“Philosophers try to understand the world. The point is to change it”
Karl Marx
A Marxist guide to inaction and passivity as a response to imperialist aggression.
A reply to Dave Brownz
Dave Brownz’ long winded argument for not taking sides in opposing the bloody Russian imperialist invasion of Ukraine, was pretty unconvincing.
Read it; Here
What is Dave saying?
That we shouldn’t support Ukraine against the Russian invader, because Western imperialism is just as bad, or worse?
Dave Brown writes;
“….Russia is not fighting in Ukraine because it [Ukraine] is fascist. Nor is Ukraine fighting for its freedom…..”
The people of Ukraine are fighting for their freedom from Russian imperialist domination and occupation. And have been doing so for a long time.
I would suggest to anyone, including Dave, if you want to understand the war in Ukraine, watch the documentary ‘Winter on Fire’. and then ask yourself. this question:
Are a people who fought so passionately for their freedom from Russia in the recent past, likely to give it up so easily in the present?
Dave writes;
“…..Workers should take a position in Ukraine for the defeat of both imperialist blocs in the war and for the fight for an Independent Socialist Ukraine……”
How should we go about doing that?
Dave gives us no suggestions.
Wishful pie in the sky theorising with no relation to the reality on the ground, and to people’s actual lived experience, never solved anything, and it is certainly no guide to action.
In my opinion, the best way to weaken both Russian and Western Imperialisms and strike a blow against the global imperialist system itself, is to achieve the total defeat of the Russian imperialists.
Dave writes;
“…We are for the arming of workers and farmers to defend themselves against both sides, against the Russian invasion as well as the NATO interests behind the war plans of the Kyiv regime…”
Workers and farmers in Ukraine are being armed, and they are using those arms to fight their immediate oppressor, the Russian imperialist invader. That the Ukrainian farmers and workers should turn around and start attacking the ‘Kiev regime’. I can see that being a popular strategy. Not!
What Dave is suggesting is unrealistic and completely impractical.
“People make history but not under conditions of their own choosing”
Karl Marx
Pat O’Dea is a trade unionist and human rights activist.
I’m rather amused by the same old fracture in Marxist ranks, the Trots against all international capitalism, the inheritors of Stalin selectively siding with capital.
Myself, I think this a good thing as neither side of the Marxist coin is a non starter. You both agree that this is a bourgeois scrap, can’t fault that. And that the prols lose, again correct.
So in this fight you have to ask what are the bourgeois doing that makes the prols do their will? Or is Marxist analysis deeply flawed?
Nick, Marxists are well aware of the role of revolution and counter-revolution since the Paris Commune in 1871.
Revolution is met by the military, closely shadowed by the traitor intellectuals preaching freedom and democracy, the media sucking off the politicians and the church blessing the chaos. And to deliver the final blow, fascist paramilitaries take out the workers leaders.
However, capitalism is its own worst enemy and brings about the destruction of the nature it has lived off for centuries.
Workers are part of nature, and number billions, while the ruling classes and their mercenaries, who live off nature count a few millions.
Socialism or Extinction!
Given the environmental catastrophes of Communism everywhere your argument failed on that front decades ago.
Wake up Tom.
That wasn’t communism it was the Stalinist/Maoist dictatorship.
Workers were not running the show, bureaucratic bosses were.
Communism means communal, that is egalitarian, collective ownership and control.
Wake up Tom.
That wasn’t communism it was the Stalinist/Maoist dictatorship.
Workers were not running the show, bureaucratic bosses were.
Communism means communal, that is egalitarian, collective ownership and control.
the right just are not funny….rigid minds precludes comedy.
if anyone can name a funny right wing comedian please do…I might let you have CK in a pinch.
Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore very funny and right wing.
Their humour not acceptable today far from politically correct and not remotely woke.
personally I find pete and dud hilarious but never saw any ‘politics’ in their work and they are hardly contemporary are they? you’ll be citing warren mitchell next.
A few posts on the war from the Marxist tendency I belong to.
https://redrave.blogspot.com/2022/07/ukraine-for-new-zimmerwald.html
http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=2930
http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=2958
and another on US vs China geopolitics
https://redrave.blogspot.com/2022/08/can-china-rescue-global-capitalism.html
Nice links Dave, if you weren’t au fait with Marxist vernacular and dialectic they’d be pretty impossible to make sense of. Still, at least they try and make sense of a complex scenario without fairytale “facts” made up to match the official story as per the Western media.
Nick+J September 5, 2022 at 8:40 pm
Nice links Dave, if you weren’t au fait with Marxist vernacular and dialectic they’d be pretty impossible to make sense of….
You are right there Nick.
