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Imperialism, Russia and Syria
From Irish Marxist Review, Vol. 7 No. 21, July 2018, pp. 31–35.
Copyright © Irish Marxist Review.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Marxist analysis of imperialism was developed in a mixture of debate and cooperation by a number of great Marxists, principally Luxemburg, Bukharin and Lenin, just over one hundred years ago. It argued that the logic of capitalist development had led to a new international imperialist stage of the system, characterised by giant monopoly corporations operating globally and, with the aid of their various capitalist states, occupying, dominating and dividing up virtually the entire world.
The main imperial powers of the time were Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, USA and Japan with more minor ones such as Belgium and Austria-Hungary. The Marxist theory of imperialism was concerned not only with relations between these imperialisms and their colonies, i.e. how Britain exploited India, South Africa and Ireland, how France oppressed Algeria, Morocco and Martinique or Russia ruled Latvia, Georgia and Uzbekistan and so on, but also with the rivalries between the major imperial powers and how this led to war. Understanding the economic roots of the catastrophe of the First World War was one the key concerns of the whole debate on imperialism and all the Marxists cited above [1], whatever their secondary differences, agreed that imperialism, arising from the fundamental drive of capitalist competitive accumulation, led to war for ‘the division and redivision of the world’.
At that time the central inter-imperialist conflict was between Britain and Germany. Britain as pioneer in terms of capitalist industrialisation had established by far the largest world empire ‘on which the sun never set’. Germany, by contrast, was a late developer, only becoming a unified nation in 1870, and only entering the world stage at a time when the planet was pretty much already carved up. But in terms of industrial and financial strength (and therefore military strength) Germany was overtaking Britain. German imperialism therefore demanded its ‘fair share’ of colonies. British imperialism, unsurprisingly, was resistant to this idea of sharing out its ‘property’. And it was around this central conflict that systems of alliances formed – France and Russia and later the US with Britain, and Austria-Hungary, Italy and the Ottoman Empire with Germany – that fought it out on Flanders Fields and the Eastern Front.
One hundred years on it is widely accepted that the First World War was a humanitarian catastrophe and, in left wing circles, probably that it was an imperialist catastrophe, but this was far from being the case at the time and it is worth briefly recalling the various ‘left’ political responses to the war. First we should note that the large majority of what today would be called ‘the left’ supported the War. By this I mean they backed ‘their own’ nation, supported their own ruling class, in the War. This was true of almost all the leaders of the numerous socialist parties that made up the Second International and of various other syndicalists and anarchists, including the Russian anarchist, Kropotkin and many Russian SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries). Many of these leftists advanced ‘left-wing’ arguments for their position. The German socialists said they were fighting against Tsarist barbarism, the Russian and British said they were fighting against German (sometimes Prussian) militarism. Where it was popular, e.g. in Ireland, it was said they were fighting for the rights of small nations such as ‘poor little Belgium’. The Marxists who opposed the War such as those mentioned above along with the likes of Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin in Germany, Leon Trotsky, James Connolly, and John MacLean in Scotland, were a tiny minority. Amongst these revolutionary opponents of the war there were differences of emphasis but the fiercest in his opposition – and historically the most important – was Lenin, so it is worth setting out his position in his own words:
What is this war being fought for, which is bringing mankind unparalleled, suffering? The government and the bourgeoisie of each belligerent country are squandering millions of rubles on hooks and newspapers so as to lay the blame on the foe, arouse the people’s furious hatred of the enemy, and stop at no lie so as to depict themselves as the side that has been unjustly attacked and is now “defending” itself. In reality, this is a war between two groups of predatory Great Powers, and it is being fought for the partitioning of colonies, the enslavement of other nations, and advantages and privileges of the world market. This is a most reactionary war, a war of modern slave-holders aimed at preserving and consolidating capitalist slavery. Britain and France are lying when they assert that they are warring for Belgium’s freedom. In reality, they have long been preparing the war, and are waging it with the purpose of robbing Germany and stripping her of her colonies; they have signed a treaty with Italy and Russia on the pillage and carving up of Turkey and Austria. The tsarist monarchy in Russia is waging a predatory war aimed at seizing Galicia, taking territory away from Turkey, enslaving Persia, Mongolia, etc. Germany is waging war with the purpose of grabbing British, Belgian, and French colonies. Whether Germany or Russia wins, or whether there is a “draw”, the war will bring humanity fresh oppression of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in the colonies, in Persia, Turkey and China, a fresh enslavement of nations, and new chains for the working class of all countries. [2]
It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of condemnation. However, to reinforce his opposition, Lenin, following the German revolutionary, Karl Liebknecht’s statement that in this war ‘The main enemy is at home!’ argued that the duty of revolutionary socialists was to support the defeat of their own ruling class, their own government:
A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war, cannot fail to see that its military reverses facilitate its overthrow. Only a bourgeois who believes that a war started by the governments must necessarily end as a war between governments and wants it to end as such, can regard as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘absurd’ the idea that the Socialists of all the belligerent countries should wish for the defeat of all ‘their’ governments and express this wish. On the contrary, it is precisely a statement of this kind that would conform to the cherished thoughts of every class-conscious worker and would be in line with our activities towards converting the imperialist war into civil war. [3]
Two points should be made about this position which are relevant to today. The first is that obviously ‘patriotic’ supporters of the war accused Lenin of being a supporter of Germany and the Kaiser, and even of being a German secret agent, in the way that opponents of the War on Iraq were accused of supporting Saddam Hussein. The second is that treating his ‘own’ i.e. the Russian government as ‘the main enemy’ affected the balance of Bolshevik agitation but it did not at all, as can be seen from the extended quotation above, mean that Lenin abstained from attacking Germany. Nor did he accept the fact that Germany was a lesser imperial power than Britain or, in terms of enslaved nations, Russia was a justification for supporting Germany. He was explicit on this point.
