Material World: Why they keep piling up manure: the psychology of wealth accumulation (2009)

The Material World column from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Money is like manure.  If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.

I can’t trace the original author, but it seems to be a popular motto among rich “philanthropists”. It has been attributed, in slightly variant wordings, to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, New York “socialite” Brooke Astor, Clint W. Murchison (chairman of Tecon Corporation) and Kenneth Langone (founder of The Home Depot).

Two questions spring to mind.

First, if these people so hate the smell of manure, why do they keep piling it up? After all, they are free to stop at any time.

Second, what do they want all that money for anyway? Surely a few hundred million should suffice to buy all the luxuries anyone could want? So why chase after the billions?

An addiction to extravagance

One answer is offered by Eric Schoenberg of Columbia Business School (on the site of Forbes magazine). Driving your first Rolls Royce is a fantastic experience, he explains, but as you get used to it you no longer enjoy it so much. So you have to look for new experiences, which for some reason are always more and more expensive.

 Presumably, an obsession with money spoils the enjoyment of anything that does not cost a lot of it. The result is an addiction to extravagance that reinforces the drive to make more money.

Kudos

Besides addiction to extravagance, the most common motive for accumulating wealth appears to be simply the desire to be admired by others. Kudos, however, depends less on absolute wealth than on place in the pecking order, as indicated by lists like the Forbes 400. Only Number One can feel fully confident of his superior status – and even he must beware of rivals overtaking him.

 Astonishing but true: many people honestly think – indeed, assume – that being rich is something worthy of pride and admiration. They consider having more money than anyone else the greatest of all conceivable human achievements. Never mind where the money came from, how it was acquired. To be a “winner” is glorious, to be a “loser” shameful and pitiable. They were brought up to think so, and can hardly imagine that anyone might be sincere in thinking otherwise.

 We might expect there to be an element of subtlety or mystery in the driving impulse at the core of a dynamic that spawns so much evil. Instead, we find something insufferably boring and trivial, the ultimate in banality.

The “philanthropists”

And yet the worship of wealth need not wholly exclude other social values. Many people feel that just being rich is not sufficiently glorious in itself: in addition, one should “do good”. As a result, some wealthy individuals wish also to be “great humanitarians and philanthropists”.

 There is actually a special business that makes money by selling “philanthropic” fame. For a fixed sum you can have a concert hall, museum, hospital, college or whatever named after you (or a relative of yours). For example, Brown University named its Institute of International Studies, where I used to work, in honour of Tom Watson of IBM in exchange for $25 million.

 The publicity given to large “philanthropic” donations suggests that in certain circles kudos may now depend on how much money you give as well as how much you have. It is like the potlatch among the Kwakiutl of western Canada, where the wealthy gain kudos by making generous gifts.

Guilt feelings?

While “philanthropy” is often just a means of cultivating a favourable public image, some wealthy people may be sincere in wanting to “do good”. Some authors even attribute the giving of certain individuals to guilt feelings about how their fortunes were made.

 Thus, it is claimed that Brooke Astor was ashamed of her family’s reputation as New York’s biggest slumlords. Carnegie, we are told, felt guilt over the workers killed in the suppression of the Homestead strike of 1892. Yet he also wanted “Carnegie Steel to come out on top” – and that feeling proved stronger than any sense of guilt.

 Ashamed or not, Astor gave nothing to the victims of her family’s rack-renting. Instead, she gave $200 million to cultural institutions. Similarly, Carnegie endowed the arts and academia, but gave nothing back to the workers who slaved in the heat of his steel mills at poverty line wages – twelve hours a day, every single day of the year except 4 July

 

 The ruthless capitalist precedes, makes possible and is vindicated by the “generous philanthropist”. The capitalist drives the system that causes the misery; the “philanthropist” then does a little to ameliorate that misery. Strangely enough, the capitalist and the “philanthropist” turn out to be one and the same person.

Piling up and spreading out

Why keep piling up manure just to spread it out again? It seems senseless – even if the manure does not end up exactly where it was before.

 Yes, it seems senseless when we focus on outcome. But when we shift our attention to process, it starts to make more sense.

 Piling up brings one sort of kudos, then spreading out brings another. One sort does not cancel out the other.

 Both piling up and spreading out give the satisfaction of exercising power, making decisions that affect millions of lives – on the sole qualification of the possession of wealth.

 So it all makes perfect sense. From a certain point of view.

Stefan

Letters: Globalisation (2009)

Letters to the Editors from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalisation

Dear Editors

“Is globalisation just another word for capitalism? The short answer is yes” (Book Reviews, Socialist Standard, July 2009).

 Globalisation is not the same as capitalism. It is a process occurring within capitalism. It has predominated in recent decades, but it was not predominant at earlier stages of the development of capitalism. It will not necessarily continue to be predominant.

 It is important to distinguish between capitalism and globalisation because many opponents of globalisation advocate not socialism but the restoration of national capitalism.

Stephen Shenfield (by email)

Reply:

That depends on what is meant by “globalisation”. In the middle of the nineteenth century Marx and Engels gave a vivid description that could equally apply to the present day:

“All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations” (Communist Manifesto, 1848).

This “golden age” of globalisation was brought to an abrupt end in 1914 with the start of the First World War and the abandonment of the international gold standard. Thereafter globalisation continued with the help of increased state intervention. Capitalism has an inherent tendency towards globalisation, driven by the competitive accumulation of profits. Globalisation is not a particular arrangement of institutions, for example deregulated markets, or a particular ideology such as neo-liberalism. Of course there are many opponents of “globalisation” who want a restoration of national capitalism, and we agree it is important to counter their faulty conception of what constitutes capitalism – Editors.

 

Fascist?

Dear Editors,

 

 I am writing in response to Adam Buick’s article about the BNP. Whilst I would whole-heartedly agree that the best way to deal with the BNP is to confront their ideology head-on, and debate with them if necessary in order to expose the paucity of their ideas, I do feel that it is naive to state that “the BNP is not a fascist party.” Their constitution may not be overtly fascist, and they may no longer espouse fascism in their public utterances, but it would hardly be a vote-winner if they did! Is it really believable that, if the BNP came to power, they would still guarantee free speech to their opponents, or meekly allow themselves to be voted out again a few years later? Er… Remember that Nick Griffin is on record as stating that “well-aimed boots and fists” will win out over “rational argument”!

 Regarding their claims not to be racist, I can only recall an incident from when I lived in east London 15-20 years ago. In those days, the BNP was more of a localised nuisance than a national threat. They used to expound their “policies” by means of small credit-card sized stickers stuck to lamp-posts or other available surfaces. “Hang Black Muggers” is one particular gem that springs to mind. In any case, I recall seeing two of these stickers side-by-side; one read, “Protect British Jobs – Ban Imports.” Alongside this (this still being the Apartheid era), was another which read, “Boycott the Boycott – Buy South African!”

 Ridiculous they may be, but these people are gradually obtaining positions of influence. It is important to expose them for what they are, but please do not underestimate them.

Shane Roberts, 

Bristol

Reply:

Irrespective of whether or not the BNP meets the historical criteria for being labelled fascist, their racism and extreme nationalism is bad enough – Editors.

 

Opportunism

Dear Editors,

 Before retiring, I was a member of the MSF union. (MSF stood for Manufacturing, Science and Finance). One month the union newsletter carried an article about how membership was being boosted by the recruitment of clergymen. I wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking that, as neither Manufacturing nor Science covered the activities of god’s representatives, could I assume their efforts were chiefly concerned with Finance? He didn’t reply.

 However, God apparently does have to take his finances very seriously. In common with numerous other multi-millionaires, his wealth is not what it was. And as always, it’s the workers who suffer when the bosses money isn’t rolling in fast enough. As a cost cutting measure, the Church of England is now looking at proposals to shed the jobs of some of my ex-fellow union members bishops and senior clergy.

