‘Trotskyist’ Confusionism
Trotskyist Fraction doublethink re: imperialism, Ukraine, China & multi-polarity
Unlike many pseudo-Trotskyist tendencies, the post-Morenoites of the Trotskyist Fraction (TF) have grown in recent years, particularly in France. The sharpening class conflicts across Europe have been fuelled by the economic fallout of the war in Ukraine, in particular the boycott of Russian energy exports. This war is an important part of an emerging multi-polar order, driven by the revolt of various neo-colonial and dependent-capitalist countries, and most importantly the Chinese deformed workers’ state, against the reactionary “rules-based international order” run by the U.S. and its imperialist allies.
As we have observed elsewhere, the TF, while correctly describing NATO’s role in provoking Russia into launching its Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, assumed a neutral posture once the conflict began. We note that different TF theorists have offered various, sometimes conflicting, justifications for this position. The authors of the TF’s 13-14 May 2023 conference document describe the coming period as one:
“in which the deep tendencies of the era of imperialist wars, crises, and revolutions (Lenin) are again in focus. On the military and geopolitical level, they express themselves in the war in Ukraine, the growing tensions between the U.S. and China, the tendency to create blocs of opposing forces, etc.”
They describe “the Russia/Ukraine-NATO war” as a pivotal event of global significance: “the war in Ukraine is not just another war. It represents the beginning of the open (even military) questioning of the current world order, even though the rhythm of events will not necessarily be linear.” The war is a continuation of “the imperialist policy…of ‘encircling’ Russia through NATO’s eastward expansion.” The document accurately observes: “The strategy of U.S. imperialism, schematically defined, is to wear down Russia by using Ukrainian troops as “cannon fodder.” It also notes: “For U.S. imperialism, continuing the war has, among other things, the benefit of further weakening Russia and continuing to reduce the economic dependence of its allies on Russia, in particular, ‘decoupling’ Germany from Russia.” Yet despite these correct observations, the conference document endorses the TF’s original 3 March 2022 statement on the conflict, “No to the War! Russian Troops Out of Ukraine! NATO Out of Eastern Europe! No to Imperialist Rearmament!” (Left Voice). We are reminded of George Orwell’s description of “Newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings.”
TF on the origins of the war in Ukraine
On 23 February 2022, the day before Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the TF’s Claudia Cinatti accurately sketched the background to the outbreak of hostilities:
“The roots of the conflict between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO go back to the end of the Cold War with the triumph of the United States, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and capitalist restoration. After having regressed to historic levels in the period of Boris Yeltsin, under Putin’s Bonapartist regime, Russia re-emerged as a power that has inherited the nuclear arsenal of the former USSR, although it does not have the status of the former Soviet Union and is based on a rentier economy dependent on oil. This gives Russia a geopolitical projection that far exceeds its material bases and feeds Putin’s ambitions to influence the international scene in the interests of Russian capitalism.
“In addition to promoting pro-Western governments in Russia’s neighborhood, the U.S. has moved forward with the eastward expansion of NATO, which gradually incorporated the countries that were part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The Atlantic Alliance, which was intended to defend capitalist Europe from an eventual attack by the Soviet Union under the leadership of the U.S., doubled its membership after the collapse of the USSR and extended to Russia’s borders. The logic guiding this expansive action of the U.S. is the strategic objective of advancing a policy of semi-colonization of Russia.”
– leftvoice.org, 23 February 2022 (emphasis added)
The 1991 triumph of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, led by Boris Yeltsin, resulted in an unprecedented decline in working-class living standards. Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, by reasserting state control over Russia’s natural resources—particularly in the oil and gas sector—reduced the outflow of value to Western corporations. This development was unpopular in the citadels of imperialism where Ukraine was seen as a potential lever to weaken Russia and ultimately reduce it to semi-colonial status. In 2023, a year into Putin’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, Sou Mi, writing in the TF’s American journal, outlined how the imperialists had been encroaching on Russia:[i]
“Over the last decades, a strategic objective of the U.S. and NATO has been to encircle and contain Russia. It has done so in two ways: first, by expanding NATO territories with the incorporation of erstwhile states of the Eastern bloc, and second, by interfering in and diverting the democratic revolts expressed through the so-called ‘color revolutions’, using the momentum against authoritarian regimes towards expanding U.S. influence. In terms of the latter in particular, the strategy to contain Russia by installing proxy regimes under the influence of western imperialism has been the policy of the U.S. and NATO in Ukraine from 2004, to 2014, to now.”
– leftvoice.org, 27 February 2023
The majority position in the TF is apparently that Russia is not an imperialist country in the Marxist sense. Esteban Mercatante, a leading figure in the TF’s Argentine flagship, the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), describes Russia as one of:
“a group of intermediate social formations for which we have proposed the category of attenuated dependency or with attenuated characteristics. By this category we mean those social formations which, without losing their subaltern status, have a greater capacity – always relative and, in comparison with, dependent countries – to direct state policy towards safeguarding the interests of sectors of the national capitalist class and to enforce them beyond their borders, generally within the limits of their immediate periphery.”
– klassegegenklasse.org, 23 September 2022 (BT translation; the original article appeared in Spanish on izquierdadiario.com on 18 September 2022)
Mercatante observes that after capitalist restoration in Russia the gap in labour productivity with the US widened:
“In its last years, the Soviet Union had a labour productivity equivalent to 60 per cent of that of the entire US economy. In the midst of the economic collapse in the 1990s, this indicator dropped to one-third of that of the US economy. Although productivity subsequently increased with the economic recovery, it remains at 45 per cent of US productivity per worker….There is no doubt that the gap with US imperialism is even wider than it was 30 years ago, and to make matters worse, it is happening with a much less diversified and complex economy, as the industrial infrastructure has shrunk considerably since the Restoration.”
He also notes that despite income from its expanding portfolio of foreign direct investment (FDI), Russia “is far from…an imperialist country”:
“In the case of Russia, the expansion of its companies abroad was accompanied by a roughly equal increase in FDI inflows into the country, so that the net position changed little. For every USD 3 of FDI out of Russia in 2021, there was USD 4 of FDI into Russia. The consequence of this negative gap is that if we assume equal returns for both FDI flows—an unrealistic assumption, but one that serves to simplify matters—the returns generated by the Russian economy abroad account for only 75 per cent of the returns generated by foreign capital in Russia. This position means that while Russia is much less vulnerable than the average dependent country, it is far from that of an imperialist country or even the ‘prosperous periphery.’”
As we have discussed previously, Russia runs a value deficit in its international relations, which signifies that it is not an imperialist power in the Marxist sense. Mercatante, recognising this, characterises its military intervention in Ukraine as essentially defensive:
“The invasion of Ukraine is an act of aggression by which Russia seeks to annex at least part of the south-eastern territory of Ukraine. But even if this occupation is part of the Russian state’s ambition to regain the territorial grandeur of the Tsarist Empire or the Soviet Union, it is part of a more defensive course of counter-attack on the part of Putin’s Russia, despite all the high-sounding speeches about the need to regain the glorious imperial past.”
—Ibid.
In its first official statement on the conflict the Trotskyist Fraction acknowledged that the imperialists’ strategic objective is to reduce Russia to a Western semi-colony:
“The imperialist nations have no interest in ‘independence and democracy’ in Ukraine, as they cynically claim. Though they are not involving themselves in a direct military confrontation with Russian forces for now, they are using the occupation for their own ends, namely military rearmament. They are seeking to position themselves to advance in a process of semi-colonization of not only Ukraine (which, under the boot of the IMF and the Western imperialist powers, is one of the poorest countries in Eastern Europe), but also Russia itself if Putin’s political and military maneuvers fail.”