Germany is fighting not for the liberation, but for the oppression of nations. It is not the business of Socialists to help the younger and stronger robber (Germany) to rob the older and overgorged robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow them all. To be able to do this, the Socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is in a treble sense a war between slave-owners to fortify slavery. [4]
Despite the defeat of Germany in 1918 and the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles, the underlying economic and geo-political realities remained such that the pattern of alliances in the Second World War was close to a rerun of those in the First (with the additions of Italy and Japan on the German side). The Second World War, however, brought about a fundamental restructuring of imperialism. Despite its victory Britain emerged decisively weakened and destined to rapidly lose much of its empire. Germany was partitioned and no longer a major power. The USA and the Soviet Union emerged from the War as the world’s two leading powers and conflict between them – the Cold War – soon developed.
From the standpoint of the Marxist theory of imperialism it was indisputable that from 1945 onwards the United States was the world’s leading imperialist power. This was clear in terms of both its overwhelming economic dominance and its military power. In 1945 US GDP stood at 1.6 trillion dollars compared to the approximately 1 trillion of the twelve main Western European countries. [5] In 1945 the US share of world manufacturing production stood at over 50% and in 1956 it accounted for 42 out the top fifty corporations in the world. [6] ‘America’s military might was as great as its economic power. In 1949 US forces were stationed in 56 countries and had the use of 400 bases worldwide’. [7] Its military budgets far exceeded those of all other countries; it stood at the head of what was by far the world’s biggest military alliance, NATO, and above all it had nuclear weapons which it rapidly developed on an almost unimaginable scale – sufficient to destroy the entire population of the globe. This accumulation of imperial power enabled it to intervene, covertly or overtly, on a regular basis to shape events in its interests from Latin America to the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, it is fair to say that, at least by the sixties, an understanding of the role of US imperialism was widespread on the international left. [8] But what of the US’s only serious international rival, namely the USSR or Soviet Union? Was this a rival imperialist power or something entirely different?
As far as the large majority of the global left were concerned, with the exception of the pro-US social democrats, it was axiomatic throughout the second half of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was not, and could not be, imperialist. This was because they associated imperialism with capitalism and believed that the Soviet Union was, in some sense or other, a socialist society and therefore essentially anti-imperialist. The Soviet Union itself put a good deal of effort into cultivating this image. It presented itself always as the advocate of ‘Peace’ and instructed its supporters globally (members and fellow travellers of the numerous Communist Parties) to participate in the various peace and disarmament movements of the time, such as CND and could also cite its material aid to various anti-US national liberation movements e.g. in Vietnam. Even Trotskyists who rejected the official Soviet propaganda and refused to regard it as socialist nevertheless tended to accept that the Soviet Union was a (degenerated) workers’ state, because of the state ownership of the means of production [9], and therefore could not be imperialist.
But if we set aside the question of these labels and look not at what the Soviet state said about itself but instead at what it actually did, it becomes abundantly clear that its behaviour was highly imperialist.
As the Second World War was drawing to a close Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met a Yalta in October 1944 to discuss the post-war settlement. There they decided to divide up Europe between them with the East being under Soviet control and the West going to the US and Britain, completely over the heads of all the peoples concerned. [10] It was a classic imperialist carve-up directly reminiscent of what was done in the Middle East with the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Treaty and what was done at the Treaty of Versailles. In so far as what actually happened differed from the agreements reached in advance this was due to the disposition of Russian and Allied forces on the ground at the end of the war.