I am au fait with Marxist vernacular and dialectic and I agree, it is pretty impossible to make sense of. Especially as it is made up of fairytale facts to match the Russian imperialist propaganda.
Dave Brown’s “Tendency” tie themselves into convoluted knots with long winded arguments built around a theoretical framework, with nothing to tie this framework back to the lived reality of Russian imperialist savagery.
“Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed”
V.I. Lenin
Hi Dave, still can’t bring yourself to watch ‘Winter On Fire’? Or answer the question posed?
Why is that?
Frightened it might challenge your divorced from reality dogmatic narrative?
The reality of a blood thirsty imperialist power invading a sovereign nation?
And a people fighting for their freedom from dictatorship and imperialist subjugation?
Dave+Brown September 5, 2022 at 12:09 pm
A few posts on the war from the Marxist tendency I belong to…..
https://redrave.blogspot.com/2022/07/ukraine-for-new-zimmerwald.html
Too bad Dave that you couldn’t bring yourself to quote from these self proclaimed loudmouths.
“…..red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers’ Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism.”
Dave I think you need to look for another Marxist tendency to belong to. A Tendency that claim that they are going to lead a global revolution to overthrow capitalism? What a joke. Their disgusting rote repetition of Russian propaganda that the popular revolt against Yanukovych was “a fascist coup”, these fantasists wouldn’t know a revolution if they fell over one.
“…we will examine the path of the fascist militia’s coup at the EuroMaidan…
……on February 20th, 2014 these people who “Love the United States” pulled off a false flag operation from a sniper’s nest killing 89 and injuring a hundred more and blaming Yanukovych.”
Again Dave I urge you to watch the documentary ‘Winter On Fire’ the footage clearly shows the Yanukovych Berkut murdering protesters in Maidan square, and attacking the trade union centre. And I dare you to slander the Ukrainian people and call this a ‘False Flag Operation’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzNxLzFfR5w
I will ask you again;
Are a people who fought so passionately for their freedom from Russian imperialism in the recent past, likely to give it up so easily in the present?
My guess Dave? You are intellectually incapable of answering this question.
I’m surprised all the pro-Russia trolls are not here as they are on Ben Morgan’s posts about the Ukrainian war.
So Tom, is a pro Russian troll someone who supports Russia or somebody who supports reality and truth?
Reality and truth can you expand on that please Nick J?
Yes, reality is what actually happens, not propaganda. Truth is what is true, not a lie. Simple, so as to a “Russian troll” is that somebody who states that Russia appears to be winning? Or is that a valid non judgemental statement based upon observation of reality?
Yes, one doesn’t become a troll for Russia by pointing out that it is winning. It is winning because the US which staged this war is using Ukraine workers as cannon fodder, and will fight to the last worker without getting its hands dirty.
The US and Russia are both fighting to determine the new front between Western and Eastern imperialism in the great game for control of Eurasia.
Workers have no interest in taking sides in this war. They fight against both sides. In a war between two imperialist powers workers fight to turn it into a civil war, said Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Lenin.
This means a war of class against class, not a popular front ‘peoples’ war dominated by the national bourgeoisie to liberate the country for its profits. It is the Ukraine proxy regime that claims this is a war for Ukraine’s independence when it is the US pulling its strings. The Zelensky bourgeois regime is only interested in profiting from the sale of Ukraine to US imperialism.
Self-determination for Ukraine will come when workers win an independent Socialist, Soviet Ukraine. The same situation arises on the Pacific front where the US is provoking China to go to war over Taiwan. Only an international socialist revolution will end imperialist war and the capitalist destruction of nature including humanity.
Dave has claimed that he is neither for Washington or Moscow.
Finally the mask comes off.
Dave makes his justification for Russian aggression against Ukraine.
…. the US which staged this war is using Ukraine workers as cannon fodder
What a load of bullshit.
Dave would have us believe that Ukraine, egged on by the US, attacked Russia, that Russia is the victim here. Unfortunately for Dave’s narrative, it is not Ukraine that has been firing missiles into Russian apartment buildings, it is not Ukraine that is reducing Russian cities to rubble. It is not Ukraine’s soldiers that are on Russian territory.
No matter what Putin’s apologists claim.
History will record that Russia is the imperialist aggressor nation in this war of choice.
Pat, this is from a real Putin apologist, a Russian commentator (Martanyov). It pays when trying to work out what is going on to hear what everybody says, how they view it. It would appear he sees the West as the imperialists. Whether or not he is right it is probably how most Russians see this conflict (Ive read quite a few).