 It is concerned that the value of its investment portfolio last year was only £4.4 billion. (Yes, 4.4 billion). In 2007 it was £5.7 billion. Another proposal under consideration which might save your local bishop from having to sign on, is to encourage congregations to be more generous with their donations. Although they currently provide the C of E with £600 million a year, it has been estimated that if they contributed 5 percent of their income, an extra £300 million a year would be generated.

 It has also been suggested, in all seriousness apparently, that priests should preach more about the value of generosity. The Rt Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, worried about his job perhaps, is quoted as saying “A time of recession is also a time of opportunity …”

Now that’s what I call opportunism.

Nick White, 

Luton

Who Are the Looters? (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans we look at what was a media obsession at the time.

What is the first priority of government in the wake of disaster? Saving lives? Looking after the survivors? Disposing of the dead and preventing epidemics? Think again. At best these things come second. The first priority of government in the wake of disaster is exactly the same as its first priority at other times: maintaining or restoring “order” – that is, its powers of coercion.

 Moreover, the first purpose of “order” is to protect and enforce property rights. From this point of view, the main threat posed by disasters like Hurricane Katrina is not the threat to human life and health, to the environment, or even to the economy. It is the threat of “chaos,” the threat to “order” and “civilization,” but above all to property, arising from the temporary breakdown of government.

 The “looter” symbolizes and dramatizes this threat, conjuring up images of Viking warriors on the rampage, barbaric violence, evil incarnate. Of course, these particular “Vikings” were all the more terrifying for being black. In the days that followed the hurricane, the media stirred up racist fears of the poor black people of New Orleans, spreading rumours (the fashionable expression is “urban myths”) later shown to be exaggerated out of all proportion, if not completely unfounded. For example, in the week following Katrina the number of murders was average for the city (four) (see Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, The Storm, pp. 124-8).

 All in all, we shouldn’t be too shocked or too surprised to learn that at 7 p.m. on Wednesday August 31, 2005 martial law was declared in the flooded city. Mayor Ray Nagin told police officers to stop rescuing people and focus solely on the job of cracking down on looters. This was just two and a half days after the hurricane made landfall and with thousands of people still stranded in attics and on rooftops.

 In one typically heroic encounter, police officers chased down a woman with a cart of supplies for her baby, handcuffed her – and then didn’t know what to do with her. All the jails were flooded. By the end of the week that problem was solved. A new makeshift jail was set up at the Greyhound bus terminal, with accommodation for 750 prisoners. This was the first institution in the city to resume normal functioning.

 True, it could have been worse. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 people were shot dead as looters while foraging in the wreckage of their own homes (see G. Hansen and E. Condon, Denial of Disaster, 1989). .Why did people loot? Or to use less loaded language, why did they take things that didn’t belong to them without paying for them?

 One man answered a TV interviewer who had asked him why he was looting by asking in turn: “Can you see anyone to pay?” The stores had been abandoned by their operators, but people still needed the things stored there. They needed food and fresh water, dressings for their wounds, new clothes to replace those ruined by exposure to the “toxic gumbo” of the floodwaters. Most of the so-called looting was of this kind – for the satisfaction of desperate need. In any sane society that would be a good enough reason for taking things.

 

Two paramedics from San Francisco who found themselves trapped in New Orleans wrote about the Walgreens store on the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the French quarter. The owners had locked up and fled. Milk, yogurt, and cheese could be seen through the window in the dairy display case, spoiling in the heat.

 Should we expect the parents of hungry and thirsty children not to break in, even at the risk of being pursued by the police? Would they have been good parents had they failed to do all in their power to see to their children’s needs? And what of storeowners who choose to let food go to waste rather than give it to needy neighbours? My first impulse is to wax lyrical about the sheer meanness of their behaviour. But probably they made no such conscious choice. As businesspeople they must have thought of the food and drink in their store not as products for assuaging hunger and thirst, but merely as commodities for profitable sale. If they could no longer be sold they might just as well go to waste.

 There were looters who acted not just for themselves and their families but for the benefit of the local community. For instance, the young men who collected medical supplies from a Rite Aid for distribution among elderly neighbours. Or the man who distributed food from a Winn-Dixie store to the 200 or so people holed up at the Grand Palace Hotel. “He was trying to help suffering people, and the idea that he was looting never crossed his mind.”

Socially responsible people of this kind are sometimes described as “commandeering” or “requisitioning” the goods they seize. That may well be how they view their own actions. In legal terms, however, only government officials, as representatives of duly constituted authority, have the right to commandeer or requisition property in an emergency. Private citizens who do so, whatever their motives, are engaging in theft and may be penalized accordingly.

 

Consider the feat of Jabar Gibson. This resourceful young man, purely on his own initiative, found a bus that was still in working order (the city authorities assumed that all buses had been ruined by the floodwater), took charge of it, filled it up with evacuees, and drove them to Houston. This was the first busload of evacuees to reach Houston after the storm (at 10 p.m. on Wednesday August 31). The police were forewarned that a “renegade bus” was on its way; if they had intercepted it Jabar might have been arrested and charged with theft. Fortunately he was in luck: he got through to his destination, to be greeted by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. Presumably his crime has been forgiven.

 Of course, not all looters were responding to real personal, family, or community needs. Some were simply taking a rare opportunity to acquire coveted though non-essential consumer goods. For others looting (and shitting in) fancy stores was a form of social protest or “empowerment,” an outlet for pent-up anger against the endlessly advertised world of affluence from which they felt excluded.  

Finally, there was a phenomenon that I propose calling “entrepreneurial looting.” Entrepreneurial looters gathered assets with a view to later sale. As they got stuff for free, they could sell at any price and still make a profit. For example, “urban foresters” went after valuable lumber. Other entrepreneurs sold looted liquor. The cases of large-scale organized looting by armed groups (their weapons also probably looted) that received so much publicity must, I think, have been of this character. 

Brinkley reports an interesting conversation between Lieutenant Colonel Bernard McLaughlin of the Louisiana National Guard and a man selling liquor at a makeshift bar. When McLaughlin tells the bartender he is shutting him down, the man replies that he is “just being entrepreneurial.” Why shouldn’t he make some money? McLaughlin gets angry at this appeal to “true American” values. “This is looting. You looted that … That’s a 15-year felony. That’s a 3-year mandatory minimum sentence.” The man submits and McLaughlin proceeds to smash his bottles one by one. And yet the preceding account makes clear that McLaughlin’s real objection to such bars has nothing to do with the provenance of the alcohol. He doesn’t want the locals drinking alcohol because it makes them more quarrelsome and disorderly as well as further dehydrating their bodies. Would he have allowed the bar to stay open if it was selling – or giving away – only looted fruit juice, soda, and bottled water? Legally, however, looting remains “a 15-year felony,” be its social consequences good or bad. Property is sacred.

 The bartender might also have tried to point out in his defence that historically all capitalist enterprise is based on looting. Early capitalism looted land and other resources from peasants (in Europe) and from indigenous peoples (throughout the Americas and other colonial territories).The looting even extended to the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of human beings, such as the ancestors of most victims of Hurricane Katrina. Marx called it the primitive accumulation of capital.

 Looting is as American as cherry pie; the looters of New Orleans are keeping up an old American tradition and should surely receive all due credit as good patriots. But… it depends on whose possessions you loot, doesn’t it?

Stefan.

(WSPUS)

(Sources: Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Understanding Katrina website (understandingkatrina.ssrc.org), Kaufman.)

Material world: Sliding Into The Abyss: The Gaza Ghetto (2008)

The Material World column from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

” In my childhood I suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto through labour camps to Buchenwald. I hear too many familiar sounds today.. I hear about ‘closed areas’ and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear ‘two-legged beasts# and I remember Untermenschen. I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission, and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder . . . Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood.” Shlomo Shmelzman (Ha’aretz, 11 August 1982)

In March a coalition of humanitarian and human rights organizations reported that the situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was “worse now than it has ever been since the start of Israeli military occupation in 1967 ” (www.oxfam.org.uk).

Under siege

Since June 2007 the strip has been under near-total siege – fenced and walled in on land, the five border crossings mostly closed, the shoreline patrolled by the Israeli navy. Together with the sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union, the siege has progressively paralyzed public utilities and economic activity. 

