Dimitrios Patelis | Collective for Revolutionary Unification (Greece)
Introduction
The ongoing World War III (WWIII) presents the global revolutionary movement with vital tasks. It makes it necessary and imperative to organically interconnect the tactics of the anti-imperialist struggle with the struggle for the strategy of socialist revolution and the perspective of communism.
The urgently needed anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, national-liberation, national-independence, anti-fascist, etc. tasks can be achieved effectively and consistently by a frontal revolutionary movement, in which the communists play a pioneering and leading role. This is in turn possible to the extent that the communists also spearhead the theoretical and ideological struggle by linking these objectives to the revolutionary perspective of socialism in an organic, substantiated, scientific and convincing way, to revolutionary social transformations that pave the way for the socialist revolution.
In order to best serve these tasks, the World Anti-imperialist Platform (WAP) was established and is being developed. The main interrelated aims of the WAP are: 1. The coordination and organisation of the anti-imperialist struggle; 2. The ideological struggle against opportunism and revisionism that act to undermine the movement; 3. The consolidation of the consistent revolutionary and internationalist communist forces, without the leading role of which the victorious anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples is unattainable.
In the WAP we consider necessary the broadest possible rallying and mobilisation in the frontal anti-imperialist struggle, of forces and tendencies with different ideological and political starting points and tendencies. However, we are convinced that the optimal way of organising and escalating the anti-imperialist struggle cannot be consciously planned without its organic interconnection with the struggle for socialist revolution.
Anti-imperialism and socialism/communism, in their social/class and ideological/political content, are two distinct but organically interrelated components of a single revolutionary process, a single movement.
The basic precondition for the strengthening of the anti-imperialist struggle today is the reconstitution and strengthening of the communist movement on a national, regional, and global scale, on the basis of the creative development and application of contemporary revolutionary theory and methodology.
WWIII has brought to the surface a plethora of ideas, scenarios and approaches to the rapid shifts taking place in the balance of power. Currently, the anti-imperialist movement is being approached by forces inspired or influenced to some extent by ideologies and ideological constructs in which concepts and doctrines of “geopolitics” are predominant.
If we seek a truly scientific approach to the issue, we must make a clear distinction between two levels of approach:
1. On the one hand, there is the actual objective historical process in the development of which historical subjects are involved based on the objectively available resources and means of pursuing their actions. The crystallisation of this process leads to the respective changes in the balance of power, the poles of attraction and/or repulsion of power and the corresponding (old and new) decision-making centres.
2. On the other hand, there is a plethora of different levels of reliability or unreliability of ideas, approaches, perceptions, speculations, working hypotheses and so on, through which people attempt to understand, describe, explain, and predict the above phenomena.
Geopolitics as ideology and propaganda of the capitalist class
Geopolitics is a direction of bourgeois ideology, a handmaid to every strategic and tactical pursuit of the “collective capitalist” at national and international level (and therefore of the ruling class’s leading political personnel). Geopolitics is often given a scientific veneer, with corresponding courses, degrees, university positions, “research centres”, etc.
As a widespread direction or trend in bourgeois political thought and propaganda, geopolitics is rooted in the extreme over-exaggeration or even absolutisation of the role of geographical factors in the life of society and in history. According to its ideologies and approaches, the whole flow of the history of human society is directly related to geographical terms and geographic location, in combination with Malthusian and neo-Malthusian ideas of demography, and even with racist concepts of social Darwinism. According to these concepts, not all races and nations are equal. On the contrary, there is a hierarchy between superior races/nations and inferior ones. Moreover, there is always insufficient “vital space” for the “superior and rising nations”, hence the legitimacy of claiming “vital space”, which leads to constant revisions of various physical borders, etc. Therefore, geopolitics as a rule functions as a necessary foundation for the ideology and propaganda of the aggressive foreign policy of imperialism.
While it emerged in its basic ideological directions from bourgeois public written discourse at the end of the 19th century in colonial Britain, France, Sweden, etc. however, as a sphere of ideological framing of the war and political aspirations of the warring imperialist camps, it flourished during the First World War. It was then that the Swedish pan-germanist political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén formulated the term “geopolitics”, describing the state as a geographical and biological organism. Since then, geopolitics has also been organically linked to the practical, ‘institutional’ applications of racism (eugenics, the imposition of sterilisation by court order, concentration and extermination camps for undesirables, control and repression of immigrants, ethnic cleansing, persecution of revolutionaries as forces ‘undermining national purity’, lobotomies, etc.).
During the interwar period it flourished in Italy, Germany, militaristic Japan and elsewhere, where it served as the “foundation” of the official doctrines of fascism, nazism and monarcho-fascism. It provided the ideological basis for the misanthropic and genocidal practices of the regimes of the anti-Comintern fascist axis.
The agents of fascist geopolitics officially organised and disseminated on a wide scale the propaganda of the ideas of revanchism and retaliation for the “unjust character” of the Treaty of Versailles against Germany. What they actually sought was to satisfy the imperialist aspirations for the redistribution of colonies and spheres of influence for the benefit of the German financial oligarchy, which they presented as a supposedly “natural aggression to claim necessary vital space” on behalf of the entire “supreme German nation” and the “Aryan race” …
After World War II, geopolitics blossomed in the United States and in some other imperialist countries as an ideological tool of anti-sovietism/anti-communism during the cold war, as a means of achieving the neo-colonialist aims of the financial oligarchy of imperialism. A distinctive feature of geopolitics is expressing the claims of the major imperialist states and their trans-state organs, coalitions, etc. for world domination, “world order” and, if possible, “world governance”. In any case, geopolitics has over time been associated with various versions of racism, chauvinism, nationalism but also with versions of cosmopolitanism.
