Conspiracy, Proxy War and the Ghost of Stalinism

In the conflict between Soviet Russia with Joseph Stalin at its head and Nazi Germany, I would have supported Soviet Russia. I suppose you could argue that might make me some kind of Stalinist. After all, I would have been supporting the Stalinist government. Not only that, I may even have hoped the US might provide it with funding to continue to organise its military effort, so you could probably label me an American stooge too. (in fact, the US did supply Soviet Russia with millions of tonnes of food, weapons and equipment during the Second World War).

But a distinction should be made.  What one is supporting most fundamentally in this case is not Stalinism but rather the struggles of the Russian people themselves,[1] their imperilled freedoms at the hands of a brutal, barbaric foreign invasion.   People fighting and dying – not because they had some great love for Stalin – but because they didn’t want to be bombed and maimed and killed at the hands of a foreign power.  Because they didn’t want to live their day-to-day lives under the shadow of foreign occupation.

Of course, one could ignore all this. One could assert, for instance, that the Russian population were simply being manipulated in the interests of the Stalinist government (and vicariously the US itself) and, therefore, it was Stalinism and the US government who were the true objects of international support.  Certainly, the defeat of Germany did bolster the imperial power of the US and Russia.  But were the millions of Russians who fought and died against fascism – were those lives merely the ‘proxies’ of the interests of Stalin and the United States government who supported him?

Such an assertion most would find obscene.  It is obscene because it involves the annihilation of a living content – the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people fighting for their concrete freedoms – in favour of the interests and relationships of a set of given states and governments considered in empty and schematic isolation.

For similar reasons, I support the right of the Ukrainian people to resist foreign occupation. As a necessary corollary, I also support the means by which they might do so – even if that means receiving funding and ammunition from the US and NATO (though if you can suggest some other alternative beyond capitulation at the point of a Russian gun, I really am all ears).

But none of this is the same as saying I support Zelensky, or that I support the US and NATO.  At the most basic philosophical level, it simply means to recognise that freedom – as Kant put it – is ‘an end in itself’.    It has an objective and social reality whether or not the arms the freedom fighters take up are provided by this particular imperial power or that one.  Likewise, freedom has an objective reality whether or not it is being menaced by Russian bombs or Israeli bombs or Nazi bombs.

Imagine, for instance, if the funding to Ukraine hadn’t been provided by the US and NATO.  Imagine it had been provided by China. Or imagine that Ukraine had the ability to fund itself to the same financial tune. Would that have any impact on the right of the Ukrainians to resist?  Each of these scenarios would have made no difference to the fundamental ethical substance of the issue; they would not have touched upon the fact that the struggle of Ukraine’s population against Russian occupation flows from their essence as human beings, as beings with a capacity for self-determination, a capacity that is being infringed and curtailed.  And self-determination is at the philosophical core of the Marxist project.   Or at least it should be.

As Lenin once said, the true work of the revolutionary begins ‘where the masses are to be found’, for it is only in the movements from below – the movement, needs and objectives of great swathes of people – that concrete forms of universal freedom can be called into being, and this, so often, in the face of the gravest oppression.

In the last few weeks, I’ve registered a number of comments and articles about the situation in Ukraine. Mainly from leftists who can barely contain their glee about the fact that Trump is planning to radically reduce or end military funding to Ukraine and possibly initiate a ‘peace’ deal where Russia holds on to the annexed territories and America imposes heavy war debts on the defeated nation.

For some commentators, Trump’ s comments ‘prove’ that the war was always a ‘proxy war’.  I don’t claim to understand the logic for this, I am not really sure there is any.  I imagine if the Democrats had won and financial support would have continued to flow toward Ukraine’s military effort, that too would have proved it is a ‘proxy war’.  Or to say the same, whatever the outcome, the commentators in question would have been confirmed in their views.