Without fuel to generate electricity, wells no longer pump water for drinking or irrigation and sewage is no longer treated. Bakeries have run out of flour. Gunboats sink any fishing boats that are still able to put to sea. The Israeli army conducts repeated cross-border raids with tanks, bulldozers and helicopters, demolishing houses, razing crops, shooting and abducting civilians (Dr. Elias Akleh,) ‘Gaza’s Imminent Explosion’ at mwcnews.net/content/view/23006/26).

 

The untreated sewage is dumped into the sea. The smell and the mosquitoes and other insects it attracts make life very unpleasant for people living near the shore. Another threat to health arises from the use of cooking oil as a substitute fuel in vehicles: its combustion releases carcinogenic hydrocarbons into the air.

Lack of food or lack of money?

As unemployment approaches 50 percent and food prices rise rapidly, the proportion of families dependent on food aid has reached 80 percent. On April 24, UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) announced that due to lack of fuel food aid is no longer being distributed. 

The problem, as Erik Johnson explains, “is not yet a lack of food, but of money to buy it” (“A Visit to Gaza” at www.roadjunky.com/article/1612). True, with no fertilizer or seeds being imported, there is no new planting, so the outlook for the future is grim. But there is fresh produce of the kind that is usually exported but cannot be exported now because of the siege. The trouble is that local residents do not have enough money to buy it all. So much of it – if the money system is allowed to function in its normally perverse manner – will go to waste in the midst of growing starvation.

Ghettoes: Europe, South Africa, Palestine 

Observers have called the Gaza Strip “the world’s largest open-air prison” (360 square kilometres), a cage, a concentration camp, now even a death camp. But a more accurate term for it, as well as for certain areas administered by the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, is a ghetto. As in the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied or late medieval Europe (the first was established in Venice in 1516), the inhabitants of the Palestinian ghettoes are confined to closed areas but not directly governed by the dominant power. They have their own semi-autonomous though dependent institutions. This usage requires only expanding the concept to cover rural and mixed rural-urban as well as urban ghettoes. 

Another parallel that many draw is with the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. While officially Israel indignantly rejects the comparison with apartheid, former Italian premier Massimo D’Alema revealed that Israeli PM Sharon had stated at a private meeting that he took the Bantustans as his model (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19256.htm). There is no conflict between the two parallels, as the Bantustan too may be regarded as a form of ghetto. 

Besides its basic political function of confining and controlling a stigmatized group, a ghetto may perform economic functions. It may provide capitalists with a captive and therefore cheap labour force. This used to be an important function of the Palestinian ghettoes. But as ‘closure’ has tightened they have lost this function. Palestinians have been replaced in menial jobs by workers from Romania, Thailand, the Philippines, and West Africa. The number of unemployed among Israelis has also increased (to about 200,000). So Palestinian ghetto workers are increasingly superfluous to the labour needs of Israel’s capitalist economy. This gives even more cause for concern about their fate.

Torment by sonic boom

One of the worst miseries inflicted on the hapless residents of the Gaza Ghetto is sonic booming. The Israeli Air Force flies U.S. F-16 fighter planes low and fast over the ghetto, generally every hour or two from midnight to dawn, deliberately creating sonic booms. The noise and the shockwaves prevent people sleeping, shake them up inside, make their pulses race, ears ring and noses bleed, cause miscarriages, crack walls, and smash windows. Children, especially, are terrified and traumatized: they suffer panic and anxiety attacks, have trouble breathing, wet their beds, lose appetite and concentration. Many are thrown off their beds, sometimes resulting in broken limbs. 

The sonic booming began in October 2005, after the Jewish settlements were evacuated from Gaza. Since then it has been periodically suspended but always renewed. An anonymous IDF source described its purpose as “trying to send a message, to break civilian support for armed groups.” And yet the first wave of booming was followed by the victory of Hamas in the Palestine Legislative Council elections of January 2006. (The US had ordered free elections, but neglected to give clear instructions on who to vote for. In view of the harsh punishment for voting incorrectly, that was most unfair.)

Stupid monkeys or malevolent humans?

A key test of intelligence in monkeys is whether the monkey goes on using a means that has repeatedly failed to achieve its purpose. By this criterion, Israeli generals and politicians appear to be very stupid, even for monkeys. But perhaps they are not so stupid. Perhaps their true purpose is something else. In the opinion of Professor Ur Shlonsky, that purpose is to “terrorise” the Palestinians and make “daily life … unbearable” for them in order to “encourage emigration and weaken resistance to future expulsions” (‘Zionist Ideology, the Non-Jews and the State of Israel,’ University of Geneva, 10 February 2002). Some do emigrate, but for the great majority that is not a viable option. As for expulsion, how will the Palestinians of Gaza be expelled? Will they be pushed into the Sinai desert? Will Egypt be compelled to accept them? It seems more likely that in the absence of strong countervailing pressure they will simply be abandoned to perish where they are, of disease, starvation and thirst – a direct consequence of Israeli, American and European policy.

Stefan.

Voices of the Russian and Ukrainian Left (2022)

From the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is an internet-based survey of what leftist organisations (or those perceived as such) in Russia and Ukraine are saying about the war in Ukraine.

Russia: the intra-system left

The main division in Russian politics is between the four parties ‘inside the system’ that on crucial issues are loyal to President Putin and other groups ‘outside the system’. Two of the intra-system parties – the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and Just Russia – are considered leftist. In foreign policy, however, all four intra-system parties adhere to various forms of Russian great-power nationalism.

The CPRF website (cprf.ru) presents ‘Information Materials’ on the war, dated 14 March and prepared by Vyacheslav Tetekin, a historian, former parliamentarian and member of the party’s Central Committee. He argues that ‘the events in Ukraine are yet another American war for control of the world’; the military operation is in ‘the historical interests of the country and the people’ while ‘sanctions will have a beneficial effect’ by making Russia less dependent on the West.

Nevertheless, a few prominent members of the CPRF have expressed opposition to the war, including three deputies of the State Duma and Yevgeny Stupin, a defence lawyer who sits on the Moscow City Council.

Also on March 14, Sergei Mironov, leader of Just Russia, calls for an international tribunal to try Ukrainian Nazis as well as ‘murderers and sadists from the Security Service of Ukraine’ for ‘crimes against peace and humanity’. The trial must be held in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions, for it was there that anti-Maidan activists were burnt alive on May 2, 2014. ‘The date will be set later’ – presumably after Odessa has been occupied (bit.ly/3D2L9gw).

An anti-war resolution

Part of the extra-system left has been more willing to oppose the war. On 24 February participants at a round table of left activists signed an anti-war resolution. On February 26 the Central Organizing Committee of the ‘social-democratic’ organisation ‘Left Socialist Action’ (LSA) officially approved the document and published it on their website (bit.ly/34Sy7W2).

The resolution condemns the decision to invade Ukraine, which it attributes to ‘the unhealthy foreign-policy ambitions of a narrow circle of persons in the country’s leadership’ and a wish to ‘distract attention from the domestic failures of Russia’s government’, demands ‘an immediate end to aggression against the fraternal Ukrainian people’ and calls upon ‘all citizens of Russia who hold left-wing and democratic views to conduct anti-war agitation’. The final point declares that ‘if the existing regime is unable to secure peace’ then ‘the whole socio-political system’ will have to undergo ‘radical change’.