– leftvoice.org, 3 March 2022
As the first month of the war drew to a close, Juan Chingo, Philippe Alcoy and Pierre Reip of the TF’s French section, Révolution Permanente (RP), accurately summed up the limited scope of Putin’s “Special Military Operation”:
“The Russian army invaded Ukraine militarily, but as a police operation aimed at extracting concessions quickly in order to avoid a costly occupation. If Russia does not achieve its objectives in the next few days, the invasion will require more and more forces and could lead to a real stalemate, as well as to an ever more deadly escalation for the Ukrainian people.”
– leftvoice.org, 20 March 2022
Yet despite recognising the character of Russia’s intervention as essentially defensive, the TF refused to take sides and advocate a Russian military victory over NATO and its Ukrainian proxy, a contradiction we identified as “political cowardice” in the face of the relentless imperialist propaganda barrage. In an apparent attempt to square this circle, TF theorists cranked out confusionist doubletalk about Russia as a “sort of” imperialist, including the following from Matías Maiello of the TF’s Argentinian section, the PTS:
“Russia today, even with all the contradictions raised by its process of capitalist restoration, including the unfinished project of its own semicolonization, is today a capitalist country. And although Russia is not imperialist in the precise sense of the term (insofar as it does not have a significant international expansion of its monopolies and export of capital; it essentially exports gas, oil, commodities, etc.), although it does act as a sort of ‘military imperialism’ in its zone of influence.”
– leftvoice.org, 10 March 2022
The term “military imperialism” is presumably intended to suggest a parallel with tsarist Russia’s role during WWI. Yet there is no parallel: Lenin argued that Russia’s “disgraceful dependence on” British and French finance capital made it a junior partner in the first inter-imperialist world war whereas the “foreign policy of the proletariat is alliance with the revolutionaries of the advanced countries and with all the oppressed nations against all and any imperialists.” Russia today cannot be described as a “weak link” in any imperialist chain, because all the actual imperialist powers oppose it. Maiello, who is obviously well aware of this, seeks to distract his readers by pointing to Putin’s role in propping up allied bonapartist regimes and crushing the national aspirations of the Chechens:
“The truth is that Putin is the head of a Bonapartist regime that, in the best traditions of Russian czarism’s national oppression, has intervened in Belarus and Kazakhstan to support reactionary governments challenged by popular mobilizations, intervened to crush the Chechen people militarily, and intervened to support regimes like that of al-Assad in Syria.”
– Ibid.
Maiello rejects the idea of “the invasion of Ukraine as necessary for [Russian] ‘national defense’ against NATO,” and equates military support to the Kremlin’s “Special Military Operation” as tantamount to a political endorsement of Putin’s bonapartist regime. In a follow-up text (leftvoice.org, 31 March 2022) he implicitly corrects this amalgam by recalling that during the 1991 and 2002 US-led invasions of Iraq and NATO’s 2001 conquest of Afghanistan, the PTS took a position of “supporting the military camp of the Afghan and Iraqi people, while rejecting any sort of political support for their reactionary governments.”[ii]
While the overwhelming majority of the western and Latin American left opposed the NATO/US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, they tended to downplay NATO’s aggressive encirclement of Russia and opposed the Kremlin’s eventual defensive response. In each case the TF’s position corresponded to the consensus of the radical-liberal-leftist milieu. Maiello seeks to explain the TF’s neutrality by arguing that while Russia “does not qualify as an imperialist country in the precise [i.e., Marxist] sense of the term”, its military capacity qualifies it as a “kind of” imperialist. He then offers the following as a “kind of” Marxist explanation:
“It is not a war in which all of imperialism is on one side, with the oppressed nation on the other (as in the examples discussed above of the two Gulf Wars…). On the one hand, there is Putin’s reactionary invasion, with Russia acting as a kind of ‘military imperialism’ (although it does not qualify as an imperialist country in the precise sense of the term, given the low level of expansion of its monopolies and capital exports on a global scale; it essentially exports gas, oil, and commodities, etc.). On the other hand, we have the semicolonial nation of Ukraine, which is being used as a proxy by the biggest imperialist powers of the West in their confrontation with Russia. But it is also not an open inter-imperialist war, as in the Polish case analyzed by Lenin.”
— Ibid.
Maiello’s contradictory claim that it is “not a war in which all of imperialism is on one side”, yet the conflict is also “not an open inter-imperialist war”, is evidently intended to rationalise the TF’s neutrality in a struggle between the world’s leading imperialist powers and a country pushing back against its own “semi-colonisation”.
In response to an article by Socialist Action’s Rob Lyons and Scott Cooper (a frequent TF collaborator), Jimena Vergara and James Dennis Hoff, leading members of the TF’s American section, argued that Putin’s SMO was not fundamentally defensive in character:
“Russia’s invasion in 2022 was not only a response to NATO expansion, but was an escalation of its own ongoing politics toward Ukraine—a politics designed to retain the country, particularly the industrial regions of the East, as a semi-colony under Russian control and influence.“
– leftvoice.org, 16 March 2023
The Kremlin’s SMO was a defensive military move designed to advance the strategic objective of resisting the “semi-colonization of Russia” by spiking Washington’s attempt to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, as a 30 January 2022 statement signed by all the TF’s international sections two months earlier made clear:
“The United States and Western powers claim that Putin is preparing a military invasion of Ukraine. The Russian president denies that his objective is the occupation of his neighbor. Instead, it seems to be a show of strength aimed at negotiating on better terms with the Biden administration over a set of demands considered ‘red lines’: that Ukraine remains neutral, that NATO halts its expansion toward Russia’s borders, and that NATO withdraws its missiles and tactical weapons from the countries of the former Soviet bloc.”
— leftvoice.org
Vergara and Hoff’s claim that Putin’s intervention was intended in part to retain “the industrial regions of the East, as a semi-colony under Russian control and influence” is entirely mistaken. The war launched on the ethnically Russian population of the Donbass in 2014 by the fascist-riddled Kiev regime, installed with massive imperialist support after the Maidan coup the same year, compelled the Kremlin to offer assistance to their compatriots. But there is simply no basis for claiming that Russia sought to exploit Ukraine’s industrialised eastern region economically. A 2014 study by the Brookings Institute reported that most of this area’s enterprises were only able to continue operations because of Russian subsidies:
“The simple fact is that Russia today supports the Ukrainian economy to the tune of at least $5 billion, perhaps as much as $10 billion, each year.
“When we talk about subsidies, we usually think of Russia’s ability to offer Ukraine cheap gas—which it does when it wants to. But there are many more ways Russia supports Ukraine, only they are hidden. The main support comes in form of Russian orders to Ukrainian heavy manufacturing enterprises. This part of Ukrainian industry depends almost entirely on demand from Russia. They wouldn’t be able to sell to anyone else. The southern and eastern provinces of Ukraine are dominated by Soviet-era dinosaur enterprises similar to Russia’s. They were all built in Soviet times as part of a single, integrated energy-abundant economy. They could be sustained only thanks to the rents from Soviet (overwhelmingly Russian) oil and gas. Russian subsidies have continued to maintain the structure in the post-Soviet era. Because most of these subsidies are informal, they do not appear in official statistics. (In fact, not even Putin talks about them, though it might be to his advantage to do so, because acknowledging the existence of hidden Russian subsidies to value-destroying Ukrainian enterprises would expose the fact that the same thing goes on, on a much greater scale, with their Russian counterparts. They, too, are not producing real value.)”