But it isn’t just the poor quality of the logic on display.  I would guess that most of the people who are making these kinds of arguments probably haven’t lived under military occupation.   The glib satisfaction many show in having their position ‘confirmed’ represents a stark failure of the imagination.  It means to once more disregard the reality of lives lived under invasion and occupation, it means to once more dismiss such lives as having no inherent meaning beyond the broader powerplay of states and governments.

I recently came across a piece in the rather comically titled Pravda (truth), a paper which is now little more than a mouthpiece of the Putin regime (unsurprisingly in Russia where that great ‘anti-imperialist’ leader is less than sensitive to the notion of a ‘free’ press)

But what struck me about this article in Pravda – was not simply that it was pro-Putin – but that it was piece by a mainstream paper which was giving vent to the most unlettered and vulgar forms of conspiracy theory.  The piece in question asserts that the Ukrainian opposition to the Russia is largely manufactured so as to set the basis for a ‘massive psyop and money laundering operation’ and also ‘the most advanced information and propaganda war in human history.’  And who was this propaganda war conduced on behalf of?  The ‘Deep State’, for it was the ‘Deep State’ which has ‘conditioned the world to believe everything Russia says is “disinformation”.’

The ‘Deep State’ is a conspiracy theory currency which allows sober, sociological notions of class interest and class exploitation to be replaced with a more baroque and sinister chimera, whereby an elite network of clandestine conspirators secreted at the very heights of the political and financial infrastructure are manipulating the institutions of the state to carry out their shadowy ends.

The ‘Deep State’ was something that the Trump administration too – very much embedded in the QAnon conspiracy movement that helped bring it to power the first time round – would employ on a regular basis to better facilitate its own political agenda.  Essentially, the concept of the ‘Deep State’ operates on an each-size-fits-all ideological basis to neutralize every manner of political challenge; it allows Trump to not only undermine any officials and civil servants whom he deems are less than subservient, but also becomes an alibi by which any political failure is balmed – ‘we didn’t achieve this particular target because the Deep State is working against us’.

Most sinister of all, it allows Trump to absolve the mechanics of the political apparatus of any democratic aspect; when he lost the election in 2019, it was not because of the masses of people who voted against him, but rather the subversive and secretive machinations of the ‘Deep State’. In such a vision Trump is transformed from an emissary of the rich and powerful into a radical and self-sacrificing figure waging war on the establishment.

It is, of course, bonkers stuff.  And many of the people who have so wholeheartedly committed to the notion that Ukraine is a ‘proxy war’ would not subscribe to the conspiracy laden politique of the ‘Deep State’.   Nevertheless, underneath both concepts run the same essential fault lines.

The ‘proxy war’ thesis means removing any agency from those lives fighting and dying against foreign occupation – they are not fighting tooth and claw to stave off the Russian invasion and cling to their freedoms and their physical lives in a determinate and conscious fashion – rather they are simply vessels, infused and directed by the will of greater powers, particularly the US and NATO. They are, quite literally, ‘proxies.’

And this bleeds into a broader analysis of the historical context.  The ‘proxy war’ constituent believe they have only to mutter the word ‘Maiden’ in dark, fretful tones to establish the full diabolical influence of the US at work in Ukrainian affairs.  Again, the logic on display is of a similar type.   The argument is that the US was behind the ‘coup’ in 2014 which saw the President Viktor Yanukovych removed from office.  This assertion (generally speaking) comes from the fact that the US poured cash into Ukraine in the years before, and that the US was particularly anti-Yanukovych who was himself pro-Russian.  And – these things being true –   then voilá!!! – the US must have facilitated the ‘coup’ against the democratically elected president.

