BT presentation at Ukraine debate with SL

As people probably know, we in the Bolshevik Tendency want to see a Russian military victory in Ukraine whereas the Spartacist League takes a position of defeatism on both sides. Most left groups which take a dual defeatist position (including the Trotskyist Fraction, Socialist Action and our former comrades in the IBT) view Russia as an “imperialist” power qualitatively equivalent to the US, Britain, et al; for them the conflict is essentially a struggle between rival imperialists. The SL, however, rejecting the notion of “Russian imperialism,” has, since February 2022, described the war as “a regional conflict between two non-imperialist capitalist classes.”[1]

This contrasts with the SL’s analysis in January 2014 when, in the midst of the fascist-led Maidan “revolution,” Workers Vanguard commented: “The ongoing aim of the Western imperialists is to establish a client state on the border of Russia….And Ukraine would be a big prize.”[2] Six weeks later in an article headlined “Ukraine Coup: Spearheaded by Fascists, Backed by U.S./EU Imperialists,” the SL asserted: “In intervening in Crimea, Putin is seeking to defend the interests of capitalist Russia against the Western imperialists, who are attempting to establish a client state on his border.”[3] The article situated the creation of a Ukrainian proxy within the context of the overall imperialist strategy:

“In its constant drive for world hegemony, the U.S. has been trying to curtail Russia’s strength as a regional power, continuously expanding NATO into East Europe and attempting to install pliant regimes… in former Soviet republics. The U.S. has also established bases across Central Asia and elsewhere on Russia’s periphery. This military extension is aimed at the encirclement not only of capitalist Russia but also of China….”

Encircling Russia with US client states and military bases does indeed pose a threat to the Chinese deformed workers’ state. By resisting NATO’s expansion into Ukraine, Russia is therefore defending itself and also (indirectly) China. This is why revolutionaries have a side in this struggle—and why the SL is wrong to sit it out.

When Russia moved into Crimea in 2014, WV correctly observed:

“The Western imperialists and their media loudly howl about Russian ‘aggression’ in Crimea. But….Putin’s intervention is essentially defensive, including to protect Russia’s Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol.”[4]

WV reported how Ukraine’s new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had been hand-picked by the US State Department, went to Brussels a few days after taking office to meet NATO’s secretary general who promised to: “strengthen our efforts to build the capacity of the Ukrainian military, including with more joint training and exercises.”

On 2 May 2014 WV proclaimed:

“We opposed the recent U.S.-backed Ukrainian coup that was spearheaded by the fascists and stand in opposition to the Kiev regime’s provocative military forays in eastern Ukraine. We oppose U.S./EU sanctions against Russia and the U.S./NATO military presence in the Baltics and elsewhere in East Europe.”[5]

The logic of that position, which the SL has yet to formally renounce, should obviously be to militarily support the Kremlin’s “Special Military Operation” to kick NATO out of Ukraine. Instead, you are refusing to take sides.

For years US strategists have been discussing how breaking Russia up into several smaller states could eliminate it as a geopolitical rival and open its vast natural resources up for exploitation by Western corporations. Zbigniew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser) and Dick Cheney (Defense Secretary in 1991 and Vice President under Bush I & II) were both enthusiastic advocates of this policy. More recently, in September 2022, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sponsored an event in Warsaw entitled “Decolonizing the Russian Empire.”[6] On 23 June this year the US “Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe” held a congressional briefing on “Decolonizing Russia–A Moral and Strategic Imperative.”[7] The briefing was pitched as:

“a long-overdue conversation about Russia’s interior empire, given Moscow’s dominion over many indigenous non-Russian nations, and the brutal extent to which the Kremlin has taken to suppress[ing] their national self-expression and self-determination.”

Articles discussing “decolonization” and breaking up the Russian Federation have recently appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Hill and Radio Free Europe.[8] Are you comrades actually unaware of this longstanding imperialist appetite to carve up Russia? Can you not see why Russia’s rulers would view this as a serious threat and why they were prepared to launch their “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine to counter it?

Putin is a reactionary bonapartist, a homophobe, a Great-Russian chauvinist and an enemy of the working class. But this conflict is not about supporting Putin’s regime; it is about preventing Ukraine from becoming a “frontline” NATO state on Russia’s border. Western pundits loudly insisted that Russia’s “unprovoked” intervention had nothing to do with NATO expansion (just as 20 years earlier they denied that the US invaded Iraq to seize control of Middle East oil). But on September 7, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s current Secretary General, casually confirmed that NATO expansion had indeed triggered the conflict—he said that Putin had:

“wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997 ….We rejected that.

