IMPERIALIST WARS AND “PACIFISM” (Part 1)

by Oleg Vernyk (from Kiev)

[abridged version]

 

The Russian aggression against Ukraine that started on February 24, 2022 has raised a number of problematic issues in Marxist theory, as well as problems putting into practice basic principles that initially seemed clear to all Marxists. There are organizations that vindicate Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International and have produced many documents on the nature of the Russian-Ukrainian war which sometimes differ diametrically from each other. At the same time, there are organizations that do not come from this tradition but have adopted political positions quite close to those of revolutionary Marxism.

At a certain level of the discussions to obtain a positive result it is necessary to return to the basic categories of 20th century Marxism. And to be clearly defined in regards to our attitude towards such concepts, often speculative, which are used by supporters of imperialist aggression to disguise their transition to the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie and to justify the new colonial aggressions of the 21st century.

Sometimes it is very difficult to cut through the thorns of the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric and discover behind them the support for the recent aggressive imperialisms. It is no less difficult to reveal the interests of one or another imperialism under the apparently attractive rhetoric of pacifism. And it is even more complex to reveal between the deafening growls of revolutionary defeatism the real work of the imperialist agents within the labor movement. We will have to do it, because only the truth is revolutionary as it can point us to the mistakes of the past and guide us correctly towards the future.

 

Imperialist wars

One of the key elements of current discussions is the category of imperialist wars and the problem of shaping the attitude of Marxist organizations towards them. 

[…]

Some are trying, based on Ukraine’s economic and military dependence on the NATO imperialist bloc countries, to deny the Ukrainian people their right to self-determination and free development. This is accompanied by false statements that Ukraine does not have its own rights, interests, and its own subjectivity. They try to point out that it is not the Ukrainian people who are face to face with a terrible aggressor on the battlefield, but rather the NATO imperialist bloc that is fighting against Russian imperialism. But it is quite obvious that the NATO bloc has no intention of directly entering this war. It prefers to limit participation to the supply of arms to Ukraine, which is not enough to liberate the Ukrainian territories occupied by the aggressor.

In this sense, the approach of the Leninist wing of the Zimmerwald Left of 1915 in relation to Serbia and its national liberation struggle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire will be very indicative for our analysis. In his work «The collapse of the Second International Lenin» noted in particular: “In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria (...) It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, “the masses of the people”, a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a “continuation”. If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie; this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war.”

As we can see, Lenin does not support the national liberation struggle of the Serbs only (!) because the inter-imperialist war of the main imperialists powers is already raging and in it Serbia is an integral part of the Entente imperialist bloc (England, France, Italy, Russia, Usa). It is not about the supply of weapons from the Entente countries to Serbia: it is about the fact that all the Entente countries are fighting directly in the European theater of operations, and the Serbian front against Austria-Hungary is only one of the fronts of the inter-imperialist war.

“I consider it theoretically mistaken and practically harmful not to distinguish between types of wars. We cannot stand against the wars of national liberation. You take an example: Serbia. But if the Serbs fought alone against Austria, would we not stand with the Serbs?” Lenin wrote in 1915. As we see, the key aspect of the formation of his political position is once again the fact of Serbia’s involvement in the united front on the side of the Entente imperialist bloc.

The club of supporters of Russian imperialism will fail in their attempt to pass off the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people and their army against Russian imperialist aggression for a NATO war against Russia. As I have already pointed out, the fact that there is an imperialist war in no way defines its imperialist character for all its participants. Even in the vile and greedy world massacre of 1914 there were peoples for whom participation in the war was associated with self-determination and national liberation.

 

Can the current Russian-Ukrainian war change its character and be transformed from a national liberation war of the Ukrainian people in one part to a global inter-imperialist war and under what conditions? Alejandro Bodart gives clear answer to this question: “If any of the imperialist countries in NATO were to declare war on Russia, for whatever reason, the character of the entire conflict would change (...) We would effectively enter an inter-imperialist armed conflict and would have to adapt our policy and orientation to the new situation”.

Do we see the premises for the development of the situation in this direction? Not yet. Should we always be prepared for such a possible transformation of the situation? Obviously yes.

Nella diffusione e/o ripubblicazione di questo articolo si prega di citare la fonte: www.utopiarossa.blogspot.com

FOR A ONE STATE SOLUTION (MULTI-ETHNIC, SECULAR AND DEMOCRATIC) IN PALESTINE

by Michele Nobile

 

1. Hamas' action: a barbaric and terrorist operation

Commentators have compared Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to several historical events, for example Pearl Harbor (in terms of surprise and impact) and the Tet Offensive (the 1968 North Vietnamese offensive pushed the US administration to begin peace negotiations). By choosing October 7 as the date of the attack, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and allied organizations obviously evoke the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the 50th anniversary of which was the previous day.

