ALB
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Another eyewitness meeting, by author of this article:MONDAY 10th MARCH 6:00 PM Revolution or Reaction?Crisis in Ukraine‘Eyewitness Report by Ukrainian Socialist'VOLODYMYR ISHCHENKOCOMMONS: Journal of Social CriticismForum hosted by John McDonnell MPCommittee Room 12, House of Commons via main St Stephens entrance, Westminster tube
Comment on the latest situation in the Ukraine from the comrade who has written the article on the Ukraine in the March Socialist Standard:Notes on the situation in Ukraine, 2/27/14Banderist (1)regroupmentIn establishing itself as a parliamentary party, the Svoboda (Freedom) Party of OlehTiahnybok has tried to present itself as ‘moderate’ and ‘respectable’, though without renouncing its ideological roots in the openly Banderist Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU). This entails, in particular, the rejecting anti-Semitism (partly for the sake of good relations with Orange oligarchs of Jewish origin) and supporting the goal of joining ‘Europe’ – previously denounced as decadent (in order not to alienate the EU and pro-EU forces within the Orange coalition).These moves toward respectability have enabled Svoboda to enter the new governing coalition and Tiahnybok himself to meet the US envoy to Ukraine, assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland (not to mention the Israeli ambassador). However, they have also opened up a political space to Svoboda’s right, which is now occupied by Right Sector (RS), an umbrella structure encompassing such organizations as Patriot of Ukraine and White Hammer. They are anti-Semitic, anti-Europe, and the other things that Svoboda can no longer allow itself.RS uses the Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) (2) as its symbol. Its armed units have taken over ‘autonomous zones’ in and around Kiev. One video on the internet shows them vandalizing the Kiev offices of the Party of Regions; another shows them stopping a police car at a roadblock and checking the driver’s ID (to assert authority). Some 30% of the protestors on the demonstrations marched under RS banners. It was they who first attacked the police with Molotov cocktails, provoking violence in response. When the anarchist Anti-Fascist Union Ukraine tried to join the protest, they were intimidated and threatened by RS.Nevertheless, there are many signs that Svoboda and RS are not really in opposition to one another. There is, rather, a division of labor between them as parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces sharing the same long-term goals. Tyahnybok’s deputy Yuri Mykhalchyshyn is thought to serve as the main link between Svoboda and RS.The existence of a radical-nationalist paramilitary force outside the weakened and demoralized state machine has been a major factor impelling Ukraine down the road to civil war, with similar ‘self-defense’ forces emerging on the other side of the political confrontation in the Eastern cities. Some analysts have been arguing that Ukraine is already in the early stages of a civil war.The atmosphere of mass violence is conveyed by another video, taken in the Crimean city of Kerch. A group of moderate (non-Banderite) Orange activists have come to set up a platform and hold an outdoor meeting with the local residents. The woman speaker has hardly begun when people begin yelling things like: ‘You are fascists, you have no right…’ and throwing things at them. Something lands right in the middle of her face. Then a group push break through the police line – the police seem to be doing their best to protect the visitors – and rush the platform. It topples over and the speaker is thrown to the ground. Then we see another group kicking and beating her companions, their faces already bloodied. The crowd eggs them on with cries of ‘Beat the fascists!’The new governmentIt had been announced that the new government would be a coalition of the three main Orange parties – Fatherland, the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR), and Svoboda. However, it turns out to be an alliance of only Fatherland and Svoboda plus a few non-party figures. UDAR says it decided not to enter the coalition but does not explain why; it promises to support the government in parliament.There is a clue: on Tuesday Tiahnybok expressed reservations about joining a coalition that would also include UDAR. Perhaps that reflected his dislike of UDAR’s conciliatory stance on language and other ethno-national issues. My guess is that both UDAR and Svoboda were unwilling to work together, so that Fatherland had to choose between them. Why did they choose Svoboda? A leaked phone call between Nuland and the US ambassador shows that the State Department did not want Svoboda in the government, suggesting that while the US has influence on the Orange politicians they are not helpless puppets of the US.My own answer is that only Svoboda can restrain RS and thereby hopefully halt the drift toward civil war. This is presumably a reality that the Ukrainians understand but the American (and European?) diplomats do not. The composition of the new government supports this hypothesis. The new head of the National Security and Defense Council, Andriy Parubiy, though recently aligned with Fatherland – he coordinated a volunteer security corps to protect the protestors – has a Banderite past (he co-founded the SNPU with Tiahnybok) and his deputy is none other than Dmytro Yarosh, grim-faced leader of the RS. Through this maneuver the radical-nationalist paramilitaries can be incorporated into the official security forces of the state.Svoboda has been given one of the three deputy prime minister posts (Oleksandr Sych) and the ministries for ecology and agriculture. The new education minister (Serhiy Kvit) is also close to the radical nationalists. And Svoboda keeps the state prosecutor’s office, a politically sensitive position already under its control.Besides the radical nationalists, several other members of the new government may disappoint those who believe in the ‘ideals of the Orange Revolution’. A number of new ministers have been targets of corruption allegations, and in some cases the evidence seems quite weighty. And some of the new people, especially in the economics ministries, are generally regarded as representatives of specific oligarchs: energy minister Yuri Prodan and finance minister Oleksandr Shlapak both have close connections to the wealthiest of the Orange oligarchs, ‘Benya’ Kolomoyski.(1). Stepan Bandera was the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was active in Galicia (Western Ukraine) under Polish rule in the 1930s, under German occupation during WW2, and under the Soviet regime until suppressed in the early 1950s. I use the term ‘Banderists’ in order to leave open the question of whether movements in this tradition should be regarded as fascist, semi-fascist or merely radical nationalist.(2) [my addition — ALB]