“So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”[9]

NATO military installations on Russia’s borders vastly increase the risk of a pre-emptive “first strike” as Theodore Postal, an eminent US rocket scientist from MIT,[10] explained. This is because Russian satellite surveillance lags behind NATO’s, so Moscow needs more time to detect and respond in the event of a hostile attack—and having Ukraine as a neutral, non-militarized buffer provides that time. We defend Russia’s right to sever Ukraine’s NATO connection as an elementary act of self-defense. This question is at the core of the current conflict, as even Stoltenberg acknowledges—but thus far the SL chooses to avoid this.

The assertion that this is merely a “regional conflict” between two dependent capitalist bourgeoisies completely ignores the geostrategic imperatives driving NATO’s proxy war. The refusal to take sides in this conflict represents a significant, if unacknowledged, line change from the SL’s earlier recognition that NATO expansion aimed not only at Russia but also at the Chinese deformed workers’ state. I think that James Robertson’s aphorism about “program determining theory” helps illuminate the origins of this abrupt programmatic shift, which rationalized sidestepping militarily supporting the Kremlin’s attempt to “de-NATOize” Ukraine.

I am sure we all remember the frenzied bourgeois propaganda in defense of “poor little Ukraine” in February 2022. The pressure was intense; the ruling class was on the warpath and capitalist ideologues of every stripe, from right-wing libertarians to radical left-liberals, were hysterically denouncing “Russian imperialism.” At such moments it is not easy to stand up and tell the simple truth. The SL did so in 1979 when it backed the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Two years later, in 1981, the SL again displayed the ability to “swim against the stream” when it denounced Lech Walesa’s Solidarnosc as an instrument of capitalist counter-revolution. But in 2022 the SL capitulated and, ignoring its previous descriptions of Zelensky’s fascist-riddled regime as a NATO proxy, proclaimed: “this is a war between two non-imperialist countries.”[11]

The SL was not the only tendency to shift from denouncing the 2014 Maidan coup (which Victoria Nuland said cost the US $5 billion) to a stance of “neither Washington nor Moscow.” The Internationalist Group and David North’s World Socialist Web Site also flinched in February 2022 when push came to shove. Six months later, as enthusiasm for NATO’s Ukrainian puppet began to wane, the IG walked back its original capitulation and belatedly adopted a Russian-defensist position. While we welcomed this correction, we criticized the IG’s clumsy attempt to attribute their flip-flop to a change in the objective situation.[12] The SL made a parallel criticism, correctly observing that:

“Ukraine has been a proxy for the imperialists going back to 2014. Imperialist weapons flooded Ukraine at the very outset of the conflict and military operations have been coordinated with NATO throughout.”[13]

Quite right. But the fact that “Ukraine has been a proxy for the imperialists going back to 2014” is precisely why revolutionaries cannot be neutral in this fight. In the latest Spartacist, you correctly observe: “The essential starting point must be that it is the imperialist system itself—defined today as the U.S.-dominated liberal order—that is responsible for the conflict in Ukraine.”[14] The same article [top of col 2, p 32] states:

“The two decisive actors in the Ukraine war are Russia and the U.S.”

This is very true–Russia and the US are indeed the “two decisive actors.” But how can you then characterize this as “a war between two non-imperialist countries,[15]” given that the US is imperialist and Russia is not? The current Spartacist article stipulates that “NATO and Russia are engaged in a proxy war”[16] which:

“broke out as a result of decades of eastward NATO expansion…. Russia sees Ukraine as of vital strategic interest…. For the Western liberal establishment, ‘defending Ukraine’ is about defending the liberal world order, i.e., the right of the United States to do as it pleases wherever it wants.” [Ibid.]

Unfortunately it is unlikely that NATO will suffer defeat at the hands of an insurgent class-conscious Russian/Ukrainian workers’ movement—but it is also clear that the imperialist proxy is going down: the Ukrainian army has taken horrendous casualties and appears to be nearing collapse, while economic sanctions against Russia have failed spectacularly. There are very few options left for NATO without potentially risking a nuclear confrontation, which the American bourgeoisie would obviously prefer to avoid. The current Spartacist correctly observes that a Russian military victory would, “be a humiliating blow for the U.S. It would signal weakness, have destabilizing consequences for Europe’s political establishment and place a question mark over NATO’s future.” What’s not to like about that? Why does the SL not welcome the prospect of imminent imperialist defeat and the collapse of NATO?

