Good analysis / Bad ideology
This is of importance to me because I had the disconcerting (and somewhat traumatic) experience of going through not just one major “head change” during my lifetime, but two.
My inculcated worldview as I grew up was that of standard American post-WWII middle class (”bourgeois”) conventionality. At 17 I happened upon Erich Fromm and then one revisionist book led to another. By the end of college I adhered to a standard internationalist anti-bourgeois Marxist ideology.
The analysis cited below shows how insightful a Marxist perspective can be. Example:
The world is ruled from the centers of finance capital in New York, Frankfurt, Paris, London and Tokyo, not Moscow. While plenty reactionary, the Russian ruling class is not imperialist. It oppresses its own working class and is a regional power. In contrast, the imperialists suck the lifeblood of workers on the entire planet.
But I went through another wrenching transition of thought upon recognizing (in my forties) that Marxism is riven with delusions when it comes to praxis:
To struggle against imperialist depredation abroad and attacks on living standards at home, the working class needs a revolutionary leadership to fulfill its world-historic role as the gravedigger of capitalism.
https://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/index.html
There’s no such agency, no such leadership, no such history, no such role.
Obviously, under capitalism, there is, objectively, a class of people who own most of society’s productive assets. That’s the small layer of individuals (“the one percent”) who own the lion’s share (the controlling share) of corporate stock.
And then there are the rest of us who own none or very little of the stock that gives control over “the means of production.” Therefore, sociologically, we can talk about a certain class contention in the sense that the owners get more in profits if the workers get less in wages.
But from that undeniable objective reality the Marxists posit a certain image of “class struggle.” They say that the working class could “gain consciousness” of their “historic role” to get active as a “class-for-itself proletariat” and then, on the basis of their collective power, force the one-percenters (the “bourgeoisie”) to give up their power, wealth, and control via socialization of society’s productive assets. For about a hundred years (circa 1850 to 1950) that was a theory of history and a paradigm of social change that achieved a good deal of resonance.
Not many people adhere to such any longer. But the Spartacists still do. Again, their analysis of the situation is insightful, surely more than what you’ll find in the mainstream media (see below). But their prescription of “what to do” is colored by their retrograde ideology.
It’s been encouraging to see that most of the left is transitioning away from the latter, embracing new ideas about what a post-capitalist world will look like and how to achieve it.
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Spartacist Statement … 27 February 2022
NATO/EU Aggression Provokes War in Ukraine
Ukrainian, Russian Workers: Turn the Guns Against Your Rulers!
Down With the EU and NATO!
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the decades-long U.S.-led expansion of NATO and the European Union. After having engineered the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR, the imperialist powers have expanded eastward to the very borders of Russia, bringing with them pillage, ethnic strife and humiliation. The Western imperialists now rage against Russia’s “war of aggression” and its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. These bandits who plunder the workers of the world couldn’t care less about Ukraine’s national rights. What they are really furious about is that Russia is challenging their exclusive rights to pillage East Europe as well as U.S. hegemony over the region. The never-ending cycle of crisis and war must be stopped at its source, through socialist revolutions in the imperialist centers. For workers revolution in the U.S.! For the Soviet United States of Europe, united on a voluntary basis!
There is only one progressive way forward in the war between Ukraine and Russia: to turn this war between two capitalist classes into a civil war where workers overthrow both capitalist classes. We call on the soldiers and workers of Ukraine and Russia: Fraternize! Turn the guns against your exploiters!
This war is fundamentally about whose sphere of influence Ukraine is under, and the victory of either the Russian or Ukrainian armed forces can only lead to more oppression. The Ukrainian government is fighting not to liberate Ukraine but to further enslave it to the NATO/EU imperialist powers, to which it has been bound since the 2014 U.S.-backed coup. Its victory would also increase the oppression of the Russian minority in Ukraine. On the other side, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seeks only to replace the imperialist boot with a Russian whip. The legitimate national struggle for self-rule in Donetsk and Luhansk has now been hitched to Russia’s broader reactionary war aim. Revolution in Ukraine and Russia would resolve the national question, do away with the oligarchs and inspire workers internationally to rise up against their own exploiters.
A revolutionary outcome to the current war is necessary and possible. In 1917, Russian and Ukrainian working people were also being used as cannon fodder by their rulers. They put an end to this by shooting their officers and joining insurgent workers under the leadership of the Bolsheviks to sweep away their common exploiters — the capitalists and landlords — in the world’s greatest revolution. For new October Revolutions in Russia and Ukraine!
The capitalist world has already been ravaged by two years of crisis triggered by the pandemic. Lockdowns, unemployment, speedup, inflation and crumbling health care are the reality for workers around the world. The current war can only accelerate the destruction of workers’ living standards and sharpen class antagonisms. The task of revolutionaries is to convert the raw anger building up at the bottom of capitalist societies into the only solution to war, misery and exploitation: the establishment of international workers rule.
The pandemic clearly laid bare the total bankruptcy of the current leaders of the workers movement. While the working class was being pummeled by both a virus and capitalist attacks, these class traitors — social democrats, Stalinists and trade-union bureaucrats — were entirely on the side of the bosses, demanding more lockdowns and more sacrifices. Now these same misleaders, particularly in the imperialist centers, are rallying workers to the cause of the U.S. and its allies, pledging undying loyalty to NATO and the EU and demanding that Russia be sanctioned into starvation. Enough betrayal! Workers must oppose the sanctions and military aid to Ukraine! To struggle against imperialist depredation abroad and attacks on living standards at home, the working class must break with its current leadership. It needs a new, revolutionary leadership to fulfill its world-historic role as the gravedigger of capitalism. Reforge the Fourth International!
