How US Big Tech Monopolies Colonized the World: Welcome to Neo-Feudalism

US Big Tech corporations are like the feudal landlords of medieval Europe. These Silicon Valley monopolies own the digital land that the global economy is built on, and are charging higher and higher rents to use their privatized infrastructure.

By Ben Norton

August 19, 2024

Source: Geopoliticaleconomy.com




US Big Tech corporations have essentially colonized the world. In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy is based is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based almost exclusively in Silicon Valley.

This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land and turned almost everyone else into serfs, who broke their backs producing food for their masters, the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based.


Every other company – not just small businesses, but even relatively large ones – must pay rent to these corporate feudal lords.

Amazon takes more than 50% of the revenue of the sellers on its platform, according to a study by the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Amazon’s cut of vendor revenue steadily rose from roughly 35% in 2016 to just over half as of 2022.

Amazon takes more than 50% of sellers’ revenue in fees (Source: Marketplace Pulse)

In fact, Amazon basically sets prices in markets by using its infamous “buy box”. The platform removes the button if a user sells a product at a price higher than those offered on competing websites. The result: 82-90% of sales on Amazon end up using the buy box.

Neoclassical economists endlessly condemned the inefficiencies of the central planning of the Soviet Union, but apparently have little to say about the de facto price setting being done by neo-feudal corporate monopolies like Amazon.

A monopolist in the 20th century would have loved to control a country’s supply of, say, refrigerators. But the Big Tech monopolists of the 21st century go a step further and control all of the digital infrastructure needed to buy those fridges — from the internet to the software, the apps, the payment systems, and even the delivery service.

Moreover, their monopolistic control extends well beyond just one country to almost the entire world.

These corporate neo-feudal lords can create and destroy entire markets. If a competitor does manage to create a product, US Big Tech monopolies can make it disappear.

Imagine you were an entrepreneur. You developed a product, made a website, and offered to sell it online. But then you searched for it on Google, and it did not show up. Instead, Google promoted another, similar product in the search results.

This is not a hypothetical: this already happens.

Amazon does exactly the same: It promotes Amazon Prime products at the top of its search results. And when a product sells well, Amazon sometimes copies it, makes its own version, and threatens to put the original vendor out of business.

As Reuters reported in 2021, “A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines”. This happened in India, but vendors in other countries have accused Amazon of doing the same.

Toy salesman Molson Hart produced a fascinating documentary that illustrates Amazon’s dystopian monopoly power.

Amazon is more powerful than any 19th-century robber baron could have imagined. It charges exorbitant fees to vendors that sell goods on its platform (goods that Amazon had nothing to do with creating).

While Apple’s 30% rent fees are bad enough, Amazon takes this to a new level, extracting more than 50% of the revenue of the sellers who use its platform.

The neo-feudal corporate landlords at Apple are taking a 30% cut of all new Patreon memberships registered using the iOS app.

Apple is not providing any service, other than allowing people to download an app that it itself does not manage. All Apple does is host the app, nothing more. It is a digital landlord. But because it has a monopoly, Apple can take 30% of the revenue that creators on Patreon receive for all of our hard work.

Patreon itself already charges fees of 8% to 12% of users’ revenue. That’s a lot, but at least the company can justify it because it runs the website and hosts creators’ work. Apple doesn’t do anything; it simply allows people to download the app that is managed by Patreon, while demanding a staggering 30% cut.

We at Geopolitical Economy Report do admittedly have a vested interest in this debate: As an independent media outlet, to sustain our work, we rely exclusively on donations from our readers, viewers, and listeners. We are very grateful to them for their generosity.

These kinds of fees from Big Tech monopolies have a big economic impact on independent journalists and creators like us and our friends and colleagues.

But Apple’s Patreon fees are merely one example of a significant problem plaguing not only the United States, but most of the global economy.

It is the perfect symbol of the future of the economy: neo-feudal rent extraction by corporate monopolies.

This is how the scheme works.

It all started with Big Tech corporations first offering supposedly “free” services (which were paid for by selling users’ information). Those “free” platforms soon became monopolies, and were so deeply embedded into the economy that they became digital utilities, albeit privatized ones.

A 20th-century economy needed utilities like an electrical grid, water plants, sewage system, highways, etc. These natural monopolies should be publicly owned, provided by the state as public goods, in order to prevent rent-seeking by corporate landlords. (Of course, neoliberals have long sought to privatize these public utilities as well, and have had success in some countries — with inevitably disastrous results, like sky-high bills and sewage being dumped into the UK’s privatized water system.)

A 21st-century economy needs all of those basic utilities plus new digital infrastructure. But here’s the thing: all of the necessary digital infrastructure that our economies are built on is privatized! You have internet providers, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Apple Store, Play Store, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.

Then there is the cloud infrastructure that apps and websites use, which is dominated by a few mostly US companies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had 31% of global market share as of the first quarter of 2024, followed by 25% for Microsoft Azure, and 11% for Google Cloud.

Together, these three big US Silicon Valley companies control 67% of the world’s cloud computing market. This is a kind of monopolistic chokehold on the internet itself.

Good luck running a modern economy, in any country, without these privatized internet providers, operating systems, app stores, social media apps, messaging apps, etc.

This digital infrastructure is now nearly as important as the public utilities like the power and water grid.

If you want to make a small business, you will almost certainly go bankrupt very quickly if you don’t use Amazon to sell your product; Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store to download your app; Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to market your good or service; or WhatsApp to make an order (especially in many Global South countries, where WhatsApp is more common than in the US). None of this is to even mention private ISPs for an internet connection, or private telecommunications companies that charge high data fees.

If your company makes an app that is not available in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you might as well not exist. Good luck getting the vast majority of your customer base to download it.

The only large country whose economy is not entirely colonized by US Big Tech is China, where Communist Party leaders were wise enough to realize they had to develop their own electronic infrastructure, to have digital sovereignty, so they aren’t utterly beholden to US monopolies. (This is one of the reasons for Washington’s new cold war on Beijing.)

Now that US Big Tech monopolies are deeply embedded into the fabric of the global economy, with no real competitors, they are jacking up the rents. It is happening everywhere. Apple’s 30% fee on purchases made in apps downloaded in the App Store is just scratching the surface.

These Big Tech monopolists are really digital landlords. They own the land upon which the rest of the digital economy is built. They are the 21st-century version of the feudal lords of Medieval Europe, who owned the land upon which serfs toiled.

Now these neo-feudal corporate landlords are charging more and more fees to use their “free” infrastructure.

This digital infrastructure should be nationalized and treated as a public good, like other basic utilities (which should also be nationalized if they have been privatized, which was increasingly the case in the neoliberal era).

This is global monopoly capitalism.

Of course, monopoly capital is far from new. Capitalism has been in a decadent monopoly stage for decades.

Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran were already writing about US monopoly capitalism in the 1960s. Rudolf Hilferding could see the rapid growth of monopolies in the early 20th century, which he described in his 1910 opus Finance Capital, which in turn inspired Lenin’s analysis of imperialism.

But in the 21st century, US monopoly capital has gone global, and colonized most of the world.