Racism is a mishmash of unscientific and irrational beliefs about the supposed biologically determined physical and spiritual inequality of the human races and about the decisive influence of racial differences on the history and culture of society. Common to all racism is misanthropism, prejudices about superior and inferior races, the ones who are supposedly destined to be the sole creators of civilisation and domination and those who are incapable of cultural creation and hence are doomed to be exclusively dominated, subjugated, and exploited.
Nationalism, as bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, psychology and politics perceives the nation as a supreme — non-historical and transcendental of class — unity, as a harmonious whole with identical basic interests. The interests of the ruling class are here projected as “nationwide”, while in relation to other nations, the nationalists put forward the idea of their own national supremacy and exclusivity. An extreme form of nationalism is chauvinism, the characteristic feature of which is an insistence on “national exclusivity”, the prevalence of the interests of one nation over the interests of other nations, national arrogance, hostility, and hatred towards other nations.
Cosmopolitanism is the reactionary bourgeois ideology/utopia with geopolitical implications, which is directed against the autonomy of the state and national sovereignty, against national traditions, national culture, and patriotism. This ideology is particularly widespread in the era of imperialism, since it aims towards the unhindered freedom of capital of the multinational monopoly groups on a planetary scale, free rein, and impunity for the financial oligarchy. The agents of this ideology consider anti-imperialism, any national liberation movement, any struggle for national and popular sovereignty “obsolete” (in this respect, the supporters of the revisionist doctrine of the “imperialist pyramid” agree with the reactionary bourgeois utopia of cosmopolitanism, with the only difference being the attempt to present this alignment with the strategy of imperialism as “the only revolutionary one”!).
Proletarian internationalism is opposed to all forms of racism, nationalism, and chauvinism, as well as to bourgeois cosmopolitanism, which advocates the integration of nations through the violent assimilation and enslavement of their peoples by imperialism in terms of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Marxists see the prospect of the rapprochement and conglomeration of nations through objective social development, through the law governed path towards unification of humanity under communism, in a process that crosses through the liberation, emancipation and self-determination of nations, through the flourishing cultural prosperity of each of these nations as organic elements of the unified humanity’s culture, on a completely voluntary basis.
Based on all the above, geopolitics certainly is not and cannot be considered a science. It is based by definition on a predominantly superficial, subjective and irrationally charged, or even highly obsessive perception of reality, especially when unresolved contradictions emerge due to the accumulation of changes in the balance of power on a regional and global scale.
In conditions of impending and/or ongoing military conflicts, geopolitics becomes particularly popular in the circles of the public opinion and common sense of everyday consciousness.
Despite its popularity in conditions of conflict, however, geopolitics is unable to rise above its immanent methodological inadequacies and its bourgeois reactionary ideological limitations. Geopolitical narratives are rife with unstable references, teetering towards a variety of different ideologies, pseudo-philosophical ravings, and irrational elements.
In its narratives, apart from the exaggeration of the geographic factor, many different factors are invoked at will, which makes it a version of the so-called “factor theory”. This type of “theory” attempts to describe and explain structure and movement, balances, imbalances, and conflicts by invoking certain “coequal” factors: economy, demography, geography, military power, religion, morality, technology, culture, “race”, etc. The inability to organically interconnect and prioritise the factors leads to a chaotic vicious circle through which it is rather impossible to distinguish cause-and-effect relationships, laws, and law-governed processes. Ultimately, anything can affect everything, and out of this maze of undefined, chaotic interactions, anything can emerge… In this way, it is impossible to produce substantiated and systematic scientific knowledge capable of objectively describing, explaining, predicting and being an effective instrument of human action.
As a rule, its proponents are not concerned about the existence within its narratives of contradictions, disparate elements, even irrational mystifications, typical of the ideological constructions/dogmas of nationalism, chauvinism, etc. I would like to point out that if some advocates of geopolitics show elements of acumen in their remarks, this is in no way due to the scientific validity of this field of ideological activity. On the contrary, any insightful remarks they may make are achieved in deviation from the irrational tradition that historically characterises this field, so it is rather due to their own individual erudition and insight, their own self-education and understanding of social theory, philosophy, political economy, etc.
As a rule, professionals of this kind (university professors, journalists and “analysts”, rambling politicians and other representatives of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class) cannot rise above the scientifically veneered propagandistic schematisation and systematisation of a narrative framework, according to the current ideological agendas for the justification of predetermined decisions taken by the political staff of the oligarchy of capital, the national or supranational bodies and institutions they serve (governments, transnational bodies such as NATO, EU, etc.).
At the level of the bourgeois geopolitical scriptwriting, peoples cannot be acting subjects, but expendable “resources” used to carry out the “national & supranational goals of the elites”. Therefore, they de facto fail to notice the class content in the interests of the real acting subjects behind every war, while the only subjects they acknowledge and promote are state formations/nations and coalitions of states. In practice, for geopolitics, the acting subjects can be, above all, the ruling classes, and their instruments at the national and supranational/transnational level (coalitions of states, etc.). Thus, the class essence, the contradictory and law-governed character of the system, comes to the surface in an inverted form, which not only conceals its essence, but presents the respective accomplishments and predeterminations of the strategy of imperialism as a one-way street…
An account of the historical context for the emergence of narratives on “multipolarity”
A systematic engagement with the history and main trends of geopolitics is not within the scope of this paper. For the sake of ideological debate here, I will make specific reference to that version/sub-variant of geopolitics which is nowadays projected as “multipolarity”. The debate concerns certain trends within and around the anti-imperialist movement of our time, which for various reasons resort to the aforementioned version of geopolitics.
