Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletariá (Spain)
The growing warmongering of the imperialist states has reached a degree of recklessness never seen since the existence of the atomic weapon. Its deepest and most decisive cause lies in the sharpening of their internal economic contradictions, increased by the successes in the economic development of the countries that manage to free themselves from their dictates. What can we do to curb the aggressiveness of the imperialists and advance towards their overthrow?
Imperialism is the highest phase of capitalism, in which the monopolies of the most developed countries came to dominate the national economies and, from there, the most backward and weakest countries. Therefore, these oppressed countries and the populations of the dominant countries share the same objective interest in liberating themselves from the imperialists. But, to do so, they have to develop the consciousness of this objective interest and the joint organization that will give them the necessary strength. The World Anti-Imperialist Platform is the incipient expression of this organization.
The consciousness that two camps are being delineated―the imperialist and the anti-imperialist―is growing spontaneously among the workers and also among the bourgeois strata whose interests conflict with the financial oligarchies. The states and the various ruling classes of the sovereign countries are already tightening their economic, political, cultural, scientific, military, etc. links, outside the toxic relations imposed on them by the imperialists, as an absolute necessity for their prosperity and survival.
But this spontaneous progress is not enough to disrupt the plans of war and domination of imperialism, but we must promote the incorporation to it of the great masses of the proletariat and the other popular classes. We have to overcome the crisis of credibility and authority suffered by our communist movement since its rupture in the 60s until the disappearance of the USSR and European socialism in the 90s. We also have to counteract the poisonous influence that the hegemonic media exert on social consciousness. And, as has always been the case, the first enemy we must confront is the one that sows division in the ranks of the anti-imperialist fighters.
The World Anti-Imperialist Platform has risen up against this enemy, whose most dangerous faction is the leadership of the KKE because of its prestige and its “leftist” posture. I will deal here with a particular aspect of the question.
From pugnacity to collusion
The “theory of the imperialist pyramid” of the KKE seems Leninist, because Lenin spoke of the inevitability of the struggle among the imperialists to modify the distribution of the world according to their respective forces. Then, it seems that the true Leninists of today are those who, like the KKE, apply the inter-imperialist scheme to describe the present conflict that pits the US and its allies, on the one hand, against Russia, China, etc., on the other hand. But, in reality, they falsify Lenin by taking from him a single statement isolated from the whole context of which it is a part and bringing it mechanically to the present moment.
Of course there continue to be conflicts among the imperialists for their quotas of domination over the world, but, neither in Lenin’s time nor now, are they the only conflicts of our epoch. The fundamental conflict is that which opposes the interests of the working class to those of the capitalist class, and necessarily leads to proletarian socialist revolution. And another outstanding conflict is that which pits the imperialist powers against the nations oppressed by them. Lenin analyzed the First World War, which was a conflict between imperialists, and, until his death, he could only see the beginning of a new stage in which the socialist revolution had triumphed in one country and a vast liberation movement of the oppressed nations of Asia was being set in motion.
Then the USSR was consolidated and the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and the oppressed nations of the three most populous continents was strengthened, to the point that the Second World War unleashed by the imperialists was no longer only a war among themselves, but also a war of anti-fascism, national liberation and the conquest of the status of great power by the first socialist country. As a result of this war, socialism spread from a single country to a whole field of countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and most of the colonized countries gained their political independence. At the same time, among the dominant countries, the correlation of forces changed drastically: never had a single imperialist country had so much superiority over the others. The US was the rising power that had won the war with the minimum cost and the maximum profit, against its declining rivals, destroyed by the fighting, and now at the mercy of its dollars and its military strength. But they agreed in considering socialism and national liberation movements as their common threat.
In this way, imperialism reached its present international configuration, which had its apogee during the 1990s, after the capitulation of the USSR. The imperialist camp is confined to the United States and its allies in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are still struggles among them, but, since the end of World War II, collusion prevails. It is difficult to foresee for how long, because it will depend on whether it is better for them to be united (as between 1918 and 1939) than at loggerheads (as between 1939 and 1945). But, today, they are acting as a single band of agressors against socialist and sovereign countries. To treat these countries―which are victims and do not subjugate others―as one side in an inter-imperialist war, is a real crime in the service of imperialism.