In fact, this has become the go-to model for most new technology corporations coming out of Silicon Valley. Uber is the textbook example. When it first came on the scene, Uber sought to bust taxi unions in major cities by charging very low rates. Rides were so cheap that Uber lost money for years. But thanks to cheap loans provided in the era of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), it was able to continue rolling over its debt, operating at a loss, and undercutting its competitors in a cutthroat battle for market dominance.

Once Uber successfully destroyed the (highly unionized) taxi industries in major cities and established a monopoly, Uber hiked up its rates. It didn’t really have any significant competition. (In 2023, Uber dominated 74% of the US market, compared to just 26% for Lyft.)

Uber also spread this monopoly model worldwide, waging a scorched-earth war against taxi unions in dozens of countries.

Economist Yanis Varoufakis has referred to this system as “technofeudalism”, in his 2024 book with this title. Although I sometimes disagree with Varoufakis, especially in terms of his criticism of China, I do largely share his analysis of technofeudalism.

Varoufakis is also absolutely right that one of the factors driving Washington’s new cold war on Beijing is the desire by US Big Tech monopolies to destroy their only competitors, which happen to be Chinese. As Varoufakis observed:


“with cloud capital dominating terrestrial capital, the maintenance of US hegemony requires more than preventing foreign capitalists from buying up US capitalist conglomerates, like Boeing and General Electric. In a world where cloud capital is borderless, global, capable of siphoning cloud rents from anywhere, the maintenance of US hegemony demands a direct confrontation with the only cloudalist class to have emerged as a threat to their own: China’s”.

This observation by Varoufakis hits the nail on the head. Where I think he is wrong is in his claim that China, like the US, is becoming techno-feudal.

There is a fundamental distinction between the two: In the US, capital controls the state; in China, the state controls capital.

In China’s unique system, which it refers to as a socialist market economy and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, roughly a third of GDP comes from massive state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are concentrated in the most strategic sectors of the economy, such as banking, construction, infrastructure, transportation, and telecommunications.

While it is true that many technology companies in China are private on paper, the reality is much more complicated. The Chinese government has a powerful “golden share” (officially known as a “special management share”) in large firms, such as Alibaba and Tencent, which gives it veto power over important decisions.

Although these large technology companies may not be full state-owned, China’s socialist government ensures that they act in the interest of the country and the people, not simply wealthy shareholders.

The US system is exactly the opposite. Large corporations control the government, and create policy on behalf of wealthy shareholders.

The problem is not just that US corporate monopolies control markets; they create those markets themselves, through their control over digital infrastructure.

As Varoufakis has observed in his discussion of “cloud capital”, Amazon does not just dominate the market; it creates markets — and prevents any potential competitors from creating alternative markets.

Some socialists don’t like the terms “neo-feudalism” or “techno-feudalism”, because they are afraid it will distract from the serious problems of capitalism.

But this idea is not like so-called “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism”, which are indeed euphemisms for plain old capitalism, as it actually exists in the real world.

Neo-feudalism really does look more and more like a distinct mode of production. Yes, capitalism in the monopoly era has had little meaningful competition, but the markets in which those firms operated were still circumscribed largely by public utilities. Wal-Mart could put local mom and pop stores out of business, but it could not effectively prevent people from traveling to other areas to buy protects from competitors; Amazon and Google essentially can.

In the 21st century, the infrastructure of society itself has been privatized.

The solution is clear: the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy is built must be nationalized and turned into public utilities, like water, electricity, and highways.

That said, the US government nationalizing Silicon Valley Big Tech companies does not solve the problem of the lack of digital sovereignty in other countries.

If Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta are nationalized, this would still mean the United States has enormous power over nations whose economies rely on this US-controlled digital infrastructure (which, again, is almost all nations everywhere, with the noble exception of China).

It wouldn’t be realistic for every single country on Earth to create its own social media platforms and search engines. This would also create another separate set of problems, and make it more difficult for people to communicate with their friends, family members, colleagues, and customers in a highly globalized world.

Instead, these digital utilities could remain global, but other countries could nationalize the local subsidiaries and/or operations of these Big Tech firms. Exactly how that could be done would need to be worked out.

Perhaps some kind of answer could be found in Apple’s funny business in Ireland. The US Big Tech monopoly reports its profits mostly in Ireland, whose 12.5% corporate tax rate is lower than that of the US.

In 2022, Apple’s Irish subsidiary reported more than $69 billion in profits, and paid just $7.7 billion in taxes. But it gave $20.7 billion in dividends to its California parent company.

If Apple wants the world to believe that its operations in Ireland are so much more important than those in the US, then is it really a US company, or is it an Irish one?

The answer, of course, is that Apple is truly global, like most big multinational corporations. So each country that these monopolies operate in should have the right to defend its sovereignty and nationalize their local subsidiaries.

This is a serious problem that should be debated worldwide. There are likely some potential creative solutions.

But that is a topic for a whole other article.

The Lingering Economic Consequences of Sri Lanka’s Civil War


A lack of justice following Sri Lanka’s Civil War has compounded the economic crisis in the North-East.

By Devana Senanayake
August 19, 2024
THE DIPLOMAT  

Sri Lankan Tamil civil war survivors perform rituals in memory of their deceased family members on a small strip of land where civilians were trapped during the last stages of the war in Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka, May 17, 2024.Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena
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This year marks 15 years since the end of the Civil War in Sri Lanka. The armed forces carried out an avalanche of atrocities during the conflict: they bombed No Fire Zones, shelled hospitals, fired on Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) combatants that surrendered, carried out enforced disappearances, and denied humanitarian aid such as food and medicine to civilians in camps. An International Crisis Group report in 2010 noted that the “the Sri Lankan option” set a precedent for the elimination of dissent. In fact, close parallels can be seen in Gaza today.

Fifteen years later, the Tamil people have not received a solution to the National Question, be it a political solution – such as the complete devolution of authority from a centralized state to the provincial councils, a solid accountability mechanism, or personalized reparations – or an economic solution.

Research has revealed a number of obstacles to economic development in the North-East: militarization, unsustainable infrastructure projects, a lack of viable livelihoods in the area, the lack of a macro-economic vision that prioritizes local people’s autonomy over land, and the absence of ports.

The diminished civic space and lack of economic development are closely connected. This can be seen in the state-sponsored colonization that has restricted people’s access to their land and resources, and militarized capitalism, that has acutely reinforced the military’s ability to act as a capitalist hand.

State-sponsored Colonization

“It is only the armed conflict that is over. The civil conflict is very much alive,” said Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, an MP and member of Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK). “The oppression still exists and the land issues are the topmost issue.”

In Sri Lanka, the majority of land is under the state’s control. Land is distributed under various ordinances to farmers as annual or extended permits. Grants exist but they have specific stipulations. In the North-East, most citizens had access to private lands. Faced by violence from the armed forces, the Indian Peace Keeping Forces, and other paramilitary troops, many people had to leave their lands and in the process lost their deeds. At the end of the Civil War, the army released the majority of land but the state used various departments to reoccupy them.

