Situated in the heights of the Caucusus between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh is a zone of intense conflict between two neighbouring states and the larger imperialist powers that support them. The barbarity and war confronted by the populations of this unstable region are not new but, for the last six months, tensions have risen and violence has become generalised. Since the end of December, fighting has already led to thousands of deaths, involving hundreds of civilian victims. The Russian president has said that there are close to 5000 victims.

The two camps have not hesitated to hit civilians by attacking enemy towns: "Sunday morning (November 1st), the separatist capital of Stepanakert (55,000 inhabitants) has been the target of intense bombardments of heavy artillery from the Azerbaijan army from around 0930. Baku (Azerbaijan's capital city) indicated that these rocket attacks were responding to those of the Armenian forces on the town (...). Azerbaijan's second-largest town, Ganja, has been ‘under fire’ from Armenian forces according to a statement on Sunday from Azerbaijan's ministery of defence"[1]. In this bloody escalation, the use of cluster bombs and particularly phosphorus against civilians amplifies the horror of the situation. The belligerents have implemented a real policy of hatred and terror. The chaos and devastation has pushed more than 90,000 people to leave their homes in order to find refuge in Armenian territory. Those remaining are condemned to live in cellars to protect themselves from artillery strikes. If the cease-fire has given them a period of respite, the bellicose announcements offer no illusions about what awaits the populations of this unstable region: still more violence, terror and chaos!

Today, the fragile cease-fire coming from the "accords" between the parties involved also supports no illusions about a "peaceful settlement" of the conflict. It is the product of a situation which can only sanction a precarious "order" and a relation of forces imposed by both Russia and Turkey. It settles nothing. On the contrary it represents another stage in the exacerbation of military tensions and feeds the chaos in this imperialist fault-line which risks reigniting the flames of war later on.

It's clear that Russia, which is posing as an arbitrator in this conflict, is aiming to turn the situation to its advantage. The conflict allows it to take a grip on the direction of the operations which had tended to escape it previously and to re-install occupation troops under cover of the protection and maintenance of the cease-fire agreement (2,000 soldiers along with a clause to renew this force of occupation every five years). It has thus been able to re-establish a permanent military control that it lost 30 years ago.

The recuperation of a major part of this territory by Azerbaijan seals the military victory and the striking supremacy of the Azeri forces. This is evident in the taking of the town of Choucha (Shushi for Armenia) leaving Armenia only a narrow corridor still linking it to the capital Stepanakert. That opens the way for the Azeri government to annexe seven districts from which it was expelled following the war of 1991-94.

Behind and on the back of the military victory of Azerbaijan, its firm supporter Turkey is strengthening its influence in the Caucusus by making a display of its aggression. This is another illustration of its new imperialist ambitions of expansion (its "New Ottoman Empire"), carving itself a place among the big gangsters of the region; this is along with its offensive in the eastern Mediterranean faced with Greece and its active role in Libya and Syria.

In fact these developments announce a more intense fight and a more direct confrontation than that already engaged in by Russia and Turkey, heightening the level of tensions and rivalry between the two protaganists. However the situation does give Turkey some supplementary assets in order to strengthen its pressure and exert a permanent blackmail within the framework of NATO. The situation is much more complex and difficult to manage on the international situation than President-elect Biden promised in his first speeches about "re-activating" NATO, which can only arouse irritation and concern within the Kremlin.

But this agreement clearly represents a striking defeat for Armenia which has totally lost the control of territory while the great majority of Armenians and their western "supporters", in particular France and the United States, have been completely marginalised and reduced to impotence, thus confirming their growing loss of influence and control.

This also opens up a crisis and a destabilisation of the Armenian government which has had to resign itself to sign the agreement under the threat of a more crushing military rout. It's also opened up a division between a Prime Minister accused of treason and other factions demanding his departure and openly trying to wind up the Armenian population to rebellion and patriotic mobilisation.

So the situation expresses no step at all to peace and stabilisation but on the contrary, a sinking into decomposition and chaotic warfare.