link wrote:I do think you should have read the link to Rosa Luxemburg which you suggest refutes my argument – Hardly. One paragraph says: ‘In order to do this, is a majority in the National Assembly necessary? Only those who subscribe to parliamentary cretinism, who would decide the revolution and socialism with parliamentary majorities, believe this. Not the parliamentary majority in the National Assembly, but the proletarian mass outside, in the factories and on the streets, will decide the fate of the National Assembly.”Do you agree with this then?Of course only the "proletarian mass" outside parliament can establish socialism. To mean anything from a socialist point of view a parliamentary majority would have to be a reflection of the opinion of workers democratically self-organised outside parliament. So that the socialist MPs would be their delegates."Parliamentary cretinism" is the view that socialism can be brought into being by the action of MPs alone, as advocated at the time by the Labour Party and on the Continent by Social Democratic parties. They imagined that socialism could be gradually introduced by a parliamentary majority gained on the basis of promises to reform capitalism. Ed's dad, among others, demolished that one in his book on so-called "parliamentary socialism".Having said this, I wouldn't want to claim that Luxemburg's position was the same as the SPGB's. I was just making the lesser point that she was not dogmatically "anti-parliamentarist" and so it wasn't the same as yours. In fact she specifically argued on this point against those you see as your intellectual forbearers.She seems to have underestimated the degree of support for socialism in Germany at the time (or maybe she didn't as she advised against the Spartacist uprising). For a contemporary socialist comment on this and the elections to the National Assembly see this article from the February 1919 Socialist Standard.
link wrote:NOW you demand that I go back over ‘when and where has this happened’ which is precisely what I discussed in the first place.There's been a misunderstanding here. I know perfectly well that there were "soviets" formed in Russia in 1905 and 1917, but I interpreted the following passage from your earlier post that you were saying that there had been workers councils that had actually run things "ignoring money, costs, profits":
link wrote:When run by class conscious workers, they showed the capacity to enable workers themselves to run society according to socialist principles ie ignoring money, costs, profits and focusing instead on need, on equality and recallable delegates.It was examples of this that I was asking you to produce. But maybe I misread you or did you mean to suggest that there had been?
When in the 1960s all the Trot groups told us we should join Labour as "the mass party of the working class" we used to refer them to Catholic Church.
It looks as if the anarcho-capitalist idea of a non-state-backed money has come unstuck:http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/02/26/us-mtgox-website-idUKBREA1O07920140226So, they can't do with the State after all. How else are they going to prevent thefts?.
link wrote:For example she goes on to say: “But in order to be able to overthrow it, the proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class-consciousness and organisation. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution.”True, but the immediately preceding sentence reads:
Quote:Absolutism in Russia must be overthrown by the proletariat.Which confirms my point that she was advocating mass strikes and "workers councils" to obtain political democracy in Russia and that the revolution she was talking about was the bourgeois revolution.Later, after the collapse of the German and Russian empires in 1917-8, she did envisage these as weapons to try to overthrow capitalism too. But as can be seen from this article she did not adopt the abstentionist position you do towards participating in elections:http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/23.htmNote the reference in the opening line to the fact that the Workers Councils in Germany had voted to back the reformist Social Democrat government. In other words, there is nothing necessarily socialist about the Workers Council form of organisation.
link wrote:When run by class conscious workers, they showed the capacity to enable workers themselves to run society according to socialist principles ie ignoring money, costs, profits and focusing instead on need, on equality and recallable delegates. This is Socialism in embryo appearing in practice, surely you can appreciate the importance of that?It would be, but when and where has this happened?
Here's one suggestion as to what may have gone wrong:It looks like the only way to access to NEB list is to join. It looks unfixable. Yahoo may have changed a policy or a box may have been unchecked in error. The only solution may be to set up a fresh group.
Don't know if this has any significance. Probably not, but something to at least note.Swedish neo-nazis are planning to go to the Ukraine to support the "revolution" there, according to this article:http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/svenska-nazister-uppmanas-aka-till-ukraina-1/
Quote:SWEDISH NAZIS ENCOURAGED TO GO TO UKRAINESwedish Nazis are being encouraged to go to Ukraine to support the revolution. According to a new Swedish right-wing site with close ties to the Nazi Swedish party the aim is to show that they "stand united with white, European nationalists in more than words." By helping, we hope that the new government formation is to be nationalist, says Magnus Söderman, who is behind the petition which calls itself the "Swedish Ukraine Volunteers".Reply from a comrade not on this forum:Trotsky was of Jewish origin. His father is described as a "well-to-do farmer" (itself an anomaly, as Jews were legally prohibited from owning land, though in fact quite a few did). However, the family was not part of a Jewish community and therefore spoke not Yiddish but the same language as their Gentile neighbors, which in that area was surzhik. As an adult Trotsky mostly used Russian. Of course, he did not think of himself as Russian, Ukrainian or Jewish but as a revolutionary internationalist.
