Simon Blow, Online
In a recent letter published in Partisan #12, David McMullen takes issue with a revolutionary defeatist outlook on the Russo–Ukraine war. McMullen correctly states that if Ukraine were to be defeated, there would not be a class war but much more likely networks of guerrilla resistance. McMullen does not address why this is the case: the reason being the absence of a mass communist party in either Ukraine or Russia. Socialist sects in both countries remain largely banned, with the exception of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which instead sucks up to the state and supports the slaughter of workers.
The call for revolutionary defeatism in the Russo–Ukraine war largely does not apply as what it actually is, a proposal for the coordinated action of the workers’ movement on both sides of the war. There does not exist a coherent workers’ movement on either side of this conflict. While I reject the notion of revolutionary defeatism as a transhistorical moral imperative that must be applied and practiced in every instance of two or more men fighting each other, this does not mean we should throw our movement, however splintered it is, behind this or that capitalist nation in its conquest for domination of the world market, as McMullen does. McMullen seems to view the world in a rather black-and-white way reserved for the Cold War classroom: a world divided not on lines of class but of democracy versus tyranny.
In form, there remains no difference between the American, Russian or Chinese states; where they differ is in content. The bourgeois democracy of the US and the bureaucratic capitalism of Russia both serve the same class interests. This position is nothing but a bizarre offshoot of Maoism, seemingly only present in Red Speck. Rather than subordinating the workers’ movement to “national development,” they wish to subordinate it to the battle for “democracy” against tyranny.
The current task of communists is not to cohere their forces and reconstitute their presence as the real movement to abolish the present state of things, but to campaign for NATO and its allies to supply more heavy artillery to aid in the mass slaughter of workers.
It is by the grace of history that Red Speck remains just that — a speck.
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