What policy for the working class faced with the increasing danger of war?

Submitted by ICConline on

Printer-friendly version

 

The barbaric wars in Ukraine and the Middle East seem to go on endlessly, as do the many wars in Africa, in particular those in Congo and Sudan. Meanwhile, European powers are more or less abandoned by their former US “protector” and demand a significant increase in military spending for their ‘defence’, which will undoubtedly involve increasing attacks on workers’ living standards. Tensions between the US and China continue to sharpen. So the question of war and the struggle against it is posed more and more acutely for all those who aim to defend the international interests of the working class.

However, any attempt to develop a clear position against war today is immediately confronted by a number of obstacles.

On the one hand, there are the sheep in wolves clothing: the organisations of the ‘far left’ of capitalist politics who present themselves as authentic revolutionaries. Foremost among these are the Trotskyist oganisations, and a number of these have been moving even further to the left to soak up any real questioning about the nature of war today[1]. The leftist organisations of the bourgeoisie present themselves today as real defenders of internationalism. But their internationalism is only a cover for their downright chauvinist credentials. Thus some leftist groups (including anarchists) call for support for Ukraine as the ‘lesser evil’ in the fight against Putin’s Russia; others still consider Russia today as some kind of anti-imperialist force, and support its war against NATO, such as the World Socialist Web Site. But a more ‘radical’ Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly International Marxist Tendency) seems to take an internationalist stand:  “We cannot support either side in this war, because it is a reactionary war on both sides. In the final analysis, it is a conflict between two groups of imperialists”.  But towards the war in the Middle East this internationalism of the RCP has completely disappeared: “From day one of this horrific conflict, we have participated in the solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation”. What leftists can never put forward is the conclusion already drawn by Rosa Luxemburg during the First World War: in the decadent period of capitalism, the era of “unbridled imperialism”, all nations and all wars are imperialist. Furthermore, all wars are links in the same chain of destruction: for example, those who support the military forces fighting for “Palestinian liberation” necessarily support the“Axis of Resistance” sustained by Iran, which in turn is a supplier of deadly drones to Russia in its attack on Ukraine.

But there is a whole landscape of political forces which inhabit an area we often refer to as the “swamp”, “that intermediate zone which brings together all those who oscillate between the camp of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, who are constantly on the way to one camp or the other”[2].

Faced with the war in Ukraine, a number of groups, mostly from an anarchist background, defend an unambiguously internationalist position of opposition to both camps, strongly criticising those anarchist groups who have formed ‘autonomous units’ within the Ukrainian army. This internationalist position was the starting point for the Prague ‘anti-war’ conference which we attended last summer[3]. But as we also saw in Prague, anarchism is at odds with a coherent political framework based on the working class as the only historical subject capable of overthrowing capitalism and thus ending all wars. They are often tempted by the search for immediate results based on the activism of small groups (for example, attempt to obstruct or sabotage the production or supply of weapons). And in some cases, this kind of activism spills over into outright leftism, as in the case of the Anarchist Communist Group, which rejected both Israel and Hamas from the beginning of the war but at the same time publicised the activities of “Palestine Action”[4], an ‘action group’ which has clearly chosen its camp.  Revolutionaries need to intervene actively in this landscape, exposing its confusions and pushing forward to a higher level the clarity it has attained. But what about the ‘revolutionary milieu’ itself: the organisations of the only tradition which has maintained a consistent internationalism for the last century or more, the international communist left?

Imperialist war and the tasks of the communist left

 Like the proletariat as a whole, which Marx in the German Ideology termed “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”, revolutionary organisations are an “alien body” inside this system, a living expression of the communist future, and yet they live and breathe inside this system, and this means that they are never immune to inhaling the poison of the dominant ideology.

The disease that this ideology brings with it is known as opportunism – adapting to the underlying assumptions of this system (such as the idea that nations are something eternal and above the division of society into classes) and watering down principles in order to gain an immediate echo within the masses.

Bordigists and the national question

The penetration of opportunism into the existing milieu of the communist left is most obvious when we look at the response of the various Bordigist groups (International Communist Parties) to the war in the Middle East. Having taken a clear position on the Ukraine war, their statements on Gaza and the Palestinian question, like many groups in the swamp, are often highly ambiguous, tending towards support for the struggle of the “Palestinian masses” specifically against the Israeli occupation, or demanding that Israeli workers first mobilise in support of the Palestinians before they can join in a common class battle against the exploiters of in both camps. As we show in a new article in International Review 173, the Bordigists’ confusions on the national question have deep historical roots, reflecting a real difficulty in recognising that capitalism is no longer, and not anywhere, an ascendant system with possibilities of national or bourgeois revolutions as it was in the days of the Communist Manifesto[5].