The state has three primary motivations for this. First, the extensively centralized state is paranoid that the complete devolution of authority to the provincial councils could loosen their control over the land. Second, colonization shapes the ethnic makeup of an area. With land occupation, the number of Sinhala voters increases and there is a greater likelihood of a Sinhala representative elected into Parliament. Finally, when the state occupies land, they could use it to complete their political project, be it Sinhalization or neoliberalization.

“Land is power. The state needs to control land to implement its political project,” said Sandun Thudugala, a member of People’s Alliance for Right to Land. This can be seen in former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s allocation of land to the military and current President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s allocation of land for market liberalization (i.e. private investment).

Methods

Under British rule, the state occupied land for tea plantations. These schemes displaced Sinhala peasants and confined them to the periphery of these areas. In the post-independence period, many politicians had to meet the demands of these constituencies and expanded colonization schemes into the Dry Zone. D. S. Senanayake, the first prime minister of Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), set up the Gal Oya project for rural development during 1948-1952. The project built a dam in the Gal Oya Basin and used it to cultivate paddy, chilies, and potatoes. The need for labor led to the violent displacement of Tamil and Muslim farmers to make space for Sinhala settlements. The Gal Oya riots in 1956 exploded as a result of these schemes.

Water diversification for Sinhala farmers was the primary aim of the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Program in the 1970s. In the next decades, Sinhala farmers did not have a base in the North-East, so the state continued the project. These development projects led to tensions in rural areas like Batticaloa’s Mayilathamaduva. Tamil cattle farmers were threatened by Sinhala paddy farmers and many times their livestocks were harmed or killed.

In the Civil War, the military occupied land for security reasons and maintained its establishments. No one could enter these areas except for military personnel. After the conflict ended, the military released most of the land, but certain lands such as Mullikullam in Manner are still occupied. The military also runs tourism sites such as the Thalsevana Holiday Resort and Restaurant in Valikamam. Some families were provided alternate lands, but other families continue to protest for their private land. Despite pressure from the international community, some of these lands have been reoccupied by other departments.

The Department of Archeology (DOA)’s main mandate is the restoration and preservation of Sinhala Buddhist culture, but they use this to colonize lands in the Tamil homeland. When the DOA identifies ruins (i.e. ancient stones or broken statues), they demarcate the land under their department. The entrance is closed and all productive activities are ceased. A Buddhist monk enters the area and a temple is built around him. He opens the space up to devotees, usually family members from the South, to clean the premises and cook. Once a number of families have been settled, the area becomes a Sinhala-Buddhist community. Kurunthurmalai temple is an example of a temple’s construction under the premise of archaeological restoration, despite the presence of a court order.

The DOA’s narrative only promotes Sinhala Buddhism. So only Sinhala people can enter these areas and pray. Tamil historians have pointed to the presence of Tamil Buddhists in the North but these nuanced identities are unable to fit into the state’s definition of a fixed Sinhala Buddhist identity. Land colonization by the DOA, as a result, upends and fractures the complexity of identity in the island.

Similarly, the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) declares land to be under its authority for conservation purposes. Once land is allocated to the DWC, people cannot enter unless they have permission. Land allocated under the DWC in the Civil War naturally turned into forests. When the state mapped the area, they demarcated occupied private land as forest cover.

“We have certain places where the house is owned by a private individual and the toilet is owned by the DWC,” Sandun said. “Conservation is important but this is an arbitrary declaration of zones. We have asked for a proper mapping of the area for environmental conservation and private lands. This can help the release of lands to citizens.”

Despite their mandate for conservation, DWC-held land has also been used to set up cultivation projects. In 2015, the president claimed demilitarized land to be forest cover. The DWC set up elephant fences as borders, initiated reforestation projects, and the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) occupied these areas. In 2021, former Wildlife Conservation Minister Wimalaweera Dissanayake asked 600 CDF members to cultivate nut trees in the 300 acres allocated to each of them. Subsequently, the CDF members erected fences and claimed to be involved in a reforestation scheme, despite it being a cultivation scheme.

Another example is the occupation of the coastal belt. Coastal land in Sri Lanka is common land and in the past fishermen used this land to host their shelters, boats, and nets. After the tsunami in 2004, the state prevented construction in a 100 meter area that separated coast and land. When the Civil War ended in 2009, the state decided to allocate this land for tourism. In the Eastern Province, in particular, land has been sold to hotels.

The occupation of land by various state departments denies people access to the land, natural resources, and local infrastructure. Land that could potentially be used to stimulate the local economy is held by the state. The state is able to occupy, appropriate, and extract the lands for its benefit at the expense of the people it belongs to.

“If land is not prioritized, who are the beneficiaries of a political solution?” Rasamanickam asked.

The release of private land is just a start. There are a number of people that relocated from the plantations to the North and members of oppressed castes that never had land.

“There is a large section of society in the North that is landless. They never had land to start. This requires a much broader scheme for land alienation and land redistribution,” said Ahilan Kardirgamar, a lecturer at the University of Jaffna.

Militarized Capitalism

A study published in 2017 touched on the concept of militarized capitalism in the North-East. The idea is that militarization intersected with capitalism, in the form of apparel factories set up in former LTTE-occupied areas. The military helped these factories secure property, production sites, and a labor force in 2009. They also built infrastructure such as roads to increase connectivity. The factories set up training centers to indoctrinate the labor force into the rules of capitalism, namely technical skills, presentation and interpersonal skills. At this point, civilians still employed the labor force.

Over time, the intersection of capitalism and militarization coalesced into one form: militarized capitalism. In Mullaitivu alone, there are a number of military-run businesses (i.e. farms, hotels, and factories), recruitment of civilians into the military-run Civil Security Department (CSD) and interference by the military in the private sector. People are stuck in a cycle of control, dependence, and debt. As a result, the military, as a hand of capitalism, has a monopoly over the local economy and local political activity.

“The local people cannot access their land, natural resources, and markets. They are denied opportunities,” Sandun said. “Smallholder businesses and SMEs are supposed to compete. This is not a fair or equal competition. This bodes badly for the entire economy. It provides control of the economy to a limited group of people.

“Look at Myanmar and Pakistan. The authority of the military has been built through economic exercises. In those countries, the military controls the economy,” he continued.

The structural dependence of local livelihoods on the military means that they are instrumentalized for political purposes. CSD employees were used to campaign for former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s re-election in 2015. Workers had been told to protest the transfer of the CSD to civilian authorities in 2017.

Impact

With the end of the Civil War, repression became normalized in Sri Lanka’s North-East. In 2017, the district of Mullaitivu had 60,000 troops – 25 percent of the approximately 243,000 active military personnel in the entire country. For every two citizens, there was one soldier.

In 2024, over a decade since the war ended, Tamil people are haunted by surveillance, harassment, and intimidation. Women, in particular, have not received justice for the sexual violence they experienced in 2009. They encounter armed men in mundane situations: as they purchase food, enter schools, and access resources. Female-headed households are particularly culpable to violence. Those who protest have received visits from armed men at late hours, sources have disclosed.

Research from 2020 mapped out diminished civic space for minorities across Sri Lanka. While this space briefly opened up in the 2022 protests in the South, activists have encountered a climate of repression in events that remember Tamil people, such as the Mullivaikkal remembrance event in 2023 in Borella Cemetery and 2024 in Wellawatte Beach. Similarly, protests for Palestine are accompanied by a police force and water cannons.

