themoscowtimes.com, 19 April).

As George Orwell warned, those who control the past can control the present. Putin long ago joined the ranks of dictators for whom ‘yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree’ —a power Orwell attributed in 1942 to Franco, Hitler and Stalin. If an event in the past is no longer regarded as useful to the authorities all reference to it is destroyed. A people who cannot remember where they used to be are in no position to challenge where they are now. Historically controlled, the present is something that workers come to accept as an unquestionable normality. Orwell was not merely inventing nightmares. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia the deletion from the record of history of disruptive facts was a carefully organised campaign.

Doublethink

‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce… Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx, 1852, bit.ly/3KcVZCm).

Mazda Majidi and Derek Ford ‘s recent article titled ‘Clarifying and inspiring revolution for 130 years: Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme‘ (hamptonthink.org, 2 April) is both tragic and farcical. The Gotha programme was drawn up to unite the two sections of the German working class movement, the General Association of German Workers, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. They combined to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany at the Gotha Congress in 1875. The Critique of the Gotha Programme consisted of marginal comments made by Marx on the draft of this party programme. The Critique remains popular among those who worship certain dead dictators or their modern counterparts because Marx refers to a transitional period between capitalism and communism (socialism) and to another between an early and a later stage of communism during which there will not be full distribution according to needs. As the authors remark, the ‘..Critique was a key resource for Lenin’s study and publication of The State and Revolution. Lenin expanded on the transition between the first and second stages of communism and justified the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ But as Marx notes in Critique just after dealing with the transitional period ‘… to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but now have become obsolete verbal rubbish’ (bit.ly/38nKn2s) seems apt for other notions which we would do well throw in the dusbin of history and are found aplenty, alas, on www.hamptonthink.org, including imperialism, Marxism-Leninism, national liberation, socialism with Chinese, Cuban, etc characteristics, and workers’ states.

Big Brother

‘Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed—there will be only free workers… Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power’ (Anarchism or Socialism? 1906, bit.ly/3MqEIHv).

Ironically, the author of this piece would thirty years later, in a complete volte-face, declare the USSR to be socialist. That same year, on the 28th August, Pravda proclaimed him divine: ‘O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,Thou who didst give birth to man, Thou who didst make fertile the earth, Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries, Thou who givest blossom to the spring… ‘ And a mere mortal observed:

‘There are in the USSR privileged and exploited classes, dominant classes and subject classes. Between them the standard of living is sharply separated. The classes of travel on the railways correspond exactly to the social classes; similarly with ships, restaurants, theatres, shops, and with houses; for one group palaces in pleasant neighbourhoods, for the others wooden barracks alongside tool stores and oily machines… It is always the same people who live in the palaces and the same people who live in the barracks. There is no longer private property, there is only one property – State property. But the State no more represents the whole community than under preceding régimes’ (What the Russian Revolution Has Become, Robert Guiheneuf, 1936).

And today, ‘Russian elites and oligarchs are probably some of the best in the world at hiding their wealth…’ (washingtonpost.com, 11 April).

Ukraine: Good Against Evil . . . Or More Complicated Than That? (2022)

From the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war in Ukraine has led to much sympathy and solidarity from people across Europe and beyond. And in a way, this is both understandable and heart-warming. Few want to see innocent people bombed out of their homes and turned into refugees, fleeing mass killing. The assistance people have been prepared to give Ukrainian refugees has been a testament to the basic solidarity and mutual support socialists have always said we are capable of as human beings.

The media have largely portrayed this war as a battle of good against evil. Socialists know that wars in modern capitalist society are never quite that simple. Sometimes the motivations for war are transparently economic (eg the Gulf Wars), while at other times there is a complex geo-political element, with states manoeuvring for political advantage and seeking to extend or defend their spheres of influence (the Falklands War was closer to this).

The Ukraine situation is complicated and most people (including us) did not expect armed conflict to actually break out. The ‘good versus evil’ scenario that is the dominant narrative doesn’t quite fit and as usual other factors are at play.

Democracy?

Over time, political democracy, imperfect though it always is within capitalism, has emerged as the dominant and favoured way for the ruling classes of nation states to manage their affairs. This has come about for a number of reasons – some because of political pressure from the working class wanting a say in how society is organised and run (e.g. the Chartists in Britain in the nineteenth century), but also because the owning class is rarely united. It is typically a mass of competing interests, not just between states but within them as well. Financial capital (such as the banks) often has different interests to industrial capital for example, and political democracy is a good way of the state arbitrating between competing interests.

Many states though take years to develop this type of democratic practice and culture as they have little by way of a tradition in it. Indeed, since the Second World War, while numerous states have gravitated towards elements of political democracy across much of the world, some have done it much more successfully than others. This is the story of many of the states that either emerged or reinvented themselves after the collapse of the old Soviet Union in the early 1990s, including both Russia and Ukraine. Both have elements of capitalist political democracy but in an obviously deformed way, and the type of political corruption that tends to exist at the fringes of more mature capitalist states like those in Western Europe, North America, etc tends to be more entwined with the state apparatus at a deep and fundamental level. Their past authoritarian cultures have had a lasting impact.

