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Lenin's "The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War" | GZD Reading Group | Week 12, 2024
LPR/DPR have nothing to do with self determination because they are not nations. Russia and Ukraine are nations, both have their states, neither is fighting for self determination.
Donbass was not colonised by Ukraine, it's a region of Ukraine with significant Russian population which is not unusual along borders.
This is a border dispute, of course people living there are affected, but that doesn't make it a war for self-determination, otherwise all wars fought over territory would be wars of self determination.
Let's bring this back to the text, it's the reading group after all:
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the "slogan" of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things:
- that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or
- that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or
- that co-ordination and mutual aid are impossible* between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries.
The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the "theory and practice" of the defeat "slogan".
*I changed "possible" to "impossible" because that's what Lenin wrote in Russian! The quote makes no sense otherwise. Russian sources: one, two, three.
So point by point:
- This is not a revolutionary war, it's neither an anticolonial struggle nor a war for proletarian liberation. It's a proxy war between two capitalist oligarchies over geopolitical power and control over resources, it doesn't matter that one is the underdog and the other the hegemon. As such this war is inherently reactionary.
- A revolution stemming from this war is possible, perhaps more possible now than it was when Lenin wrote this.
- International cooperation and mutual aid are not only possible but much easier in modern times than they were when Lenin wrote this.
You're basically saying it's fine when a reactionary capitalist power invades their neighbours to control them, as long as it's detrimental to US interests. This is campism and it's completely incompatible with Marxism-Leninism.
Yes the war was provoked by the US and NATO but this doesn't absolve Russia from all responsibility and it definitely doesn't make it a "progressive struggle". It's undeniable Russia escalated the conflict 3 years ago and it wasn’t necessary - Russia absolutely had enough power in Ukraine to meddle and pull strings, hell do some assassinations, sanctions, etc.
What did we get out of this?
Over a million people dead, over 10 millions displaced, Ukraine is destroyed, the debt will surpass the GDP this year with state assets already sold off to foreign capital for chicken feed, it's the most landmined nation in the world (84% of landmine victims globally are civilians, with children accounting for 37%), it's polluted by depleted uranium which will cause cancers and birth defects for generations, its population reduced by a quartrer and will likely never reach its pre-war levels. You're sitting on the sidelines cheering cause you just want to see US snubbed.
But the opposite is happening, US has achieved its goals in this war. This war has accelerated the European descent into fascism, it made Europe dependent on the US energy, it triggered European countries to join NATO and to raise their defense budgets by billions. This is exactly what the US wanted and Trump is pushing NATO countries to increase their defense budgets even further.
Regardless. The question is whether this text by Lenin suggests that Russian communists should desire the defeat of Russia in this war so that they can turn it into a civil war, a revolution. The answer is yes, unambiguously. You can disagree with Lenin and that's fine, but that doesn't change what Lenin said.
the imperialist hegemon would benefit from a civil war in Russia
Again this is exactly the kind of thinking Lenin is railing against in the very text we're discussing.
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany.
This is lesser evilism. Sure, Russia has legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion, this doesn't make this war a "progressive struggle" though. Ultimately it is just as much about control over Ukrainian resources and Russia simply acts like any capitalist power would. Russia does support some progressive struggles around the world but Ukraine isn't it.
I think "The National Question" and "Inevitability of Wars Between Capitalist Countries" would be a great follow-up from "The Defeat of One's Government", those texts really compliment each other:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch06.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch07.htm
Combahee River Collective and Brixton Black Women's Group manifestos are great:
https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf
Just to note that Palestine is different because Palestinians are not waging an imperialist war but an anti-colonial war. This text doesn't apply to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and Palestinian communists are correct in supporting their government even if it is not progressive or communist:
The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British “Labour” Government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are “for” socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch06.htm
it gets incredibly complex when it’s about ascendant capitalist countries like Russia.
It really doesn't though. Russia was a backwards agrarian state barely on its way out of feudalism when Lenin wrote this, he even explicitly acknowledges it right in this text:
Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible.
If Lenin's thesis applied to WW1 Russia, it surely applies to SMO Russia.
would likely lead to a civil war, and now is not a good time for Russia to be destabilized
This is exactly the position Lenin critisises in this text. Lenin is quite clear:
A revolution in wartime means civil war
To add to it,
The hosting of EU-China summits traditionally alternates between Brussels and Beijing. The premier usually attends the summit in Brussels, and Xi hosts it in Beijing, but the EU believes the importance of this meeting — to commemorate half a century of diplomatic relations — means that China’s president should attend
So actually China is sending the exact same person who always attends the summit in Brussels. Which for EU means Xi snubbed them. Peak western diplomacy.
The point is, that's the only kind of liberal there is.
It's un fucking believable the biggest cartoon release in history is censored in the UK and Europe. Fucking freedom, can't event take the little one to see a cartoon cause it's about underdogs rising against their oppressors.
One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption
The value of producing algorythms vs producing servers themselves is hugely overblown, there's value transfer from one part of the global population to another.
We don't create value by shopping online, algorythms training by observing our behaviour does not change that.
the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator
It's not, that's the whole point. The money flows don't reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.
You are totally right but that's not what Yanis means by "cloud capitalism", which is what I was referring to.
"Cloud capitalism" is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you're talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced "unpaid labor", none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.
In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital:
Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.
The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algorithms. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.
From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent.
This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the "cloud". Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their "content", doesn't mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it's easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
Obligatory (and, sadly, real):
Absolutely. Going further, Putin is undeniably better for the Russian people and for the world than e.g. Navalny would've been: a literal neo-Nazi who called immigrants "cockroaches who should be exterminated" in a televised interview, and who's top aide met with MI6 offering to create a color revolution for 10-20 mln USD.
For as long as the West is attempting to install a Yeltsin 2.0 in Russia, Russian people will keep electing Putin or some "continuation Putin" if they know what's good for them.
Having said that, I don't consider modern Russia "anti-imperialist" as some other posters here, and I have no love for Putin. It's a bit like Assad, the least bad option under the imperialist assault of the USA and it's vassals.
I wouldn't put China and Russia in the same basket though
Very good and well thought answers, thank you. I upvoted both, no idea why would someone downvote a well researched comment, especially in the reading group / discussion thread.
I'll reply to both your comments here to keep it in one place. I'll need some time to think about what you wrote and go over your sources with a fine comb. Just a couple of questions now, and thank you in advance for the help:
It looks like the only source for amassment of troops is this, are there any other sources, at least a link directly to the Russian ministry of foreign affairs statement it references?
Regardless, amassment of troops can be a show of force and more often than not doesn't lead to an invasion, for instance Russia has amassed troops and held military exercises along Ukrainian border regularly since 2014.
As for preparatory shelling, your post has no sources at all, it only links this article which is not from OSCE and doesn't link to OSCE source. Do you have a link directly to OSCE report?
The only source is one unnamed guy saying this. I'd like to know who he is and what the context was cause most likely he was calling to kill separatists, not just ethnic Russians. That's horrible but no different from what you could hear some people say on Russian TV about separatists within Russia.
That's not enough to claim Zelensky's govt was going to ethnically cleanse Donbass.