Unión Proletaria (Spain)
The growing bellicosity of the imperialist states has reached a level of recklessness not seen since the existence of atomic weapons. Its deepest and most decisive cause lies in the exacerbation of its internal economic contradictions, accentuated by the economic development successes of those countries that manage to free themselves from its dictates. What can we do to put an end to the aggressiveness of the imperialists and move towards their overthrow?
Imperialism is the highest phase of capitalism, in which the monopolies of the most developed countries have succeeded in dominating national economies and, from there, the most backward and weakest countries. These oppressed countries and the populations of the dominant countries therefore share the same objective interest in liberating themselves from the imperialists. But to do so, they must become aware of this objective interest and of the common organisation that can give them the necessary strength. The anti-imperialist World Platform is the nascent expression of this organisation.
The awareness that two camps are being demarcated – the imperialist and the anti-imperialist – is growing spontaneously among the workers and also among the bourgeois strata whose interests are in conflict with the financial oligarchies. The States and the various ruling classes of sovereign countries are already strengthening their economic, political, cultural, scientific, military and other ties, away from 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 thwart imperialism’s plans for war and domination; we must also promote the incorporation of the great masses of the proletariat and other popular classes. We must overcome the crisis of credibility and authority that our communist movement has suffered since its break-up in the 1960s until the demise of the USSR and European socialism in the 1990s. We must also counter the poisonous influence of the hegemonic media on social consciousness. And, as has always been the case, the first enemy we must face is the one who sows division in the ranks of anti-imperialist fighters.
The World Anti-Imperialist Platform has risen up against this enemy, whose most dangerous faction is the leadership of KKE because of its prestige and its ‘left’ attitude. I’m going to deal here with one particular aspect of the question.
From struggle to collusion
KKE’s ‘imperialist pyramid theory’ sounds Leninist, because Lenin spoke of the inevitability of struggle between the imperialists to alter the distribution of the world according to their respective strengths. So it seems that the real Leninists today are those who, like KKE, apply the inter-imperialist schema to describe the current conflict between the United States and its allies on the one hand and Russia, China, etc. on the other. But, in reality, they falsify Lenin by taking a single statement of his, isolated from the whole context of which it is a part, and mechanically bringing it back to the present moment.
Of course, there are still conflicts between imperialists over their share of domination of the world, but neither in Lenin’s time nor today are these the only conflicts of our time. The fundamental conflict is that between the interests of the working class and those of the capitalist class, which necessarily leads to proletarian socialist revolution. And another notable conflict is that between the imperialist powers and the nations they oppress. Lenin analysed the First World War, which was a conflict between imperialists, and, until his death, he only managed to see the beginning of a new stage in which socialist revolution had triumphed in one country and a vast liberation movement had been launched in the oppressed nations of Asia.
Later, the USSR was consolidated and the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and the oppressed nations of the three most populous continents was strengthened to such an extent that the Second World War launched by the imperialists was no longer just a war between 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 range of countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and most of the colonised countries gained political independence. At the same time, among the dominant countries, the balance of power changed radically: never before had a single imperialist country had such superiority over the others. The United States was the rising power that had won the war at minimum cost and maximum benefit, compared with its rivals in decline, destroyed by the fighting and now at the mercy of its dollars and military might. But they agreed that socialism and the national liberation movements were their common threat.
Imperialism has thus reached its present international configuration, which reached its apogee in the 1990s, after the capitulation of the USSR. The imperialist camp is limited to the United States and its allies/vassals in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are still conflicts between them, but since the end of the Second World War, collusion has prevailed. It is difficult to predict how long this will last, as it will depend on whether they come out better united (as they did between 1918 and 1939) or at loggerheads (as they did between 1939 and 1945). But today they are acting as a single band of aggressors against the sovereign socialist countries. Treating 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 people are now astonished at the submission of the European Union states to the interests of American financial capital, particularly after the sanctions and the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines which are damaging the old continent. Social democrats, Eurocommunists and certain Soviet leaders believed that the European Union 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 of Russia, to offer advantages to the Euro-Western governments in order to prevent them from becoming aggressors again, did not bear fruit. Worst of all, they fuelled the illusion that these 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 the Second World War, the Bolshevik leaders of the USSR, unlike the conciliatory revisionists who followed them, confirmed that war was inevitable until imperialism was destroyed. They had cleverly taken advantage of the necessary growth of contradictions between the imperialist powers to obtain the best possible result from the imperialist war. Stalin summed up the result of Bolshevik policy thus:
‘In his time, Lenin did not even dream of the balance of forces that we have achieved in the course of this war. Lenin thought that the whole world would attack us… when it turned out that only one group of the bourgeoisie was against us while the others supported us. Lenin didn’t think it was possible to ally with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight the other. But we managed to do it, we are led not by our emotions but by reason, analysis and calculation.