The 7 February 2020 WV, in discussing Washington’s use of its Ukrainian proxy, observed:

“What is criminal is that the U.S. continues to arm and finance Kiev in this proxy war against the East Ukraine insurgents. Echoing one witness during [Trump’s] trial, the Democrats’ House impeachment tsar, Russophobe Adam Schiff, raved: ‘The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.’”[17]

Schiff’s view is shared by many other leading American politicians. Last August, after visiting Kiev with fellow member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal proclaimed: “Ukraine is at the tip of the spear, fighting our fight for independence and freedom.” He continued:

“We’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half…. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost.”[18]

Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, characterized military support for Ukraine as “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done” because “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money … a weakened Russia is a good thing.”[19] Romney also explicitly linked the war in Ukraine to the looming fight with China:

“The single most important thing we can do to strengthen America relative to China is to see Russia defeated in Ukraine. A weakened Russia deters the CCP’s territorial ambition …. Supporting Ukraine is in our interest.”[20]

Romney is right that a Russian defeat in Ukraine would vastly “strengthen America relative to China,” as well as Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and every other potential victim of US/NATO aggression. Conversely, a Russian military victory will weaken “America relative to China.” Presumably SL comrades can understand this simple equation. So how can you be neutral?

I want to conclude with a few comments on your proposal to the IG to open up a serious, and, in our view, long overdue, discussion of Spartacist history. There is a problem with looking back only as far as 1990 as you proposed–because the SL actually went off the rails as a revolutionary organization long before that.[21] In 1978 Liz Gordon, who is still “Director of Party Publications,” was harshly attacked for daring to suggest that a single line in a draft co-authored by Jim Robertson might be “unbalanced.” Robertson’s threat to split the group over that actually was unbalanced. Later the same year Robertson launched the “clone purge,” a “sub-political” struggle that permanently crippled the SL’s once-promising youth group.

In 1979, as a few of us here can recall, the central event at the founding conference of the international Spartacist tendency was the show trial of Bill Logan on charges of seriously mistreating young comrades in Australia. Logan was indeed guilty of that, but the allegation that he bore sole responsibility was a brazen lie: his actions were known to and approved by Robertson and rest of the top SL leadership, as we documented in a pamphlet available on our lit table.[22] This travesty provided a template for future frame-ups, including the crooked “trial” that featured in the 1996 purge of the IG.

In the early 1980s the SL began making a series of overtly programmatic deviations—the first of which was marching around under the banner of the Salvadoran popular front.[23] The next year the SL was saluting Yuri Andropov,[24] the Soviet bureaucrat who oversaw the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian workers’ political revolution. In 1983 the SL leadership called for saving the survivors of the Islamic Jihad’s truck-bombing that blew the US Marines out of Lebanon. Any genuine revolutionary would view that attack (which Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah more or less took credit for last week [25]) as a welcome blow against imperialism. But the SL leadership did not. This cowardly social-patriotic flinch was unprecedented in the previous history of the Spartacist tendency,[26] although it was later paralleled by the refusal to take an Afghan-defensist position in 2001 after the US invaded.[27] In recent correspondence with the new SL leadership, comrade Norden rightly objected to the SL’s “provocateur-baiting” of the IG.[28] We agree that this filthy smear should be formally retracted by the SL—but we also recall several similarly odious slanders aimed at us in Spartacist publications during Norden’s tenure as WV editor which he and the SL must also repudiate.[29]

To date the desire of comrades Perrault and David to chart a new course has unfortunately mostly seemed to involve renouncing things that Robertson got right—like warning Iranian leftists not to stick their heads in Khomeini’s noose and rejecting the ANC’s Stalinist/Menshevik “Freedom Charter” which advocated reforming, rather than smashing, the South African apartheid state.

The current state of programmatic flux in the Spartacist tendency has not surprisingly created a lot of confusion within the cadre. We saw this six weeks ago in Toronto when we asked John Masters, the Canadian section’s longstanding leading comrade, whether you still upheld a position of dual defeatism in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 67 and 73. We had to ask three times before John finally indicated that he simply did not know. Perhaps someone here can answer that rather important question.