“Tamils in the North-East have fought for the right to commemorate for many years prior, facing severe repression from the state. While commemoration events marking the Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day and Maaveerar Naal happen, the participants and organizers continue to face harassment from the state,” said Mario Arulthas, a Ph.D. candidate at SOAS, University of London. “The people organizing Tamil remembrance events in Colombo only started in recent years and are in a space that the state is not used to and therefore faced some backlash. Tamils have shown that these spaces, while contested, must be fought for.”

The deprivation of economic and civic rights has left the North-East vulnerable to external shocks. Sri Lanka’s poverty rate increased from 4 to 7 million during 2019-2023. While the economic crisis hit the entire island, the impact is compounded in the Tamil homeland. Research from 2019 revealed that multidimensional poverty had declined from 2007-2013, but existed in pockets in the North-East. In 2023, a UNDP report identified 55.7 percent of the country to be multidimensionally vulnerable, mostly from areas in the North, North-Central, and Eastern provinces. Many people have been forced into debt to secure basic necessities such as food and medicine. Reports by the World Food Program and U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization in 2023 exposed the acute food insecurity in districts in the North-East.

Tamil Vote

The Tamil people’s choice is crucial for the upcoming presidential election because no party is likely to secure a majority in the first round. Data from 2019 revealed that the North-East has exceptional voter turnout. These votes helped Sajith Premadasa and his party become a contender in the 2019 presidential election. The upcoming election is a three-horse race run by three candidates. As the Sinhala vote is likely to be split into three, the minority Tamil votes are essential for a party to secure a victory.

Tamil nationalist parties have announced a number of options: a boycott of the elections, support for a candidate in the South, or a common candidate for the Tamil vote. While some feel that the common candidate is an opportune moment to further Tamil demands, others are critical of it.

“The common candidate is a distraction. The Tamil nationalist parties have distorted the entire project. They remain on this one-track, polarizing ethnic project but this does not help the Tamil people,” Kardirgamar observed.

In a local paper, leader of ITAK, M. A. Sumanthiran said that presidential elections are not the time to make statements about Tamil demands.

“No party or a candidate is likely to receive 50 percent in the first count. So the president is likely to focus on the second preference. He could rely on SLPP members for the Southern votes and CWC for the Hill Country Tamil votes,” said Shreen Saroor, an activist and member of the Women’s Action Network.

“The Cabinet recently issued a statement about burial rites and an apology for forced cremation done during the pandemic, probably for the Muslim votes. It is also speculated that the president and the Tamil common candidate have a deal to further split the Tamil votes.”

Despite the importance of the Tamil vote, apart from lip service about the provincial councils, none of the candidates has proposed a radical solution to either the national question or the economic crisis. In the North-East, they manifest as one crisis.

Ernest Mandel
Hope and Marxism: Historical and Theoretical Essays



Resistance Books, London, 2023. 306 pp., £15.00 pb
ISBN 9780902869417

Reviewed by Fabian Van Onzen

About the reviewer
Fabian van Onzen received his PhD from the European Graduate School 

Some of Ernest Mandel’s finest work on Marxist theory and revolutionary politics appeared in the form of short articles. Hope and Marxism collects eleven of Mandel’s most significant articles and provides an excellent introduction to his thought.

The first article, ‘Althusser Corrects Marx’ (1969), represents Mandel’s contribution to the Marxist humanism debate. Althusser argued that Marx underwent an epistemological break in the 1860s, in which he abandoned the humanism of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and broke from Hegelian idealism. In ‘The Causes of Alienation’ (1970), Mandel shows that there was no epistemological break between the young and old Marx, but ‘an important evolution, not identical repetition, in Marx’s thought from decade to decade’ (40). A product of Marx’s humanism was the concept of alienation, which shows that working people under capitalism are alienated from the product of their labour, from each other and from themselves. Four features of alienation appear in a more mature form in Capital, which include the separation of the worker from the means of production, the generalisation of the sale of labour-power, the product belonging to the employer rather than the worker, and the loss of labour’s creative content. Mandel’s exposition is helpful and relevant, as many working people today are alienated through working uncreative, meaningless jobs that provide little satisfaction. For many, work is ‘something which is not productive or creative for human beings but something which is harmful and destructive’ (45).

Mandel argues that the solution to alienation is not more leisure time, for consumption is often just as alienated as production. In a way similar to Sweezy and Baran in Monopoly Capital, Mandel notes that through marketing and planned obsolescence, capitalists constantly render us dissatisfied in order to generate the desire for new products. Our relation to other people are also alienated and mediated by the commodity-form, for Mandel notes a tendency to treat people through socially defined functions (i.e. customer, student, client, patient, etc.). Alienation can only be overcome by socialism, which results in a planned economy that has abolished commodity production and private ownership of the means of production. Mandel denies that former socialist countries like the USSR, East Germany and Cuba managed to fully abolish alienation, insofar as they were transitional social formations that had eliminated capitalist property relations but had not ‘abolished the division of society into classes, they still have different social classes and different social layers’ (52). While life was materially better in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the bureaucratic deformation of political and social life resulted in similar patterns of alienation as witnessed in the capitalist world.

In ‘Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy’ (1977) and ‘A Critique of Eurocommunism’ (1979), Mandel examines reformist currents in the communist movement. He engages with a text from Engels (1870), who argued that the workers movement in Germany should utilise elections in order to agitate for socialism and win millions to revolutionary Marxism. Whereas Engels viewed parliamentary election as a tactic of a larger revolutionary strategy, his followers in the SPD, such as Bernstein, used it to argue for a non-revolutionary parliamentary road to socialism. Mandel emphasises that Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few figures who took a clear stance against electoralism and warned that it would fail ‘if the masses were not trained well in advance in the politics of extra-parliamentary action as well as routine electoralism and purely economic strikes’ (58). Taking inspiration from the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg advocated for a mass workers strike and predicted that the SPD party bureaucrats would oppose such actions in order to maintain their parliamentary privileges. Mandel notes that because the Second International was under the command of party bureaucrats, the masses became passive. This passivity enabled the leaders of the SPD and other Second International parties to call for the ‘defence of the fatherland’ during the First World War.

Luxemburg agitated for a party with a clear programme, which would intervene in workers’ struggle to ‘ensure that on the day of the revolution the party would be the driving force of the proletariat and not its bureaucratic hangman’ (71). While the article is helpful in allowing us to appreciate Luxemburg’s contributions to Marxist politics, it is somewhat reductive and does not bring out the rich debates that took place in the Second International of which Luxemburg was a major participant. These debates, recently compiled by Mike Taber in Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism and Under the Socialist Banner, show that while the SPD did later develop in an extremely opportunist direction, the debates around parliamentarism and war were far more complex than Mandel’s account. In Taber’s work we see a wide cast of characters who took a range of positions on party-building, strategy and tactics, elections and socialism.