— “Ukraine: A Prize Neither Russia Nor the West Can Afford to Win,” brookings.edu
The TF’s confused explanations of Russia’s motivation for intervening against NATO’s Kiev proxy were clearly a “Marxist” rationalisation for tailing popular pro-Ukrainian sentiment manufactured by imperialist propaganda in the early days of the SMO. The appetite of the Revolutionäre Internationalistische Organisation (RIO), the TF’s German section, to surf the massive wave of pro-Kiev “anti-war” protests is evident in its reportage at the time:
“From Alexanderplatz to Großer Stern, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the war in Ukraine. According to the organisers, 125,000 people were on the streets nationwide, 60,000 in Berlin. Trade unions, churches and dozens of NGOs had called for the demonstration. While the rejection of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was universal, there were unfortunately once again—as at the large demonstration a fortnight ago with 500,000 people—many voices for sanctions and in part also for arms deliveries to Ukraine, both from the stage and among many demonstrators.”
– klassegegenklasse.org, 11 March 2022 (BT translation)
“Unfortunately” most of the participants in these demonstrations were cheering on NATO’s Ukrainian proxy. Philippe Alcoy, of the TF’s French section RP, reported that “[pro-Nazi] Banderist symbols such as the red and black flag, which we’ve even seen at demonstrations in Paris, have become regular old national symbols.” The TF is not deterred by the far-right presence and openly pro-imperialist character of the protests. Maiello claimed, without any evidence, that “a tough fight is arising against the movement being used by imperialist militarism”, while acknowledging that the successful promotion of Ukrainian defencism, popularised through these demonstrations, provided cover for German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s aggressive programme of rearmament:
“In Germany on Sunday, February 27, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Berlin against the war in Ukraine. On a smaller scale, there were demonstrations in other European cities…. But in the movements against the war that are beginning to emerge, a tough fight is arising against the movement being used by imperialist militarism. In fact, on the same day of the Berlin mobilization, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced German imperialism’s rearmament. In the European countries in particular, the site of growing mobilizations against the war, there is enormous pressure from the mass media and the political establishment directed against anyone who dares to denounce NATO—doing so means being attacked, almost automatically, as a supporter of Putin, if nothing else.”
– leftvoice.org, 10 March 2022
These protests were intended to mobilise public support for the Ukrainian war effort. The TF’s recognition that the conflict resulted from the imperialist strategy of encircling Russia as a step towards its subordination as a semi-colonial vassal on the one hand was counterposed to its appetite to participate in the pro-Ukrainian popular mobilisations. Nathaniel Flakin, a leading figure in both the TF’s German and US sections, acknowledges that the “Ukrainian army is fighting for imperialism” and correctly observes that “Imperialism, as understood by Marxists, is not limited to military manoeuvres. U.S. imperialism controls Ukraine via political and financial means.” Flakin is clever enough to know that the leading Russian oligarchs do not qualify as imperialists “in the Marxist sense of the word”, i.e., finance capitalists, as Matías Maiello and Esteban Mercatante also acknowledge. Yet the TF position of dual defeatism would only conform to Lenin and Trotsky’s teachings if both sides were either imperialist or dependent capitalist countries. In a conflict between an imperialist proxy and a non-imperialist country (which the imperialists seek to maintain as, or transform into, a semi-colony) Marxists have a side. Flakin, however, displays his “independence” from Trotsky’s position by lauding the TF stance as “independent” of “both NATO and Russian imperialism”:
“Socialists need to fight for an independent position. This applies to Ukraine as well, where socialists need to fight for the working class to become an independent political factor, with a perspective of liberating the country from both NATO and Russian imperialism. This is the only way to put an end to reactionary wars.”
– leftvoice.org, 1 July 2023
The mistaken equation of US/NATO and Russia, with its dual-defeatist conclusion, is shared by various revisionists, including the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) and the British Socialist Workers Party, if not by Maiello and other more serious elements of the TF. It seems that the TF is not operating on a democratic-centralist basis and, at least on this crucial issue, is prepared to publish contradictory positions.
TF incoherence on Ukrainian national self-determination
As Maeillo acknowledged shortly after the Russian intervention, the 2014 Maidan coup, financed by US imperialism, resulted in a murderous offensive against the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine:
“The truth, though, is that the crack in Ukrainian society has been consolidated ever since the so-called [2004] Orange Revolution (after the colors of the pro-Western party Our Ukraine), and even more so since the Maidan Square revolt broke out at the end of 2013—which led to the brutal repression of the (pro-Russian) government of Yanukovych and the takeover of the opposition movement by reactionary and ultra-right-wing pro-Western forces. It has been developing since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of right-wing nationalism, especially against the Russian-speaking minority, which comprises about 30 percent of the population in the east and south of the country”
– leftvoice.org, 10 March 2022
Between 2014 and 2022, some 14,000 people, mostly Russian speakers, were killed as Kiev attempted to reassert control over Donetsk and Luhansk. A prominent left-liberal American publication outlined how Petro Poroshenko, who won Ukraine’s November 2014 presidential election, intended to deal with resistance in the rebellious eastern territories:
“If Poroshenko and his cheerleaders in the Obama administration and the US Congress believe that an economic blockade, Kiev’s deployment of snipers, the shelling of Donbas’s civilians and a proposal to send American weapons with which to facilitate the shelling is the recipe for winning eastern Ukrainian ‘hearts and minds’ they couldn’t be more wrong.
“Yet, tellingly, this is the strategy Poroshenko himself laid out last November in a speech in which he declared: ‘Our children will go to schools and kindergartens, theirs will be holed up in the basements. Because they are not able to do a thing. This is exactly how we will win this war!’”
– thenation.com, 6 April 2015
Volodymyr Zelensky, Poroshenko’s successor, was elected in 2019 on a promise to end the war on the Donbass. But his plans changed abruptly after he travelled to Zolote, a frontline city, to advocate a negotiated end to the fighting, and was bluntly told to leave, as the Kyiv Post reported. The president’s submission to the fascist Azov battalion vividly illustrated the dominance of the far-right. The TF’s Philippe Alcoy observed:
“It’s clear that Western imperialist leaders are aware of the political and military activity of the Far Right in Ukraine. Yet they choose not to express their concerns in public, not only because it feeds into Putin’s discourse, but also because the Far Right is aligned with their interests.”
– leftvoice.org, 14 March 2022
The failure of the so-called Minsk Accords, which were supposed to provide an autonomous status for the Donbass, led to Russia’s 2022 incursion. German chancellor Angela Merkel, French prime minister François Hollande, (the two European powers that sponsored the 2015 agreement) and the Ukrainian president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, all subsequently admitted that the negotiations were a sham intended to buy time to better arm Ukraine for an eventual conflict with Russia.
Claudia Cinatti’s February 2022 article credulously claimed that “these agreements were more favourable to Russia because they provided for the autonomy of Donetsk and Lugansk”. This set the tone for subsequent TF articles tilting towards NATO’s Ukrainian proxy. In a polemic against the German Communist Party (DKP), the TF’s Marius Rabe acknowledged the oppression of Russian-speakers in the Donbass in passing before denying that Moscow could “in any way” protect the victims of Kiev’s murderous assault:
“The DKP and SDAJ [the DKP’s youth group] point out that the Ukrainian government, with the help of fascist militias, has been waging a war against the Russian-backed ‘peoples’ republics’ in the Donbass for eight years. It is true that there is repression of Russian minorities by the Zelensky government. However, it is fundamentally wrong to conclude that the Russian Federation could in any way be a guarantor or a protective power for national minorities. Thus, all socialists should stand up for the right of peoples to self-determination, which means that no peoples should be forced to live together in a state against their will—in other words, the right to separation. The right of peoples to self-determination signifies that with a Russian occupation in Crimea and the ‘peoples’ republics’ no free decision and no peaceful coexistence of peoples is possible. The current invasion—a reactionary sibling war—definitively proves that Russia’s government makes the peace of the peoples impossible.”