But what the ‘proxy war’ enthusiasts don’t take into account is how the political demonstrations of millions of people which took place for months beforehand and led to the ousting of Yanukovych were themselves an expression of a vast and popular discontent, a consequence of the way Yanukovych had chosen to simply refuse the results of a popular referendum where a majority of the country had voted for a closer economic and political association with the European Union.[2]

It was as if, in 2016, David Cameron – the then UK Prime Minister – had simply chosen to repeal the results of the Brexit referendum by way of his own personal diktat.  Now I am someone who was and remains anti-Brexit, but even I can comprehend why that would have been outrageous and anti-democratic.  It was no less outrageous and anti-democratic in the Ukrainian case, even if the decision of the original vote had favoured US and NATO interests.

Of course the US and NATO had a vested political motive in bringing Ukraine into the sphere of the EU, just as Russia – as a competing imperialist tendency – had vested interests in stymying this and bringing Ukraine deeper within its own sphere of influence (which is why the Ukrainian President felt emboldened enough to ignore a popular mandate).  But the fact that the US was pressing these interests by syphoning finances into Ukraine in the years before does not speak to the idea that the ousting of the Ukrainian president was somehow an artificial and external fait accompli achieved on the part of American political capital and the CIA.

For the simple, stubborn fact remains.   The US didn’t create the Euromaidan protests, the protestors did, and in their millions to wit.  For the ‘proxy war’ analysis to remain consistent, however, not only is the autonomy of the Ukrainian masses fighting against a Russian invasion denied, but so too the autonomy of their political interests as exemplified through mass protests and the popular vote.   These aspects of social development are simply rendered invisible or defunct, perishing before the motivations and ends of great nations and global empires.

And this is part of a broader historical pattern.  On the Marxist left in particular, those who encourage the notion of the ‘proxy war’, are – in all likelihood – the same tendencies and groups who responded to the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, the civil war, and Russia’s carpet bombing of Syrian towns and cities – by dismissing the widespread resistance on the part of the Syrian population as merely an excrescence of Western imperialism.

These tiny, tiny groups decreed in all their mighty majesty that the Syrian popular resistance was religiously fundamentalist to the core. They reduced a complex and contradictory array of political currents to a single ISIS-style fanaticism – even during times when vast sections of those rebelling against Assad were as well locked in a mortal combat with the forces of ISIS itself (the latter being expelled from the country in a wave of popular discontent which swept over the country from late 2013 to early 2014).

What I think is most notable here is that – once you denude the masses of any possibility of self-determination – then currents of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left start to sound rather similar to the pro-imperialist right.    As Israel continues its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, the ‘rationale’ for this on the part of the right-wing is nearly always couched in the same refrain.  The Palestinian citizens lack human agency because such agency has been co-opted by Hamas.  Hence, any atrocity against Palestinian civilians becomes feasible, for it is really an attack on Hamas.

So, when Israel bombs a hospital, it is because that hospital has been infiltrated by Hamas.  When a food or aid convey is destroyed, that too was necessary because Hamas members are ‘known’ to be onboard.  When crowds of marching protestors are shot down, it is because Hamas terrorists are lurking in their ranks, or the protestors themselves have been manipulated by Hamas figures behind-the-scenes.  The idea of the civilian as simply the mask – or one might say the ‘proxy’ – for the true terrorist agenda is something imperial power will always mobilize in its theatre of war and repression.  And yet, the same type of Orwellian logic is being taken up by more ‘radical’ voices too.

In Syria, for example, the wholesale destruction of civilian lives was justified by the Assad regime, the Russian state and large swathes of the radical left along the same lines.  Bombed civilian hospitals had been infiltrated by ISIS. The men and women who formed volunteer brigades in order to try and rescue injured people from the rubble such as the White Helmets were merely the sinister proxies of Western power who were staging chemical attacks in order to blacken the Assad regime.  And whole cities razed to the ground were just the unenviable but necessary response of a ‘secular’ government trying to defend itself against an Islamic terror grown out of Western imperial interests.