Three of the resolution’s ten signatories are unaffiliated public figures:

• Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalisation and Social Movements
• pollster and columnist Grigory Yudin
• Sergei Tsukasov, member of the Council of Deputies for the Ostankino Municipal District (Moscow)

The other seven are:

• historian and lecturer Nikita Arkin (LSA)
• Yevgeny Stupin (CPRF)
• mathematics lecturer Mikhail Lobanov (trade union ‘University Solidarity’)
• historian Alexei Sakhnin (Left Front)
• Vladimir Avramchuk (Revolutionary Workers’ Party)
• Nikita Novichkov (Union of Marxists)
• musician, author and publisher Kirill Medvedev (Russian Socialist Movement)

It is unclear whether any organisation besides LSA has officially adopted the resolution. It does not appear on the website of any other group. Two of the signatories definitely do not represent the organisations to which they belong. Stupin does not represent the CPRF (see above). Nor does Sakhnin represent the Left Front, even though he was one of its founders and first coordinators. Left Front calls itself ‘a left-patriotic public organisation’ and supports the invasion of Ukraine. Its leader, Sergei Udaltsov, is a self-styled ‘Soviet patriot’ who managed the campaign of CPRF presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov in 2012.

Russia: Trotskyists

The Revolutionary Workers’ Party, which has a Trotskyist orientation, models its position with regard to the current war on Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ during World War One. According to their spokesman Vladimir Pisarev, the war between Russia and Ukraine is ‘imperialist on both sides’; however, Russia’s defeat is to be welcomed as it will bring the Putin regime to an end (bit.ly/3KYsK7i).

The Russian Socialist Movement is also Trotskyist. At the time of writing no commentary on the current war has appeared on its website (bit.ly/34UMysT).

Anarcho-syndicalists

On February 25, the Russian section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association issued the following statement in several languages:

‘The war has begun.

What people were afraid of, what they were warned about, what they did not want to believe, but what was inevitable – happened. The ruling elites of Russia and Ukraine, instigated and provoked by world capital, greedy for power and bloated with billions stolen from the working people, came together in a deadly battle. Their thirst for profit and domination is now paid with blood by ordinary people — just like us.

The first shot was fired by the stronger, more predatory and more arrogant of the bandits – the Kremlin. But, as always in imperialist conflicts, behind the immediate cause lies a whole tangle of disgusting reasons…. Today these (interstate conflicts) give rise to local wars. Tomorrow they threaten to turn into a Third World Imperialist War.

Whatever ‘humanist’, nationalistic, militaristic, historical or any other rhetoric justifies the current conflict, behind it there are only the interests of those who have political, economic and military power. To us, working people, pensioners, students, it brings only suffering, blood and death. Bombing of peaceful cities, shelling, killing people have no justification.

We demand an immediate cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of all troops to the borders and lines that existed before the start of the war.

We call on the soldiers sent to fight not to shoot at each other, and especially not to open fire on the civilian population.

We urge them to refuse en masse to carry out the criminal orders of their commanders.

STOP THIS WAR!

BAYONET TO THE GROUND!

We call on people in the rear on both sides of the front, the working people of Russia and Ukraine, not to support this war, not to help it – on the contrary, to resist it with all their might!

Don’t go to war!

Not a single ruble, not a single hryvnia from our pockets for the war!

Strike against this war if you can!

Someday — when they have enough strength — the working people in Russia and Ukraine will demand the full responsibility from all presumptuous politicians and oligarchs who set us against each other.

NO WAR BETWEEN WORKING PEOPLE OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE!

NO PEACE BETWEEN CLASSES!

PEACE TO THE HOUSES – WAR TO THE PALACES! 

(bit.ly/3CSUck3 – I have omitted the authors’ analysis of specific causes of the war. Following criticism by the Kharkov anarchists, they clarified and revised their analysis).’

Irina Shumilova

Assambleya (Assembly), online journal of the Kharkov anarchists, expresses general agreement with this statement (bit.ly/3MXsXtf) They also report an anti-war protest in the Russian city of Kostroma by law student Irina Shumilova, author of The Black Book of Capitalism. Her placard read: ‘If you’re a vegetable at home, you’ll be fertilizer abroad.’(Link).

In an interview with Spanish comrades, the Russian anarcho-syndicalists make it clearer that they oppose both sides in the war:

‘The current war is solely a confrontation between two states, two groupings of capitalists, two nationalisms. It is not for anarchists to choose which is the ‘lesser evil’. We do not desire victory for either side. All our sympathy is for the ordinary peaceful working people who are perishing today under gunfire, missiles and bombs’ (bit.ly/3N7h3Nh).

Ukraine: the Left

The ‘Old Left’ parties in post-Soviet Ukraine – the Communist Party of Ukraine, the ‘social-democratic’ Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Borotba (Struggle) – were oriented toward the former Soviet Union, Russia or ‘Eurasia’. Their offices were destroyed by Ukrainian nationalists during the Maidan of 2014 and they were banned in 2015 by the ‘de-communisation’ law.

A Trotskyist group called the Party of Social Revolution managed to survive the upheaval by professing support for the Maidan protests despite their liberal and nationalist character and by giving their organisation a more ‘respectable’ name — ‘the Social Movement’ (bit.ly/3Ip4w48). Apart from the anarchists, this seems to be the only viable leftist organisation in Ukraine today. In the current war they support ‘the fight of the Ukrainian people for self-determination’ but are opposed to NATO (tinyurl.com/mu3sxs6m). Some small leftist groups are among the eleven parties suspended by the Zelensky government on 20 March 2022 for alleged ties to Russia.

Anarchists in Ukraine

While the Ukrainian Left is weak, anarchists have a significant presence in the country, partly due to interest in the legacy of Nestor Makhno and his ‘insurgent army’ during the Russian civil war.

In 2014 the Ukrainian anarchist movement split in two. One group gave whole-hearted support to the Maidan protests and then helped the new authorities fight the separatists in the Donbass. The other – smaller – group tried to formulate a more ‘internationalist’ position.

Three tendencies are now identifiable within the anarchist movement:

• ‘National-anarchists’, such as ‘Nihilist’, ‘Revolutionary Action’ and the Arsenal football fan club in Kiev and ‘Autonomous Resistance’ in Lviv, lend full support to the Ukrainian state and are willing to join its armed forces. They even man an ‘anarchist battalion’.
• The Kharkov anarchist group ‘Assembly’ exemplifies those who condemn both sides, though they do consider Russia a more dangerous and reactionary state than Ukraine. They do not fight or urge others to fight, but work to help the civilian population, especially victims of bombing and bombardment.
• ‘Black Flag’ in Kiev and Lviv occupies an intermediate position. They blame the war on capitalism and on the rulers of both states, but participate in ‘territorial self-defence’ – local volunteer light-infantry units.

It may seem strange for people to claim to be nationalists and anarchists at the same time, inasmuch as nationalism is usually considered the doctrine of the nation-state while anarchists are against the state. However, ‘national-anarchists’ distinguish between the nation-state, which they oppose, and the national community, which they value. They regard the nation-state and the national community as separable. Thus even if the Ukrainian state is defeated they hope to continue ‘autonomous resistance’ on behalf of the national community.

Stefan

Kharkov under bombardment (2022)

From the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kharkov is Ukraine’s second city, with a population of 1.4 million. Being in the country’s northeast, just 25 miles from the Russian border, its northern and eastern districts soon came under heavy shelling. The website of the Kharkov anarchist group ‘Assembly’(assembly.org.ua) describes life in the city at the end of February and beginning of March.

By March 3 the daily output of goods and services in Kharkov had fallen by about half. Many factories had come to a standstill. Many stores had closed their doors. Some firms were still paying wages to their workers, but many were not. Tens of thousands had taken shelter underground in the thirty metro stations, with the ‘Heroes of Labour’ station alone accommodating over 2,000.

How did people behave in these dire circumstances?

There were many who exploited the situation for their own profit. The ‘Assembly’ website provides a blacklist of employers who used the threat of unemployment to cut wages, lengthen hours and impose harsher working conditions. Taxi drivers demanded extra payment over and above the fixed tariffs. Thieves had a field day.

However, there were also many who volunteered to help others. Some voluntary efforts were initiated by the city administration. On February 28, for example, the mayor visited a bakery, where he called for volunteer drivers. But there was also a wide range of grassroots initiatives.