Initially, the term “polarity” was introduced into the discourse of geopolitics, political science and international relations in the 1970s, within the context of needing to describe and explain the terms of the then dominant bipolar system of the Cold War.
Multipolarity emerged as a term and a trend in geopolitics after the end of the Cold War. It implies the existence (or the pursuit of the emergence and simultaneous predominance) of multiple poles/centres of power in the world, composed of the strongest powers/states, which are not bound to any specific alignment after the collapse of the bipolar world. According to some “multipolar” narratives, none of these “poles of power” (military, cultural, political, economic, etc.) should outnumber the others, nor seek to extend its influence over the others. As of 1989, with the end of the Cold War, the bipolar world (US and USSR) ceased to exist. Since then, many “well-meaning” journalists have been indulging in opinion pieces on the “future just world”, which somehow “ought” to be “multipolar, fair and equitable”, “subscribing to international law, morality and equality”, fostering mutually beneficial cooperation and “fair competition in the world market”, leaving room for each independent country to have its own domestic and foreign policy, etc., and so on.
At that time the confrontation was characterised by the antagonism between two rival socio-political and economic systems, two camps: capitalism and the countries of early socialism. Particularly after the crushing defeat of fascism-nazism — with the decisive role of the USSR and the anti-fascist popular liberation movements led by the communists — other types of relations of power were created on a global scale which favoured the development of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and national liberation movements on all continents where until then, the main imperialist countries had maintained their conquests and colonies. At that time, even to the most ignorant on matters of social science, it was clear that there was an irreconcilable conflict between two poles (camps, coalitions), between “two worlds” led by two superpowers: the first led by the USA and the second led by the USSR.
Among them there was also an ambivalent and contested space, a multitude of countries that were then and often still are called “third world countries”. One after another, these countries were gaining their independence in various ways and at various levels. The breadth and depth of the socio-economic and political independence they achieved emerged as a function of the class character of the socio-political and ideological fronts that led these anti-colonial anti-imperialist movements, of the balance of power at the national, regional, and international levels, and of the effectiveness of internationalist assistance from the camp of the early socialist countries. This explains the range of diverse socio-economic changes and reforms historically observed in them in the decades after WWII.
These changes cannot be understood scientifically without the theoretical and methodological investigation into the position and role reserved by the existence of the camp of the early socialist revolutions and the countries that emerged from them. They must be examined as a historically necessary escalation of the basic contradiction of the global capitalist system, as a fundamental condition and manifestation of the general crisis of this system, i.e., the fact that the superior system/socio-economic formation of private property (capitalism) is beginning to lose the justification of its historical existence due to the progressive development of humanity in the direction of socialism, communist unified humanity. It is precisely the manifestation of revolutionary situations that blossom into victorious early socialist revolutions within the countries that constitute the weak links of the world capitalist system that creates conditions for an upsurge of historical optimism and new types of liberation movements in the countries that have been subjected to overexploitation by the parasitic imperialist countries.
The contradiction between the poles of the imperialist core and the periphery of the colonies and conquests of that core is also a manifestation of the basic, fundamental contradiction of the global capitalist system: the contradiction between capital and labour.
With the research established by Lenin in his work “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, it becomes clear that in the monopoly stage, the escalation of capital accumulation on a global scale creates multiply mediated1) mechanisms for extracting surplus wealth on a planetary scale in the form of monopoly super-profits.
It was precisely as a result of the creation and strengthening of the camp of early socialism that — at the level of the balance of power, but also at the level of the realisation of this fact — another level of capacity for struggles for the liberation/emancipation of the colonies emerges, as a result of which the range of options for the predatory parasitism in terms of genocide, of the imperialist countries against the colonies and their possessions, semi-colonies, dependent, semi-independent and formally independent countries is shrinking.
In this way, during the monopoly stage of capitalism (imperialism), after World War II, rapid changes in the global balance of power emerge, which are directly related to the qualitatively different manifestations of the essential fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system:
- The dipole of the contradiction between capital and wage labour, between dead labour of the past (embedded in the material means of production) and living labour of the present (which productively activates these material means).
This fundamental contradiction continues to manifest itself, but no longer in a clear form, in the context of each individual country. It is precisely the new type, the escalation to a higher level of the law of capital accumulation discovered by Marx, that leads — as Lenin demonstrated in the field of the science of political economy — to the monopoly stage, in which two additional organically interrelated contradictory dipoles are revealed, manifested on a radically different scale, as qualitatively and essentially differentiated: - capitalism — early socialism and
- imperialist center — colonial/neo-colonial periphery.
It is precisely the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the subsequent great early socialist revolutions in Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. that has a catalytic effect on the emergence of this third dipole, as expressed by the extremely popular but inaccurate term “third world”.
Each of these organically interconnected opposing dipoles, and all of them combined, constitute fields of distinctive struggles between the forces of progress and regression: wage labour and capital, early socialism, and decaying imperialism (monopoly capitalism), anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist movements and imperialism/neo-colonialism.