Mandel further explores reformism in ‘A Critique of Eurocommunism’ (1979), which explores the eurocommunist current in the French (PCF), Italian (PCI), Spanish (PCE) and Japanese (JCP) communist parties. Eurocommunism was a current in the 1970s, in which communist parties engaged in coalitions with other socialist parties and social movements in order to seize state power through parliament. In the PCF and PCI, this resulted in major revisions to established party doctrine, such as removing ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ from the programme and sharp criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy in order to appeal to more voters. They adopted the anti-monopoly strategy, which sought to unite trade unions, small business owners, oppressed peoples movements and even sections of the bourgeoisie against ‘monopoly capitalism’. If elected, the Communist Party would expropriate monopoly property, strengthen union power and delink from the global capitalist system.

Mandel views eurocommunism as a continuation of the Popular Front strategy pursued by the Third International in the 1930s, in which communist parties around the world formed alliances with the national bourgeoisie in order to protect democracy against fascism. As the PCF, PCI, PCE and JCP had all become hugely powerful organisations by the 1970s that could garner millions of votes, Mandel notes that a bureaucracy emerged within bourgeois parliaments with special privileges. He claims that the reason why they adopted a critical attitude towards the USSR was not in order to honestly break from Stalinism, but because the parliamentary CP bureaucracies had shifted their allegiance towards the bourgeoisie. Just like in the period of the Popular Front, the eurocommunist parties abandoned revolutionary Leninism in order to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and gain special privileges. While he views the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Bukharin in the eurocommunist period as positive, Mandel analyses eurocommunism from within the Trotskyist paradigm and compares it to the opportunist turn of the Second International.

In a further critique of eurocommunist politics, ‘On the Class Nature of the Capitalist State’ (1980), Mandel argues that socialist transformation is impossible through elections. He distinguishes between state power and state management. Following Lenin, Mandel views the capitalist state as an instrument of repression that is necessary for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. While the bourgeoisie always holds state power in a capitalist state, other classes can manage the state in certain social formations. For example, in the period of fascism in Germany and Italy, sections of the petty-bourgeoisie managed the capitalist state in order to crush the workers movement through organised terror. Mandel concludes that if the eurocommunists were to get elected into power, they would manage the capitalist state for the bourgeoisie until they were no longer useful and then be overthrown, as happened in Chile in 1973 with Pinochet’s coup.

Despite being non-revolutionary and a major cause of the liquidation of many communist parties around the world, eurocommunism had a leftist current within it led by Nikos Poulantzas. Poulantzas was critical of the eurocommunist strategy but could appreciate some of the questions it raised and the ways it engaged with non-communist movements like feminism. For example, the eurocommunist parties drew significant attention to the nature of the capitalist state in a way that Lenin, Trotsky and other Third International figures did not. While Mandel briefly engages with Poulantzas in his longer work From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, his approach is to dismiss him by claiming that Poulantzas veered too much from Marxist orthodoxy. Such an attitude prevents Mandel from integrating new theory into Marxism, which he treats as a fully worked-out doctrine.

In ‘We Must Dream’ (1978), Mandel engages with the work of Ernest Bloch, who is known for his introduction of utopianism and revolutionary vision into communist thought. Mandel argues that Bloch’s category of hope is a fundamental aspect of all revolutionary movements that gives ‘it an energy and driving power, which cannot arise exclusively from the defence of daily material interests’ (115). Those who have dedicated their life to the fight for a communist, classless society are often inspired by a vision which the most fundamental defeats cannot break. This communist faith anticipates something without any current existence, but is materially possible and therefore inspires revolutionary praxis. Revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral and Maurice Bishop were able to gain the trust of millions of people not solely on the basis of their programme, but because they provided an emancipatory vision and showed the way to achieve it.

Hope and Marxism illustrates the incredible depth of Mandel’s thinking over a period of 25 years. It is a fine collection of essays that gives helpful overview to Mandel’s thought during the seventies and eighties. It is a great book for those who are new to Marxism and eager to see certain threads on how Marxists have approached electoral politics, the capitalist state and socialist revolution.

10 February 2024

ReferencesMike Taber (ed) 2023 Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism and Under the Socialist Banner (Chicago: Haymarket Books).


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21371_hope-and-marxism-historical-and-theoretical-essays-by-ernest-mandel-reviewed-by-fabian-van-onzen/

Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis, and the Situationists

Vasilis Grollios

Routledge, New York and London, 2024. 206 pp., £130 hb
ISBN 9781032556772

Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty


The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?

Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.

Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.

One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.

Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).

In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.

The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).

Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).

The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).

In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).

The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation ­of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

1 March 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/

 

Lenin on Serbia’s role in World War I: A useful analogy for the current Ukraine war?

By Michael Pröbsting

Published 16 August, 2024

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Since the start of the Ukraine War, a number of organisations have wrongly taken a neutral position in this conflict. They refused to defend Ukraine despite its semi-colonial character and Russia’s imperialist character. To justify such an approach, they often used the example of Vladimir Lenin’s position on Serbia in World War I.

We will not discuss the Ukraine War as such, something I have covered in numerous other documents.1 We shall rather focus on one specific aspect in the debate among Marxists, namely Lenin’s actual position on the defence of Serbia in World War I and why it is wrong to apply it to the Ukraine War today.

The Marxist position on the Ukraine War

Since the start of the invasion two and a half years ago, we have emphasised the reactionary character of Russia’s war. As is well-known, there is a long history of national oppression of the Ukrainian people by Great Russian chauvinism. Furthermore, the war has an imperialist character from the side of Russia, which became an imperialist Great Power in the early 2000s.2 In contrast, Ukraine has been a semi-colony since the restoration of capitalism in 1991.3

We have characterised Ukraine’s struggle against Putin’s invasion as a just war of national defence. At the same time, we have emphasised the dual character of the conflict, since it is not only a national liberation war by Ukraine but it is also linked with the accelerating rivalry between imperialist powers.4

Hence, a consistent internationalist and anti-imperialist position requires a dual tactic. Socialists are obliged to defend semi-colonial Ukraine against Russian imperialism. However, they must lend no support for the chauvinist and militarist policy of any Great Power against their rivals. Hence, it is impermissible to support economic sanctions or similar Great Power measures.

In a Manifesto, published a few days after the beginning of the war, we summarised our position in the following slogans: 

Defend Ukraine! Defeat Russian imperialism! International popular solidarity with the Ukrainian national resistance — independent of any imperialist influence! Down with all imperialist powers — NATO and EU as well as Russia! In all conflicts between these powers, revolutionaries fight against both camps!5

While we side with Ukraine and its just war of national defence, we refuse to lend any political support for the bourgeois and pro-NATO government of Zelensky.6

How centrists misuse Lenin’s example of Serbia

Numerous self-proclaimed Marxists who refuse to defend Ukraine have justified their position by referring to Lenin’s approach on Serbia’s role in World War I. Serbia was a capitalist semi-colonial country that was attacked by the imperialist Austro-Hungarian Empire in July 1914. While Lenin recognised that, in itself, Serbia’s struggle was a just war for national self-determination, he emphasised this was a subordinated element in the World War, which had an imperialist character. In such a situation, the national element in Serbia’s case could not play an independent role. Consequently, the Bolsheviks opposed calling for the defence of Serbia.