The think-tank Transparency International (not above controversy itself) produces an annual Corruptions Perceptions Index which ranks countries according to general perceptions of corruption and theft in their state machinery and operations. In 2021 Russia ranked a lowly 136th out of 180 listed states. Interestingly, Ukraine was little better at 122nd in the world as graft, corruption and client-politics there are legion. This manages to put both Russia and Ukraine even lower than dictatorships such as Cuba (64th) and China (66th).

Most politics in Ukraine is dominated by ethnic and nationalist considerations, with what could be described as the right/left political spectrum associated with more mature democratic states barely in existence. This situation is blurred slightly by the fact that Ukraine currently has a government led by a president (Zelenskyy) and party (Servant of the People) that have an orientation that is at least broadly aligned with some conventional notions of Western parliamentary democracy, including aspirations towards membership of the European Union.

Russia on the other hand has more obviously still struggled to shake off decades of authoritarian control and culture and is run by what appears to be an ever-smaller clique led by President Putin, an elected dictatorship in all but name. Checks and balances on authoritarian actions and adventures are low and Putin has long hankered after recreating what some would refer to as the old Soviet Union without much of the associated Leninist politics. It could be seen even more easily as a recreation of Tsarist Russia, an empire which also included most of what is now Ukraine and parts of many other Eastern European states.

Whenever Putin sees an opportunity to embark on a military adventure in pursuit of this goal he has a tendency to move fast, with few if any challenging voices around him in the Russian hierarchy. The usual manoeuvrings and diplomacy around these situations by other states effectively become cast as an excuse to do what he most likely wants to do anyway (as with NATO expansion into the East). This then – at least in theory – strengthens his internal and external position as the leader of an empire trying to regain its ‘rightful’ position among the nations. This worldview has been exacerbated by longstanding grievances, both related to Russia’s historic standing and defeat in the Cold War, and also personal slights such as when his mooted interest in Russia itself joining NATO over two decades ago was rebuffed by both Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

Economic interests

In addition, Russia has its own clear economic interests too. As such, in 1994 it sought to set up its own trading bloc which came to full fruition in 2011 when seven other countries agreed to join it in a free trade area. These were Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine. But the orientation of Ukraine along with many other Eastern European states towards the EU led it to sign a ‘Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement’ in January 2016. Since then, Russia has suspended its free trade agreement with Ukraine and Ukraine retaliated by passing trade restrictions on Russia.

Russia has long created issues for the West that it has struggled to resolve. Doing deals with the oligarchs while watching Putin help rip up various geo-political agreements made in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Bloc has created a certain cognitive dissonance, but until recently it was the money that largely won out. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the oligarchs who stripped the state of many of its assets for a massive profit have found a welcome home for the most part, particularly in the UK. The debutant balls that take place in Mayfair each summer are no longer arranged for Sloane Rangers but for the sons and daughters of the Russian elite. Many of the top FTSE 350 resources companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange are Russian – such as Evraz, Polymetal International and Petropavlovsk. The oligarchs and their families who own football clubs and newspapers had become ever more integrated into Western capital and it is hardly surprising, as they have qualities, connections and money admired by the elites in the West.

According to The Economist, 41.3 percent of Russia’s exports come to the European Union and the UK, while 34.5 percent of its imports originate from the EU and UK. The massive sanctions that have now been imposed as a result of the war in Ukraine will hit this considerably and it is clearly something the West would not have otherwise countenanced.

Arguably, the move to expand both the EU and NATO to the East have ‘provoked the Russian bear’, but it is a bear they have been prepared to happily play with for quite some time. This too despite the Russian invasions of Chechnya (1995), Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014). And many on the political left have been closet apologists for Putin on the grounds that an enemy of an enemy must be a friend, irrespective of the discrimination and human rights abuses of the Putin regime and the fact that most of them would most likely end up in prison there just for promoting the views they have.

Murky business

So, one way or the other the war in Ukraine has interrupted business as usual, as wars tend to do. The previous Russian invasions of adjacent territory were not welcomed by the West but not proactively resisted either. Ukraine is too big, too close and the situation now perhaps too grotesque in some aspects for them to turn the other cheek completely. They will not wish to get involved militarily (at least not in an active sense) as that might provoke an even worse escalation, so the retaliation will be economic in essence, building on Ukraine’s own sanctions against Russia since 2016.

It is a mess, but the sort of mess capitalism delivers all too frequently. Socialists have sympathy with the oppressed and those struggling for basic democratic rights everywhere but don’t take sides in conflicts between elites. We know all too well that the victors soon become the oppressors (as happened in Russia itself post-USSR). To put it bluntly, we are on the side of both the Ukrainian people getting bombed out of their homes and the Russian soldiers getting murdered in battle because of the imperial fantasies of the leader who ordered them there.