Oleg and Yulia Koval lived in Northern Saltivka, a residential district whose location on the northeastern edge of the city exposed it to especially heavy bombardment. They could have just got out and saved themselves. That would have been the ‘sensible’ thing to do. But instead they stayed on in order to help fellow residents evacuate, ferrying them to the railway station and supplying them with food and medicine. One day Oleg returned from a shopping trip to see that their home was now a pile of rubble. In the rubble he found his wife’s body. He resolved to continue the work in honour of her memory.

The ’Assembly’ website displays several photos of volunteers transporting, preparing or cooking food for free distribution or giving food away on the street or inside metro stations (where volunteers also set up public toilets). A man from the countryside with two boxes full of apples, handing them out to passersby. Packages of chicken, ground meat and liver being distributed from the back of a truck in the vicinity of Kharkov airport. Kitchen workers at the ‘Mafia’ Restaurant cooking meals for children’s hospitals and the military.

And advertising posters that inform the public what goods a firm has to give out, inviting would-be recipients to call so-and-so. Thus, ‘Mr. Bourbon Coffee’ café can provide 100—150 litres of distilled water a day. And there are also volunteers who bring food and medicine to people unable to leave home.

Unfortunately, the website does not explain how all this production and distribution for use – the commentators call it ‘disaster communism’ – came about. Did the owners of the firms involved give their consent? Or had the workers taken control after the owners fled the country?

A few of the photos on the website reveal a less inspiring aspect of life in besieged Kharkov. One shows a man tied to a lamppost and with the word marodyor scrawled across his face. Others show men lying half-naked on the ground, tied up in rather uncomfortable postures and with the same word painted on their backs.

We are not told exactly what these men had done to deserve such humiliation and discomfort or who had imposed their punishment on them. Marodyor can mean looter, marauder or – more colloquially – profiteer. It is unlikely that it means ‘looter’ because public opinion in Kharkov does not condemn theft or looting as such. Indeed, we are told that an elderly woman who shoplifted food right in front of a surveillance camera became ‘heroine of the day’. It was alright to steal food if you were hungry. And it was alright to loot from abandoned stores or street kiosks in order to distribute the stuff freely to others. Otherwise, after all, it would only have gone to waste. Presumably looting became unacceptable when conducted with a view to selling the loot and making a profit out of it.

The experience of Kharkov under bombardment confirms the conclusions drawn by writers who have investigated the social impact of other disasters – for instance, Rebecca Solnit in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Penguin Books, 2010). Disaster sometimes brings out the worst in people, but very often it brings out the best – a greatly enhanced willingness to cooperate and help others. ‘Human nature’ is not an insuperable obstacle to socialism. On the contrary, socialism is the natural way of life of our species.

Stefan

Material World: Dedicated to serving the rich: the reality of aid (2010)

The Material World column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“CARE: Dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.” So reads a wall poster at the Haiti offices of the “humanitarian” agency CARE International. The offices are housed in a mansion in a wealthy district up in the hills above Port-au-Prince, at a hygienic distance from the poor people they are “dedicated to serve”.

Well, you can’t expect the respectable ladies and gentlemen who administer aid to live and work down in the filth and stench of the shantytowns. Of course, you can’t blame the poor for the lack of sewers, but still…

The aid administrators realise that they need the assistance of people who do know something about the poor and are capable of interacting with them. So they hire specialists called anthropologists, who acquire the requisite knowledge and skill as trainees by living for a time among poor people (formally in order to gather material for their Ph.D. theses).

But some trainees “go native”. They come to sympathise with their temporary neighbours and feel the urge to talk about inconvenient realities that they have discovered. This annoys the administrators, who label them “idealists” and say they have “a negative attitude”. It would be quite unsuitable to appoint them to responsible positions in aid agencies.

An eye-opening book has just appeared, written by just such a chatterbox: Timothy T. Schwartz, Travesty in Haiti. No publisher would touch it, so he published it himself.

Charity for the rich

Very little aid ever reaches the poor, let alone the poorest of the poor. This is partly due to the practical difficulty that the poorest areas also have the poorest infrastructure (roads, storage facilities, etc.). But mainly it is because those who are supposed to distribute the aid sell most of it and pocket the proceeds.

In some cases, aid goes directly to the rich. Schwartz describes an “orphanage” run by an American reverend where the “orphans” have parents who could easily afford to provide for them. The place is really an elite boarding school. Meanwhile, naïve churchgoers back in the States, most of them ordinary working people, fork out to support the “poor orphans” they have “adopted”, send them gifts, and even pay for their college education. The poor in rich countries give charity to the rich in poor countries.

The more aid, the more misery

Schwartz’ most important finding is this. When the flow of food aid into Haiti increases, the overall result is that malnutrition becomes more widespread, not less. Why? The great majority of Haitians are small farmers, dependent on selling food to meet their non-food needs. Typically, natural disaster prompts the decision to send food aid, but by the time it arrives the emergency is over and the country may well be right in the middle of a bumper harvest. The effect is to drive prices down further, causing enormous misery throughout the rural areas.

It seems commonsense. If you see hungry people on TV, so you give money to buy and send them food. But capitalism has a perverse logic of its own that has nothing to do with commonsense. Reactions that ignore that logic are liable to do more harm than good.

Some experts and charities – notably, Oxfam – advocate aid in the form of cash transfers. Then food for distribution can be bought locally instead of imported, strengthening rather than undermining the local peasant economy. Local supply would also be quicker and easier to organise.

Nevertheless, most aid agencies, and especially those like CARE that are dependent on Western governments, keep on shipping in food. They even require their national affiliates to cover operating expenses by selling part of the food received locally (“monetised food”).

Expanding export markets

US overseas food aid began in 1954. Until recently it was openly justified as a foreign policy tool and means of promoting American business interests. In particular, it has expanded export markets for US agriculture. Dumping surpluses abroad has helped the US and the EU maintain prices and profits on their domestic markets.

According to the website of the US Agency for International Development, aid was used to transform Egypt from a food exporter in competition with the US into a net importer of food with a low-wage industrial sector. Since the 1980s Western governments and financial institutions pursued the same strategy in Haiti. The country was turned from an exporter into an importer of rice, sugar, and other crops, while 100,000 peasants abandoned the land to work for $2 a day in assembly plants, mostly US-owned, making T-shirts, jeans, and the like for the American market. This new industrial sector has now also largely collapsed, leaving Haiti to depend increasingly on the Columbian drugs trade.

A striking illustration of the commercial interests underlying aid is the fate of the Haitian pig. Farmers used to rely on a small black pig well adapted to conditions in rural Haiti. USAID had these pigs exterminated under the pretext of fighting a swine fever epidemic. The Haitian pig was replaced with a large white pig from Iowa that had to be fed large quantities of imported US corn.

Do they know?

Do the aid administrators understand what they are doing? It is clear from Schwartz that they understand very well. When he “reveals” his sensational findings, they do not argue that he is wrong. They just advise him that if he wants a job he should stop saying things that the US government does not want to hear. They know who they really serve.

Stefan.

In Material World February issue we didn’t mean to write that the poll showed that people with high incomes were more likely to be favourable to the word “socialism” than those with low but the opposite, so:

“Women are slightly more likely than men to prefer ‘socialism’; people with low incomes (under $40,000 per year) more than twice as likely as people with high incomes (over $75,000); and blacks almost twice as likely as whites, with equal proportions favouring ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ (31 percent each).”

Capitalism and Michael Moore (2010)

Film Review from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like Michael Moore’s other films, Capitalism: A Love Story is brilliant in its way, hard-hitting and funny. He strips away the lies and hypocrisy of “public relations” propaganda to expose the ruthless predators who dominate our society and profit from the misery of working people.

And at the same time he makes us laugh. So far so good. It’s fairly clear what Michael Moore is against. But what he is for? He doesn’t seem to know himself, as he admits in a recent newspaper interview:

“What I’m asking for is a new economic order. I don’t know how to construct that. I’m not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the [wealthiest] 1 percent. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without first asking the question, is this for the common good?” (Guardian, 30 January).

We too want democracy to extend to all spheres of social life. For us that’s what socialism is – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole community. But genuine democracy will not be achieved by relying on economists or other supposed experts to design it.