The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is a dismal illustration of the historic impasse into which capitalism is dragging the whole of humanity. Such chaos finds its roots in the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990's: "Frontiers have been set up within the USSR, defended by armed nationalist militias. Lithuania has set up frontier posts, and its frontier guards have clashed several times with Moscow police, resulting in several deaths. The conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani militias has not diminished in the least since the intervention of the ‘Red’ Army. Pogroms, war and repression in Baku have caused hundreds of deaths. The ‘Red’ Army has got bogged down, without being able to impose a solution on the conflict. In Georgia, recent clashes between Georgians and Ossetians are growing now that a new area of tension has opened. Ethnic conflicts are proliferating at the farthest confines of Russia."[2] The years that followed were a terrible confirmation of what we wrote in 1991. Between 1991-1994 armed confrontations between Azerbaijan and Armenia resulted in nearly 30,000 deaths and provoked an exodus of more than a million refugees. In May 1994, the attachement of the Nargono-Karabakh enclave to Armenia fed a strong feeling of revenge within the Azerbaijani state (which had lost almost a third of ex-Soviet territory). Subsequently the conflict has become what some experts describe as "frozen", but tensions and provocations increased, with numerous "incidents" on the frontier.

The military campaign undertaken by Azerbaijan to re-conquer this small, automous territory is an expression of the disintegration of the situation and its growing instability. For Russia, the historic and dominant power in the region, although it is linked to Armenia by a mutual defence pact (as is the EU and Iran), the situation is far from simple: "If Russia is maintaining a privileged relationship with Yerevan (Armemia's capital), it nevertheless has a economic partnership with Azerbaijan, including in the armements domain with its undeniably superior army compared materially to that of Armenia”.[3] Russia cannot allow itself to openly take a position supporting one camp or the other. Turkey has exploited this situation by actively supporting Azerbaijan in its military offensive. In this strategy, it is easy for Turkey to base its position on the Muslim culture of a very large section of the Azeri population (more than 90%), echoing the recent declarations of Erdogan claiming to be the real "defender of Islam". It's clear that successive pushes of Turkish imperialism, which are being followed very closely by Moscow, will incite Russia to intervene in one way or another. [4] With the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan aims to extend its territory towards the frontier bordering its Turkish ally. Ankara hasn't hesitated in sending jihadist fighters and Syrian mercenaries to support the offensive: "In fact, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), at least 64 Syrian fighters have been killed in the territory since the beginning of the fighting. It also affirms that 1,200 Syrians have been sent by Turkey to fight alongside Azeri forces against the separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh”.[5]

The new cease-fire has given rise to demonstrations in Armenia. These mobilisations, in which Prime Minister Pacharan is accused of being a traitor, are nothing other than a settling of accounts between different factions of the Armenian bourgeoisie to which the population is hostage. Here as elsewhere, we must defend the idea that the global proletariat has no country, no territory to defend, nor imperialist war to get involved in. Choosing one camp against another is always a trap which divides us and which diverts us from the only perspective which can bring humanity out of capitalist barbarity: class struggle for the world revolution!

 

Marius, November 10 2020

The USA, the most powerful country on the planet, has become a showcase for the advancing decomposition of the capitalist world order. The presidential election race has cast a harsh light on a country torn by racial divisions, by increasingly brutal conflicts within the ruling class, by a shocking inability to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic which has left nearly a quarter of a million dead, by the devastating impact of economic and ecological crisis, by the spread of irrational, apocalyptic ideologies. And yet these ideologies, paradoxically, reflect an underlying truth: that we are living in the “last days” of a capitalist system which rules in every country of the world.

But even in this final phase of its historic decline, even as the ruling class increasingly demonstrates its loss of control over its own system, capitalism can turn its own rottenness against its real enemy – against the working class and the danger that it could become conscious of its true interests. The record turn-out in these elections and the noisy protests and celebrations on both sides of the political divide represent a powerful reinforcement of the democratic delusion – of the false idea that changing a president or a government can halt capitalism’s slide into the abyss, that the vote enables “the people” to take charge of their destiny.

Today this ideology is spearheaded by the belief that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will save American democracy from Trump’s authoritarian bullying, that they will heal the nation’s wounds, restore rationality and reliability to the USA’s relationship with other global powers. And these ideas are being echoed in a gigantic international campaign which hails the renewal of democracy and the retreat of the populist assault on liberal values.