By type of attacking force, psychological impact and ferocity of the assault I am among those for which the most pertinent comparison is with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The vast majority of the at least 1,300 Israelis killed in the incursion were civilians, Jews of both sexes and of all ages, including many dozens of Israeli Arabs, to which must be added the wounded and approximately 200 kidnapped hostages. Overall, the number of Israelis killed in just a few hours in Operation Al-Aqsa flood is more than four times the total killed in the fifteen years between 2008 and September 2023.

In evaluating the political and military consequences of the complex and surprising Hamas operation, one cannot ignore its terrorist rather than warlike character in the usual sense, that is, it was not aimed at striking the enemy armed force and/or taking control of territory. Although full of negative connotations and often used in a more instrumentally moralistic than rationally ethical-political way, I use the term «terrorism» here in a descriptive way: as an action of an individual or an organized group, whose value does not reside primarily in material damage inflicted on the enemy, but in the symbolic importance of the gesture itself; real objective is to affect the will to fight and the orientation of the political and/or social adversary, therefore with the aim of revenge and deterrent intimidation, or as an exemplary gesture which has the intention of arousing consensus and indicating - to the people or to the reference class - the right path to follow: purposes that can be combined. It is also necessary to distinguish terrorism carried out in the name of an oppressed people or a class dominated by state terrorism as the practice of a dominant caste or class. The distinction is politically relevant because the coherence between the means employed and the purpose can be very different in the two cases, 

This is especially true for oppressed peoples and the dominated class: terrorism can produce effects far from those desired or declared, it tends to replace apparatus warfare for the struggle, organization and self-defense of social movements.

The operation launched by Hamas and other organizations aspires to achieve the indicated terrorist objectives: intimidation against Israeli state terrorism and Zionist extremism, revenge for the deaths and suffering of the Palestinians, an «exemplary» gesture for Palestinians, Arab peoples and states against Zionist and Western domination.

What is horribly «ordinary» for Gaza is instead extraordinary for Israel and therefore psychologically and politically traumatic. However, trauma does not necessarily equate to paralysis. If before October the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu was in serious difficulty, now a government of national unity has been formed; a state of war was declared for the first time since 1973; the reservists - in August more than 10,000 had declared that they did not intend to serve if Netanyahu did not give up his reform of the judicial system - are mobilised: 360,000.

It is not possible that, however fanatical and optimistically hopeful of external help, the leaders of Hamas and other organizations underestimated the destructiveness of Israel’s retaliation in the face of an action of this magnitude. It was absolutely obvious that the attack by Hamas and other organizations would condemn the Palestinians of Gaza to terrible and unnecessary suffering: as of October 18, 3,478 Palestinians had already been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 853 children (on the 17th) and 64 in West Bank, the injured in the two regions are 12,500 and 1,284 respectively (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs data). If the bombings do not cease and if the Israeli army invades Gaza, the Palestinian victims, mostly civilians, will be between ten and twenty times more numerous than the victims of the Hamas incursion. We cannot have any illusions about this, we can only hope that as many Gazans as possible will be allowed to reach safety, instead of remaining under siege to act as «human shields» for Hamas and «collateral damage» for the Israelis. And whatever their real motivations and objectives, discussed later in the article, Palestinian leaders cannot fail to have taken into account the possibility - if not the certainty - of military annihilation. The orography of Gaza is not that of southern Lebanon, favorable for defense, where Hezbollah is present in force; the Gaza Strip does not allow for defense in depth; it has no contiguity with countries - Syria and Iran - which could support it with arms supplies; Gaza Strip can be completely blocked: Hamas has no logistical background; the military capabilities and quality of the arsenal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are much inferior to those of Hezbollah and, presumably, they have already discharged the mass of rockets available.

Operation Al-Aqsa flood was the exact opposite of a spontaneous popular uprising (which may result from and involve the action of an organization but is not determined by it) and of the first Intifada, which was the moment of maximum sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Then it was truly a challenge between David’s sling and the brute strength of the colossus Goliath. Instead, 2023 is a coldly deliberate terrorist operation, not an explosion of popular anger.

This said, I move from the description to the ethical-political evaluation, the reasons for which I will explore further below.

For the Palestinian people, Operation Al-Aqsa flood is a human catastrophe, which does not result from an error of evaluation or from unintentional and unpredictable effects on the part of those who decided it. The material agent of the catastrophe is the Israeli armed force, but Hamas and its allies share political responsibility with the Israeli government and its supporters.