– klassegegenklasse.org, 26 March 2022 (BT translation)
Had the workers in the Donbass followed the TF’s advice and prioritised ending the “Russian occupation”, they would have opened the door for their own massacre by rabid Ukrainian nationalists. Comrade Rabe’s notions about “self-determination” do not include the vast majority of the population of Crimea and the Donbass, who have clearly opted for Moscow over Kiev. The Russian intervention in the Donbass halted the murderous repression being inflicted by the NATO-backed, fascist-riddled Ukrainian military—Rabe’s assertion that it made the “peace of peoples [in what was formerly Eastern Ukraine] impossible” is sheer nonsense. In fact, the main thing that Moscow’s intervention in the Donbass made “impossible” was the continuation of the massacre of Russian speakers.
A few weeks earlier, two PTS comrades, Josefina L. Martínez and Diego Lotito, published an article that, blithely ignoring the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people of the Donbass, vacuously proposed an “independent policy” to “expel the Russian troops”:
“Today, more than ever, we can affirm that a gradual exit from this long conflict and genuine national self-determination of Ukraine can only be achieved if the working class and the people of both the Western region and the Donbass region develop an independent policy. NATO, US and European imperialism, to which the right-wing Zelensky government is subordinated, are not the allies of the Ukrainian working class and the Ukrainian masses, they are their enemies. But the reactionary nationalism of Putin and the Russian capitalist oligarchy, who pretend to want to ‘denazify’ Ukraine by invading it with tanks, is not a progressive way out either.
“In order to expel the Russian troops from Ukraine and find a progressive way out of this conflict, the Ukrainian resistance must equip itself with a policy independent of NATO and the Zelensky government and rely on the self-organisation of the workers and the masses.”
– laizquierdadiario.com, 1 March 2022 (BT translation)
The formal acknowledgement of the Zelensky government’s status as an imperialist proxy is counterbalanced by endorsing NATO’s military objective of “expel[ling] the Russian forces from Ukraine.” Philippe Alcoy was at least prepared to recognise the danger posed by the role of Ukraine’s “extreme right-wing” in the conflict:
“Meanwhile, the policies of Kyiv and the Ukrainian oligarchs promote violent anti-Russian nationalism.
“Thus, one of the dangers ahead for the workers and the masses is that the war—given the current relationship of forces—could end up strengthening extreme right-wing currents, especially those collaborating closely with Ukrainian security forces…. Because they are in many cases playing a decisive role in the defense of Ukraine, we could see these militias led by the Far Right achieve a heightened level of prestige that could extend even to Western countries.”
– leftvoice.org, 14 March 2022
The TF’s attempt to frame the axis of the conflict as a struggle for Ukrainian self-determination against both NATO and the Kremlin was spelled out clearly by Stefan Schneider, Celine Blume and Simon Zinnstein of RIO:
“A free and independent Ukraine is possible neither through submission to NATO nor through submission to Russia. With all the weapons in circulation, only the unity of the workers of Ukraine, divided by oligarchies on both sides of the divide, can beat back Putin’s invasion. It cannot exchange one chain for another and remain in the pendulum (between Russia and NATO) that has shaped the country’s politics in recent decades. The only perspective for a truly free and independent Ukraine is the construction of a socialist Ukraine of workers.”
– klassegegenklasse.org, 28 March 2022 (BT translation)
The TF’s depiction of the conflict as a matter of “a free and independent Ukraine” is a gross falsification—NATO’s expansion into Ukraine was aimed at hemming in Russia as the US think tank Stratfor observed in 2013 when the Maidan demonstrations were ramping up:
“For Russia, the future of Ukraine is closely tied with its own future. Ukraine is territory that is deep within the Russian core and losing Ukraine from its orbit leaves Russia indefensible.”
– stratfor.com, 10 December 2013
As we noted in February 2022, the core issue in the current conflict is Russia’s right to keep the NATO predators away from its door:
“We recognize the right of the people of Crimea to rejoin Russia, just as we recognized the right of the Chechens to separate from Russia. We categorically reject the idea that the rulers of Ukraine or Georgia have a right to join the NATO imperialist military alliance targeting Russia. The left wing of the ‘Neither Moscow nor Washington’ crew tend to want to avoid taking a position on this issue—because recognizing such a ‘right,’ means aligning with the US State Department’s position. Conversely, rejecting Ukraine’s ‘right’ to enlist as a pawn in the imperialist struggle to defeat and dismember Russia, means favouring the military victory of Putin’s forces and defying the furious imperialist propaganda barrage currently underway.”
– Bolshevik No. 4
An item in the Washington Post in 2023 stupidly celebrated Washington’s failed gambit as a “strategic windfall” for US imperialism while casually dismissing the horrendous devastation inflicted on Ukraine:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked.”
– washingtonpost.com, 18 July 2023
As the war dragged on and imperialist propaganda about “poor little Ukraine” began to lose traction, the TF changed tack. The new turn, to downplay the question of Ukrainian “self-determination”, was approved by the TF’s 12th International Conference:
“Our policy from the beginning of the conflict, which we consider correct, as put forward in the FT statement, was, ‘No to the war! Russian troops out of Ukraine! NATO out of Eastern Europe! No to imperialist rearmament! For the unity of the international working class! For an independent policy in Ukraine to confront the Russian occupation and imperialist domination.’ Thus, we pointed out the relevance of the element of national self-determination, highlighting, at the same time, the oppressive measures against the Russian-speaking minority within the factors to be taken into account for an independent policy in the conflict, marked by the Russian invasion and the intervention by proxy of the U.S. and NATO. However, as direct U.S. and NATO intervention expands (and has already expanded), that element of national self-determination is increasingly pushed into the background in determining our policy, as it is subordinated to military confrontation between powers.”
– leftvoice.org, 11 July 2023
Cinatti and Maiello noted in this report that “The strategy of U.S. imperialism, schematically defined, is to wear down Russia by using Ukrainian troops as ‘cannon fodder’.” The TF had, from the outset, described Ukraine as a “proxy” (see Maiello’s 31 March 2022 article quoted above), which flatly contradicts its erstwhile claim that the core issue was one of “self-determination.” The tendency to avoid political consistency and a willingness to advocate mutually contradictory positions at the same time is characteristic of centrists, as Trotsky observed:
“Theoretically, centrism is amorphous and eclectic; so far as possible it evades theoretical obligations and inclines (in words) to give preference to ‘revolutionary practice’ over theory, without understanding that only Marxian theory can impart revolutionary direction to practice. … In the sphere of ideology centrism leads a parasitic existence: it repeats against revolutionary Marxists the old Menshevik arguments (Martov, Axelrod, Plechanov) usually without suspecting this; on the other hand, its main arguments against the rights it borrows from the Marxists, that is first of all from the Bolshevik-Leninists, dulling however, the sharp edge of criticism avoiding practical conclusions, thereby rendering their criticism meaningless.”
—Leon Trotsky, “Centrism and the 4th International”, 23 February 1934 (emphasis added)
Nathaniel Flakin correctly denounced the US International Workers’ League (LIT—which is also descended from the Argentine chameleon-revisionist Nahuel Moreno) for backing imperialist support for NATO’s puppet regime in Kiev:
“The LIT-CI acts as if fundamental opposition to NATO could be combined with support for NATO’s central policy for the last year—as if they could cheer for increased military spending for Ukraine’s army (which hopes to join NATO as soon as possible), while somehow opposing NATO. While we have always criticized Bernie Sanders and other ‘socialists’ in the Democratic Party for voting in favor of U.S. military spending, a hypothetical LIT-CI representative in Congress would need to be voting alongside Democrats and Republicans for billions more to go to U.S. arms manufacturers.