From this, centrists conclude that it would be likewise legitimate to refuse to defend Ukraine today, since this war supposedly constitutes only a subordinated element in the inter-imperialist rivalry between NATO and Russia (and China).

Alex Callinicos, the leading theoretician of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and its International Socialist Tendency, wrote in an article explaining his organisations’ position:

Inter-imperialist struggles and wars of national defence often interweave. The First World War started when the Austro-Hungarian Empire attacked Serbia, which it blamed for the assassination of its crown prince Franz Ferdinand. Russia then backed Serbia, leading to an escalating process of military mobilisations that ended in a terrible general war. The German Marxist Karl Kautsky argued that the role played by the Serbian struggle for national self-determination meant the conflict wasn’t just an imperialist war. Lenin responded, ‘To Serbia, i.e., to perhaps one percent or so of the participants in the present war, the war is a ‘continuation of the politics’ of the bourgeois-liberation movement. ‘To the other ninety-nine percent, the war is a continuation of the politics of imperialism.’ Of course, the balance is different in the present case since the direct fighting involves just Ukraine and Russia.7

The Trotskyist Fraction, whose main force is the Socialist Workers’ Party (PTS) in Argentina which, as part of the Left and Workers Front (FIT-U), has several deputies in national and regional parliaments, argues similarly:

Like the Ukraine war, the First World War led to historic debates on the Marxist Left. In 1914, there was a legitimate war of national liberation by the Belgian people against an unprovoked German attack and occupation. Serbia was also waging a war of national defence against an imperialist power, Austria-Hungry, that wanted to devour it. Had Lenin and other Marxists attempted to look at either of these partial conflicts in isolation, they would have needed to give full support to the Belgians and Serbians. But they recognized this would have meant placing themselves on the side of the imperialist Allies. As most socialists would agree today, World War I was not a series of isolated wars of national liberation — it was a global conflict among imperialist powers. Socialists needed to fight for the defeat of their “own” bourgeoisie. (…) Today, socialists in the NATO countries need to oppose their “own” imperialist power. (…) Socialists need to fight for an independent position.8

Finally, the ultraleft International Bolshevik Tendency, which comes from the Spartacist tradition whose founder was Jim Robertson, argues:

It can happen, however, that conflict between imperialist powers becomes the defining feature of the situation – in such cases, a non-imperialist country’s independence and right to self-determination become illusory in the context of an inter-imperialist struggle for control of its territory, whichever side it chooses or is forced to align with. Today, this applies to the war between imperialist Russia and neocolonial Ukraine, which is backed by a massive coalition of Russia’s imperialist rivals. In The Collapse of the Second International (1915), Lenin addressed this type of situation vis-à-vis Serbia’s war against the Austro-Hungarian empire. (It follows a Lenin quote which we will reproduce below, Ed.) The problem, Lenin argued, was that the Serbian struggle for national self-determination had become subsumed in the broader inter-imperialist conflict. (It follows another Lenin quote which we will reproduce below, Ed.) Likewise, Ukraine’s struggle to defeat Russia cannot be separated from NATO’s campaign to diminish Russian imperialism – a campaign whose victory would result in further subordinating Ukraine to German and US imperialism.9

Irrespective of their different traditions, these organisations arrive at the same conclusion of refusing to support Ukraine by referring to Lenin’s position on Serbia in WWI. However, they are all mistaken in such an interpretation of the Bolshevik’s position.

What did Lenin say?

Lenin recognised the imperialist character of WWI from the very first days. The Bolsheviks opposed all imperialist Great Powers — both the Central Powers as well as the Entente — and advocated a policy of revolutionary defeatism in all participating countries. This strategy was summarised in famous slogans such as “The main enemy is at home” (Karl Liebknecht), that the defeat of the own imperialist ruling class was the “lesser evil” and that revolutionaries should strive for the “transformation of the imperialist war into civil war”, that is, the advance of the proletariats’ struggle for power under the conditions of war.

The Bolsheviks were fully aware that while the war as a whole was imperialist, it also had in the case of Serbia, which was attacked by Austria-Hungary, the element of a national war of defence. They wrote in their first Manifesto in October 1914:

In fact, the German bourgeoisie has launched a robber campaign against Serbia, with the object of subjugating her and throttling the national revolution of the Southern Slavs, at the same time sending the bulk of its military forces against the freer countries, Belgium and France, so as to plunder richer competitors.10

However, they also made clear that this element was subordinated to the overall imperialist character of the World War:

The present war is, in substance, a struggle between Britain, France and Germany for the partition of colonies and for the plunder of rival countries; on the part of tsarism and the ruling classes of Russia, it is an attempt to seize Persia, Mongolia, Turkey in Asia, Constantinople, Galicia, etc. The national element in the Austro-Serbian war is an entirely secondary consideration and does not affect the general imperialist character of the war.11

Lenin considered the “national element in the Austro-Serbian war” as secondary only because it was a comparably very small and subordinate factor in a world war involving all Great Powers. Given most Great Powers had colonial empires, it meant most countries in the world participated, in one way or the other, in this gigantic confrontation.12

Lenin wrote:

The national element in the Serbo-Austrian war is not, and cannot be, of any serious significance in the general European war. If Germany wins, she will throttle Belgium, one more part of Poland, perhaps part of France, etc. If Russia wins, she will throttle Galicia, one more part of Poland, Armenia, etc. If the war ends in a “draw”, the old national oppression will remain. To Serbia, i.e., to perhaps one per cent or so of the participants in the present war, the war is a “continuation of the politics” of the bourgeois-liberation movement. To the other ninety-nine per cent, the war is a continuation of the politics of imperialism, i.e., of the decrepit bourgeoisie, which is capable only of raping nations, not freeing them. The Triple Entente, which is “liberating” Serbia, is selling the interests of Serbian liberty to Italian imperialism in return for the latter’s aid in robbing Austria.13

However, he insisted that if the war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary would take place in isolation — that is, not as part of a world war — socialists would be obligated to support the Balkan country:

In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria (which, by the way, was noted in the resolution of our Party’s Berne Conference). It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, “the masses of the people”, a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a “continuation”. If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie – this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war.14

Lenin repeated this approach in several documents, all the more as he considered the national question of crucial importance in the epoch of imperialism:

Of course, even now there are blotches of the old colour in the living picture of reality. Thus, of all the warring countries, the Serbs alone are still fighting for national existence. In India and China, too, class-conscious proletarians could not take any other path but the national one, because their countries have not yet been formed into national states. If China had to carry on an offensive war for this purpose, we could only sympathise with her, because objectively it would be a progressive war. In exactly the same way, Marx in 1848 could call for an offensive war against Russia.15

I think it is mistaken in theory and harmful in practice not to distinguish types of wars. We cannot be against wars of national liberation. You quote the example of Serbia. But if the Serbs were alone against Austria, would we not be for the Serbs?16

Lenin was quite clear about the relationship of the “national element” and the “imperialist element”. He recognized the “national element” in the Austro-Serbian war but viewed this conflict as only a small factor within the whole World War, which had a thoroughly imperialist character. Hence, socialists could not defend Serbia since this objectively would have meant to side with one imperialist camp against another (Serbia was part of the Entente). However, if the Austro-Serbian war would have taken place in isolation, the Bolsheviks would have supported the Balkan country and advocated the defeat of its imperialist opponent.