But it would be absurd to deduce from this that Stalin reduced all international conflict to contradictions between imperialist powers and denied the possibility of the latter launching a war against the socialist and democratic camp, such as the one they are waging today. In reality, his interest in the contradictory relations between the imperialists was subordinated to his firm struggle to unite and strengthen this group of socialist and democratic countries.
This is why we must base our strategy and tactics on the tried and tested knowledge that the Soviet leadership acquired after the Second World War about modern imperialism and how to fight it.
The imperialists united against the democratic and anti-fascist agreements of Yalta and Potsdam
Even before the end of the war, they perceived the United States’ desire to change the established balance of power and impose its world domination. This would be accepted by the other imperialists because the Americans were the only ones capable of gathering enough strength to confront socialism and the national liberation movement.
Faced with the US refusal to share control of Japan with the USSR as it had done with Germany, Stalin warned US Ambassador Harriman on 25 October 1945: ‘No decision taken by [Yankee General] McArthur was passed on [to the USSR]. In fact, the Soviet Union has become an American satellite in the Pacific. This is a role it cannot accept. It was not treated as an ally. The Soviet Union will not be a satellite of the United States, neither in the Far East nor anywhere else’.
On 14 November of the same year, Stalin was convinced that there was ‘no difference between the British and the Americans. They are closely linked. Their intelligence services are conducting powerful operations against us in all countries… The aims of their intelligence services are as follows. Firstly, they are trying to intimidate us and force us to give in on the controversial issues of Japan, the Balkans and reparations. Secondly, they want to distance us from our allies – Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria…’.
In May 1946, Molotov denounced that ‘there is no corner of the world where the United States is not visible. The United States has air bases everywhere: in Iceland, Greece, Italy, Turkey, China, Indonesia and elsewhere, and it has even more air and naval bases in the Pacific. The US maintains troops in Iceland despite protests from the Icelandic government, as well as in China, while Soviet troops have been withdrawn from that country and all other foreign territories. This is proof of real expansionism and expresses the steps taken by certain American circles towards an imperialist policy.’
The Anglo-Americans were quick to brandish the scarecrow of the ‘communist danger’ to appeal to the class discipline of all capitalist governments. The first was former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his speech on 5 March 1946 in Fulton (United States). Using a phrase coined by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, he accused the Soviets of having brought down an ‘iron curtain’ over Europe and called on Western governments not to repeat the mistaken policy of appeasement that had enabled Hitler to start the war (the same demagogic argument is now being used again to justify sending arms to the puppet putschist regime in Kiev).
In an interview with Pravda on 14 March, Stalin rejected this absurd parallelism, claiming the right of the USSR (now the Russian Federation) to have as neighbours friendly regimes in states that had offered Hitler’s Germany a platform for aggression against it (precisely with the help of this policy of appeasement by the Western powers in the 1930s). He ended the interview by warning that if Churchill and his friends managed to organise a ‘new march against Eastern Europe, they would be defeated again, as they had been in the past’.
In July 1946, the influential American newspaper Foreign Affairs published an article by George Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, entitled ‘The Origins of the Soviet Attitude’ and signed anonymously by X, in which he described the USSR as a messianic, expansionist state against which a skillful, antagonistic power must stand. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a series of articles on the subject, which were later published in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Cold War’, popularising the expression.
In March 1947, it was the President of the United States who gave a speech known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, in which he set out 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 5 June 1947 at Harvard University. It proposed a large-scale American aid programme for war-torn Europe, with funds distributed on the basis of coordination between the Europeans themselves.
The Soviet ambassador in Washington, Novikov, revealed that ‘this American proposal draws the very clear outlines of a Western European bloc directed against us… a thorough analysis of the Marshall Plan shows that it ultimately leads to the creation of a Western European bloc, an instrument of American policy… Instead of previous uncoordinated actions aimed at economically and politically subjugating European countries to American capital, the Marshall Plan proposes broader actions aimed at solving the problem more effectively’.
In July 1947, faced with the logical failure of the Franco-British-Soviet conference on this ‘aid’ from the United States, the USSR Foreign Minister, Molotov, made the following final statement: ‘The question of American economic aid … has … been used by the British and French governments as a pretext for persisting in the creation of a new organisation which would stand above the countries of Europe and intervene in the internal affairs of the countries of Europe… There are two paths to 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 over other countries, which are thus reduced to the position of subordinate states, deprived of their independence’.