Many are now surprised at the submission of the states of the European Union to the interests of U.S. financial capital, particularly after the sanctions and the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines that harm the old continent. Social democrats, Eurocommunists and certain Soviet leaders believed that the European Community could compete economically with the United States or act as a counterweight to its hegemony. However, the legitimate diplomatic efforts of the USSR and then Russia to offer gains to Euro-Western governments in exchange for preventing them from becoming aggressors again did not succeed. Worst of all, they nurtured illusions that such concessions and the differences between the imperialists on both sides of the Atlantic would be enough to put an end to their anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-Russian collusion.
Immediately after World War II, the Bolshevik leaders of the USSR, unlike the conciliatory revisionists who succeeded them, confirmed that war was inevitable as long as imperialism was not destroyed. They had intelligently taken advantage of the necessary growth of the contradictions between the imperialist powers to achieve the best possible result of the imperialist war. Stalin summed up the result of the Bolshevik policy thus:
“In his time, Lenin did not even dream of the correlation of forces which we have reached during this war. Lenin thought that the whole world would attack us… when it turns out that only one group of the bourgeoisie has been against us while the others have supported us. Lenin did not think it was possible to ally with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight the other. But we have succeeded, we are led not by our emotions but by reason, analysis, and calculation.”[1]
But, it would be absurd to deduce from this that Stalin reduced all international conflict to the contradictions between imperialist powers and that he denied the possibility of the latter unleashing a war against the socialist and democratic camp, such as the one they are waging today. In reality, their interest in the contradictory relationship between the imperialists was subordinate to their firm struggle to unite and strengthen this camp of socialist and democratic countries.
For this reason, we need to base our strategy and tactics on the knowledge that the proven Soviet leaders had acquired after World War II about modern imperialism and how to fight it.
Imperialists united against the democratic and anti-fascist Yalta and Potsdam agreements
Even before the end of the war, they saw the will of the United States to change the established correlation of forces in order to impose its world domination. This would be accepted by the other imperialists because the Americans were the only ones capable of mustering sufficient force to confront socialism and the national liberation movement.
Faced with the US refusal to share with the USSR the control of Japan as had been done with Germany, Stalin warned US Ambassador Harriman on October 25, 1945: “No decision taken by [Yankee General] McArthur was transmitted to him [the USSR]. In fact, the Soviet Union has become an American satellite in the Pacific. It is a role it cannot accept. It has not been treated as an ally. The Soviet Union will not be a satellite of the United States, either in the Far East or anywhere else.”[2]
On November 14 of the same year, Stalin was convinced that there were “no divergences between the English and the Americans. They are closely linked together. Their information services carry out powerful operations against us in all countries… The aims of their information services are as follows. First, they are trying to intimidate us and force us to give in on disputed issues concerning Japan, the Balkans and reparations. Secondly, they want to alienate us from our allies-Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria…”[3]
In May 1946, Molotov denounced that “There is no corner of the world where the United States is not seen. The United States has air bases everywhere: in Iceland, in Greece, in Italy, in Turkey, in China, in Indonesia and elsewhere and has even more air and naval bases in the Pacific. The United States retains troops in Iceland despite the protests of the Icelandic government, as well as in China, while Soviet troops have been withdrawn from this country and all other foreign territories. This is the proof of real expansionism and this expresses the steps undertaken by certain American circles towards an imperialist policy.”[4]
The Anglo-Americans were quick to wave the scarecrow of “communist danger” to appeal to the class discipline of all capitalist governments. The first was former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his speech of March 5, 1946 in Fulton (USA). Using the expression coined by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, he accused the Soviets of having erected an “iron curtain” over Europe and called on Western governments not to repeat the erroneous policy of appeasement which had allowed Hitler to unleash the war (this same demagogic argument has now been used again to justify sending arms to the puppet coup regime in Kiev).
In an interview in Pravda on March 14, Stalin rejected this absurd parallelism, vindicating the right of the USSR (now, of the Russian Federation) to have as neighbors friendly regimes in the States which had offered a platform of aggression against it for Hitlerite Germany (precisely with the help of that policy of appeasement of the Western powers of the 1930s). He ended the interview by warning that, if Churchill and his friends succeeded in organizing a “new march against Eastern Europe, they would be defeated again, as they had been in the past.”[5]
In July 1946, the influential American newspaper Foreign Affairs published an article by George Kennan, in charge of American affairs in Moscow, entitled “The Origins of the Soviet Attitude” and signed anonymously by X, where he characterized the USSR as a messianic and expansionist state against which a skillful antagonistic power had to rise. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a series of articles on the subject, which would later be published in a booklet under the title “The Cold War”, popularizing this expression.