In this way, in the 20th century, a new level of internationalisation of the economic, social, and ideological-political life of the world’s population on a global scale was launched. The world system, the global division of labour and the respective positions and roles of countries and regions of the world are articulated in their further development through the escalation of these contradictory bipolarities, which are not static, but are subject to the historical necessity of the law of the global unified revolutionary process of the transition of humanity to socialism, which is the becoming, the process of the formation of communism, of unified humanity.
The process of this revolutionary transition cannot be understood in a non-historical, linearly mechanistic way. It is a process characterised by an extraordinary and increasing complexity and diversity that is not only due to the multiply mediated relations between the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system and its necessary derivative manifestations under imperialism. They are also linked to the extraordinary diversity of residual pre-capitalist forms and structures. These remnants — insofar as they are not completely transformed by capitalism — function as historically necessary and extremely convenient for the monopoly overexploitation of imperialism, forms of manifestation and historically specific reproduction of inequality. In this capacity they are organically intertwined with the law of the “weak link” and thus with the extremely contradictory process of the rise and fall of revolutionary movements in the historical confrontation between the forces of revolutionary progress and counter-revolutionary reaction/regression.
Contrary to the reactionary and irrational self-delusions of the ideologues of the financial oligarchy (who were quick to celebrate ghoulishly, joining the cries of the bourgeoisie along with the lamentations of some shipwrecks of the “left” of defeat and renunciation of even the idea of revolution) the temporary defeat of some early socialist revolutions (in the USSR and in the European socialist countries) did not in any way signify the death knell of the “end of history”, the definitive and irrevocable domination of capitalist barbarism, the cancellation of the inevitable historical course of humanity towards communism.
Indeed, the world labour and revolutionary movement has suffered an unprecedented strategic defeat. The tragic consequences of this counter-revolution were even expressed in demographic losses amounting to genocide. The people of the movement tragically experienced the counter-revolution, its consequences, and its impact, often in the form of existential anguish.
This defeat was of strategic importance and was tragically experienced by the people of the revolutionary movement. However, in terms of the logic of history, on a world/historical scale, it was only a tactical defeat. There is no strategic total victory in history without individual tactical defeats of the ultimate victors. Defeats through which the camp of the forthcoming victorious revolutions regroups at all levels (theoretical, practical, organisational, etc.) to finally defeat the forces of counter-revolution definitively and irrevocably.
The tragedy of this defeat in no way negates the historical necessity of the global revolutionary process, the historical legitimacy of the revolutionary transition to a unified humanity. In the period since these counterrevolutions, the historical law governed process has continued to escalate through the contradictions mentioned above and other more complex and mediated ones. Underground fundamental processes (not visible on the surface by the common mind, untrained in dialectical science, and its variant that remains locked into metaphysical schemas stereotyped by dogmatism and revisionism) continued the work of the destructive and creative forces of historical becoming.
The Soviet Union and the European countries of early socialism were once again transformed into a field ripe for predatory exploitation, being violently dragged back into the capitalist system. Imperialism, by means of unbridled revanchism, tried and to a considerable extent succeeded in subordinating them to its own system of global division of labour, positions, and roles. For this purpose, all legitimate and illegitimate means, all deceitful and inhuman ways of imposition, manipulation and subjugation have been employed.
This process was characterised by the recolonisation of these countries and peoples by the imperialist camp led by the USA and its supranational organs. This process of recolonisation found fertile ground in a historically unprecedented process of primary accumulation of capital. The hitherto historically known process of Primitive Accumulation of Capital took place in its classic form as a process of historical transition from feudalism to capitalism, as a process of the abolition of feudalism and the feudal guild relations of society by the emerging capitalist relations of production. This process was spearheaded by the then revolutionary rising bourgeoisie together with its allies, the nascent working class and the poor peasantry of smallholders and landless peasants who suffered the evils of the declining serfdom. Successive early bourgeois revolutions were swept away by feudal counterrevolutions and restorative processes, until finally the capitalist system (long since dominant in the field of economy) was established at the level of the bourgeois superstructure. This took place with the late bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions, in a process which in the major European countries lasted for more than five centuries.
On the contrary, the unprecedented historical form of Primitive Accumulation of Capital beginning anew was led by the newly emergent parasitic bourgeoisie of Russia and the other countries of the post-Soviet space. This partially incomplete accumulation took place under conditions of global domination of late imperialism.
Crucial for understanding the historical context of the emerging narratives of multipolarity are the tectonic shifts in power marked by the development process of the early socialist countries that are continuing socialist construction, with the prominent role of the historically unprecedented rapid development of the People’s Republic of China.
Geopolitical doctrines on “multipolarity”
New impetus has been given to various forms of geopolitical/geostrategic public discourses among the ideological constituents of the ruling class of various countries after the victory of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the imposition of reactionary processes of dismantling the coherent framework of the planned socialist economy during the capitalist restoration in the countries that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR and overall in the countries of early socialism in Europe.
Particular reference should be made to the adoption and application of geopolitical views of “multipolarity” in Russia after the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR. The historical specificity of the ideologies put forward by the newly emerging bourgeoisie in Russia is organically linked to the historical specificity of its emergence and formation: from the structures of the “shadowy” underground economy that parasitized on the weaknesses of the central planning of the USSR in the sphere of circulation, to the appropriation of ever deeper positions and roles in the economy and society, in proportion to the escalation of the bourgeois counter-revolution and capitalist restoration. They literally enriched themselves by treading on corpses, by the predatory privatisation of the wealth and infrastructure created and defended by generations of Soviet citizens with their sweat and blood.