Concessions to bourgeois ideology and practices, the distinguishing feature of the ‘right wing’ in the workers’ movement, have always been accompanied by sectarianism towards the ‘left wing’ of the movement, towards those whose adherence to principles and capacity to understand the profound changes in the situation of capitalism and the proletariat is an irritant to those who want to carry on with their opportunist schemes. This is clearly the case with the Bordigists, who have almost always made refusal to discuss with other currents of the revolutionary movement a new ‘eternal principle’, one which is totally at odds with the practice of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s, who always argued that the confrontation of political positions was a vital need for the development and ultimate unification of the revolutionary movement.

When the Ukraine war broke out in 2022, the ICC called for a joint declaration in defence of internationalist principles by all the genuine groups of the communist left[6]. This was subsequently followed by other appeals (around the war in the Middle East, the bourgeois campaigns around the ‘defence of democracy’ against the populist right). With some exceptions, whose importance we don’t want to diminish, these appeals have been systematically rejected by the other groups.

The response (or in most cases, the non-response) of the Bordigists was to be expected, since it fits in with their classically sectarian idea that their various organisations have already achieved the exalted position of being the one and only class party. But we must also note that the Internationalist Communist Tendency, whose programmatic positions, especially on the national question, are much closer to ours than the Bordigists, also rejected our appeal, as their predecessors have done at other moments of acute imperialist conflict, such as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the war in ex-Yugoslavia, etc. A joint declaration of the communist left was rejected on various grounds: of being too general and ignoring important differences of analysis, because it was not sent to groups which we define as parasitic but which they want to accept as part of the communist left (eg the IGCL[7]), and above all because their main concern has been to bring together a wider range of internationalist groups and individuals. Hence their No War But the Class War initiative, forming groups on a reduced set of principles in order to carry out propaganda or agitation against imperialist war[8].

For us, this was a new case of sectarianism towards the left accompanied by an opportunist approach to the swamp – the NWBCW initiative was particularly aimed at the anarchist milieu, and prior to the Prague conference was offered as a way forward for all its very heterogeneous components, the majority of whom see opposition to war in completely activist manner. In fact, as we argued in an article looking back at the conference, one of the more positive elements to come out of this gathering was the tentative beginnings of political cooperation between the ICC and the Communist Workers' Organisation (the ICT's affiliate in the UK) in putting forward a critique of individual or small group activism based on a clear recognition that opposition to imperialist war can only grow out of the mass struggle of the proletariat in defence of its own class interests[9].

In our view, this fragile moment of unity between the forces of the communist left (which encountered real hostility on the part of some of the ‘organisers’ of the conference) was a vindication of the approach adopted by the left wing, in particular Lenin and the Bolsheviks, at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences during the First World War. The Bolsheviks understood the need to participate in these conferences despite the fact that they brought together pacifists and centrists as well as consistent internationalists. The essential issue was to be present to put forward a rigorous critique of pacifism and centrism and to outline a real internationalist position (which at that moment was best expressed by the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”). The same conclusion can be applied to today: yes, we must go out and encounter all those who want to fight against imperialist war, gather together with them and discuss with them, but without making any concessions to the groups’ confused notion of organisation, their political incoherence and concessions to bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. To do this, a unified stance by the groups of the communist left is an essential point of departure.

This is not to deny that there are important disagreements among the groups of the communist left, such as whether the current war drive is seeing the reconstitution of imperialist blocs and heading towards a third world war, or whether the dominant tendency is towards an imperialist chaos which is no less dangerous. These are points for discussion which we will return to in a second article, which will focus on the significance of the ‘divorce’ between the USA and Europe. But what Prague showed is that the communist left is really the only current capable of addressing the problem of war from a class perspective. In our view, applying this perspective in today’s conditions leads to the conclusion that the possibility of a mass proletarian opposition to imperialist war will come predominantly from the workers’ struggles against the attacks on their living standards demanded by the economic crisis. The fact that these attacks are more and more being accompanied by calls for sacrifice in order to build up the war economy will certainly be a factor in enabling workers to draw the link between the struggle for economic demands and the question of imperialist war, and ultimately to politicise their struggles, but this remains a long-drawn out process which should not lead to impatient actions which tend to substitute for the necessary mass  struggle of the proletariat. After decades of retreat in the class struggle, the working class can only recover its sense of itself as a class – as a world force which has no homeland to defend – by going through the hard school of the defence of its living standards. The organisations of the communist left will certainly play a key part in the recovery of class identity, and ultimately of the perspective of revolution, but they can only do so as distinct political organisations based on a coherent platform, and not as loose ‘fronts’ which misleadingly appear to offer the possibility of more immediate success in opposing or even stopping war.

D'nA

 

Rubric: 

Imperialist war and the class struggle