“These comrades pretend that they are supporting not the Zelenskyy government but rather some mythical ‘Ukrainian resistance’ that is independent of Zelenskyy and NATO. In several statements, they have failed to say who might make up such a ‘resistance.’ The only forces on the ground are the Ukrainian army and militias under strict government control—the only groups that have any kind of autonomy are the Nazis!”
– leftvoice.org, 1 July 2023
While Flakin is of course correct to oppose imperialist support to Zelensky’s fascist-riddled regime, the TF’s refusal to take sides in the conflict (i.e., advocate the military victory of Russia over NATO and its stooges in Kiev) starkly illuminates its distance from the Leninist heritage it claims. Jimena Vergara and James Dennis Hoff, representing the TF’s majority, wrote:
“…By challenging NATO’s post-war borders, Russia has precipitated a military crisis whose scope is still difficult to predict. Most importantly, behind Russia, a new emerging power, China, with strong imperialist features—evidenced by its increasing influence in Africa and Latin America—is challenging U.S. economic and military hegemony, raising the specter of greater confrontation in the future. While Russia sees the war and its increasingly close relationship with China as an opportunity to reestablish itself as a global power, the U.S. and NATO see the conflict as a way of strengthening their hand against China and weakening Russia.”
– leftvoice.org, 16 March 2023
Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is not an aggressive bid to “reestablish itself as a global power” but rather, as comrade Mercatante put it, “part of a more defensive course of counter-attack” in response to US imperialism’s “decolonization” project (i.e., carving up the Russian Federation into several smaller, more easily exploitable entities). Vergara and Hoff thus absolve the US/NATO imperialists of responsibility for this conflict and absurdly declare it a proxy war on both sides:
“Within this context, the Ukrainian war is best understood not as an inter-imperialist war, or simply a war of NATO aggression, but as a proxy war between competing capitalist alliances, in a period of economic crisis and imperialist decay.”
Ukraine is obviously a NATO proxy, but whose “proxy” is Russia? Like Flakin’s July 2023 article, Vergara and Hoff’s attempt to equate Russia with the US/NATO imperialist bloc effectively repudiates Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, which centres on the net appropriation of value by a few advanced capitalist powers at the expense of colonies and other less developed countries:
“…monopoly yields superprofits, i.e., a surplus of profits over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world. … Imperialism is monopoly capitalism. Every cartel, trust, syndicate, every giant bank is a monopoly. Superprofits have not disappeared; they still remain. The exploitation of all other countries by one privileged, financially wealthy country remains and has become more intense. A handful of wealthy countries—there are only four of them, if we mean independent, really gigantic, ‘modern’ wealth: England, France, the United States and Germany—have developed monopoly to vast proportions, they obtain superprofits running into hundreds, if not thousands, of millions, they ‘ride on the backs’ of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in other countries and fight among themselves for the division of the particularly rich, particularly fat and particularly easy spoils.
“This, in fact, is the economic and political essence of imperialism….”
— V. I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, October 1916
Vergara and Hoff’s assurance that “our analysis and the analysis of the TF are guided by the dialectical methods of Lenin and Trotsky” is an example of paper taking anything that is written on it. The TF leadership square their positions with the Leninist/Trotskyist tradition they claim wherever possible, but tend to shy away if it involves taking unpopular positions.
The current negotiations between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine have required the TF to adjust its analysis—what was formerly described as a proxy war on both sides is now portrayed as a matter of two competing powers carving up its mineral assets:
“Some of these minerals are in the area occupied by Russia, suggesting that the agreement seems to be for Trump and Putin to share the spoils, leaving the European powers—who are also claiming their share—out of the deal.
“While Trump played the ‘bad cop,’ the White House envoy to Ukraine, retired General Keith Kelogg, praised Zelenskyy and negotiated the terms with the Kiev government. This supposed transaction is equivalent to practically transforming Ukraine into an American colony, obliged to pay reparations for a proxy war that was encouraged by the United States under Biden and the ‘interventionist’ wing of the American establishment in an effort to weaken Russia without its own troops on the ground.”
– leftvoice.org, 24 February 2025
The US attempt to turn Ukraine into a battering ram against Russia has failed; Russian troops are steadily advancing while the Ukrainian military is in a very bad way. The TF has seemed unwilling or unable to admit the reality of where things stand on the ground:
“This crisis could seem beneficial for Russia. On the one hand, it also opens up a significant contradiction, because, as it stands, the Russian army would be forced to continue the war, even if potentially in a more favorable position. On the other, too great an advance by Russia on the ground could more strongly unify the European powers in the effort to support Ukraine. It is uncertain that in this context the Russian army will succeed in delivering a sufficiently decisive blow to Kyiv to force Zelenskyy to capitulate. In other words, Putin could be forced to find, in one way or another, an agreement with Ukraine and the Europeans in a potentially less favorable situation. The United States, meanwhile, could still manage to impose an agreement of plunder on Ukraine: they cannot let the Europeans profit from Ukrainian wealth.”
– leftvoice.org, 4 March 2025
The negotiations only started because Russia is winning the war; the Ukrainian army is in retreat and might well collapse before the year is over. Unlike the TF, Trump appears to have given some indication of understanding that the Ukrainian ship is sinking, and he is losing interest in paying the orchestra to keep playing.
American Apples and Chinese Oranges
Vergara and Hoff’s assertion that the Chinese deformed workers’ state has “strong imperialist features” is designed to rationalise refusing to defend the gains of the 1949 social revolution. The TF, which mistakenly asserts that capitalism has been restored in China, knows that Beijing, not Moscow, is Washington’s primary target. In 2023 Sou Mi, a member of the TF in the US, noted:
“As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said last year, the task at hand is to lead an international bloc opposed to Russia’s invasion into a broader coalition to contain China, which the U.S. regime sees as a more serious and long-term threat.”
– leftvoice.org, 23 February 2023
She continues:
“the war [in Ukraine] is part of a growing strategic confrontation between U.S. imperialism and China. The crisis of neoliberalism and the decline of U.S. hegemony coincides with the emergence of new threats to the top. The restoration of capitalism in China had introduced a billion-strong workforce to the world’s proletariat and, during the period of globalization, the country was fertile pasture for imperialist plunder and formed an integral part of this cycle of capitalist accumulation. The influx of foreign capital had simultaneously spurred technological and industrial advances in China which lay the foundations for Beijing to emerge as a strategic competitor to the United States.
“As American capital faced a slow recovery after 2008, China emerged as a key force, using its relative stability to play a role in recovering the global economy, penetrating new markets particularly in Africa in the Middle East, and now using monetary investments, geopolitical and even defense partnerships to position itself as a key partner. In Russia, China has found a key ally and, although wary of the Putin regime’s more adventurous tendencies within this war, it continues to advance defense exercises as well as other strategic partnerships in building a zone of influence around itself.”
– Ibid.
Sou Mi and other relatively politically sophisticated cadres in the TF might wonder how exactly the “capitalist” rulers of the Peoples’ Republic managed to go from a “fertile pasture for imperialist plunder” to turning the “influx of foreign capital” into a spur for “technological and industrial advances.” Why haven’t Mexico, Turkey, Brazil and other dependent-capitalist countries achieved similar miracles? They have all provided “fertile pasture for imperialist plunder” and welcomed an “influx of foreign capital.” The reason that China had a different outcome is because it has a qualitatively different social structure. China is a deformed workers’ state—not capitalist; it is ruled by the Stalinist Communist Party which came to power in the social revolution of 1949 and has since then retained the capacity to utilise foreign investment in accordance with its priorities for economic development. It is only partially integrated into the capitalist world market and, at its core, rests on collectivised property forms. The fact that it is not driven by the imperative to maximise profit is why hundreds of millions of its working population have been lifted out of absolute poverty in recent decades.