By its very nature, democracy must be created by a conscious majority. Michael Moore seems to be saying that in his “new economic order” the wealthiest 1 percent will still exist, even though they will no longer have all the say. He also assumes that there are still going to be “business decisions”. But business decisions are about making money, not serving the common good. Any firm run by managers who care too much about ethics and morality will soon go bust – unless the managers get sacked first!

On one key point, he is right. If the situation he exposes so well is to change, it really does require a “new economic order”. An end to production for profit. The alternative is a society in which the means for producing what we need are owned in common and run democratically. A society in which productive activity is no longer “business” but simply cooperation to satisfy human needs.

This is much more than he offers on his website (www.michaelmoore.com). He says nothing there about any kind of “new order”. It’s all about campaigning for various reforms. These may well be of benefit to working people in the short term, but as they still leave capitalism in place there would always be pressure to reverse any gains made. Worst of all, and despite Michael Moore’s evident disillusionment with Obama, he urges readers to work for change through the Democratic Party – a recipe for endless failure and frustration.

One last point. Michael Moore talks only about changing things in the United States. This national focus makes it impossible even to conceive of a fundamentally new society. That’s because nowadays capitalism is a highly integrated world system and can only be replaced at the global level. It is clear to us that society urgently needs a worldwide system upgrade… from capitalism to socialism!

- leaflet for handing out to those going to see the film.

The almost-war in Ukraine (2022)

Blogger's Note:

A version of this article originally appeared on the WSPUS website as long ago as the January 30th of this year, and events in the past week have obviously overtaken both the article and its title. The March issue of the Socialist Standard was going to press when Russia invaded the Ukraine.

From the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

They told us that 16 February would be the day that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. But diplomatic discussions continued. What had happened? Did Putin really intend to go to war? Or were what appeared to be war preparations merely a means to exert pressure and win concessions from the West?

Developments within Ukraine

Ukraine has been in the grip of civil war since the coups of 2014 — the Ukrainian-nationalist coup in Kiev and the west and the counter-coup in the east.

The split between western and eastern Ukraine goes back to the 19th century, when Ukraine was divided between the Austro-Hungarian and tsarist empires. Eastern Ukraine, where the country’s industry is concentrated, is mainly Russian-speaking and depends on economic ties with Russia, while western Ukraine is oriented toward Europe. Yanukovych, who was president in 2010—2014, tried to hold Ukraine together by developing closer economic relations with both the EU and Russia, but the EU insisted that he choose – he could not do both. As a representative of the east Ukrainian capital and its Party of Regions, he could not afford to break ties with Russia. This placed him at loggerheads with west Ukrainians, who aspired to join an idealized ‘Europe’, and in 2014 he was overthrown.

The ‘Maidan’– the movement that overthrew Yanukovych – began with peaceful mass protests against corruption, but developed into a violent struggle between riot police and extreme Ukrainian nationalists. The regime that emerged, with the support and guidance of Western politicians and propagandists, was semi-fascist in spirit despite a thin democratic veneer (for a fuller analysis see ‘Ukraine: popular uprising or fascist coup?’ tinyurl.com/mr3m689x).Its hostility to ethnic Russians and citizens of mixed ethnic identity and a massacre of Russian activists in Odessa struck terror in the hearts of easterners, who responded with the ‘anti-Maidan’ – an uprising against the Maidan.

The anti-Maidan also began with peaceful demonstrations and even shared certain themes with the Maidan, such as a concern with corruption. But it too was taken over by militaristic nationalists – Russian nationalists in this case. The process went furthest in the two easternmost provinces, where there emerged breakaway mini-states called the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic, supported and manipulated by the Russian government and Russian nationalist organizations.

The new Ukrainian government conducted an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ to crush the DPR and LPR and reincorporate their territory. The civil war dragged on spasmodically, without decisive results. Two million people fled the war zone and became refugees.

Whole communities in parts of Ukraine resisted the draft, unwilling to sacrifice their sons in a cause of no concern to them. Immunity to nationalist propaganda is especially characteristic of people with mixed ethnic identities, such as Ukrainians long resident in Russia and children of Russian-Ukrainian marriages. Most people in eastern Ukraine see no contradiction in identifying simultaneously as Russian and Ukrainian (in many places they speak a mixture of the two languages called Surzhyk). When interviewed, residents of the war zone are inclined to blame both the Ukrainian and the Russian government.

Russia and its ‘near abroad’

A key security requirement for Soviet leaders was that the USSR be surrounded by a belt of states that were either allies or at least ‘friendly neutrals’ (like post-war Finland). ‘Friendship’ entailed willingness to develop economic and cultural ties, consult regularly with the Kremlin and refrain from offensive propaganda campaigns. Above all, it meant not joining hostile military alliances like NATO.

This attitude was inherited by leaders of post-Soviet Russia, except that now the belt of friendly neighbours had to consist mainly of other post-Soviet states. Due to their shared Soviet and tsarist heritage, these states are felt to be less ‘foreign’ than countries beyond the old borders. The two zones came to be referred to as ‘the near abroad’ and ‘the far abroad’.

It is no longer regarded as essential that all former Soviet republics belong to this ‘friendly neighbourhood’. It is now accepted as a fact of life that the Baltic states are going to remain ‘unfriendly’. However, such tolerance does not extend to the three large inner states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Belarus and Kazakhstan remain ‘friendly’ but since 2014 Ukraine has not behaved in a ‘friendly’ manner.

This has an immediate impact on Moscow’s approach to border issues. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the internal administrative borders between its ‘union republics’ suddenly turned into interstate borders, even though they did not closely reflect the pattern of ethnic settlement. The international community nonetheless soon began to treat them as no less inviolable than any other interstate borders.

The Kremlin too accepted these borders, but not unconditionally. Borders with ‘friendly’ neighbours were accepted, however anomalous they might seem, because border issues were not felt to be important enough to justify spoiling good relations by raising them. Thus, Russia has never objected to the inclusion in Kazakhstan of large areas in the north and east with predominantly Russian-speaking populations, and has lent no support to attempts at secession by Russian nationalists in those areas. Nor did the Kremlin contest Russia’s border with Ukraine until 2014, when the overthrow of Yanukovych was quickly followed by the annexation of Crimea, thereby reversing Khrushchev’s transfer of the peninsula from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine. For the Kremlin, the anti-Russian stance of the new government in Kiev also justified support of the secessionist ‘people’s republics’ in eastern Ukraine.

NATO expansion

The eastward expansion of NATO, especially when it extends to the ‘near abroad’ and right up to Russia’s borders, is a bitter grievance of Russia’s power elite. That is because it violates the security requirement of a ‘friendly neighbourhood’ deeply embedded in their psyche. It is also because it violates the verbal promises made by Western politicians to Gorbachev that if he allowed Germany to unite and united Germany to remain in NATO then NATO would not expand ‘an inch to the east’. These promises were ‘forgotten’ under pressure from American arms manufacturers, whose sales were flagging due to improved relations with Russia and who sought new markets in Eastern Europe. (For a detailed account see Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine, Verso 2021, Chapter 6.)

Hence the feeling of Russian leaders that Russia – and they personally — have been deceived, swindled and humiliated. It is surely understandable that there should eventually come a time when as a matter of self-respect they say ‘enough is enough’ and ‘take a firm stand’ in defence of core state interests as they perceive them.

Russia first ‘took a firm stand’ against NATO expansion when it invaded Georgia in 2008, partly in order to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. As Georgia has still not joined NATO, that war – together with Russia’s subsequent recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — may have achieved its purpose, although Georgia may have remained outside NATO even without Russian intervention. The invasion of Georgia provided a precedent for the confrontation with Ukraine when it adopted the goal of joining NATO.

The recent crisis

Thanks in large part to Western arms supplies, Ukrainian forces in the east grew strong enough to make it seem likely that they would succeed in breaking the stalemate and penetrate core areas of the DPR and LPR. Residents of these areas feared what might then happen to them, especially as the forces facing them contained Nazi formations like the Azov Battalion. Russian commentators too envisioned a scenario like the massacre of Moslems at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, in which case Russia would be morally obliged to intervene.