In a similar vein, hospitals bombed by Russian airpower in Ukraine were, rather predictably, ones that had been infiltrated by neo-Nazis courtesy of the Azov Brigade (a tiny percentage of Ukrainian military personnel incidentally). The Russian invasion as a whole was completely reimagined; no longer an aggressive and murderous imperial endeavour but rather a brave rescue mission which set out to liberate Ukraine from the grip of Nazi power and control.  

And from the ontological premise which underlies the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘proxy war’ standpoint, this all makes sense.  If the lives of the vast majority of men and women of a given population are conceived in terms which render them shapeless, empty and bereft – then inevitably what remains can be infiltrated and determined by external interests and alien forces; easily can they become the placeholder or ‘proxy’ for the figure of the Islamic terrorist or neo-Nazi lurking in the background.

Thus, not only are the Syrian or Palestinian or Ukrainian masses relieved of their own essential content but as well they are seen to necessitate the destruction that is unleashed against them, for what is being destroyed isn’t so much themselves as living breathing entities with aspirations and will, but rather the sinister spectral ‘other’, forever working to assert its malign power from the shadows.

And in this respect, the notion of the ‘proxy war’ provides a natural stepping stone to that of the ‘conspiracy’.  In ‘proxy war’ theory, local population are denuded of their powers of self-determination because they are simply the ‘proxies’ of some other entity – typically the US and its fascist or fundamentalist offshoots. And yet, the ‘proxy war’ theory is still referencing this or that specific population – i.e. the Ukrainians or the Syrians.[3]

The conspiracy theory does away with this by performing a greater abstraction still – it is no longer just a given and specific population that is relieved of its autonomy, but more broadly the masses of all populations are now considered under the same, abstract rubric.  They are all condensed into a single supine mass – the ‘sheeple’, an ovine-like herd which lacks any crispness of thought or critical capacity, and is, therefore, completely beholden to the Matrix-type illusion crafted by the most powerful to disguise the political reality.  In a similar vein, the conspiracy theory also tends to amalgamate ruling class power into one uniform entity which operates on a global scale – the New World Order, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati and so on.

By draining the general population of any iota of self-determination, by rendering them all the unthinking dupes of the conspiracy which the elite have set into motion – the elite themselves are transformed into a single transcendental power which stands above history – and in this respect, the last vestiges of an account which understands social development in terms of social and class interests and concrete relations of economic exploitation is snuffed out before the timeless Manichean contrast between light and dark, the cosmic tension between the puppet master and the puppet.  Of course, this is a tension that can never be resolved; for both terms are locked into eternal contradiction. The elite will forever hoodwink the majority because the majority are susceptible by their very nature, their lack of agency demands that they be manipulated – demands that they buy into the conspiracy.  In living their lives within the confines of the Matrix, they are merely actualising their own fundamental sense of emptiness.

The ‘truther’ or conspiracy theorist themselves might well see beyond the Matrix, might see past the illusion, but, ultimately, this doesn’t matter because the masses never will. And so, the conspiracy theorist in some way inhabits the role of the lonely prophet of old, ridiculed by those around him, ‘predicting’ the future, ‘anticipating’ what is to come, but without the ability to ever really change it. Nostradamus is, by his very nature, a figure of despair – of all the disasters he was said to have predicted, none were ever mitigated or averted.

And this is what the ‘proxy war’ theory and the conspiracy theory hold in common; ultimately both are counsels of despair.   In relieving a given population of agency and autonomy, the ‘proxy war’ theorists more and more have to fall back on murderous, megalomaniacal dictators like Putin, like Assad – as those capable of carrying the torch of hope and human freedom, as the only real bulwark to the power of global US domination, and the only concrete possibility of achieving some form of historical equilibrium and redress.

But to place your hope in such figures, such regimes, is itself an act of hopelessness.  In the conspiracy theory the hopelessness is even more pronounced, even more absolute; there is no possibility of historical change, not even that which might be delivered from above by way of powerful nations and dictators.  Instead, there is simply the Deep State (or its equivalent) and the bewildered masses locked into their eternal pantomime, and thus power and exploitation are completely unmoored from any socio-historical groundings.