In March 1947, it was the President of the United States who gave a speech known as the “Truman Doctrine”, in which he outlined a foreign policy of intervention based on force.
After the “stick” came the “carrot” of the Marshall Plan, outlined by this American general and Secretary of State on June 5, 1947 at Harvard University. It proposed a wide-ranging American aid program for a war-torn Europe, with funds distributed on the basis of coordination by the Europeans themselves.
The Soviet ambassador in Washington, Novikov, revealed that “In this American proposal the quite clear contours of a Western European bloc directed against us are drawn…a careful analysis of the Marshall Plan shows that this ultimately results in the creation of a Western European bloc, an instrument of American policy…Instead of the previous uncoordinated actions aimed at economically and politically subjugating the European countries to American capital, the Marshall Plan sets out more extensive actions aimed at solving the problem more effectively.”[6]
In July 1947, faced with the logical failure of the Franco-British-Soviet conference on this US “aid”, USSR Foreign Minister Molotov made the following final statement: “The question of American economic aid… has… served as a pretext for the British and French governments to persist in the creation of a new organization which would stand above the European countries and intervene in the internal affairs of the countries of Europe… There are two ways in international cooperation. One is based on the development of mutual political and economic relations between States with equal rights… the other is based on the dominant position of one or more great powers vis-à-vis other countries, which are thereby lowered to the position of subordinate States, deprived of their independence.”[7]
In September 1947, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Vyshinski, denounced before the United Nations that “The Marshall Plan, at bottom, is nothing more than a variant of the Truman Doctrine… the implementation of the Marshall Plan would mean placing the European countries under the economic and political control of the United States and a direct interference in the internal affairs of these countries…. this plan is an attempt to divide Europe into two camps… to complete the formation of a bloc of several European states hostile to the interests of the democratic countries of Eastern Europe and more particularly to the interests of the Soviet Union.” [8]
The communists, at the head of the construction of the anti-imperialist camp.
In May 1947, the French and Italian Communists had been expelled from the international coalition governments and, in this complex situation, they had shown signs of reformism and parliamentary illusions. The communist parties were forced to close ranks before the coordinated plan of the imperialists, just as we are now to build a World Anti-imperialist Platform against imperialism and its course towards the Third World War.
In September 1947, the Kominform was formed in Belgrade, composed of the Communist parties in power in Europe, plus the Communist parties of France and Italy. The Soviet spokesman at its First Conference was Andrei Zhdanov, head of ideology for the Bolsheviks, who worked on his report throughout the summer, under Stalin’s supervision:
“The further we move away from the end of the war, the more sharply appear the two main directions of post-war international politics which correspond to the arrangement in two main camps of the political forces operating in the world arena: the imperialist and anti-democratic camp, on the one hand, and, on the other, the anti-imperialist and democratic camp. The United States is the main leading force of the imperialist camp… The main purpose of the imperialist camp is to strengthen imperialism, to prepare a new imperialist war, to fight against socialism and democracy and to sustain everywhere the pro-fascist, reactionary and anti-democratic regimes and movements. (…) The anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces form the other camp. The USSR and the countries of the new democracy are its foundation… The purpose of this camp consists in fighting against the threat of new wars and imperialist expansion, to affirm democracy and to extirpate the remnants of fascism.”[9]
In April 1949, NATO was created, the Western anti-Soviet military bloc that evidenced the background of the Marshall Plan. It was a violation of the Anglo-Soviet and Franco-Soviet pacts signed during the war, which forbade joining coalitions directed against any of these states. Stalin made it clear that “The Americans need an army in West Germany to ensure their control over Western Europe. They say that the army is directed against us. In reality, the army remains there in order to control Europe.”[10]