Russian spokesmen often promised that Russia would not be the first to violate the status quo. However, a major Ukrainian offensive against the DPR and LPR would be regarded as a violation of the status quo and Russia would respond forcefully to any such ‘provocation’. Kiev took the view that it has a perfect right to move against secessionists on its own territory. So each side would be able to blame the other for starting a war.

However, there was no guarantee that hostilities would be confined to eastern Ukraine. The concentration of Russian forces in southern Belarus, close to the border with Ukraine and just 120 kilometres from Kiev, prefigured a possible blitzkrieg to install a ‘friendly’ government.

Many signs appeared in recent weeks of a deep division within Russia’s power elite over the expediency of invading Ukraine. Two senior army officers, one retired from the defence ministry and the other from the General Staff, publicly warned against the prospect of protracted occupation of a hostile population. The main threats to Russia, they declared, are internal ones like corruption and demographic decline. Prominent civilian experts likewise argued – as Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, was quoted on St. Petersburg Online (fontanka.ru) – that ‘any analysis shows that war is to Russia’s disadvantage’.

The prospect of cancelation of Nord Stream, the pipeline through the Baltic Sea to bring Russian natural gas to Germany, is likely to have pulled the huge gas corporation Gazprom into the anti-war camp.

The main advocates of war seem to have been officials of the security services, more concerned with the threat to the regime posed by Colour Revolutions than with broader national interests.

Even the most ‘democratic’ governments, having decided on war, suppress public expression of anti-war opinion. So the fact that it was possible during the recent crisis in Russia openly to oppose any resort to war shows that Putin was not committed to military action. He may have been keeping his options open until the moment when a decision had to be made. (The high level of mobilization of Russian troops could not be sustained for long: they had to be set in motion fairly soon or else demobilized.) Or he may have never intended to go to war at all, resolved in advance to content himself with whatever gains the crisis might yield.

Russian gains

The Ukrainian crisis was accompanied by intensive diplomacy, involving mainly Russia, the United States and major European member states of NATO (Britain, France, Germany). Much of this diplomacy remains secret. But clearly NATO has agreed to take some account of Russian security concerns and revive the stalled process of European arms control. On January 12, after a hiatus of two and a half years, the NATO—Russia Council reconvened in Brussels.

Western governments have affirmed the continuing validity of the NATO—Russia Founding Act of 1997 and the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015. Kiev and its unconditional supporters inside NATO have been lobbying hard to consign these agreements to oblivion, thereby releasing Kiev from such unpleasant obligations as granting a special status to the areas controlled by the People’s Republics.

Russia has obtained no guarantee against Ukraine joining NATO, but it is conceivable that France or Germany, which take pride in maintaining a certain autonomy from the US, secretly promised to block Ukraine’s admission – requiring, as it does, a consensus of existing members.

The Russian parliament (State Duma) is now asking Putin to recognize the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as independent states, maybe as a step towards their subsequent annexation to Russia (as happened to Crimea).

Our attitude

Socialists need feel no great temptation to take sides in disputes between Russia and Ukraine. In both countries wealth is concentrated in the hands of wealthy capitalists known as ‘oligarchs’ who own the mass media and control political parties. (One difference is that Russia under Putin, unlike Ukraine, has acquired a state strong enough to limit the rivalry and political power of the oligarchs.) Corruption remains rampant in both countries, despite the best efforts of Maidan and anti-Maidan activists. Human and democratic rights exist on paper, but just try to exercise them and you will find yourself at the mercy of nationalist vigilantes and paranoid security agencies. Fascist groups are actively engaged on both sides. The anti-nationalist Left is weakened by the depth of ethnic and religious divisions and the continued association of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ with the Soviet past.

As always, we urge our fellow workers in Russia and Ukraine to reflect. Where do their true interests lie? With ‘their own’ oligarchs and politicians? With the oligarchs and politicians on the other side? Or with one another?

Stefan

Uprising in Kazakhstan (2022)

From the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The latest wave of protests began in Janaozen (sometimes spelled Zhanaozen), an oil town in western Kazakhstan. It was here that police shot down unarmed strikers in December 2011. Ten years later, the oilmen again struck for higher wages, better working conditions and the right to organise. The immediate triggers were the layoff in December of 40,000 workers by the main local employer, Tengiz Chevron Oil (75 percent US-owned), followed on New Year’s Day by the doubling of the price of the liquefied natural gas used in vehicles.

On 2 January a protest meeting started in the main square. Next day the strike began to spread. Roads were blockaded. By 4 January all the oilmen of western Kazakhstan were on strike; in the evening they were joined by the coalminers and metalworkers of central Kazakhstan. Non-stop mass meetings were now in progress in some dozen cities. New demands appeared, such as lowering the pension age, but the emphasis remained on ‘bread-and-butter’ issues.

On 5 January mass meetings began in the Russian-speaking cities of northern and eastern Kazakhstan. The protests now encompassed the entire country, with the exception of the capital of Nur-Sultan – previously Akmola and then Astana before being renamed in honor of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Politicisation

The last few days before the crackdown saw a politicisation of the protests. Political as well as economic demands were now raised, including an end to arrests, release of political prisoners, the resignation of President Tokayev, Nazarbayev’s successor, and the final departure of Nazarbayev himself, no longer president but still head of the Security Council of Kazakhstan. Some called for restoration of the Constitution of 1993, which had divided power between president and parliament more equally than later ‘super-presidential’ constitutions. Others demanded a purely parliamentary system with no executive presidency.

It seems that at this time there were also attempts to form committees and councils to coordinate the protest movement, and also a ‘Council of Elders’.

It is worth noting what sorts of demands were not raised. In sharp contrast to the mass protests in Ukraine, there were no demands to change the foreign policy orientation of the country. Nor did any of the demands raised concern ‘ethnic’ issues such as the relative status of the Kazakh and Russian languages (Kazakh is the ‘state language’ but both are ‘official languages’).

What happened in Almaty?

Although protestors in several cities did topple statues of Nazarbayev or occupy government buildings, protests in most places were peaceful: they did not entail violence against people. However, events in Almaty developed very differently.

Almaty is the biggest city in Kazakhstan. During the Soviet period and the first few years of independence it was the republic’s capital. Even after the capital was moved to Akmola/Astana in 1997, Almaty remained the country’s main commercial, cultural and intellectual centre.

On the night of 4 January, protestors marched to the main square of Almaty, where they managed to push back the police lines and gain the upper hand. Some policemen were seen to flee or even change sides. Stores were looted, bank branches trashed, police cars burned. There were also raids on armouries – a fact that helps explain the emergence of armed insurgents who that night seized control of Almaty International Airport and a number of suburban districts.

The protestors dispersed in the early morning hours of 5 January, but returned about 10am. Over the course of the day, both the city administration building and the police headquarters were stormed and set on fire.

The insurgency in Almaty lasted no longer than 24 hours – from nightfall on 4 January to nightfall on the 5th. It appears that at this time President Tokayev was afraid of losing all control over the situation. He announced a series of concessions: he made the government resign, removed Nazarbayev, lowered the price of gas, and promised to provide assistance to the poorest families. This was also when he appealed for help to other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Russia promised to send troops, as did Belarus and Armenia.

As it turned out, Tokayev was able to defeat the insurgency without the aid of foreign troops. On the night of 5 January, police units regained control of central Almaty, the airport and the suburban districts that the insurgents had seized the night before.

The plane carrying the first ‘peacekeepers’ from Russia landed on 6 January. Their trucks and armoured vehicles trundled around the streets of Almaty. Now and then residents could hear what sounded like gunfire. On 16 January the last Russian troops flew home.

Who were the organisers?

While most strikers and protestors came from the regular workforce, the looters and insurgents in Almaty were ‘marginals’ – resentful young men from the countryside who live in certain suburban districts and are unemployed or occupy poorly paid casual jobs. But armed insurgency – and especially seizure of the airport, 15 kilometres from the city – requires a certain amount of organisation, planning and preparation. So who were the organisers?