We certainly hope that this debate and your forthcoming one with the IG in New York, will mark the beginning of a serious, “warts and all” discussion of Spartacist history. Whatever its problems, the SL during the 1960s and 70s was the only genuinely Trotskyist tendency in the world and the assimilation of its political legacy is, we believe, essential for the future rebirth of the Fourth International.

Notes:

  1. https://spartacist.org/english/esp/67/spartacist-en-67.pdf [p17] ↑
  2. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1038/ukraine.html ↑
  3. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1041/ukraine.html ↑
  4. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1042/crimea.html ↑
  5. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1045/chicago.html ↑
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W1XsSqRN8A ↑
  7. https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/events/decolonizing-russia ↑
  8. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/russia-putin-colonization-ukraine-chechnya/639428/https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration/https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-war-ukraine-western-academia/32201630.html
    https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3483799-prepare-for-the-disappearance-of-russia/ ↑
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf5xEBwBhds ↑
  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppD_bhWODDc [Postal’s commentary begins at 1:06:50] ↑
  11. https://spartacist.org/english/esp/67/spartacist-en-67.pdf [p48] ↑
  12. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2022/11/25/better-late-than-never/ ↑
  13. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/2022-11-05-ig/ ↑
  14. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/68/breakdown/ [p32] ↑
  15. https://spartacist.org/english/esp/67/spartacist-en-67.pdf [p48 c1] ↑
  16. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/68/breakdown/ [p30 c2] ↑
  17. https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1169/impeachment.html ↑
  18. https://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/sen-blumenthal-opinion-ukraine-tip-spear-18335871.php ↑
  19. https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/31/sen-blumenthal-us-getting-its-moneys-worth-in-ukraine-because-americans-arent-dying/ ↑
  20. https://twitter.com/SenatorRomney/status/1695183212174266556?s=20 ↑
  21. https://bolsheviktendency.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IG-letter-1996-and-rejoinder-leaflet-with-contact-box-FINAL-for-printing.pdf ↑
  22. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2021/08/10/on-the-logan-show-trial/ ↑
  23. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/1981/0280_08_05_1981.pdf [p1]“On May 3,[1981] the only flags of the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were carried by the [SL’s] Anti-Imperialist Contingent, whose color guard also bore Vietnamese and Cuban banners, along with red flags of proletarian internationalism….” ↑
  24. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/01/18/no-1-only-trotskyism-can-defend-the-gains-of-october/ ↑
  25. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-leader-says-hamas-oct-7-assault-was-100-palestinian-2023-11-03/“Nasrallah said Hezbollah was not afraid of the warships.“’We have prepared well for your fleets, with which you are threatening us,’ said Nasrallah, whose group’s arsenal includes anti-ship missiles.“He recalled attacks on U.S. interests in Lebanon in the early 1980s – a reference to 1983 suicide bombings that destroyed the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 servicemen, and a suicide attack on the U.S. embassy. The United States holds Hezbollah responsible for the attacks.“Those ‘who defeated you in Lebanon … are still alive’, he said.” ↑
  26. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/05/tb-2-marxism-vs-social-patriotism/ ↑
  27. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/05/05/where-is-the-icl-going-2/ ↑
  28. https://www.internationalist.org/corresondence-between-international-communist-league-and-league-for-the-fourth-international-2310.html“In contrast, the ICL unleashed a decades-long torrent of slanders against us, seeking to brand the IG as ‘anti-American’ at the height of post-9/11 hysteria for our call to defeat U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan,5  ‘provocateur’-baiting,6 and much more.” [Norden to SL, 27 Sept 2023] ↑
  29. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/1987/0428_15_05_1987.pdf“But how can one explain the BT? Writing on the BT two years ago (“ET: New Name, Same Game?” WV No.388, 4 October 1985) we observed:”Those who are guided by intense” subjective malice as a political program are just asking to be someone’s tool, witting or unwitting (sometimes both)…. But applying the criterion cui bono (who benefits) to the ET /BT suggests answers ranging from the merely unsavory to the downright sinister.”“The whole tone of the BT recalls nothing so much as the insinuating style associated with the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO.”https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1990/trotskyism.html“As for the BT’s own political positions, besides hatred of the Soviet Union, these highly dubious provocateurs appear to dislike American blacks, are solicitous of Zionism and praise the indiscriminant mass killings of Americans. Of the state agencies in the world only the Mossad, the Israeli secret police, has similar appetites.” ↑