That explains their ambivalent character. For decades they have been grovelling, begging the imperialist powers for a share and a role in the world economy. They have been getting kicked around and having doors slammed in their face on all sides. World imperialism did not relish the defeat and dissolution of early socialism in the USSR and Europe to have in its place even petty capitalists with aspirations and ambitions. It was and is aiming to pre-emptively eliminate all competition, through further fragmentation, the total colonisation of the post-Soviet formations, by turning them into vulnerable and subservient sources of raw materials, energy and cheap labour power. For this goal, a slimy submissive comprador bourgeoisie (of the Latin American banana republic-type like that of the late Yeltsin) is more than enough. Whatever independence and autonomy this bourgeoisie has had stems from the constant battering and humiliation at the international level, from the fact that Russia has not yet been dissolved, and — above all — from the mighty arsenal inherited from the USSR.
The present Russia is by no means the USSR and should not be equated to it. However, even the present counter-revolutionary Russia with the anti-Soviet/anti-communist excesses of its leadership, has to cloak its actions with references to the glorious anti-fascist victory of the USSR, “anti-Nazism”, etc., because it owes any power it may hold, to the achievements and legacies of the October Revolution and building of socialism.
The Soviet and later Russian spy, political scientist, diplomat, and politician Yevgeny Primakov2) (1929-2015) was the mastermind behind the Russian Federation’s pursuit of foreign policy and diplomacy based on the doctrine of a Russian variant of “multipolarity”, the operational/military version of which is known today as the “Gerasimov doctrine” (after the Russian Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov).
- Pursuit of a “multipolar world” governed by a group of independent powerful states, capable of counterbalancing the unipolar power of the USA.
- Seeking to regain control of the post-Soviet space, playing in it the role of a pole of re-coalescence and integration of countries it influences and inspires.
- Highlighting and strengthening in geopolitical terms Russia’s “Eurasian role” in Central Asia and beyond.
- In this context, it is necessary to establish close alliance relations with Asian countries (especially China, India, Iran, etc.), capable of bringing forth the weakening of Euro-Atlantic economic and monetary dominance in the global economy and the international division of labour, as well as strengthening tendencies of coalescence within the EU.
- It is of vital importance to prevent further expansion and strengthening of NATO in its periphery, by activating military-technical or even military operational measures of power projection and deterrence.
There are two versions or aspects of narratives about “multipolarity”:
- The first is confirmatory, pointing out the situation in which there is no singular dominant pole, or two of them with undisputed power, but a situation of uncertainty in which a few existing or even potentially rising poles — centres of power — emerge as coexisting, competing, or cooperating.
- Of an ethical and/or practical political nature: “multipolarity”, as a desirable idealised state of affairs or even as “strategy”.
The 1st version (confirmatory in character) contains, in my opinion, the rational core of this argumentation: it ascertains, captures some moments of an ongoing process, even if it does so in a static, fragmented, and disjointed way, without scientifically examining where, why, and how this process came about and without being able to make a scientific prediction of where this situation is going to lead.
First of all, we must point out that no complex developmental process exists in the form of a steady state, as any kind of static “multipolarity”. This is particularly true of society as the most complex system which constitutes an organic whole.
Any organic whole — no matter how multifactorial the context of the preceding or even contemporary reality within and from which it emerges — may well include various trends and dynamic directions of further development, however, in the course of the developmental process itself, these diverse tendencies converge until they are polarised as components of a fundamental antithetical dipole which gives rise to its development, a moving and driving contradiction, which constitutes the law-governed basis of its self-development. This is the fundamental contradiction of the system from which all further derivative contradictions arise.
Therefore, in the process of the scientific research and the dialectical reconstitution in the cognition of the structure and history of society as a developing (organic) whole, any partial existence of a forming diversity of poles and contradictions can only constitute a historical moment of the early stages of a new whole being formed, with its own essential contradiction.
Therefore, both versions of the “multipolarity” narratives mentioned above are highly unscientific, limited, static and restrictive. Both the approach which regards “multipolarity” in a confirmatory way as a given and unchangeable state of affairs, and the one which perceives it as an ideal and insurmountable future prospect, as an imperative to which the development process must be directed towards, as a … “strategic goal of the anti-imperialist movement”.
Therefore, if there is a rational core to the multitude of views on multipolarity, it is at best reduced to the static confirmation, pointing out the existence of various poles, at some stage of their development process.
And in the case where multipolarity is perceived as a moral/political and ethical principle, as some kind of ideal, or — even worse — as some kind of strategy the pursuit of which is asserted as a basic strategic purpose of an anti-imperialist movement, it is certain that if such an extremely short-sighted, vague and disorienting goal of this kind is adopted, it will ultimately have disastrous consequences for the movement. In any case, the multipolarity narratives, however “realistic” they may seem to some, are highly unhistorical, undialectical, and therefore, unscientific, and ungrounded.
Of course, in terms of the discourse articulated by institutions of foreign policy and diplomacy, certain versions of a desirable “multipolarity” may have a certain resonance and functionality. In the case of those who evangelise a world in which there will no longer be unipolarity, supremacy and domination on a planetary scale of, say, a coalition of coercion headed by the United States as the “sole superpower having claims”, the functionality of this narrative has some meaning, some significance in tactical terms. This significance could be expressed in slogans along the lines of: “Down with the imperialist aggression of the US-led axis!”