Hamas uses the Palestinians of Gaza as cannon fodder for its own power purposes. Hamas is an enemy of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians are the first interested in eliminating Hamas and its associates.

For the Israelis and for the world, the Hamas Operation is an act of barbarism worthy of the pogroms of the Russian Black Hundreds at the time of the Tsar or the Nazi Kristallnacht. It is a horror that Jews are still killed because they are Jews. It is a crime on par with the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity, a shame that tarnishes the Palestinian cause. This fact cannot be reduced by listing Israeli war crimes, nor can it be justified by the daily barbarity that the Palestinians have suffered for many decades. There is no justification for horror wherever it comes from, otherwise all horrors, especially those of the powerful, will always find their justification in the name of the end that justifies the means. 

For for the protests against the war and for Palestinian rights to have political and moral credibility and therefore consensus, the atrocity of Hamas and its partners must be condemned in the clearest and most unequivocal way.

Whatever the expectations of the Hamas leaders, the terrorist characteristics and the consequent effects of Operation Flood objectively demonstrate the impossibility of militarily defeating Israel, whose destructive potential, including nuclear weapons, remains intact. Knowing history, one can understand that the prospect of winning the State of Israel through armed struggle died at least more than forty years ago, when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 led to the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from that country. Operation Flood is the last barbaric but desperate coup that marks its definitive failure. 

It is proven that on the path of armed struggle and terrorism the Palestinian people will never be able to obtain justice. It has become a politically useless path and a morally unacceptable waste of lives.

The rise of Hamas was the result of another failure: that of al-Fatah, of the Oslo accords and of the aspiration for an independent Palestinian state alongside that of Israel. On the other hand, as long as Israel remains constitutionally an ethnocentric and Zionist state, the Palestinians will not be able to have justice. At this point, the only pursuable objective is therefore that of a single multi-ethnic Israeli-Palestinian state, obviously secular so that the feud between Judaism and Islam does not survive.

 

HASTA SIEMPRE PARA MIGUEL ÁNGEL GARCÍA

por Horacio Tarcus

BILINGUE: ESPAÑOL-ITALIANO 

[Quiero sumarme a este recuerdo de Miguel Ángel García. Lo conocí en los años 1970, cuando vivía en Milán y se publicó la primera edición de mi Peronismo y el movimiento obrero (Jaca Book 1975). El mismo año Mazzotta publicó su Argentina. De la Independencia al peronismo actual. Fue Miguel quien se puso en contacto conmigo y me dijo que teníamos una interpretación común del fenómeno peronista: un hecho de poca significación para la Italia de entonces (donde todavía circulaba la vieja calumnia estalinista de que el peronismo era un movimiento fascista), pero importante para la Argentina y para las nuevas fuerzas políticas que allí estaban naciendo. Nos mantuvimos en contacto durante algunos años.

Con cada muerte de estos camaradas que tanto contribuyeron a una visión moderna del proceso revolucionario, todos nos quedamos un poco más solos. Sólo el futuro podrá decirnos si semillas como las que dejó Miguel Ángel todavía pueden dar frutos (r.m.).]

 

Miguel Ángel García (Buenos Aires, 1/5/1939 - 14/10/2023) murió a los 84 años. Fiel a su estilo de vida plebeyo, no contaba con una obra social prepaga, de modo que pasó los últimos días de su vida internado en un hospital público de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Cada vez que la enfermera se descuidaba, se desataba de la cama y se sentaba a esperar plácidamente en la silla de las visitas, como si el internado fuera otro.

Con la muerte de Miguel y la de Alejandro Dabat en marzo del año pasado, uno de sus contemporáneos, se perdieron los dos últimos mentores de una corriente de pensamiento político hoy olvidada, la llamada "izquierda socialista".

La "izquierda socialista" fue un archipiélago de pequeños grupos clasistas nacidos a fines de la década de 1960 en Córdoba, Rosario y Buenos Aires que no se encuadraban en ninguna de las fuerzas políticas de la izquierda revolucionaria de su tiempo. Su programa era tan lúcido como irrealizable políticamente. A contrapelo de las corrientes leninistas y peronistas de entonces, consideraba que la Argentina no era en modo alguno una "semicolonia" del imperialismo estadounidense, sino un país con un considerable desarrollo social, industrial y urbano. Su avanzado y organizado proletariado, madurando a lo largo del camino que iba desde el Cordobazo a los emergentes sindicatos clasistas, no tenía por delante las tareas de la "revolución democrático-burguesa" sino las del socialismo. Un socialismo que, en este programa, no se parecía a ninguno de los regímenes comunistas existentes, sino que proclamaba como principios organizadores la democracia obrera y la autogestión.