The Soviet Union then used the combination of the Red Army and the respective Eastern European Communist Parties to, a) insist that the whole of Eastern Europe from Poland to Bulgaria came into its sphere of influence and under its control; b) adopted the Soviet economic and political model and c) used that control and that model to subordinate the economies of the Eastern bloc to the needs of the Russian economy. This was done by means of extreme war reparations, mixed companies and unequal trade. Chris Harman describes this process in detail in his Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945–83 [11] and on the final element comments: ‘The method of exploitation was quite simple: Eastern European goods were bought at below world market prices, at times even below cost price, while Russian goods were sold in Eastern Europe at above world prices.’ [12]
This economic exploitation and subordination was widely understood and resented by ‘ordinary’ people across the Eastern bloc and is one the main reasons, along with the police state methods of the regimes, why Eastern Europe is characterised by a succession of ‘anti-Soviet’ rebellions throughout the post-war period. The first of these rebellions was in Yugoslavia in 1948. It was led by Marshall Tito and the Yugoslav Communist Party and centred precisely on the Yugoslav’s unwillingness to be economically subservient to Stalin and the Soviet Union. The next was in the workers uprising in East Berlin in 1953, followed by revolts in Poland and Hungary in 1956. The Hungarian revolt turned into a full-scale revolution. Then came the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Solidarnosc uprising in Poland in September 1980. The Soviet response to all these revolts was invariably repressive and imperialist: on two occasions – Hungary ’56 and Czechoslovakia ’68 they mounted full scale military invasions. The cycle of revolt and repression ended only when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Communist regimes collapsed right across Eastern Europe and in Russia itself in the years 1989–91.
Soviet imperialism, however, was by no means confined to Eastern Europe. It operated also within the boundaries of the USSR and in Asia.
The old Tsarist empire was infamous as ‘the prison house of the people’s’ and was regularly denounced as such by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Their position was to defend unequivocally the right to self-determination, including the right to secede, of all the various and numerous oppressed nationalities of the Russian empire – of Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Kazaks and so on. Under the Stalin regime all the old oppression of these nations was restored. Although granted formal ‘autonomy’, all their economic, political and cultural life was strictly controlled from Moscow through European Russian party secretaries and there was a general process of cultural Russification.
In extreme cases whole supposedly, autonomous National Republics were dissolved, and entire national populations were deported: this was the fate of the Volga German Republic in 1941, the Kalmuk SSR in in 1943, the Checheno-Ingush SSR and the Crimean Tartars in 1946. Communists leaders from these oppressed nations were also systematically persecuted. Tony Cliff writes: ‘Altogether in the big purge of 1937–8 the whole or majority of thirty national governments were liquidated. The main accusation against them was their desire for secession from the USSR’. [13] And the outcome of this imperialist oppression was that the moment the centralised Communist regime fell apart almost all these nationalities decided to secede in much the same way as the moment the British empire was weakened, the British colonies in India and Africa all established their independence.
Just as the US and the Soviet Union partitioned Germany at the end of the War so they partitioned Korea. The country was split into a Soviet puppet regime in the North and a US puppet regime in the South, a division from which the Korean people are still suffering. Then in 1950 North Korean forces, prompted and backed by the Soviet Union, invaded the South. What followed was a three-year proxy war between the great powers (also with the involvement of China) which utterly devastated Korea and claimed something like 3 million (overwhelmingly Korean) lives without achieving any significant outcome. It was classic imperialist butchery in which ordinary people were sacrificed on an industrial scale by both sides.
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 when Mao’s Red Army captured Beijing was hailed as the greatest victory for ’communism’ since 1917, but within seven years the Soviet and Maoist Regimes were at each other’s throats in a split which divided the international Communist movement, came close to war and affected geopolitics for decades. Ostensibly the split was about doctrine with the Maoists condemning ‘Soviet revisionism’ and preaching a more ‘revolutionary’ anti-imperialist line but China’s deeds and actual development give the lie to this ‘ideological’ i.e. idealist explanation. In reality the basis of the split was that the Soviet Union was attempting, as it did elsewhere, to impose its will and its economic priorities on China but Mao, the Chinese nationalist was having none of it. In other words, the root of the problem was Russian Imperialism.
Yet another example was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 which led to ten years of war costing over 2 million lives and creating 5 million refugees at the end of which Russia was forced to admit defeat and withdraw.
Nor did Russian imperialism come to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. If, as was often argued by right wing anti-communists, Soviet imperialism was driven by ideology, by a political aspiration to force communism on the whole world, then these imperialist wars should have ceased after 1991. If on the other hand Soviet expansionism was, like western imperialism, fundamentally driven by competitive capital accumulation, then one would expect it to continue despite the abandonment of ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist’ language and symbolism, and despite the shift sideways from bureaucratic state capitalism to a mixed semi-state capitalism, continue it did.