Putin and Tokayev point the finger at ‘criminals’ and ‘radical Islamic terrorists’ backed by unidentified forces outside Kazakhstan. While this may help explain disturbances elsewhere in Central Asia, especially in Uzbekistan, it is highly implausible in the case of Kazakhstan. Although most Kazakhs are nominally Moslem, Islam lacks deep roots in Kazakh society and political Islam has very little influence. The purpose of resorting to this bogeyman may be to justify a harsh response to the protests in the eyes of Westerners and Chinese who know little about the people of the region and are influenced by racial stereotypes. This effect is enhanced by blurring the distinction between armed insurgency and peaceful protest and by ignoring the fact that members of all of Kazakhstan’s ethnic groups participated in the protests, including traditionally Christian Slavs.

A Russian colleague who knows Kazakhstan well has a much more plausible explanation in terms of clan politics. Why, he asks, did Nazarbayev move the capital to Akmola in 1997? The official reasons were that Almaty is susceptible to earthquakes and too close to the border with China. He suggests another reason: the danger to Nazarbayev’s position posed by hostile local clans. The recent insurgency may have been organised by the heads of these clans, who are at the same time small or medium businessmen and therefore dispose of the necessary resources.

Be that as it may, the events in Almaty point to the need to investigate possibly significant regional differences in how the uprising developed and whose interests it served.

Another Colour Revolution?

The leaders of authoritarian post-Soviet regimes in Russia and its close allies live in mortal fear of so-called ‘Colour Revolutions’ of the kind that have overthrown similar regimes in other post-Soviet states. These revolutions, though justified in terms of democracy and human rights, are in fact carried out on the initiative and in the interests of Western powers.

The EU and the US were indeed deeply involved in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. However, there is hardly any sign of such involvement in the uprising in Kazakhstan.

True, there is a party called Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK), led by a group of anti-Nazarbayev Kazakh businessmen and former state officials in exile in France. It stands for parliamentary democracy and genuine – as opposed to crony – capitalism. The DCK website (bit.ly/3tzU6Ly) focuses extensively on the gross corruption of Nazarbayev and his relatives (he, his daughter and his son-in-law are all billionaires). Apparently DCK has used social media to encourage and facilitate protest inside Kazakhstan. It is hard to judge its impact. Perhaps its leaders have connections in Western intelligence agencies.

What seems more significant is that Western oil companies with investments in Kazakhstan have been demanding the restoration of ‘order’. Strangely enough, they don’t like strikes and demands for higher wages. The main interest of Western capitalists in Kazakhstan is continued easy access to its vast natural resources. It doesn’t bother them if Kazakh politicians grab a hefty chunk of the proceeds for themselves. What else is new?

As for drawing Kazakhstan fully into the Western sphere of interest, this is not currently viewed as a realistic goal. No one is talking about admitting Kazakhstan to NATO or the EU. For Kazakhstan, as for Central Asia more broadly, there are just two candidates for hegemon – Russia and China.

Aftermath

Gradually but surely, things are returning to normal – or so the Astana Times assures us. The official figure for the number of people killed, probably much too low, is 164. Some 10,000 people have been arrested. Where are they and what will happen to them?

A new government has been appointed. Not quite as new as it might have been, seeing that 11 of the 20 old ministers are back in office and the new prime minister is the first deputy of the old prime minister.

President Tokayev acknowledges that socio-economic problems underlay ‘the tragic events’. Measures must be taken to narrow the gulf between rich and poor. Taxes on the extraction of mineral resource must be increased. At the same time, foreign investors must be reassured so that they do not withdraw their capital (by making them pay higher taxes?). He calls on citizens to ‘get involved in building a new Kazakhstan’. Time will tell how far this reformist rhetoric will go and how long it will last.

Karim Massimov, head of the National Security Committee and a former prime minister, has been arrested ‘on suspicion of treason’. Educated in China, fluent in Chinese and friends with senior Chinese officials, he has promoted economic ties with China and advocated a foreign policy of ‘balancing’ between Russia and China. It is hard not to see ‘the hand of Moscow’ behind this astonishing event. The Russian leadership seem to be exploiting the dependence of the Tokayev regime on Russian support to exclude any Chinese influence from Kazakhstan.

Nazarbayev has disappeared from view. He may be in Switzerland, where his daughter and son-in-law have a $75 million luxury villa.

Stefan

Camouflaging class rule (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our society is routinely described in terms that camouflage the reality of exploitation and class rule.

The story goes like this. Everyone is basically equal. There is no ruling class as we are all citizens in a “democracy.” We live not in capitalism (that outmoded concept) but in a classless “market economy” where we are all consumers, taxpayers and investors (if only through our pension schemes). In some countries the camouflage is taken one step further: the social system is officially defined to be not just democratic but actually socialist. Those who insist on pointing out the reality behind the camouflage are labelled “extremists,” denied access to the mass media, and banished from respectable society.

This camouflage is so familiar to us that it is easy to assume it has always existed. In fact, it is quite a recent development in historical terms. Pre-industrial ruling classes never thought of pretending that they did not exist. On the contrary, they glorified or even deified themselves as intrinsically superior beings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who for many centuries was considered the fount of all wisdom, wrote that some people are slaves and others masters in accordance with their natures. Feudal law highlighted class by specifying in detail the dress appropriate to each class and making it illegal for people to wear clothes inappropriate to their station in life.

The situation started to change when the thinkers of the Enlightenment (such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) questioned the doctrine of natural inequality as well as other received ideas. In 1789 revolutionaries overthrew the French monarchy and aristocracy in the name of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. But some of them (Babeuf and his followers), disappointed that the revolution had failed to achieve these ideals, wanted to go further and strike at the roots of property itself. For the first time a ruling class felt the need for some camouflage.

In Britain, where the transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by less political upheaval, the need for concealment did not become urgent until later. Democracy was condemned as a dangerous extremist notion, while the class structure continued to be sanctified by religion and custom. Nineteenth-century British economists like Ricardo and Adam Smith talked quite openly about the division of society into classes. They were closer in this respect to Marx than to their twentieth-century successors (see the article on Smith in January’s Socialist Standard). You may also recall a verse in the nineteenth-century hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful that goes:

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.”

British ruling class attitudes shifted in face of the growing movement for universal male suffrage represented by the working class Chartists. The capitalists began to wonder whether they had exaggerated the threat inherent in political democracy. Perhaps it would not endanger class privilege all that much, provided that at the same time they made greater efforts to indoctrinate the workers. That is why the 1867 Reform Act, which first extended the franchise to part of the working class (male householders), was followed by the 1870 Education Act, which first made provision for general elementary education. “We must educate our masters,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe cynically remarked.

By the early twentieth century the ideological transformation was complete. Capitalist society could now be defined as “democracy” and its demands imposed in the name of democracy, as when US president Woodrow Wilson christened World War One “a war to make the world safe for democracy.” The class structure was henceforth to be camouflaged rather than openly justified. It was also about this time that there appeared new economic theories – in particular, the marginalist school – in which class was no longer a central concept.

With the rise of the so-called “communist” regimes in Russia and elsewhere, a similar fate befell the word “socialism.” The new class system in these countries was defined as “socialism,” just as the old class system in the West was defined as “democracy.” But the essence of the matter was the same: in both cases, in mainstream or official discourse the real class structure of the society simply did not exist. In the countries under Communist Party rule, just to say that there was a ruling class was grounds for condemnation as a “Trotskyite” or “counterrevolutionary.” (For an example from the Chinese “cultural revolution” see http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1969/06/intro.htm)

The camouflaging of class rule generates endless hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is not one of the more appealing character traits. But, as poet Matthew Arnold remarked, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The prevalence of hypocrisy is a sign that it is no longer possible openly to justify certain evils, showing that there has after all been some progress in human thinking. Class society is now on the defensive, and there is no way to defend the indefensible.

Stefan.