In any case, however, the insistence on “multipolarity” as a strategic horizon indicates a tendency and attitude in which the weaker pole or poles, the “cheated” ones in the present balance of power, claim a better position for themselves in the future order of society or even beg for this position, in cooperation with other weaker and “cheated” peers. So, if the discourse of multipolarity is articulated in this context, it is a rather short-sighted and shallow move to ideologically frame tactical objectives, which in no way could constitute a strategic perspective of an anti-imperialist movement with a revolutionary impetus and objective.
This clearly pertains to the multipolarity beliefs and rhetoric of the official political and propaganda discourse of the newly formed, current ruling class in Russia.
Here I am not even referring to those shades of “multipolarity” ideologies that are organically and overtly linked not only to versions of mysticism, obscurantism, regression, and reaction, but also to versions of fascist practices and ideologies. Indicatives are the cases of the pursuit of the constitution of geopolitically significant centres/poles based on reactionary tendencies that are more akin with conspiracy theories, such as “anti-globalism”, “conservative values”, ecclesiastical and theological structures of orthodoxy, pan-Slavism3), pan-Turkism, every nationalist “great idea”, etc. The pursuit of e.g., the establishment of a pole of this “multipolarity” based on “national Russian exclusivity”, the “Russian idea”, a metaphysical “special mission of the Russian people”, the “Russian idea”, the “Russian world” — and that in a highly multinational state like the present Russian Federation — denotes a nationalist and chauvinist position. Russian nationalism, in a spirit of conservatism and reaction that feeds national division, cannot be posited as the counterpoint to the russophobic hysteria of imperialism.
Versions of the “multipolarity” discourse can also be observed in declarations of a constitutional character, in official texts of international organisations, such as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and other alternative coalitions in the present historical context.
A similar rhetoric is often expressed with regard to the foreign policy of the PR of China, in full conformity with the foreign economic policy model adopted by this early-socialist country at the international level. In all these cases we must take into account the specificity of the international policy and diplomatic language of various countries, which should not be directly confused with the concise scientific and ideological equipment of the anti-imperialist revolutionary movement.
Ethical and moral aspects of “multipolarity”
Does “multipolarity” have anything to do with justice?
Justice is a concept that touches on aspects of ethics, politics, and law. The concepts of good and evil are placed at a higher level of generalisation and abstraction, allowing the formulation of moral judgments about certain moral phenomena as a whole. In contrast to the concepts of good and evil, which morally characterise certain phenomena (attitudes, behaviours, acts, actions, steps, initiatives, omissions, inaction, and so on), justice characterises more specifically the interrelation of certain phenomena, or even the overall assessment of the state of society at any given time, in terms of the interrelation and distribution of good and evil in the relations between people. In this light, through the concepts of justice and injustice, people assess the totality of the social conditions of their existence and form their perception of the need and desirability of maintaining or changing these conditions.
Under the prism of justice, the ways of distribution among people of goods in scarcity (e.g. of optimal access in terms of quantity and quality to material goods and services for the satisfaction first of all of biological needs, of optimal access to creative activities that lead to the development of the individual and to the acquis of culture) are examined. It concerns therefore the way people relate to each other, mediated by access or not to desirable and contested goods. It also concerns the global dimension of the economy and inter-state relations, the relations of exploitation, domination, and subordination on a planetary scale.
From this point of view, if this access is unequal, i.e., as long as the existence of exploitation of man by man is historical necessity, injustice prevails and the prospect of the elimination of this exploitation projects itself as the prospect of justice. However, the objective conditions of this prospect, which arise, are formed and mature historically, are realised in corresponding conceptions of justice. The latter are divided, they differ and clash, to the extent that the material interests of individuals, groups (classes), countries, groups of countries and society, of humanity as a whole, are divided, differ and clash, while the respective dominant conception of justice, is consolidated and internalised at the level of everyday practice within the dominant relations, but in general, it is also imposed by the institutions of the dominant material interests as a pseudo-generic justice, which supposedly expresses the whole of society (through law, institutions, etc., but also by invoking “national interests”, international and/or “universal”, “democratic”, “anti-authoritarian” principles, values, institutions, etc.).
These perceptions change historically and regionally. For example, in antiquity, slavery was seen as the natural state of slaves (according to Aristotle, “speaking tools”), while feudalism and serfdom were considered in their decline by the rising bourgeoisie to be an unjust and undignified anachronism that deserved to be overthrown.
Until recently, the neo-colonialist super-exploitation of peoples by imperialism was considered an “insurmountable normality”. However, with the escalation of WWIII, the anti-imperialist/anti-neo-colonialist sentiments of hundreds of millions of people on the planet are beginning to snowball as a claim for justice and dignity in international economic relations.
From a certain point of view, justice can be projected and function as the moral dimension of the respective conditions and limits of the consent of the underprivileged, of those subjected to exploitation, oppression, or (when these tolerable limits are exceeded, which is perceived as social injustice, corruption, and so on) of the claim to change their conditions of existence. In the latter case, we have clear symptoms of the manifestation, on a mass scale and at the level of everyday consciousness, of the moral decay and bankruptcy of historically obsolete economic and social relations and institutions, but also of the balance of power that is radically changing.