First under Yeltsin and then under Putin Russia waged two brutal wars in 1994–96 and 1999–2000 in and against Chechenya. Amnesty International reported:
‘There were frequent reports that Russian forces indiscriminately bombed and shelled civilian areas. Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, continued to be the target of military attacks by Russian forces. Hundreds of Chechen civilians and prisoners of war were extra judicially executed.’ [14]
The Chechen capital, Grozny, was flattened and occupied but guerrilla resistance continued in the mountains for another nine years.
In August 2008 in a short and totally unequal war, Russia invaded Georgia in a dispute about the region of South Ossetia. In 2014 they intervened in the conflict in the Ukraine to annexe the Crimean Peninsula. [15]
Reviewing this brief survey of Russian imperialism since 1945 it could be objected that is one-sided in that in each instance I have failed to consider the possible justification for Russia’s actions as in the invasion of Hungary in 1956 was necessary to prevent ‘fascist counter revolution’ or the invasion of Czechoslovakia was necessary to prevent it being taken over by the West and the invasion of Afghanistan was necessary to prevent it being taken over by Islamist jihadis and so on. Any power always has its justifications; in the modern world where ‘public opinion’ (i.e. the consciousness of the working class) has to be considered even by dictators, no government ever simply says we are imperialist predators. To have considered each of these justifications in turn would have extended this article far beyond the space available, but it is worth noting the pattern. In each case the ‘excuse’ put forward is the need to combat a demonised enemy: fascists, western imperialists, jihadis, Islamic terrorists etc. The problem is that, with the substitution of evil communists for western imperialists this turns out to be more or less the same list of enemies used by the US and the UK to justify their numerous imperialist interventions.
Two final points should be made about this. The first is that whether Cuba, Vietnam or Nicaragua ‘went communist’ or not was a matter for the Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan people alone: the US had no right to any say in the matter. Similarly if Hungary [16] or Czechoslovakia or Poland wished to cease being ‘communist’ or Afghanistan wanted to be Islamic or Chechenya wanted to be both Islamist and independent that was for them to decide not Russia. The second is that no serious person will believe that in 1914 Britain, who held in subjection India, Ireland and half of Africa, went to war for the sake of ‘poor little Belgium’ or that the US fought for three years in Korea out of concern for the rights of the Korean people. By the same token are we really being asked to believe that the Russian state which had deported the Chechens and the Crimean Tartars wholesale in the thirties and forties was motivated by international solidarity, rather than, for example, its desire to protect oil supply lines or to have a foothold on the Black Sea, when it came to 1999 or 2014?
No, the pattern of imperialist behaviour is long standing and consistent and therefore when it comes to assessing Russia’s current interventions in the war in Syria there is absolutely no reason to imagine that it is motivated by anything other than imperialist calculation and self interest.
1. The ‘Marxist’ exception to this was Karl Kautsky, the so-called Pope of Marxism and the ideological leader of the Second International who believed that imperialism, or ‘ultraimperialism’ could be conducive to peace in a similar way to some advocates of globalisation argued it would make for a peaceful world. Lenin furiously rejected Kautsky’s suggestion. See the discussion of this issue in John Molyneux, Lenin for Today, London 2017, pp. 71–74.
2. Lenin, Appeal on the War (1915). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/x04.htm.
3. Lenin, Socialism and War, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm.
4. Lenin, Socialism and War, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm.
5. These are in 1990 International Geary-Khamis dollars, a standard measure which facilitates historical and international comparisons taken from Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, OECD 2003, p. 85 and 51.
6. See John Rees, Imperialism and Resistance, London 2006, p. 43.
7. As above, p. 42.
8. In saying this it should not be forgotten that a very large part of international social democracy (from Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in the 1945 British Labour Government to Harold Wilson and Tony Blair along with the German Social Democrats, the leadership of the Irish Labour Party etc.) actually supported US imperialism throughout the post-war period, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq.
9. The authors of this article do not accept that the Soviet Union was either socialist or a workers state, degenerated or otherwise. Following Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, we regard it as bureaucratic state capitalist.
10. See the vivid description of this actually happening in Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War, New York 1970, pp. 114–5.
11. See Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945–83, London 1988, pp. 41–49.
12. As above p.45.
13. Tony Cliff, Russia – A Marxist Analysis, London 1955. p. 190
14. Russian Federation 2001 Report, Amnesty International, Archived 14 November 2007.
15. The conflict in the Ukraine was very complex and cannot be discussed here but this is a thorough and impressive analysis, Rob Ferguson, Ukraine: imperialism, war and the left, International Socialism 144. http://isj.org.uk/ukraine-imperialism-war-and-the-left/.
16. In making this general argument I specifically do not want to give the impression that I accept in anyway the lie that the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with its mass workers’ councils and its heroic working-class resistance to Soviet tanks was a ‘fascist counter-revolution’. See Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945–83, as above, especially pp. 139–143.>
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