Reply To: Russian Tensions
In trying to understand something as complex as war I guess there will always be many different meanings given to it. Robbo for example gives his own unique account in seeing Russia’s war with Ukraine as merely “a squabble between capitalists”, or “a squalid capitalist war” fought by “equally obnoxious regimes” headed by “equally repulsive, corrupt capitalist war lords”, “corrupt business men” and “sociopathic warmongers”. Could it ever be worse? I can only imagine he gets to this position because of an immovable conviction that the state in a capitalist society is a capitalist state, run by capitalists or agents of capitalists. And since the interests of capitalists are always dead opposite to the interests of workers (the class war after all), therefore the workers fighting in the Russia- Ukraine war are not acting in their own interests but only in the interests of capitalists. In this scenario, Robbo is bound to view Putin as a capitalist and of course Zelensky has to be a capitalist too. In fact neither are capitalists. Nor is there any credible evidence that they are acting at the behest of capitalists or in the broad interests of capital. This is what comes of a crude reductionist reading of Marx’s materialism and class analysis, where everything political is determined by economics.
Every Marxist I know of has long ago accepted that political regimes in capitalist societies have an autonomy that cannot be reduced to class interests, class conflict or other socio-economic tensions. Politics produces evils of its own, specific to the exercise of power – something amply demonstrated by Putin and his “power vertical”. Zelensky is no paragon of liberal democratic virtue, but it is absurd to see Zelensky in the same light as Putin. The upshot of all this is that Robbo’s analysis serves to put out of sight the most basic fact about the war in Ukraine on which judgment about its rights and wrongs must rest: Putin made an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Putin was the aggressor, Ukraine the victim of that aggression. No doubt Robbo would say that it was the Ukrainian state that was attacked, and because it is a capitalist state it’s not worthy of the support of the workers (people of Ukraine). But when states are attacked it is individuals (workers) who are challenged, not just in their lives but in the things they value most, including their political associations whatever we may think of them.
Always consistent, Robbo finds it “dumb beyond comprehension” that workers risk losing their lives, becoming seriously wounded, or having their homes destroyed, all for the sake of a “tacky cloth called a flag”. Here again, the only meaning Robbo gives to workers taking up arms to defend their common life is to say that they are “heeding the call of a capitalist regime”. Maybe they are. But they may also be heeding the call of their conscience in believing it right to defend their lives when it’s their lives and the lives of others that are directly threatened. What’s incomprehensible about that?