The TF’s neutrality in the Ukrainian conflict is paralleled by its overt third campism regarding imperialist aggression against China:
“China cannot be characterized as imperialist in the full sense of the term. But when there is a clash between China and the United States, or any other imperialist power, we should not read this clash as code for ‘imperialist aggression against China,’ which would dictate automatic support for the latter. Although China is challenged by imperialism, the state led by the CCP does not represent a progressive alternative to imperialist domination by the U.S. and its allies, as made clear by the experiences of the Chinese proletariat and China’s oppressed nationalities. Of course, each conflict must be defined by its concrete circumstances. But it is clear that from such conflicts there will emerge neither an alternative nor a toehold for the oppressed to cut the chains of imperialism and capitalist exploitation. On the contrary, the ambition of Xi Jinping and the entire CCP leadership is to make the Chinese state another brick in the wall.”
– leftvoice.org, 23 November 2020
The TF’s 12th international conference document blandly observed:
“The clash between global integration under U.S. hegemony, currently in crisis, and the redoubled challenge to this world order by the so-called ‘revisionist’ powers, defines the framework of the policy being pursued in the war in Ukraine. It’s a matter of questioning this unipolar order, where each one does so, for the time being, in the terms in which the U.S. has presented the conflict to them. In the case of Russia this is in directly military terms, and in the case of China still in terms of economic ‘war,’ although with growing tensions on the military field.”
– leftvoice.org, 13 July 2023
Cinatti and Maiello, the document’s authors, describe Russia and China as presenting a “redoubled challenge to this world order”—a strangely neutral way of describing successful resistance to wholesale looting by global imperialism. They continue:
“While in the case of Russia we had pointed out that it acts as a kind of military imperialism, in the case of China we assess that it has imperialist traits. This can be seen in China’s case in the financial and trade agreements in exchange for privileged access to the plundering of raw materials and the exchange of credits for resource exploitation rights made by Africa and Latin America. Other examples are seeking to have political influence in internal decisions in some countries of the capitalist periphery, and the Belt and Road Initiative itself, among many other aspects.
“It is important to differentiate between the current strengthening of China’s imperialist features and the constitution of an alternative global hegemony by China, which would result in a much higher level of confrontation. The possibility of any kind of ‘succession’ of U.S. hegemony will certainly not be peaceful or evolutionary, that is to say, it will not happen without wars on a large scale.”
– Ibid.
They portray routine economic activities like investment in facilities in exchange for the extraction of raw materials, which any workers’ states might engage in, as “plundering.” But as we observed in “China in Africa”:
“The truth is that, on the whole, Chinese engagement, particularly that of the SOEs, has promoted African economic development. Chinese concessionary loans, far from creating the ‘debt traps’ cynically bemoaned by imperialist publicists have forced the IMF to improve the terms of its loans in order to remain in the game. Beijing’s BRI represents an ambitious attempt to secure critical resources and political/diplomatic influence in the semi-colonial world through a complex mix of bureaucratic state-planning with market competition. While China’s global outreach has not and cannot change the fundamental contours of the world economy, it has somewhat loosened the imperialist grip on the countries of the ‘Global South.’”
— Bolshevik No. 7
The fact that Chinese investment is preferred by many semi-colonial recipients is occasionally acknowledged by the media of the “free world”:
“The developing world has preferred China’s loans because it has financed what these countries want—big infrastructure and energy projects with no strings attached—not what the West says they need. Western institutions and states tend to make loans conditional on a country’s commitment to controversial policy reform, such as deregulating financial markets and privatizing public utilities. … The Trump administration has criticized African and Latin American countries for receiving development financing, arguing that it will turn into a form of colonialism. Democrats have joined in as well. In early September, more than a dozen U.S. senators wrote a letter to the Trump administration urging the president to use his leverage at the International Monetary Fund to get tough on China’s ‘predatory infrastructure financing.’ As hypocritical as that is—almost every emerging-market crisis has been a function of predatory speculative financial flows from the West—China’s overseas loans may be the newest point of contention for the U.S.-China relationship.
“While China should be lauded for financing infrastructure without attaching the Western-style conditions that have brought more harm than good, Chinese lenders need to be cautious.”
– npr.org, 11 October 2018
The TF’s conference document projects any Sino-American war as driven by US imperialism’s drive to subordinate China, while also absurdly claiming that a Chinese move on Taiwan (the main staging area for any US attack) would “not in any way be a defensive measure”
“…we have to start from the policies that each side would pursue in the war. In the case of the U.S., it would be the continuation of its imperialist policy of globalization based on the subordination of capitalist China and Russia. And, more specifically, of its attempts to prevent China from continuing to advance as a power by calling into question U.S. hegemony, which is in obvious decline.
“In the case of China, it is a continuity of the CCP policy that restored capitalism. This was carried out throughout the previous period under the auspices of international financial capital, especially that of the U.S.. However, due to the increasing importance that its economy was gaining on the world stage, the CCP needed—and increasingly needs—to expand Chinese capitalism in imperialist terms. Far from the viewpoint that presents China as a more benign, ‘non-hegemonic’ power, the current imperialist tensions with the rest of the powers is the more or less inevitable course of the emergence of capitalist China in the 21st century. That is to say, an eventual invasion of Taiwan would not in any way be a defensive measure.”
– leftvoice.org, 13 July 2023
Soviet counterrevolution, China & emergent multi-polarity
The TF’s confusion about the class character and international role of China is perhaps most clearly expressed in its text, referenced in Cinatti’s and Maiello’s conference document, “At the Limits of ‘Bourgeois Restoration’”:
“…capitalist relations continued to develop under the new regimes, and the illusion of a ‘return to the past’ was no more than that, an illusion. As opposed to this, ‘capitalist restoration’ implied, not only the fall of the bureaucracy and its dictatorship ‘over the proletariat’; it also means, as is clearly demonstrated by the ‘orderly’ process by which the bureaucracy of the Chinese CP have become capitalists, the destruction of the conquests that remained from the revolution in the bureaucratized workers’ states (such as the sectors of the economy outside of the laws of capital and new property relations in the means of production)..”
– leftvoice.org, 24 December 2019, originally published in Estrategia Internacional, March 2011
This disorientation on China can be traced to its muddle over the downfall of the USSR. The destruction of the collectivised property system in the Soviet Union shattered the bureaucratic caste—it did not lead to its seamless transformation into a new class of capitalist exploiters as Mercatante asserts elsewhere:
“Since the bureaucracy became a capitalist class through a brutal expropriation of nationalised property, the Russian economy has been shrinking at an accelerated pace. During Boris Yeltsin’s reign, the GDP as a whole fell by no less than 50 per cent.”
– klassegegenklasse.org, 23 September 2022 (BT translation)
It is simply not true that in the USSR “the bureaucracy became a capitalist class.” While numerous managers, technicians, engineers and academics landed on their feet in the new capitalist Russia, the same was true of Tsarist personnel in the early Soviet Union. In an article we published in 2002 we noted:
“Most of the upper layers of the [Soviet] nomenklatura, particularly those involved in running the central economic ministries, the ideologists, and the CPSU apparatchiks, were simply dismissed. [Michael] Ellman and [Vladimir] Kontorovich [in their 1998 book The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System] flatly reject claims that those who ran the economy, society and state in the USSR continued to exercise power after Yeltsin’s ascension:
‘We found no evidence to support the fashionable theory that the Soviet system was toppled by the Party and state officials in order to turn their power into private wealth. Just as these officials, though loathing Gorbachev, were incapable of collective action to defend the system, they were equally incapable of consciously hastening its demise. If they landed on their feet after the system had crashed, it was due to their individual survival skills, rather than some grand design.’”