DAP

Proper Gander: The Media as Intermediary (2022)

The Proper Gander Column from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

While the current tensions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ are in many ways a return to those of the Cold War years, one difference between then and now is that our awareness of events comes through countless more media outlets than in the last century. Alongside TV news on multiple channels and print journalism we have all the footage, testimony and opinions spread online, especially through social media. In theory, this gives us a wide pool of information in which we can swim around to find the truth as it rises to the surface. In practice, we have to wade through a swamp of biased and incomplete narratives too murky to reveal a clear picture.

The main TV news channels in the UK – BBC News, Sky News and Al Jazeera – have been largely similar to each other in how they have reported on the invasion of Ukraine, each focusing on the effects of the bombing, including the vast numbers of people displaced, alongside the pronouncements of governments and analysts. The BBC has probably devoted more time than the other channels to how the war is affecting people, including those interviewed while struggling to live under attack from Russian forces. Coverage of the relief effort for refugees has been prominent, maybe to try and counterbalance the distressing accounts of the devastation with something more positive about people’s willingness to help those in need. GB News has taken a characteristically conservative perspective, with little emphasis on the refugees’ plight, and pundits such as Dan Wootton applauding Boris Johnson’s handling of the crisis.

Having a near-consensus in the mainstream media doesn’t mean that it is comprehensive. TV news channels have examined economic aspects of the war only to the extent of the impact of sanctions on Russia or whether a side effect will be further increases to energy prices in the UK and Europe. Economic factors behind the situation aren’t generally discussed, such as the dilemma Ukraine was in over whether to develop trade links with the EU or Russia, alongside those with China. In recent years, the UK’s mainstream TV news programmes haven’t reported much on events in Eastern Europe, making the invasion of Ukraine appear more unexpected than it should have been. The Russian state’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 received media attention in the UK at the time, unlike the contemporaneous takeover of the government and police in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions by pro-Russian separatist forces. And neither issue has been covered much in the intervening years, when attention instead went to Brexit and then the pandemic. Nor has NATO’s expansion eastwards been critiqued, and there haven’t been comparisons drawn between the Russian army’s attacks on hospitals and homes and NATO’s bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War in 1999. The impression given is that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was a sudden event, prompted only by him finally deciding to show his true colours. The lack of recognition of NATO’s actions as contributory factors helps to simplify the mainstream media’s narrative.

UK news channels have been consistent in presenting the war in a conveniently black and white way. It is difficult to imagine them being at all critical of Volodymyr Zelensky’s actions or giving prominence to any allegations of wrongdoing by the Ukrainian army, which includes the far-right Azov regiment. In fact, not much at all has been reported about how they are fighting the war. Russia Today, on the other hand, was keen to depict Ukraine as the sole aggressor, following the narrative of its owner, the Russian state. Before its broadcast in the UK ended, RT’s emphasis was firmly on reports of Ukrainian forces bombing ‘the two Donbass republics’ as it called them, echoing the Russian state’s view that Donetsk and Luhansk have separated from Ukraine, where they are officially defined as ‘temporarily occupied territories’. These reports included allegations that the Ukrainian army has been using phosphorus in weapons, banned by the UN. RT’s policy was to promote the Russian state’s description of a ‘special military operation’ to ‘demilitarise and denazify’ Ukraine, with words such as ‘war’ and ‘invasion’ forbidden. Ironically, one of RT’s slogans has been ‘truth over narrative’. Regulator Ofcom investigated whether the channel was breaching its rules about ‘due impartiality’, according to which some political bias is allowed provided that alternative views are mentioned. Consequently, RT’s licence to broadcast in the UK was revoked on 18 March, although the EU had already pulled the plug on the channel on 2nd March, cutting its stream to the UK. Restricting RT limits access to different opinions (albeit ones heavily biased in favour of Putin’s brutal regime) from which people can make their own judgements. The Kremlin’s crackdown on independent journalism and dissenting voices within Russia is doing the same in a more extreme way.

The mainstream media in capitalism is never going to give us the full story, especially during a war. It doesn’t have the full story to give: any state is bound to curb what information about its strategies the media has access to. Each media outlet selects what to use from the material it obtains and explains events according to its own ethos, creating a narrative which news bulletins disguise under the pretence of objectivity. The language which the media uses also shapes our interpretation. While it is easy to see through the term ‘special military operation’, other expressions are more subtle in how they frame events. For instance, journalists use phrases like ‘Russia invading’ or ‘Ukraine negotiating’, as do many people. It’s recognised that this is just shorthand for the army or government rather than meaning Russia or Ukraine as a whole, but the wording lazily conflates the state with the people under it. This distracts from the reality that the war is between states, not the peoples of Russia and Ukraine who are both pawns and victims. Despite any slant given by the media, footage of families grieving or missiles hitting tower blocks speaks for itself.

Mike Foster