November 4, 2024

From London, the new acquisition of the"Havana Meeting":
Mr. Callinicos and his "masterly" opportunist politics

He intends the Ukrainian workers to be "turning the gun around", so confronting on their own all the NATO troops of the USA, France, England, Germany... An aberrant social-imperialist policy.

Callinicos, the leader of the English SWP and the ISO (who, as we have already said, dissolved his party into the left of the Democratic Party), gave a "master class" at the meeting. This man has a record for which he would not be able to enter any serious meeting of revolutionaries: he declared himself neutral in the Malvinas war, where Argentina was crushed by England, which placed a NATO military base there.
Callinicos' excuse was to say that "he was neither with Thatcher nor with the generals of the dictatorship of Argentina". In other words, he was for the British occupation of the Malvinas. Truly, this man gave a "master class" on how to be a truly complying servant of the British monarchy.

This "guest of honor" of the Buenos Aires conference has just spent years militating alongside Corbyn in the English Labor Party, the partner of the Tories in the City of London and NATO. No wonder then that his party is also in that den of bandits of the millionaire bourgeoisie of the African National Congress of South Africa, which lives and survives on a sea of millions of black slave workers.

In his "master class", Callinicos insisted that there was no need to have a defensive Ukrainian policy, since this was a "secondary contradiction" (sic). The "fundamental contradiction" would be “the imperialist character of the war”.
Mr. Callinicos and the panelists of this meeting would deserve to go to Ukraine to apply the policy they advocate... This policy has already been applied: there has been a great setback to the Ukrainian nation, which was occupied by Russian troops and plundered by the IMF, while the Zelensky government has just given away all the fertile lands and gas to the US imperialists as part of the payment for the arms given to it by NATO.
Russia got stronger... it stole all the enterprises, ports and mines from Donbass to Crimea. The US keeps the gas and the land. Is it really possible to say that the contradiction about the struggle for self-determination and national independence of Ukraine is "secondary", when today it has become an occupied colony?

Where Callinicos, and also his partner Altamira, go too far is when they proclaim that, since we are facing an "inter-imperialist war", it would be necessary to "turn the gun around". Without words. We insist. Go to Kiev to apply your policy. Go to the Ukrainian front where the workers are fighting and dying. Already 60 thousand deserted because NATO does not give them ammunition to continue shooting.
That the Russian soldier and worker should rise up and turning the gun around is the task of the moment as they are in an oppressor country... But are they seriously suggesting that the Ukrainian workers, who are 200 thousand men, with half of them almost unarmed, should face and turn the gun around and start a war against NATO, that is, the USA, England, Spain, France, Greece, etc.? The task of the Ukrainian workers is, first of all, to unify their ranks. How can the task of national liberation, whose first point is to unify the Ukrainian working class, be a "secondary contradiction"? This is necessary both to smash today the Russian invasion; and tomorrow, by defeating the Zelensky government, to defeat NATO and the imperialist Maastricht together with the European working class.

They really should be in Kharkiv or Dnipro. Then they would at least understand what Trotsky said in the midst of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when, despite the fact that the Republic was “supported” by England and France, he said that if “two ships with arms and ammunition leave France or the United States, one for Franco and one for Negrin, what attitude should the workers take? Sabotage the transport of both or only that of Franco? We are not neutral. We would let the ship with ammunition for Negrin pass. Without illusions, we know that of these bullets, nine out of ten will be directed against the fascists, but at least one against our comrades. But of the ammunition destined for Franco, ten out of ten will be directed against our comrades. We are not neutral.  We would not let the ship with ammunition for Franco pass by...”

Today we could say that the obligation of the workers of the world is to take on board the weapons that are going to Ukraine today and not to take on board those that are going to the military apparatus of Moscow, since 10 out of 10 bullets that enter Putin’s army are directed against the oppressed Ukrainian masses, while, although 1 out of 10 bullets that enter via Zelensky’s army do go to the Ukrainian masses, 9 out of 10 bullets will not go against them but against the oppressive Russian invading army.

They are miserable. They are cynics. Let Mr. Callinicos go to fight with World War II equipment against all the armies of NATO... That is a task for the working class of the U.S. and of the whole Europe.

Every oppressed people must be liberated by the uprising of the workers of the countries that oppress or invade it, and with the victory of the revolution in the oppressed country to conquer its liberation. Therefore, we are for the arming of the Ukrainian nation. But to achieve this, we must defeat the Zelensky government and expropriate the industry, the banks and the land in order to be able to eat and manufacture and buy weapons to win the war.

Never, not even in an inter-imperialist war, does the struggle for the self-determination of the oppressed peoples become secondary. This is so, as Lenin said, because while we are defenders of the oppressed country attacked by an oppressor country, we are anti-defenders in a war between imperialist countries. In World War I, we told the Russian, English and French workers to turn the gun around and that the workers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, etc. should do the same. But "to turn the gun around" meant to take power, to transform the inter-imperialist war into the beginning of the socialist revolution, a question that you "anti-defensists" keep silent and hide, because you are hiding in Putin's tanks.

Precisely this revolutionary policy in the inter-imperialist wars, far from transforming the struggle for national liberation into a "secondary question", places it at the center of the scene of the military policy of the proletariat. Concretely: the inter-imperialist wars are ones of plunder and national oppression, of dispute of the spheres of influence of the semicolonial world. Therefore, the first task of the workers who turn the gun is to defeat their imperialist bourgeoisie so that the peoples it subjugates and plunders can be liberated. This happened in the USSR, to give just one example.
You falsify the Marxist-Leninist position and its defensist position before the oppressed peoples in the same way you also falsify the anti-defensist policy before the inter-imperialist wars.

Stop looking for excuses to jump on Putin's tanks and to hide the fact that all those of this "new Progressive International" are the "left leg" of all the NATO governments in Europe and the U.S.! Let's see if Mr. Corbyn, of whom Callinicos was secretary and adulator, was for defeating NATO with the uprising of the English working class from within....
So different, but so much the same... So social-imperialist... So much a reflection of the high labor aristocracy of the imperialist countries.

To the working class it is necessary to mark clearly who are its allies and who are its enemies. That is what the task of the Trotskyists is all about.