— 1917, No. 24
Mercatante ignores the fact that Yeltsin only took power after overcoming the (pathetically weak) resistance of the Stalinist coupsters led by Gennady Yanayev. The Trotskyist Fraction’s antecedents in the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas in 1991 turned reality on its head and absurdly hailed the victory of Yeltsin’s capitalist restorationists as creating “more favourable terrain” for the working class and making “capitalist restoration more difficult”:
“The defeat of the coup meant a step forward for the mass movement. If the coup had succeeded, although it was very difficult, it was not the capitalist reforms that would have been threatened, but the workers’ movement and its organisations. The first thing the Emergency Committee made clear was that the reforms would continue. In other words, the defeat of the coup opens a more favourable terrain to fight for a working class and independent policy and to build a revolutionary leadership. As a second element, the disintegration of the CPSU, the deep crisis of the KGB and the Red Army, which the defeat of the coup has made ultra-powerful, makes capitalist restoration more difficult, since—as Trotsky argued—it is only the product of a counter-revolution or a dictatorship, since the mechanics of deception can only go relatively far in this direction.”
– Rebelión de los Trabajadores No. 2, 2 September 1991 (BT translation)
In 1994 the PTS was still hailing the victory of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc as “a progressive phenomenon”:
“The Trotskyists of the PTS (inclusive against majority sectors of our own movement) affirmed (and we affirm today) that the revolutions of 89-91 in the East and in the ex-USSR, constituted a progressive phenomenon, that is to say, they were a blow from the left and not from the right to Stalinism, and, indirectly, to imperialism. As we will see later, the direction of the arrow indicates (in the midst of the enormous contradictions we have seen in these notes, caused by the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat) an upward path of the revolution: a stage of great struggles between the world proletariat and imperialism and its partners. And not a stage of domination ‘at the whim’ of imperialism.”
– Rebelión de los Trabajadores No. 59, 28 September 1994 (BT translation – emphasis in original)
Today the TF acknowledges that the crisis of Stalinism in 1989-91 resulted in capitalist restoration and piously criticises leaders of the larger ostensibly Trotskyist groups (including Jack Barnes, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Lambert and Nahuel Moreno) for backing Boris Yeltsin, Lech Walesa et al in their counterrevolutionary struggles:
“Thus the years 1989-91, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the pro-capitalist processes with their ‘democratic’ ideology, saw these currents openly turn to the right, increasingly distancing themselves from the legacy of Trotsky and swimming with the stream which, in spite of the hopes in Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Castroism, ‘democratic revolutions,’ Socialist Parties, etc., inexorably flowed towards restoration.”
– leftvoice.org, 24 December 2019
The TF acts as if every current identifying with Trotsky was neutral, or supported the “democratic” counterrevolution at the time. We are proud of our September 1991 statement on the coup, entitled “Counterrevolution Triumphs in USSR,” which was diametrically opposed to the pro-Yeltsin stance of the PTS et al.:
“The victory of the openly pro-capitalist current around Boris Yeltsin after the coup collapsed shattered the state power created by the October 1917 revolution. This represents a catastrophic defeat not only for the Soviet working class, but for workers everywhere.“
We asserted:
“The August coup attempt [by Communist Party ‘hardliners’] was a confrontation in which the working class had a side. A victory for the coup leaders would not have rescued the USSR from the economic impasse that Stalinism has led to, nor would it have removed the threat of capitalist restoration. It could, however, have slowed the restorationist momentum at least temporarily, and bought precious time for the Soviet working class. The collapse of the coup, on the other hand, led inevitably to the counterrevolution that is now in full flood. Without ceasing to expose the coup leaders’ political bankruptcy, it was the duty of revolutionary Marxists to side with them against Yeltsin and Gorbachev.“
— 1917, No. 11 (emphasis added)
We note that the TF, while denouncing those who supported Yeltsin, Walesa and the forces of capitalist restoration at the time, has yet to come out and forthrightly state that revolutionaries had a duty to bloc with the Stalinist hardliners. As we explained in our 1991 statement:
“But the Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union always meant defense of the system of collectivized property against restorationist threats regardless of the consciousness or subjective intentions of the bureaucrats. The status quo the ‘hardliners’ sought to protect, however incompetently, included the state ownership of the means of production—an objective barrier to the return of capitalist wage slavery. The collapse of the central state authority cleared the way for the juggernaut of reaction that is now rolling over the territory of the former USSR. To halt the advance of that juggernaut revolutionists had to be prepared to make a tactical military alliance with any section of the bureaucracy that, for whatever reason, was standing in front of its wheels.”
— Ibid.
Today the TF is repeating the errors of its political forebears in refusing to stand for the unconditional defence of the Chinese deformed workers’ state.
Neutrality in struggles against imperialism
The TF considers that no member in the camp of what is being called the “Global South” can be described “as imperialist in the full sense of the term.” The developing bloc led by Moscow/Beijing is clearly an obstacle to the domination of the US and its imperialist allies over the rest of the world. In a 2022 speech Josep Borell, former European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, explained why the imperialist “gardeners” were compelled to subordinate the “jungle,” i.e., less economically developed regions:
“Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build—the three things together. …
“The rest of the world–and you know this very well, Federica–is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.
“The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”
– “European Diplomatic Academy: Opening remarks by High Representative Josep Borrell at the inauguration of the pilot programme”, 13 October 2022
Much of the “Global South”, i.e., the dependent-capitalist and semi-colonial countries, welcomes the prospect of a Russian military victory over NATO’s Ukrainian proxy because they understand that it will obstruct the “gardeners”’ attempts to “be much more engaged with the rest of the world”. Attempts by the US and EU to discourage Chinese investment in Africa have largely failed for reasons outlined in a 2020 British government report:
“Comparing empirical evidence worldwide, Fu and Buckley (2015) point out that Chinese investments in lower-income countries has a positive and significant impact on their long-term economic growth, but the growth impacts vary as they are based on multi-dimensional complementarity between Chinese investments and host country conditions, in terms of financing, knowledge, resources and the status of competition. Chinese investments contributed most significantly to economic growth in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in Asia, whereas the influence on Latin America was insignificant.”
– Linda Calabrese, Xiaoyang Tang, “Africa’s economic transformation: the role of Chinese investment”, June 2020
It is hardly surprising that various African governments have sought to sever connections to their colonial masters in favour of military support from Russia and development assistance from China. The leaders of the July 2023 military coup in Niger demanded the withdrawal of French troops and banned uranium and gold exports to France. A similar coup in Burkina Faso a year earlier, “kicked out the French troops and banned the export of gold and uranium to France and the US, while forging a regional alliance with Niger, Guinea, Mali and Algeria” as the German Berliner Zeitung reported. The article described how French imperialism had exploited Niger after it gained nominal independence:
“About a quarter of European and a third of France’s uranium imports come from the West African country of Niger. France operates 56 nuclear power plants and is one of the world’s top exporters of nuclear power (with capacity for expansion). Their essential fuel is procured by the state nuclear giant Orano (formerly Areva), which owns the tallest and (appropriately) blackest granite building under the skyscrapers of Paris’ capital district La Défense, in secret agreements e.g. from Niger, where the corporation has snatched up three huge uranium mines as well as a majority stake in Niger’s state-owned company for uranium processing (Somaïr).