However, provided that revolutionary Marxist-Leninists do not wish to indulge in abstract moralism and arbitrary deontological constructions from a safe distance, they do not confine themselves to philosophical reformulations of the experiences that cause the above symptoms in the subjects of everyday consciousness, nor to schemes outside of the historical place and time, as if they were timelessly unchanging “principles and values”. Abstract ideas, understood as an unhistorical self-righteousness, and feelings of justice cannot replace the theoretical (philosophical and interdisciplinary) investigation of the actual possibilities and the law-governed necessity of a way out of the social deadlocks experienced by people as conditions of injustice at the local, national, and global level. They cannot be a substitute for the struggle to achieve the tactical and strategic goals of the real revolutionary movement.
The bourgeois conception of justice is linked to formal equality (egalitarianism) and natural law theories. In the bourgeois “neoliberal” ideologies of “unadulterated meritocracy” and in the practices of post-modernist identity and rights politics, the complete degeneration of the demands of the rising bourgeoisie for equality, justice and freedom is manifested today. The neoliberal revision of bourgeois values that is predominant today is manifested with such extreme social minimalism that it not only renounces the prospect of social revolution, anti-imperialism and any radical demands of the working class and the people, but also renounces any positive definition of the fight against injustice, inequality and oppression, from every positive platform, means and ways of making demands, from every concrete interconnection of revolutionary tactics and strategy. It is limited to negatively critiquing the conditions that led to the consolidation of the now undisputed inequality and oppression, or to the conditions of their reformation in order to ensure consensus with the strategic choices of the financial oligarchy. Modern opportunism and revisionism operate in a similar way.
Some practical conclusions on ideological intervention and propaganda in the anti-imperialist movement
In the case where “multipolarity” is put forward as an ideal, an expectation of a more just world or, in any case, of a framework for more just international relations, then it is linked to deontological thought and to a certain moral ideal, to some notions of justice based on a certain sense of right.
In this respect, people and groups of people who begin to understand injustice on a primitive level, even in terms borrowed from “multipolar” narratives, are welcome into the movement.
However, there is no reason to maintain and reproduce this static, limited, and restrictive level of awareness as it is, nor is there any reason for it to be promoted as the central concern and purpose of the movement.
Any perception of the people that even partially, even in a static way, reflects the sense of injustice from the dominant regime of imperialism, which is now endangering humanity, can be a certain basis, a starting point for their rallying in our frontal anti-imperialist struggle. But this is not enough. The catalytic intervention of communists armed with scientific revolutionary theory is required to achieve further radicalisation of the perceptions and dispositions of these people.
In any case, this sense of justice is organically linked to the position and condition of some who are or feel wronged or even “cheated” in the international division of labour, positions, and roles, in the global hierarchy of countries and regions. In this sense, even as a framework of protest expressing this sense of right, the rhetoric of “multipolarity” is extremely shallow and pessimistic if it is ever to become a frame of reference capable of inspiring an anti-imperialist movement with a certain perspective. In its narratives, this rhetoric takes as given by default the conditions and limits of the state of a certain type of transitional international relations on the planet. It moves by definition in the realm of hetero-definition, a negative identification with the old world, with the declining and waning imperialist unipolarity under the leadership and hegemony of the United States.
The rhetoric of “multipolarity” disorientates from the realisation of the nature of war and the imperative necessity of militant anti-imperialism, trapping consciences in the ideologies of the bourgeois pseudo-science of geopolitics, in the tail of the capitalist class of certain countries. Therefore, it does not and could not constitute a positive project of perspective that could as a strategically oriented purpose stimulate a mass anti-imperialist movement in a revolutionary direction.
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To the extent that geotectonic power shifts and war continue, this fluidity will be reflected in the existence of various attraction/repulsion movements of poles and centres. Hence, the “multipolarity” views will also be reproduced in various forms. This will continue to happen until — through the conflicts and the revolutionary potential that they gestate — the new transitional crystallisation of the global basic contradiction, together with its derivative essential manifestations, emerges more clearly in a new stage, in a new contradictory dipole, with the forces of the pole of socialism and its anti-imperialist allies strengthened in breadth and depth (extensively and intensively), in the event that it emerges victorious from the conflict.
This conflict of the WWIII, which has resulted from radical qualitative and essential changes in the content, forms and acting subjects involved in the resolution of the crux of the contradictions of the time and the conjuncture, in turn, catalytically counteracts all these variables, accelerating, widening and deepening the transformations and projections of the subjects involved.
The rapid resurgence of a new unprecedented wave of anti-imperialism, now capable of dynamically and drastically nullifying to a large extent the potential for super-exploitation of the majority of the world’s population by the imperialist powers (through the siphoning off of enormous surplus value, through various and multiply mediated mechanisms of neo-colonial super-exploitation through the extraction of monopoly super-profits), it is also significantly upgraded through new alliances, coalitions and integrations of an alternative type. The rapid expansion of BRICS at their recent 15th summit in South Africa alone is indicative of the quantitative changes that are now becoming qualitative and essential. We are no longer talking about a numerical aggregation of countries, populations, sizes, economic and military powers, but about a qualitative and substantial leap in the formation of a new pole-centre, i.e., a new subject-in-the-making with a decisive role in the global development process.
These trends are extremely encouraging. However, the revolutionary movement has no room for groundless over-optimism and complacency while life-or-death conflicts are escalating.
