Simon Blow, Online
David McMullen’s latest reply to my polemic ‘Red Specktarian’ only confirms what was already obvious: the politics of the duplicitous duo behind Red Speck have nothing to do with Marxism. What they advance is the detritus of Stalinism, carried through to its most illogical and embarrassing endpoint. Where Stalin demanded the subordination of the workers movement to the needs of “national development” and coalitionism. McMullen demands its subordination to the national-democratic: that is, to NATO arms and liberal constitutions, in the hope that someday, in the indefinite future, this will create better soil for socialism.
McMullen frames Ukraine as a bourgeois-democratic state denied its right to self-determination. Yet states do not have rights—people do. To speak of a “states right to self-determination: is to leave the terrain of Marxism and step onto that of liberal international law. It is necessary to ask: where does the current Ukrainian state’s “right” to self-determination come from? The UN charters, drafted to sanctify a US-led world order? From some eternal moral principle, no different from the fairy tale of natural property rights? Or from a distortion of the Bolshevik slogan, which was never meant to be a universal one but a limited tactic, and one shown to be unworkable once nationalist movements inevitably integrated themselves into the world hierarchy of states
What McMullen and the social-imperialists really defend is Ukraine’s “right” to act as a semi-colony under NATO and the EU, to be a reserve of cheap labour-power for transnational corporations, and to serve as a forward operating base for US imperialism. For us Marxist’s, the question is not a state’s legal “right,” but whether the working class within that state can determine its own destiny. In Ukraine this is not the case: it is a violently nationalist regime built on the suppression of the working class, the banning of opposition parties, suppression of collective bargaining and the looting of the national economy by oligarchs in bed with western finance capital.
The contradictory line of the social-imperialists, where they criticise the domestic policy but cheer its foreign adventures (foreign policy being an extension of domestic policy,) is a direct attack on one of the most fundamental pillars of revolutionary strategy: total and unrelenting disloyalty to one’s own state. The working class and its future parties must never be subordinated to nationalism, moralism or illusions in bourgeois democracy. To tail the foreign policy of NATO under the guise of “self-determination” is not only profound opportunism; it is a betrayal of the international working class and a revival of the worst social-imperialist traditions of the Second International’s right wing, echoing the fatuous support once offered to “brave little Belgium” and “plucky little Serbia” in the First World War.
But clearly our dear speck-sized comrades are no strangers to this; they are the bastard grandchild of the Second International’s right wing. McMullen calls for the popular front position of the Comintern, sacrificing the political independence of the working class on the altar of subordination to bourgeois democracy.
Let the ‘Red Specktarian’ devote himself to his sectarian speck: the real movement to abolish the present state of things awaits for those who break from political bankruptcy of both imperialist camps.
Respond on our letters page: partisanmagazine@proton.me
PARTISAN! 