The Australian Left, like the Left across the world, has been split over the issue of the war in Ukraine. Revmira writes on how much of the Australian Left, in taking a defencist position defending Ukraine and the EU/NATO, are taking a position in alignment with imperialism.
The recent slap-fight between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky has widely been seen as a watershed moment in world politics. It has also turned the focus of the non-British Anglophone left temporarily back to Ukraine and the slaughterhouse that the Russo-American rivalry has transformed it into. Across the left the myriad fields of part-time internationalists have suddenly remembered that Ukraine exists, and many newspaper articles have appeared outlining the varied positions held by the wonderful world of the sects.
In Australia; Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance, the Freedom Socialist Party, and the theoretical local branch of the Alliance for Western Loyalism (or as they are formally known – the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) have all declared their support for the Ukrainian state to some degree or another. Their positioning of the war as one of national liberation against Russian Imperialism has resulted in the common refrain of ‘From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime’. This is a position which involves the remarkably fascinating alternating ability to both denounce the production of Australian military weaponry when directed to Israel and yet proclaim undying support when that exact same production is directed to the fields of Ukraine.
This social patriotism is hardly a new development on either the Australian or international left. After all, the collapse of the Second International was based upon the total dissolution of all parties (save the Russian and Serbian) into vulgar nationalism, and a rabid defence of ‘their’ state against the ‘undemocratic barbarism’ of the opposition. Now of course there is a difference between the betrayal of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), and the Labour Party, and the myriads of minor sects giving their support to the interests of the Australian state today. The SPD was a mass party with influence over the vast majority of the German proletariat — these charming sects are not.
Presently, most of the social patriotism in the Ukraine conflict isn’t as blatant as some of the worst historical examples (the AWL aside). The general line expressed is continued support of Australian military shipments and logistical support to Ukraine and running implicit political defence for the Ukrainian regime. Nonetheless, this is a fundamental failure of the socialist movement. It is a rejection of perhaps the most important pillar of Communism during the long road to workers’ power, total and unrelenting state disloyalty. The interests of the bourgeois state and the international Proletariat are at fundamental loggerheads — this is a basic tenet of Marxism.
To declare the old Trotskyist adage of ‘military but not political support’ is to give into inane sterile dogma, because fundamentally there is a clear and total inability of socialist forces to intervene on a military basis, and the role that these political parties are playing is fundamentally political. There are no international brigades fighting their way across the fields of the Donbass. The choice is either support to our imperialist block, the opposing imperialist block, or the revolutionary choice of declaring for neither side and fighting for workers’ revolution.
Opportunism will always require more justification than simply defending the principles and positions of world revolution that the Communist movement defends and upholds. Ukraine is simply the most recent example. Social patriotism, or sometimes outright social imperialism has a long and proud history on the Australian left, be it under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, or post-Trotskyism. Many a time, the Australian left has given into its worst impulses and declared their support for the interests of an imperialist state, and indeed quite often for the interests of our imperialist state.
A crucial example of this historically is the actions of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) during the East Timor Genocide in the 1990’s. Their theoretical and political history of uncritical support to national liberation movements and a general tactic of tailing nationalism led to them raising the demand ‘the Democratic Socialist Party calls on all supporters of democracy to mobilise to demand that the Australian government insist that the United Nations authorise the immediate dispatch of Australian troops to East Timor’ — a position which they took even when in that same statement they degenerate into active support for Australian imperialism by declaring that, ‘If the United Nations Security Council continues to argue that an international military force cannot be sent to East Timor without the Indonesian government’s agreement, then the Australian government should act unilaterally and send its armed forces into East Timor’.
The historical record of Australian intervention and imperialist exploitation into East Timor has quite demonstrably proven the failure of the DSP’s line that Australian Imperialism would be a lesser evil. While perhaps the frying pan is less murderous than the fire, the exploitation remains the same. The DSP’s active support and organisation of rallies where the predominant chant (in a deeply ironic twist of history) was ‘Troops in’ can be seen as nothing less than treason. The interests of the working class and Australian imperialism did not briefly see some sort of temporal convergence which justified a temporary liquidation of state loyalism.1
Just as in East Timor, we see in Ukraine that opportunism and defence for imperialism has seeped in through the defence of democratic politics and concessions to moralism over and despite the principled communist positions held by the movement. Although, the opportunist taint has been well established within Socialist Alternative for many decades. The political tradition from which they descended was founded due to Tony Cliff refusing to take a side in the Korean War, in yet another demonstration of his at least superficial similarity to the scattered ‘Ultra-left’ tradition. Yet rather than taking on a line of dual revolutionary defeatism, the cry of ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ evolved into ‘Well Washington is a bit better than Moscow’ — a line which spread out to the myriads of sects clinging to the ideological teat of Tony Cliff and his Socialist Workers Party.
In 1980, when the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan to secure their crumbling puppet state, the International Socialist Tendency declared their opposition to the intervention and their political support to the Mujahideen in the struggle against what they considered to be Soviet imperialism. By declaring political support for the forces struggling against the Soviet Union, Australian socialists declared their support for the capitalist and imperialist positions of their own state. Australia and America both actively benefitted from the Soviet military intervention and eventual defeat in Afghanistan.
This political tendency is perhaps the natural outgrowth of the anti-imperialist ditch that socialist politics parked in during the 1960’s and has yet to climb out of. The near entirety of the left is banking upon the hope that another mass-radicalisation event in the tradition of the Vietnam War will emerge, allowing for a short cut direct to the masses.
This leads to nothing more than constant twists and turns, a declaration that nationalism is bad one day, and then uncritical support to nationalism the next. The works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky get twisted and warped so much that they lose all original meaning and until all that matters is the sect line.
It is the task of genuine communists to fight against this distortion of theoretical and programmatical positions. To fight unerringly against the interests of whatever state we exist within be it Australia, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, Ukraine, or Russia.
The interests of the proletariat and the capitalist class never overlap, and it is vital that we never give into the capitalist myth that they do. Comrades should bear in mind the memories of the Zimmerwald Left. The slogan we must unerringly defend is simple.
No war but the class war.
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1 See: ‘Capitulation to Junior Imperialism’, WW.
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