The history of early socialism and 20th century anti-imperialism has shown that the viability of the revolutionary camp depends directly on the interrelation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in the global revolutionary process.
In this correlation, the role of the camp of the socialist countries, the extent and depth of the consolidation of the socialist transformations within them, and the degree of their constitution as a collective historical subject are catalytic and decisive.
The degree of their constitution as a collective historical subject is in turn a function of the level of economic integration and internationalisation of socialist relations of production, the degree of collective subordination of their societies to scientific planning, and therefore of their monolithic unity in the face of the remaining lethal forces of shrinking imperialism.
The historical experience of the 20th century has shown that the camp of early socialism was clearly inferior to the imperialist camp, both in terms of its forces and in the degree of integration of socialist economies and societies compared to imperialism. Unfortunately, the “multipolarity” within the socialist camp (with disruptive tendencies that even reached the point of warlike inter-alliance conflicts, and even with elements of nationalist geopolitics) played an undermining and disintegrating role, contributing to the discrediting of socialism and the well-known phenomena of counter-revolutions at the end of the 20th century.
Only with a qualitative and substantial upgrade (a radical broadening and deepening) of the socialist camp as a leading pole will the upgrade of the anti-imperialist camp be achieved, the pulling power of which will strengthen the world/historical tendency of the “non-capitalist mode of development” with a clear socialist orientation for the countries that break the shackles of imperialist neo-colonial dependence.
In this way, through the victorious advance, military or peaceful, of the revolutionary pole (socialist and anti-imperialist), the process of the early socialist revolutions will be completed and revolutionary processes will be launched in the developed capitalist countries as well, in the centres of imperialism, since the financial oligarchy, having lost its sources of parasitism, will no longer be able to use the resources of monopoly superprofits to manipulate the working class in its countries of origin (through bribery, deception, divisions and brute force).
Then socialism will begin to develop (sublating the capitalist and pre-capitalist remnants, free from external sabotage and interference) on its own (scientific-technical, productive, and cultural) basis and will move rapidly towards communism, towards the maturity of society, towards a unified humanity.
Then the time will come for the mature and late socialist revolutions, with the victory of which the ground for any trace of “multipolar” phases and conceptions will have disappeared, since capitalism and all exploitative relations will have been eliminated from the historical arena.
No ideological construct of “multipolarity” is even capable of putting the complexity of this dialectic of strategic and tactical goals on a rational scientific basis.
These tasks call for a conscious struggle for the qualitative and essential theoretical, practical, and organisational upgrading of the world anti-imperialist and communist revolutionary movement, which confirms the strategic importance of achieving the aims of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform.
Notes
1) Multiple mediation, in dialectical logic and methodology of scientific research, refers to the type of connections, relations and interactions that characterise the contradictory complexity of a system that constitutes an organic whole. These are non-linear, complex, multi-level, contradictory, obscured, not directly visible on the surface, connections the investigation of which requires systematic scientific research. e.g. For some, the mere fact of the existence of formally independent states in Africa, is evidence of the absence of imperialist dependence, overexploitation, etc. while ignoring the profound and multiply mediated mechanisms of surplus value extraction in the form of monopoly superprofits, unequal exchange, overpricing and underpricing, loan agreements, currency manipulation, government takeovers, extortion, regime change, arms programmes, foreign bases, military interventions, etc. that are typical of neo-colonialism.
2) Primakov is ideologically and politically positioned in right-wing social democracy. He sought for Russia a version of capitalism with state-monopoly regulation of the Keynesian type. His popularity soared when, as prime minister of the Russian federation and while on his way to an official visit to the United States in 1999, upon learning of US and NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, he instructed the pilot of his aircraft to make a 180° turn over the Atlantic and return to Moscow. It was a cowardly symbolic act of dignity towards the US leadership. A leadership that in its unbridled arrogance had staged the complete national humiliation, the international vilification of counter-revolutionary Russia also on a symbolic level: with the media coverage of the official presence of the Russian Prime Minister alongside the coverage of the bombing of the fraternal for the Russian people Yugoslavia! Of course, it would have been of much greater value — and not only symbolic but mainly practical — if Mr. Primakov had allowed the then President of Belarus, Lukashenko, to deliver some S-300 anti-aircraft anti-ballistic missile batteries to the heroic Yugoslavia, which would have practically prevented an attack on it by the Western powers. However, Russia’s leadership at the time was far from adopting a dignified defence policy even at that level.
3) An internet search of the word “multipolarity”, as a rule, leads to the notorious irrational “philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin. Evidently, we are dealing with aggressive marketing over-promoting this version of eclecticist beliefs of a fascist hue, at the heart of which is consistently anti-Sovietism/anti-communism, the resurrection of reactionary doctrines of 18th-19th century slavophiles, a primitive version of russian nationalism, mysticism of orthodoxy and the projection of Russia as the bearer of a metaphysical mission of “Eurasianism”. The connections of these circles with the terrorist Nazi organisation “Golden Dawn” in Greece and with a multitude of far-right, nationalist, and fascist groups from Turkey and many other countries are anything but accidental. As long as some people base their “anti-imperialism” and their disposition for “independence” on bourgeois geopolitical narratives of “multipolarity” on the resurrection of the obscurantist “Eurasian” mysticism of the 19th century, seeking “philosophical depth” in the irrational fascist ravings such as Dugin’s, they are practically paving the way to fascism!