As many of us continued to stress for years–Russia’s conflict is NOT just with Nazi regime in Ukraine, it is with combined West and its leader, the United States, and that Ukraine, while extremely important, is but one of theaters of operations in this cataclysmic struggle between emerging new world order, more just and predictable, and forces of utter destruction which Pax Americana came to embody. This Neo-colonial regime is not just doomed, it already lost and the world is in the stage of mopping operations, with Europe being driven back to her western-most peninsula and with the United States being cut down to its proper size. Economic reality of the combined West is such that it is being dwarfed now by the emerging Eurasian economies, while remaining militarily impotent in a serious peer-to-peer conflict. They don’t like it and they feel the existential threat to themselves–they are correct. Their rule is over.
In terms of the actual conflict Id posit that a Marxist interpretation is only partially correct (there are multiple parallel interpretations that hold some of the truth). The biggest thing going on seems to be a fight for independent national economic sovereignty from the US dollar regime. History may well record that Russia invaded parts of a Ukrainian state as a liberator….depends who ultimately wins (there are statues of Czar Alexander across the Balkans for his role in supporting their liberation from the Ottomans, the Turks record him as an aggressor).
“….a “Russian troll” is that somebody who states that Russia appears to be winning? Or is that a valid non judgemental statement based upon observation of reality?”
Nick+J
‘appears to be’ and ‘reality’ are two different things.
An Amercian commander in Vietnam was moved to say, “We won every battle but we lost the war!”
Russia isn’t even winning every battle. But even if Russia were winning every battle, Russia’s eventual defeat is inevitable.
Why?
Because as the Soviet Union found out in Afghanistan and the Americans found out in Vietnam, (and Afghanistan), an insurgent population will never stop fighting until the invader is driven out.
Come on Pat, you have got to do better than that. Where’s the Vietnam equivalence in the Donbass and Crimea? Their populations are predominantly Russian. And not surprisingly I doubt that they would tolerate some Galician guerilla thug on their territory.
In addition Pat neither of us know for sure whether the Russians wish to take over Ukrainian ethnic regions and get themselves into a Vietnam scenario. Look at the map, so far they haven’t. Who knows, I’d suggest that the Russians are not stupid.
….Where’s the Vietnam equivalence in the Donbass and Crimea? Their populations are predominantly Russian.. Nick=J
Predominantly Russian?
And here I was thinking that the concept of ‘Anschluss’ had long been out of fashion. It seems not.
The population of the Donbass and Crimea are not predominantly Russian, they are predominantly Russian speakers. There is a difference.
The people of Austria are German speakers, they are not German.
New Zealand, Australia and the US are predominantly English speakers, but are not English. Because the majority of New Zealanders speak the same language spoken in Australia, doesn’t mean we are Australians.
The joke has been made that America and Britain are divided by a common language.
There are some advantages in speaking the same language as your enemy.
This is an advantage that was seldom enjoyed by Vietnamese villagers against the US invaders.
Here are some Ukrainian villagers verbally abusing the Russian invaders ‘in Russian’.
‘It’s You That’s Fascist’: Russian Soldiers Not Welcomed In Ukrainian Village
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgmKygmkqSA&t=2s
Odessa is a predominantly Russian speaking city, but the Russian speaking population of Odessa are against a Russian takeover of their city, especially after suffering months of unprovoked and senseless Russian rocket attacks.
And last but not least, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is a native Russian speaker only learning to speak Ukrainian and English later in life.
When the Russian negotiators refused Ukraine’s peace terms, because of his fluency in Russian Zelensky was able to by-pass the Russian politicians in a video address the Russian people directly laying out Ukraine’s offers of peace. Which were; A commitment to hold a binding referendum on Ukraine becoming a neutral country. Ukraine also offered to allow Russian Forces to remain in the parts of the Donbas that the Russian forces had occupied before February 2022 invasion. In exchange for an agreement for further negotiations for a final settlement of these disputed areas.
Holding or sharing copies of the video of President Zelensky putting his peace offer to the Russian people was made a criminal offense in Russia with a a maximum penalty of 20 incarceration.
In the so called official ‘Peace Talks’ the Russian negotiators had rejected all of these peace offers by Ukraine and instead demanded Ukraine’s total surrender and ‘denazification’ (their euphemism for regime change). Russia also refused to agree to hold a ceasefire during the negotiations, deciding to keep pressing on with their invasion.
Pat, get your facts right. According to the census result the population of the Crimean Federal District is 2.2844 million people. The ethnic composition is as follows: Russians: 1.49 million (65.3%), Ukrainians: 0.35 million (15.1%), Crimean Tatars: 0.24 million (12.0%).
Arguing with you is pointless, you never check the facts behind your claims. Over and out.
What do you expect from an unironic Marxist? Reality is not their strong point