The aggressiveness of the imperialists was not just rhetoric. In Western Ukraine, anti-communist nationalists killed 35,000 Soviet army and party cadres between 1945 and 1951, while in Lithuania as many as 100,000 people took part in the struggle to prevent the restoration of Soviet power. In 1950, the United States and its allies unleashed the war against Korea which, Stalin said, had shown “America’s weaknesses” (weaknesses which, since then, have come to light again in every new major military intervention): “The armies of twenty-four countries cannot continue the war in Korea for long yet… The Americans are no longer capable of carrying on a war of great breadth, particularly after the Korean War. After all, their strength rests on their air power and the atomic bomb… America cannot defeat little Korea. You have to be firm when dealing with America… It’s been two years now, and the United States has not been able to beat little Korea… They want to dominate the world, yet they cannot dominate little Korea. No, the Americans do not know how to fight. After the Korean War, in particular, they have lost their ability to conduct a major war. They pin all their hopes on the atomic bomb and air power. But you can’t win a war with that. You need infantry, and they have no infantry; the infantry they have is weak. They fight little Korea and already people are crying in the U.S. What happens when they launch a big war? Maybe then they will all cry.”[11]
Stalin not only aptly described the imperialism of our day and its military weakness in the face of peoples willing to fight it. He also exposed the relationship between the military defeats of the imperialists and the development of socialist consciousness among the masses: “In reality, as a consequence of the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, after the Second World War, which cost so much but destroyed the ruling classes in a certain number of countries, the mass consciousness of the people had awakened. Through these historical conditions there appeared numerous possibilities and paths open to the socialist movement.”[12]
But war was not enough to clear the road to revolution. The subjective factor was also present: during “the years of fascist domination in Europe, the communists have shown themselves trustworthy, courageous, ready to make sacrifices to fight the fascist regime and to fight for the freedom of the peoples…”[13]
To take advantage of this combination of circumstances, Stalin advised “to unite the working class with the other working masses on the basis of a minimalist program: the time for a maximalist program has not yet come. In essence, the party will be communist, but they will have a broader base and a better mask for the present moment.“
Practical conclusions
Such is the line bequeathed to us by the victorious Bolsheviks against imperialism:
1) Fight the imperialists, without waiting for conflicts to break out between them.
2) To take advantage of these conflicts, as soon as they begin to manifest themselves, to weaken the imperialist camp.
3) Absorb as well as possible the shock of their air military power and defeat them on the ground.
4) To unite the maximum possible mass force against them on the basis of a minimum program.
5) Develop the revolutionary movement for socialism in the course of the war leading to the defeat of the imperialists.
Down with imperialism!
Proletarians and oppressed peoples of all countries, let us unite!
Notes
[1] “Stalin and the National-Territorial Controversies in Eastern Europe, 1945-1947 (Part 1)” Cold War History, vol. 1, no. 3, 2001.
Vostochnaya Evropa v Dokumentakh Rossiishikh Arkhivov, 1944-1953:
https://inslav.ru/sites/default/files/editions/1997_vostochnaja_evropa_v_dokumentax_rossijskix_arxivov_1.pdf, doc. 37, p. 118-133.
[2] Stalin and the Cold War, 1945-1953: A Cold War International History Project Documentary Reader, Washington, DC 1999, pp. 264-265: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/stalin_and_the_cold_war_1945-53.pdf.
[3] Ibid, p. 272.
[4] SSSR i germanskii vopros, 1941-1949, Moscow 1996, 2000, 2003.
Stalin’s Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, 1943 to 1956. By Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, pp. 101-109.
[5] Сталин И.В. Сочинения. Т.16, pp. 26-30.
The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947: A Historical Problem with Interpretations and Documents. Walter LaFeber. Wiley, 1971, doc. 37.
[6] G. Takhnenko, “Anatomy of a Political Decision: Notes on the Marshall Plan,” International Affairs, July 1992.
[7] French Yellow Book: Documents of the Conference of Foreign Ministers of France, the United Kingdom and the USSR held in Paris from 27 June to 3rd July 1947.
“La cooperation internationale doit avoir des bases démocratiques. Declaration made at the Conference of the Three Ministers in Paris, 2 July 1947. Questions de politique exterieure, V. Molotov, Editions en langues étrangères, Moscow 1949, pp. 477-480.
[8] M. McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War, London 2003.
https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/origins-of-the-cold-war-19411949-5nbsp ed-2021001010-2021001011-9780367858360-9780367858384-9781003015338.html, doc. 28, p. 256.
[9] Procacci, Cominform, pp. 225-227.
[10] Stalin and the Cold War, 1945-1953: A Cold War International History Project Documentary Reader, Washington, DC 1999, pp. 505: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/stalin_and_the_cold_war_1945-53.pdf
[11] Ibid., p. 512.
[12] Vostochnaya Evropa v Dokumentakh Rossiishikh Arkhivov, 1944-1953:
https://inslav.ru/sites/default/files/editions/1997_vostochnaja_evropa_v_dokumentax_rossijskix_arxivov_1.pdf, doc. 194, p. 579, n. 3.
[13] Vasselin Dimitrov, “Revolution Released: Stalin, The Bulgarian Communist Party, and the Founding of the Cominform,” in Gori and Pons, The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 284:
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ACFB11.pdf, p. 33.