In the ‘proxy war’ conception, living history is already being phased out in favour of a formal and lifeless schema which treats states and leaders in abstraction from the interests and potentials of the great majority of human beings.  The conspiracy theory simply brings this process to its fruition.   Although they do not know it, those who promote the ‘proxy war’ thesis to argue or imply that Russia’s decimation of Ukraine is somehow justified or progressive – are themselves preparing the ground by which conspiracy theory is mainlined into the life-blood of a radical left politics.

And this brings us back to the piece in Pravda – for it marks the point when a ‘proxy war’ style analysis morphs into the conspiracy theory proper, it marks the point at which left wing ‘anti-imperialism’ is elided into right-wing libertarianism, and it is significant because such a transition is more and more projected onto a mainstream discourse.   Much of this reared its ugly head during the Syrian Revolution and the struggle against Assad.  The rebels were all rabid fundamentalists, so the ‘anti-imperialist’ line read, they were all the ‘proxies’ of ISIS and its Western ‘sponsors’ which meant, in turn, that the only hope for some kind of ‘secular’ stability and a more progressive reordering of Syrian society would come from Assad himself.

But given the fact that between 2011 and 2024, Assad’s government had taken around 201,000 civilian lives while those rebels who genuinely were affiliated to ISIS had killed around 5,000 civilians in the same period – this was a world view which became increasingly hard to cling to.  And that’s when ‘anti-imperialism’ began to tilt more and more toward conspiracy theory; to continue to regard Assad’s dictatorship as the most progressive element in the unfolding civil war, in order to square the circle, the crimes against humanity that the state regime were embroiled in had to be absolved by purely artificial and fantastical means.

So when a chemical weapons attack was launched against the rebel-occupied Ghouta, killing hundreds with the nerve agent sarin – though Ghouta at the time had been under fire by Assad’s forces, though the Assad regime had admitted possessing chemical weapons and chemicals discovered on the site of the massacre were linked through laboratory tests to the regime’s own stockpile – nevertheless a substantial portion of the left refused to draw the inevitable, logical conclusion. 

Instead, prominent left-wing figures such as Max Blumenthal, Caitlin Johnson, Ben Norton, Gareth Porter and Aaron Maté all retreated into the nonsense fiction of the conspiracy theory, echoing the propaganda of the authoritarian regime itself by declaring that the attacks were a ‘false flag’ operation, perpetrated by the rebels so as to incriminate Assad.

In addition, many of the websites such as The Greyzone, Consortium News and Mint Press which hosted the writings of these prominent figures and others were part of a larger ecosystem whose backers were often drawn together in a murky synthesis of conspiracy theory advocates who’d developed a larger presence post-9-11, and those who had some financial or political affiliation with the Assad regime and its sponsors, and who inevitably towed the ‘anti-imperialist’ line.

The Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees (AIPAC), for example – which is registered in the US as a non-profit organisation providing ‘fiscal sponsorship’ for various activist groups –  managed to channel funding from donors to the tune of about $165,000 a year between 2012-2018.  Some of this cash was dispersed in the form of grants or prizes to the very same journalists who had worked so hard to promote false flag conspiracy theories in Syria – so, for instance, $10,000 was awarded to Mint Press, $10,000 to Gareth Porter and $20,000 to Max Blumenthal.

What is of particular note in the case of AIPAC is that its president during this period, one Kamal Obeid, was a keen supporter of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organisation which claims the destruction of the Twin Towers was the result of a controlled explosion, while the treasurer of AIPAC was one Paul Larudee who had appeared on Iran’s propaganda channel Press TV and would herald the Assad regime as ‘the legitimate, democratic expression of the Syrian people’.