In September 1947, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vychinsky denounced before the United Nations that ‘the Marshall Plan, in substance, is nothing but a variant of the Truman Doctrine… the implementation of the Marshall Plan would mean placing European countries under the economic and political control of the United States and 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.’
The Communists at the forefront of building the anti-imperialist camp
In May 1947, the French and Italian Communists had been excluded from the international coalition governments and, in this complex situation, had shown signs of reformism and parliamentary illusions. Communist parties were forced to close ranks in the face of the imperialists’ co-ordinated plan, just as we are now being forced to close ranks to build a world platform against imperialism and its drive towards the Third World War.
In September 1947, the Cominform was formed in Belgrade. It brought together the Communist parties in power in Europe, as well as the Communist parties of France and Italy. The Soviet spokesman at the first conference was Andrei Zhdanov, head of Bolshevik ideology, who worked on his report throughout the summer under Stalin’s supervision:
‘The further away we get from the end of the war, the clearer appear the two main directions of post-war international politics, which correspond to the disposition into 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 leading force in the imperialist camp… The main aim of the imperialist camp is to strengthen imperialism, to prepare for a new imperialist war, to fight against socialism and democracy, and to support pro-fascist, reactionary and anti-democratic regimes and movements everywhere. (…) The anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces form the other camp. The USSR and the countries of the new democracy are its foundation… The aim of this field is to fight against the threats of new wars and imperialist expansion, to strengthen democracy and root out the remnants of fascism’.
In April 1949, NATO, the Western anti-Soviet military bloc, was created, demonstrating the true intention of the Marshall Plan. This was a violation of the Anglo-Soviet and Franco-Soviet pacts signed during the war, which forbade the formation of coalitions directed against one of these states. Stalin pointed out that ‘the Americans need an army in West Germany to ensure control of Western Europe. It is said that the army is directed against us. In reality, the army remains there to control Europe.’
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 up to 100,000 people took part in the struggle to prevent the restoration of Soviet power. In 1950, the United States and its allies launched the war against Korea which, according to Stalin, had shown ‘America’s weaknesses’ (weaknesses that have been revealed ever since with each new major military intervention): ‘The armies of the twenty-five countries cannot continue the war in Korea for much longer… The Americans are no longer capable of waging a large-scale war, especially after the Korean War. After all, their strength lies in their air power and their atomic bomb… America cannot defeat little Korea. We have to stand firm against America… It’s been two years now, and the United States has not been able to defeat little Korea… They want to dominate the world, but they can’t dominate little Korea. No, the Americans don’t know how to fight. After the Korean War, in particular, they lost their ability to wage a major war. They put all their hopes in the atomic bomb and air power. But you can’t win a war with that. They need infantry, and they don’t have any; the infantry they have is weak. They’re fighting little Korea and there are already people crying in the United States. What will happen when they start a big war? Maybe everyone will be crying then.
Stalin not only accurately described modern imperialism and its military weakness in the face of peoples prepared to fight it. He also exposed the relationship between the military defeats of the imperialists and the development of socialist consciousness in the masses: ‘In reality, following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, after the Second World War, which was very costly but destroyed the ruling classes in a number of countries, the consciousness of the masses of the people awoke. These historical conditions opened up many possibilities and avenues for the socialist movement.
But the war was not enough to pave the way for revolution. The subjective factor was also present: ‘during the years of fascist domination in Europe, communists showed themselves to be trustworthy, courageous, ready to sacrifice themselves to fight the fascist regime and fight for the freedom of the people…’.
To take advantage of this combination of circumstances, Stalin advised ‘uniting the working class with the other toiling masses on the basis of a minimalist programme: the time for a maximalist programme has not yet come. In essence, the party will be communist, but it will have a broader base and a better mask for the moment.’
Practical conclusions
This is the line left to us by the victorious Bolsheviks against imperialism:
1) Fight the imperialists, without waiting for conflicts to break out between them.
2) Take advantage of these conflicts, as soon as they arise, to weaken the imperialist camp.
3) To absorb as best we can the shock of their military power in the air and defeat them on the ground.
4) To unite against them the maximum possible mass force on the basis of a minimal programme.
5) To develop the revolutionary movement for socialism in the course of the war which will lead to the defeat of the imperialists.
Down with imperialism!
Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!