But we, the workers, should be warned. If Trump and “America First” stood openly for sharpening economic and even military conflict with other capitalist states – China in particular – Biden and Harris will also pursue America’s drive for imperialist domination, perhaps with slightly different methods and rhetoric. If Trump stood for tax cuts for the rich and ended his reign presiding over a vast surge in unemployment, a Biden administration, faced with a world economic crisis that has been severely aggravated by the pandemic, will have no choice but make the exploited class pay for the crisis through mounting attacks on its living and working conditions. If immigrant and “illegal” workers think they will be safer under a Biden administration, let them recall that under president Obama and vice-president Biden 3 million “illegal” workers were deported from the US.

No doubt much of the current support for Biden comes in reaction to the real horrors of Trumpism: the blatant lies, the dog-whistle racism, the harsh repression of protests, the total irresponsibility in the face of Covid-19 and climate change. No question that Trump is a clear reflection of a putrefying social system. But Trump also claims to speak in the name of the people, to act as an “outsider” who will oppose the unaccountable “elites”. And even when he openly undermines the “norms” of capitalist democracy he strengthens the counter-argument that more than ever we must rally to the defence of these norms. In this sense, Biden and Trump are two wings of the same democratic fraud.

This doesn’t mean that the two wings will be working together peacefully. Even if Trump is removed as president, Trumpism won’t disappear. Trump has normalised armed right-wing militias parading in the streets and brought fringe conspiracy cults like QAnon into the ideological mainstream. This in turn has fed the growth of anti-fascist squads and black power militias ready to oppose the white supremacists on a military terrain. And behind all this, the whole bourgeois class and its state machine is riven by conflicting economic and foreign policy interests which cannot be wished away by Biden’s “healing” speeches. There is every possibility that these conflicts will become more intense and more violent in the period ahead. And the working class has no interest whatever in being caught up in this kind of “civil war”, in giving its energy and even its blood to the battle between populist and anti-populist factions of the bourgeoisie.

These factions have no hesitation in appealing to their version of the “working class”. Trump presents himself as the champion of the blue-collar workers whose jobs have been endangered or destroyed by “unfair” foreign competition. The Democrats, especially left-wing figures like Sanders or Ocasio-Ortez, also claim to speak on behalf of the exploited and the oppressed.

But the working class has its own interests and they don’t coincide with any of the parties of the bourgeoisie, Republican or Democrat. Neither do they coincide with the interests of “America”, of the “nation” or the “people”, that legendary place where the exploited and the exploiters live in harmony (albeit in ruthless competition with other nations). The workers have no nation. They are part of an international class which in all countries is exploited by capital and oppressed by its governments, including those who dare to call themselves socialist, like China or Cuba, simply because they have nationalised the relationship between capital and its wage slaves. This form of state capitalism is the preferred option of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but it does not mean, as Engels once pointed out “that the capitalist relation is done away with. Rather, it is brought to a head”.

Real socialism is a world human community where classes, wage slavery and the state have been abolished. This will be the first society in history where human beings have a real control over the product of their own hands and minds.  But to take the first step towards such a society requires the working class recognising itself as a class opposed to capital. And such an awareness can only develop if workers fight tooth and nail for their own material needs, against the efforts of the employing class and its state to drive down wages, cut jobs and lengthen the working day. And there can be no doubt that the global depression that is shaping up in the wake of the pandemic will make such attacks the unavoidable programme of all parts of the capitalist class.  Faced with these attacks, workers will have to enter massively into struggle in defence of their living standards. And there can be no room for illusion: Biden, like every other capitalist ruler, will not hesitate to order the bloody repression of the working class if it threatens their order.

The workers’ struggle for their own class demands is a necessity, not only to counter the economic attacks launched by the bourgeoisie, but above all as the basis for overcoming their illusions in this or that bourgeois party or leader, and for developing their own perspective, their own alternative to this decaying society.

In the course of its struggles, the working class will be obliged to develop its own forms of organisation such as general assemblies and elected, revocable strike committees, embryonic forms of the workers’ councils which, in past revolutionary moments, have revealed themselves as the means through which the working class can take power into its own hands and begin the construction of a new society. In this process, an authentic proletarian political party would have a vital role to play: not in asking workers to vote it into power, but in defending principles derived from the struggles of the past and in pointing the way towards the revolutionary future. In the words of the Internationale, “No saviour from on high delivers. No faith have we in prince or peer”. No Trump, no Biden, no false messiahs - the working class can only emancipate itself by its own efforts, and in doing so, free all of humanity from the chains of capital.

Amos