Again, the synergy between conspiracy theory and ‘anti-imperialism’ is readily apparent, and on a broader scale we have seen how these two methodological currents unite in a right-wing and libertarian inflected analysis which is simultaneously packaged as left-wing and anti-establishment.   Just consider, for instance, how closely the rhetoric of the ‘left-wing’ Russel Brand has come to mimic the rantings and ravings of shock jock and far-right loon Alex Jones – both supporting the Russian propaganda point (and nearly always a key aspect of the proxy war narrative) that the Zelensky government is essentially under the sway of neo-fascists.  As well, both frame the underlying causes of the war in Ukraine in terms of the world conspiracy. As well too, both are reaching audiences of many millions.

And here it’s worth recalling that, once upon a time, Russel Brand would take to the streets to march alongside poor Londoners who were facing eviction, using his celebrity to help highlight their plight. Now he speaks from luxury wellness retreats with the type of eerie, unhinged spirituality which might befit a Rasputin waxing lyrical about the End of Days; it is no longer ordinary people who are fighting development projects and ruthless landlords his ideas seeks to encompass, but rather those acolytes he describes as his ‘awakening wonders’ as he de-programmes them, opening their eyes to the sinister shadow of the ‘globalists’ shaping world events from behind the curtain.

To understand these trends, one must first make an exodus into the past, specifically the midnight of the twentieth century and the rise of Stalinism.  Stalinism was a bureaucratic and necrotic power which, in zombie-like fashion, had arisen out of the wreckage of the 1917 revolution, the destruction of the workers’ and peasants’ democracy which had been bled out under the exergies of foreign invasion, counter revolution and civil war.

Other great revolutions would follow suit: the defeat of the German revolutions of 1918 and 1923, the workers councils in Northern Italy which would succumb the growing fascist movement of the early twenties, the great Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 whereby workers took control of the city of Shanghai, only to be massacred in their tens of thousands by the Kuomintang in collusion with the Stalinist leadership who had urged the workers to de-arm and de-mob.

Such terrible defeats left an imprint on the consciousness of a whole generation of radicals in the western world.   For many, there was the underlying feeling that salvation would not come from below, and that the Stalinist dictatorship might be the only force that could step into the breech.   With the rise of the US as the pre-eminent imperial power after the Second World War, and the way in which it intervened, bombed, decimated and occupied countries across the world in order to extend its political and economic grip, many came to see in the USSR – not a competing and murderous strain of imperialism in its own right – but perhaps the last best hope to providing a counterweight to US hegemony, to reining in the swath of destruction the US was cutting across the world.   Or to say the same, this was a hope which was itself born of hopelessness.

And it inveigled its advocates in the most sordid forms of self-contradiction.  Not only did they have to stick their fingers in their ears and whistle a cheery melody while the Stalinist regime went about slaughtering millions through vast projects of ethnic cleansing and slave labour prison camps, but in 1956 the Soviet Union – in its ongoing struggle to preserve control of its brutalized dominium – sent tanks in to repress a revolution that had broken out in Hungry.[4]  The revolution had generated from itself ‘soviets’ – i.e. the same type of workers’ and students’ councils that the USSR itself had been named in honour of, and which had first emerged in the context of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.  From a Marxist point of view, these soviets represented the very highest forms of self-determination on the part of the revolutionary subject, the working class itself.

But for those who had clung to the Stalinist chimera for so long, for those who had derided the accounts of gulags, slave labour, and the Holodomor famine Stalin inflicted on Ukraine – as merely the fabrications of Western propaganda (much the way many ‘anti-imperialists’ of today dismiss reports of Uyghur concentration camps in China or the ‘Filtration camps’ in Putin’s Russia); for these figures, a leap into the absurd was both methodologically consistent and absolutely necessary when it came to trying to justify the bloody repression in Budapest and other cities.