How to apply the analogy to the Ukraine War?

How should we correctly apply the analogy with Serbia to the Ukraine War. The above-quoted centrists all “ignore”, or better pretend not to be aware of, the gigantic difference between the Austro-Serbian war in 1914-18 and the current Ukraine War: the former case was part of a World War involving all Great Powers and resulting in about 15-22 million deaths while the latter is an isolated war without an ongoing world war.

The centrists’ analogy with Lenin’s position on the subordinated role of the Austro-Serbian war would only be appropriate if the current Ukraine War was part of World War III. However, as far as we know, such a colossal event has not begun yet.

Some centrists might try to defend their position by saying that there is a cold war between Western and Eastern imperialists and that such a conflict is kind of equivalent to a World War. However, such an objection is nonsense.

First, a world war is not the same as a cold war. One kills millions of people and escalates the contradictions between classes and state to the utmost extreme. The other does not — it is rather a step towards such a possible apocalyptic scenario, and it is not unavoidable that it results in Armageddon. It can be brought to an end either by a socialist world revolution or the implosion of one of the belligerent camps (see for example the last Cold War (1948-91), which ended with the collapse of Stalinism). To confuse these two scenarios is ridiculous and criminal idiocy.

Second, every historian knows that WWI did not appear out of thin air but was the result of the long-existing rivalry between European imperialist powers — most importantly France, Germany, Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary. There were several occasions in the years before 1914 where the European powers were in a stage of acute crisis or even close to military conflict: the Agadir Crisis and the Tangier Crisis between Germany, France and Britain — both conflicts about control of Morocco (the first in 1905-06 and the second in 1911); the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-09; and the Balkan Wars in 1912-13. All these crises brought rivalry between imperialist powers close to an explosion.17

Serbia itself had been in conflict — economically and diplomatically — with the Austro-Hungarian Empire for a number of years before 1914 (similar to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine before 2022). At the same time, it was financially dependent on France, which held three quarters of its debt. Furthermore, it was politically and militarily allied with Russian imperialism for many years and viewed it as its “protector”. In fact, the whole world war started because Russia mobilised troops after Austria-Hungary started a war against its Serbian ally on July 28.18

The Second International was fully aware of the cold war between imperialist powers and discussed how to resist the war-drive at its congresses (most importantly in Stuttgart in 1907) as well as the Basel Conference in 1912. The resolutions adopted at these congresses took a correct position against such a reactionary war between the Great Powers. But when the war started in summer 1914, the Second International, riven by the influence of the opportunist labour bureaucracy and aristocracy, failed to put their words into deeds.

The only exceptions were the minorities who founded the Zimmerwald movement and, in particular, the left wing of the Second International led by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. The latter put up an energetic and consistent struggle against the imperialist war and laid the foundation for the Communist International, which was founded in March 1919.19

Notwithstanding this failure, the fact that the Second International warned about a looming Great War in Europe and discussed this as the most important issue at its congresses before 1914 reflects that this period was one of armament race and accelerated inter-imperialist rivalry; that is, a cold war between Great Powers.

When Lenin discussed the possibility of an Austro-Serbian war in isolation — without the context of WWI — he had in mind a situation as it existed before 1914. Hence, he could not but consider Serbia as it existed at this time, that is as a capitalist semi-colony allied with Russian imperialism that operated in a world political situation characterised by a cold war between the Great Powers.

The role of imperialist aid

Some say socialists cannot support a semi-colony if it receives aid from this or that imperialist power. We have already discussed this argument on several occasions.20 At this point we shall limit ourselves to referring to Lenin, who faced similar objections and who rejected such arguments:

Britain and France fought the Seven Years’ War for the possession of colonies. In other words, they waged an imperialist war (which is possible on the basis of slavery and primitive capitalism as well as on the basis of modern highly developed capitalism). France suffered defeat and lost some of her colonies. Several years later there began the national liberation war of the North American States against Britain alone. France and Spain, then in possession of some parts of the present United States, concluded a friendship treaty with the States in rebellion against Britain. This they did out of hostility to Britain, i.e., in their own imperialist interests. French troops fought the British on the side of the American forces. What we have here is a national liberation war in which imperialist rivalry is an auxiliary element, one that has no serious importance. This is the very opposite to what we see in the war of 1914-16 (the national element in the Austro-Serbian War is of no serious importance compared with the all-determining element of imperialist rivalry). It would be absurd, therefore, to apply the concept of imperialism indiscriminately and conclude that national wars are “impossible”. A national liberation war, waged, for example, by an alliance of Persia, India and China against one or more of the imperialist powers, is both possible and probable, for it would follow from the national liberation movements in these countries. The transformation of such a war into an imperialist war between the present-day imperialist powers would depend upon very many concrete factors, the emergence of which it would be ridiculous to guarantee.21

The general staffs in the current war are doing their utmost to utilise any national and revolutionary movement in the enemy camp: the Germans utilise the Irish rebellion, the French—the Czech movement, etc. They are acting quite correctly from their own point of view. A serious war would not be treated seriously if advantage were not taken of the enemy’s slightest weakness and if every opportunity that presented itself were not seized upon, the more so since it is impossible to know beforehand at what moment, where, and with what force some powder magazine will “explode”. We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis.22

We shall point out that one cannot exclude the possibility that the character of the Ukraine War could undergo a qualitative change in the future and be transformed from what is primarily a national liberation war into a war where Ukraine becomes a proxy of Western imperialism, and therefore equally reactionary on both sides. As we analysed in several documents, such a transformation could take place if NATO troops directly intervene in the war, if Ukraine becomes a member of NATO or the EU or if similar developments take place. However, while such a course is currently advocated by some minority sectors of the Western political and military elite, it has not taken place until now — hence there has been no such transformation of the war’s character.23

The centrists completely misinterpret Lenin’s example of Serbia’s role in WWI. They wrongly claim that the Austrian-Serbian War, as part of such a gigantic slaughter of people, is the same as the current war, which has evolved as a result of the contradictions between semi-colony Ukraine and Russian imperialism within the context of a cold war between Great Powers. Lenin explicitly argued that if the war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia would take place without the context of a world war, socialists would be obligated to side with the Balkan country and advocate the defeat of the imperialist power.

This example demonstrates once more that without a concrete and dialectical analysis of a war, as well as of the world situation, it is impossible to find a correct orientation.

