File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 135


Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 13:54:14 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-I: Perfidious imperialist powers


Neil puts the problem with all the talk of untrustworthy Brits, French,
Germans, Russians, etc etc (fill in your own pet ethnic bogeyperson) in
relation to the Second World War very clearly:

>it misses the key political and economic issues/contradictions
>that unleasehed the 2nd  imperialist  world war.
>
>Both Nazi apologists  on the right and USSR apologists on the
>left all cover up the class nature of their conniving and
>predatory plans to enslave millions of workers  and
>butcher millions more , incuding civilians thru armed
>aggression.

For Marxists (real Marxists), it is elementary to assume two things about
imperialist powers:

1) their own material interests as international capitalist exploiters come
first and override everything else,

2) moral aspects such as fair play and abstract trustworthiness have
nothing to do with it.

Hence the guff about Stalin's twisting and turning in relation to the
"trustworthiness" of various imperialists is pathetic nonsense. One of the
worst aspects of Stalinist degeneration was its substitution of subjective
moralizing categories such as "democratic", "fascist", "progressive",
"patriotic" etc for objective scientific categories such as "capitalist",
"bourgeois", "landlord" etc. This was part and parcel of both the
ultra-left swings (Social-Democrats as social-fascists and the main enemy)
and the class-collaborationist contortions of the Popular Front
(imperialist governments and bourgeois parties seen as progressive and
democratic) as well as the abominable crippling of the consciousness of the
international workers' movement entailed in the Peace and Democracy muck of
peaceful coexistence with imperialist powers.

If anything, this Stalinist indifference to class should warn Neil and
other state caps away from their fetishization of a bureaucratic regime
into a new class. Classes look after their own interests and see them as
objective matters regardless of attitude. This cannot be the case with a
caste like a bureaucracy where attitude and manoeuvering to keep close to
the objective source of power and wealth (class control of the means of
production) is all.

This same (petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic) indifference to the class
foundations of a state leads Neil and other State Caps to identify the
interests of the Soviet Union and the imperialist powers as follows:

>In fact, it was the  imperialist nature of the Nazi and Russian
>societies and the needs of their national capitals expansion
>to  'compete'  which impelled them to unite to divvy up E. Europe
>culminating in the 1939 "Pact of Non-aggression"

This distorts the history of our century atrociously. If anything was
forcing the Soviet Union to "expand" it was the need for a worldwide
socialist revolution to ensure its survival, and this would not be the
Soviet Union as a state in the first instance but the socialist bases of
the economy and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a voluntary
federation of states liberated from capitalism and the dictates of the
imperialist world market.

Also Neil misses completely the revolutionary upsurge of the international
working class in the pre-war years. Before their defeats at the hands of
Stalinism and imperialist class forces the Chinese, German and Spanish
working classes were ready to take on and capable of defeating their
capitalist states.

Motivating Stalinism were not the competitive and expansion needs of
Russian national capital, but the contradictory needs of survival and
growth of the socialist bases of the planned Soviet economy combined with
the survival and consolidation of bureaucratic rule and privilege.

>Spheres of influnece deals have a military/political and economic basis
>from a marxist point of view and attempts to separate these
>are at the least a retreat to bourgeios historical  method.

This is the important point. What our revisionists do is fetishize
diplomatic  and military history as a thing in itself, with the inevitable
personalization and psychologizing that accompanies this.

>Indeed not only   did the pact give the  Nazis' the last  green light
>to attack Poland but  also for  the USSR to sieze eastern Poland
>as their share of booty.

All part of Stalinism's buffer round the heartlands strategy.

>you do not win workers from a weaker  capitalist regime (Poland, etc)
>  to socialism by  bombing their homes and  sticking them with bayonets..
>So it is clear  that this had nothing to do with strengthening
>the workers cause nationally or internationally .

The first statement is true. The second is a half-truth. The expansion of
the transitional economic bases of the dictatorship of the proletariat did
indeed strengthen the "cause" (position, social power) of the working class
internationally. At the same time as the bureaucratic, chauvinist Russian
control of the expansion weakened it. The process was dialectical.


>The lucrative  nature of the pact may also partially explain why
>the Russian rulers did not think they would be  double-
>crossed and attacked in June '41.

People who don't understand the motive force of history cannot understand
the motive forces behind the moves of their enemies. This was clearly the
case here with Stalin and Nazi imperialist Germany.

>Of course there were
>the military tactics too, The Russians feeling confident that
>the fascists would not strike them until they had won outright
>the war against the British in the western theatre and
>that the Nazis would never undertake a 2 front war against
>major industrial powers.

Given the class nature of Nazi Germany and the class nature of the
imperialists it was fighting in the war, it is obvious that this failure of
judgement on the part of Stalinism was due to wishful thinking.


>In any case this manuvering was clearly the diplomacy
>of imperialist states which were all counterrevolutionary.

All counter-revolutionary, yes, all imperialist, no.

Neil doesn't need this kind of oversimplification to back up his work to
defeat capitalism or his criticism of the weaknesses of the anti-socialist
Stalinist regime. It doesn't strengthen his concrete position, it weakens
it.  It trivializes the gains of October, it exaggerates the capacity of
the Stalinist bureaucracy to affect real changes in the foundations of
society, and worst of all it encourages fatalism and adventurism in that it
paints the situation of the international working class as worse than it is
and makes the strength of its enemies look greater than it is.

Cheers,

Hugh




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