And how did they describe the crushing of that revolution?  Simple.  The workers and the students had not been addressing their own repression at the hands of the Soviet regime in the first place, and thus no genuine revolution had taken place.  The workers and students, you see, were merely the … How might one term it? … the proxies for a  ‘fascist reactionary’ plot.   In such an explanation, we once again see how the ‘anti-imperialist’ perspective dovetails neatly into conspiracy theory – the ‘proxies’ are simply the tools of a secretive and conspiratorial ploy achieved by the hidden hand of the US elite.

And we see too the atavistic and binary nature of the logic on display.    The Hungarian workers and students were opposing the power of the Soviet Union, American imperialism was also opposing that same power – ergo the workers and the students were really acting on behalf of the US.   It is a vulgar elision in which the interests of those fighting for their freedoms are simply subsumed under the category of Western imperialism.  And yet, it is an elision that echoes down the decades to be repeated by the ‘proxy war’ theorists in their analysis of Ukraine almost to the letter.

But what about those communists such as Peter Fryer, who had actually gone to Hungry, actually witnessed first hand the tragic bravery of the workers and students revolution, and who refused to toe the Party line?  Fryer could not buy into the notion that the workers and students were merely the dupes and proxies of the US and NATO because he had recorded in real time the way they had cultivated their freedoms through collective and self-conscious forms of social organisation in the face of the most lethal oppression – ‘It was the proletariat of Hungary, above all, that fought the tanks which came to destroy the revolutionary order they had already established in the shape of workers’ councils.’

Fryer’s book ‘Hungarian Tragedy’ should be required reading for any radical who wants to understand the way people can build direct democracy from the bottom up, how precious that achievement is, and how tragic its loss.  But Fryer’s efforts to poignantly chronicle the emergence of a genuine proletarian revolution were met by the ghastly, prehensile grotesques of the British Communist Party apparatus with dull-eyed stupefaction, enmity and dogma.

He was, of course, branded a traitor to party orthodoxy, he was excommunicated from the citadel, and perhaps, most predictably of all, he was charged as being an emissary of Western imperial interests.  How many of us on the radical left who have chosen to support the simple right of the Ukrainian masses to resist being invaded, bombed and killed have been tarred with that same absurd brush?

One might, however, point out that there is a significant lapse of time between the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and what is happening now.   Russia is, quite clearly a capitalist country – the liquidation of private property in the means of production which Stalinist regimes tended to facilitate has in turn been liquidated. Even China with its avowedly ‘Communist’ leadership (read bloody authoritarian dictatorship) has at its core a fundamentally capitalist economy albeit one with a higher level of state penetration and ownership.

At first glance, it might seem difficult to appreciate why a critique of Stalinism and the defunct USSR has such a bearing on our present reality, but more than being a description of a given state and its evolution and decline, I think that Stalinism represents something else as well – it represents the historical logic of despair.

In the last forty or so years, working class struggles across the board have been systematically dismantled and defeated by a neoliberal agenda where states and governments have facilitated deindustrialisation and the most vicious privatisation of social services and welfare.   Many of the great movements in the western world which fought to combat this, like the miners’ strike in England, or the Occupy movement in the US, or the ‘indignados’ in Spain or the movement behind Syriza in Greece have either been violently defeated, betrayed or simply petered away.

Inevitably this generates despair.  And the despair that comes from faithlessness in popular power can be neatly amended by the masochistic desire for an external force to step into the breach and impose some form of order from above – enter stage left, Assad, Putin, China.  Those who mobilize the ‘proxy war’ theory against Ukraine today are not aware of it, but they are channelling the same sense of historical despair their Stalinist predecessors did in 1956 as they heaped scorn on the possibility of the self determination of the Hungarian populace, deriding it as nothing more than a façade behind which lay the true power, that of American imperialism.

And yet, as bleak as things are now, this is hardly the whole story.   To turn to Ukraine one final time, more than a century ago lived an obscure and non-descript Ukranian student by the name of Lev Bronstein.    He wrote out a few lines about the dawn of the twentieth century, lines which, in my view, might well be applied to our own:

It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana.

– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! Thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.

– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’

– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.

NOTES