Pub quiz question: What nationality was Trotsky? Was he a Ukrainian? He was born in the Kherson region (see map above) and, according to this, his father spoke surzhyk, a dialect between Ukrainian and Russian. He also wrote articles in 1939 justifying independence for the Ukraine.
I've nothing against history. Nor has the SPGB. Far from it. At this stage of the development of the socialist movement, when we are so few, a degree of knowledge about it is important. I would have thought, though, that this criticism would be more appropriately directed at those at the meeting who argued that workers can spontaneously reach a socialist consciousness simply through struggle without needing to hear the past experiences of the working class as encapsulated in socialist principles and conveyed in publications or by word of mouth. For the record (and for discussion, if you want) here's my take on the "soviets" in Russia.It was just that I was disappointed that the meeting might turn into a discussion about the details of what did or did not happen in the upheavals in Russia in 1905 and 1917, as has so often happened in discussions we've had with the ICC and CWO. Fortunately, in the second part, the discussion did centre on contemporary political, economic and social conditions which are significantly different from those in Russia a hundred years and the implications of this for revolutionary socialists today.For instance, the internet and its use to organise demonstrations and strikes and to spread socialist ideas; the fact that today most workers do not work in big factories in huge industrial complexes as they did in St Petersburg in the days of "soviets" and the implications of this for factory workers councils; and how to involve in the struggle for socialism workers not at work (the unemployed, the retired). We tried to bring out the use as a weapon in the class struggle of the vote (which didn't exist in Russia in 1905) by revolutionary socialists and by the working class in general, but came up against a brick wall.Incidentally, to return to history, if you re-read Luxemburg's 1906 pamphlet on the mass strike you will see that at the end of the first chapter (which also contains a vitriolic attack on anarchist anti-parliamentarism) she is advocating its use in Russia (and by implication in Germany too) to try to get political democracy:
Quote:… the mass strike in Russia has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International. Thus has historical dialectics, the rock on which the whole teaching of Marxian socialism rests, brought it about that today anarchism, with which the idea of the mass strike is indissolubly associated, has itself come to be opposed to the mass strike which was combated as the opposite of the political activity of the proletariat, appears today as the most powerful weapon of the struggle for political rights.I suppose I could have mentioned this too but appeals to authority was another thing I was trying to avoid, but we can by all means discuss it here or even at a future meeting. Anyway, you can use her against us !
I must confess to be being surprised at the turn of events. It seems that the government collapsed as a result of losing the support of the army. It remains to be seen whether the West will be able to benefit from the victory in Kiev of its side. There are already indications that part of the country won't accept the new regime. The map at the end of this article from RT (Russian government world TV) shows what these areas might be.It is also ominous that in other reports RT is referring to the people living there as "Russians" rather than Russian-speaking Ukrainians as well as referring to the western part of the country as "Galicia" The EU could end up with only a land-locked poor region in its sphere of influence.The real tragedy of the events in the Ukraine is that the working class there, insofar as it has got involved, have agreed to line up behind one or other capitalist State that wants the area to be in its sphere of influence and/or with one or other group of local oligarchs.
I went to a meeting of Labour Heritage (a Labour Party history group) yesterday. One of the talks was by Ivan Gibbons, Director of Irish Studies at St. Mary's University College in Twickenham, on "The Dublin Lockout of 1913 and its impact on the future of Labour in Ireland". It was quite an impressive analysis which punctured Irish leftwing Republican mythology both about the lockout and about James Connolly. Its main points can be found here:http://www.labour-heritage.com/Bulletin%20Autumn%202013.pdfHe also, perhaps inadvertently, brought out that, from the point of view of the material conditions of the working class, Irish "independence" made things worse. As he points out in the article, even before independence the IRA had sought to suppress labour unrest in the west of Ireland and one of the first acts of the Irish Free State was to use its new army to break a postal workers strike (its second act was to abolish divorce). A few years later pensions and other benefits were cut because the new State could not afford to keep paying them at the same level as in rest of the British Isles. There must be a lesson here for those who support Scottish "independence" on leftwing or "socialist" grounds.
LBird wrote:Hence, I see the role of propaganda and the battle of ideas within our class as a fundamental one, rather inclined to think that there is a necessary link between Engels' positivist view of science, and the notion that 'struggle/experience' leads to consciousness. The Left Communists, I think, espouse Engels, rather than Marx, on this issue.I wouldn't have thought that Engels can be made to carry the can for their peculiar ideas on how socialist consciousness arises, as what Engels wrote in his introduction to a reprint in 1895 of Marx's Civil War in France directly contradicts their view:
Quote:The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required,I think Engels is with us (both of us) on this one.