• 1

  See https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/compilation-of-documents-on-nato-russia-conflict/

• 2

  See by Michael Pröbsting: The Peculiar Features of Russian Imperialism. A Study of Russia’s Monopolies, Capital Export and Super-Exploitation in the Light of Marxist Theory, 10 August 2021, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-peculiar-features-of-russian-imperialism/; Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism and the Rise of Russia as a Great Power. On the Understanding and Misunderstanding of Today’s Inter-Imperialist Rivalry in the Light of Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism. Another Reply to Our Critics Who Deny Russia’s Imperialist Character, August 2014, http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialism-theory-and-russia/; Russia as a Great Imperialist Power. The formation of Russian Monopoly Capital and its Empire – A Reply to our Critics, 18 March 2014 (this pamphlet contains a document written in 2001 in which we established for the first time our characterisation of Russia as imperialist), http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialist-russia/. See also by same author: Russia: An Imperialist Power or a “Non-Hegemonic Empire in Gestation”? A reply to the Argentinean economist Claudio Katz, in: New Politics, 11 August 2022, at https://newpol.org/russia-an-imperialist-power-or-a-non-hegemonic-empire-in-gestation-a-reply-to-the-argentinean-economist-claudio-katz-an-essay-with-8-tables/; Russian Imperialism and Its Monopolies, in: New Politics Vol. XVIII No. 4, Whole Number 72, Winter 2022, https://newpol.org/issue_post/russian-imperialism-and-its-monopolies/; Once Again on Russian Imperialism (Reply to Critics). A rebuttal of a theory which claims that Russia is not an imperialist state but would be rather “comparable to Brazil and Iran”, 30 March 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/once-again-on-russian-imperialism-reply-to-critics/. See also: https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/china-russia-as-imperialist-powers/.

• 3

  For a detailed analysis of Ukraine see Michael Pröbsting: Ukraine: A Capitalist Semi-Colony. On the exploitation and deformation of Ukraine’s economy by imperialist monopolies and oligarchs since capitalist restoration in 1991, January 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/ukraine-a-capitalist-semi-colony/ 

• 4

  See Michael Pröbsting: Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry. The Factors behind the Accelerating Rivalry between the U.S., China, Russia, EU and Japan. A Critique of the Left’s Analysis and an Outline of the Marxist Perspective, RCIT Books, Vienna 2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-imperialism-in-the-age-of-great-power-rivalry/.

• 5

  RCIT Manifesto: Ukraine War: A Turning Point of World Historic Significance. Socialists must combine the revolutionary defense of the Ukraine against Putin’s invasion with the internationalist struggle against Russian as well as NATO and EU imperialism, 1 March 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/manifesto-ukraine-war-a-turning-point-of-world-historic-significance/.

• 6

  See NATO Integration: An Imperialist Trap for the Ukrainian People! 19 June 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/nato-integration-is-imperialist-trap-for-ukraine/

• 7

  Alex Callinicos: The great power grab—imperialism and the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is an ongoing battle between imperialist rivals, driven forward by capitalist competition, 27 March 2022, Socialist Worker, Issue 2798, https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/the-great-power-grab-imperialism-and-war-in-ukraine/ 

• 8

  Nathaniel Flakin: Ukraine Is Not Vietnam, Left Voice (Trotskyist Faction), 1 July 2023, https://www.leftvoice.org/ukraine-is-not-vietnam/ 

• 9

  IBT: Ukraine & the Left. Revolutionary defeatism & workers’ internationalism, 7 March 2022, https://bolshevik.org/statements/ibt_20220307_ukraine_left.html 

• 10

  V.I. Lenin: The War and Russian Social-Democracy (1914); in: LCW 21, p.28

• 11

  V. I. Lenin: The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Groups Abroad (1915); in LCW 21, p. 129

• 12

  Naturally, there exists a vast amount of literature about World War I. As useful historical works from a Marxist or progressive point of view, we refer to Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, Michael Joseph, London 1994, pp. 21-53; Gerd Hardach: The First World War 1914–1918, Pelican Books, 1977; Alexander Anievas (Ed.): Cataclysm 1914. The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, Brill, Leiden 2015; for a map which visualises the global span of WWI see Wikipedia: Allies of World War I, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_I.

• 13

  V. I. Lenin: The Collapse of the Second International (1915), in: LCW Vol. 21, pp.235-236

• 14

  V.I. Lenin: The Collapse of the Second International (1915), in: LCW Vol. 21, p.235

• 15

  V.I. Lenin: Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War” (October 1914), in: LCW 36, p. 299

• 16

  V.I. Lenin: Letter to A. M. Kollontai (Summer 1915), in: LCW 35, p. 249; see e.g. also V. I. Lenin: The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up (1916) ; in: LCW Vol. 22, p. 332

• 17

  There exists also a vast amount of literature about the prehistory of World War I. As useful historical works from a Marxist or progressive point of view, we refer to James Joll: The Origins of the First World War, Longman, London 1984; Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Empire, Vintage Books, New York 1989, pp. 302-327; M. N. Pokrovsky: Aus den Geheim-Archiven des Zaren. Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach den Urhebern des Weltkrieges, August Scherl G.m.b.H, Berlin 1919; Imanuel Geiss: Der lange Weg in die Katastrophe. Die Vorgeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs 1815-1914, Piper, München 1990

• 18

  See on this e.g. Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Allen Lane, London 2012, pp. 242-313; John Paul Newman: Civil and military relations in Serbia during 1903–1914, in: Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (Eds.): The Wars before the Great War. Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015, pp. 114-128

• 19

  On the Zimmerwald Movement and, in particular the Zimmerwald Left led by Lenin see e.g. John Riddell, Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, New York: Pathfinder, 1984; R. Craig Nation, War on War, Duke University Press, Durham 1989; Olga Hess Fisher, H.H. Gankin: The Bolsheviks and the World War; the Origin of the Third International, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1940; Ian D. Thatcher: Leon Trotsky and World War One August 1914–February 1917, Macmillan Press Ltd, London 2000 (Chapter 4); Alfred Erich Senn: The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 1914-1917, University of Wisconsin Press, London 1971; Akito Yamanouchi: "Internationalized Bolshevism": The Bolsheviks and the International, 1914-1917, in: Acta Slavica Iaponica Vol.7 (1989), pp. 17-32; Horst Lademacher: Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Vol. 1 and 2, Den Haag 1967; Jules Humbert-Droz: Der Krieg und die Internationale. Die Konferenzen von Zimmerwald und Kienthal, Wien 1964; Angelica Balabanova: Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung 1914–1919. Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1928; Arnold Reisberg: Lenin und die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Berlin 1966.

• 20

  See Michael Pröbsting: A Marxist Slogan and its Caricature. On the social-imperialist distortion of the slogan “The Main Enemy Is At Home” in the context of the Ukraine War and the Taiwan Strait Crisis, 17 August 2022, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/the-marxist-slogan-the-main-enemy-is-at-home-and-its-social-imperialist-distortion/; by the same author Ukraine War: Once More on Military Aid and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry. A critical contribution to a debate among Trotskyists in the U.S., 7 January 2023, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/ukraine-war-once-more-on-military-aid-and-inter-imperialist-rivalry-rsop-dc-srs-ft-lit/

• 21

  V. I. Lenin: The Junius Pamphlet (1916); in: LCW 22, p. 310-11

• 22

  V. I. Lenin: The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up (1916); in: LCW Vol. 22, p. 357

• 23

  See RCIT: European Imperialism: A Shift towards Armament and Militarisation, 4 May 2024, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/european-imperialism-a-shift-towards-armament-and-militarisation/