“The (former) French colony of Niger has the highest-grade uranium ores in Africa and is the seventh-largest uranium producer in the world, but according to the World Bank, 81.4 per cent of its citizens are not even connected to the electricity grid. 40 percent live below the poverty line, a third of the children are underweight, and the illiteracy rate is 63 percent. Only half of the inhabitants have access to clean drinking water, only 16 percent are connected to adequate sanitation. …
“The total state budget of Niger, a country three times the size of the Federal Republic of Germany, is no larger than the annual turnover of the French nuclear company, at around 4.5 billion euros. Despite its uranium and gold deposits, Niger was last ranked 189th out of 191 countries in the development index.
“In the course of the ‘decolonisation’ of the 1960s, France released its former colonies into formal independence, but left them state and legal systems that were designed—as in colonial times—to control the population with as little effort as possible on the one hand and to export as many raw materials as possible on the other. It is not enough that France, through the so-called colonial pact in Françafrique, has continued to secure the pre-emptive right to all natural resources and privileged access to state contracts; since then, it has also been imposing its insane colonial currency, the CFA franc, on the states, making any autonomous monetary, economic or social policy of the (formally sovereign) states permanently impossible. The fourteen CFA states are not only chained to the euro by a fixed exchange rate determined solely by the descendants of French colonial messieurs (which brought them a 50% devaluation in 1994), but have also lost all access to 85% of their currency reserves, which they are forced to deposit with the Agence France Trésor.”
– Berliner-zeitung.de, 3 August 2023 (BT translation)
There were popular mass demonstrations in support of the coup in Niamey, Niger’s capital, in response to threats of imperialist military intervention using the the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a cover. The attempt by the new government, headed by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, to wrest control of Niger’s resources from the imperialist predators paralleled Lázaro Cárdenas’ expropriation of Mexico’s oil industry in the 1930s, a measure hailed as “highly progressive” by Leon Trotsky:
“Without succumbing to illusions and without fear of slander, the advanced workers will completely support the Mexican people in their struggle against the imperialists. The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense.”
– Leon Trotsky, Mexico and British Imperialism, 5 June 1938
The analogy between Mexico’s oil and Niger’s uranium and gold is obvious—but for some reason the TF’s Claudia Cinatti sneers that the Nigerien resistance to foreign imperialist control was “largely motivated by cliquish disputes over the military-state apparatus”:
“The relationship between the structural misery of these plundered countries and the neocolonial past and present explains the deep anti-French sentiment that runs through Africa, especially among the younger generations. The coups are largely motivated by cliquish disputes over control of the military-state apparatus, rather than being ‘anti-colonial’ (let alone ‘anti-imperialist’). These groups try to build their legitimacy by stirring up anti-French sentiment and shifting allegiances to China and Russia. …
“The hegemonic decline of the United States and the emergence of powers such as China and Russia that propose a ‘multipolar order’ as an alternative has accelerated with the war in Ukraine. This is the basis of ‘campist’ positions that believe that in order to oppose the imperialist domination of the U.S. and the EU, it is necessary to align with China and Russia. However, these two countries represent equally reactionary capitalist bloc pursuing its own imperial interests. While the Western powers claim to act in ‘defense of democracy’ in order to obfuscate their imperialist objectives, Putin uses ‘anti-colonial’ rhetoric to increase his geopolitical influence for the benefit of Russian capitalism. Both Russia and China seek plunder Africa’s strategic resources. China imposes onerous conditions on loans to African countries in its role as their main creditor. This is in opposition to the interests of the workers, peasants and oppressed peoples of Africa and the world.”
– leftvoice.org, 7 August 2023
The TF rejection of either the US/EU or Russia/China “camp” in favour of a sort of “Third Camp” neutrality is premised on the false assertion that capitalist Russia and the Chinese deformed workers’ state are “equally reactionary” as the European and American imperial predators. Russia is not an imperialist power according to Lenin’s criteria and it has only a minimal economic presence in Africa. The Chinese deformed workers’ state, created by the 1949 social revolution which overturned capitalist property and expropriated imperialist holdings, does have a substantial economic footprint in Africa. But any serious investigation of Chinese activity in that region reveals that on the whole Beijing’s economic activity involves the mutually beneficial development of natural assets and infrastructure. The TF’s blithe assertions of Russian and Chinese “imperialism,” echo the cynical accusations levelled by Washington and Africa’s former colonial masters, but are without foundation in fact. This is presumably why, to our knowledge, the comrades have made no serious attempt to provide evidence to verify their claims.
Despite the indifference expressed by Cinatti and other TF leaders in response to the coup in Niger, we were pleased to note that Révolution Permanente, the TF’s French section, celebrated the withdrawal of French troops two months later:
“We are delighted to see that the French military have had to evacuate 1,500 men and, above all, large quantities of equipment, notably from the Niamey air base. When the French army and the Fifth Republic are ridiculed on the international stage, the struggle against the oppression of peoples gains ground. French imperialism has become so decadent in Africa that it can no longer even convince part of the bourgeoisie in these countries to support it: it is no longer capable of enriching a political minority loyal to Paris, nor of supporting the regimes it has installed and sustains. What’s more, the ocean of poverty and misery organized by France, via the CFA franc, via foreign debts and through control of the main natural resources and logistical means, is the basis for the people’s fed-up reaction against France.”
– revolutionpermanente.fr, 5 October 2023 (BT translation)
The TF’s initial statement on Niger illustrated how mistaken notions about Chinese and Russian “almost imperialism” resulted in indifference to a revolt against French neo-colonialism. Without coming out and repudiating the equation of Russian and Chinese “almost imperialism” and US/NATO as “equally reactionary,” Révolution Permanente eventually acknowledged the mass popular support for the coup:
“The French army and the French ambassador will leave Niger after months of stubborn refusal of Macron to give in to the junta, supported by large mobilizations of the population. … The people of Niger have in their own way experimented with the fight against imperialism by mobilizing for the departure of the country’s French troops.”
– revolutionpermanente.fr, 25 September 2023 (BT translation)
The TF leadership apparently lacks the political courage to admit its mistakes and correct them by advocating the military defence of Niger, Russia and China against the imperialist “gardeners”. Leon Trotsky would have advised the modern-day Third Campists of the TF:
“The policy of defeatism is not punishment of a given government for this or that crime it has committed but a conclusion from the class relationships. The Marxist line of conduct in war is not based on abstract moral and sentimental considerations but on the social appraisal of a regime in its reciprocal relations with other regimes. We supported Abyssinia not because the Negus was politically or ‘morally’ superior to Mussolini but because the defense of a backward country against colonial oppression deals a blow to imperialism, which is the main enemy of the world working class. We defend the USSR independently of the policy of the Moscow Negus for two fundamental reasons. First, the defeat of the USSR would supply imperialism with new colossal resources and could prolong for many years the death agony of capitalist society. Secondly, the social foundations of the USSR, cleansed of the parasitic bureaucracy are capable of assuring unbounded economic and cultural progress, while the capitalist foundations disclose no possibilities except further decay.
– Leon Trotsky, “Balance Sheet of the Finish Events”, 25 April 1940
Endnotes
[i] We cited the following examples in our November 2023 debate with the Spartacist League: https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/events/decolonizing-russia ↑
And:
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/ ↑
[ii] In a special edition of Avanzada Socialista, headlined “Against imperialism–We stand with Iraq and the Arab masses. No more Yanks in the Gulf!” the PTS argued:
“We are with Iraq unconditionally in its struggle against imperialism. We do not, however, place any trust in Hussein. We are with Iraq because its victory or defeat will be the victory or defeat of the rest of the oppressed peoples.”
– Avanzada Socialista, 22 January 1991 (BT translation)