Is Russia today engaged in capitalist imperialism? The answer is contradictory. In the first place, the answer is a plain no. Callinicos wants to call only the ‘top six’ countries imperialist; it is then wholly artificial for him to include Russia among them. More fundamentally, the Russian economy is primarily agricultural and extractive, with significant secondary line in arms exports; and there is not - yet - a fully-autonomous banking sector. On the contrary, Russian ‘foreign direct investments’ consist of individual oligarchs pulling cash out of the Russian domestic economy and putting it into prestige objects like Chelsea FC or real estate. It is not investment of capital: that is, money put to work as investments, which return a profit through the application of capital and labour in combination. If the US wins this proxy war, Russia will more or less rapidly become a semi-colony.

On the other side, Russia might become capitalist-imperialist - if it devises financial mechanisms independent of Swift, etc, and wins this war. Japan in 1894 was not an imperialist power, but victory over China in the war of 1894-95 made it into one, with the annexation of Taiwan. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904 could have reduced Japan to the status of a semi-colony of Russia; Japanese victory produced, instead, annexation of Korea and clear Japanese entry into the ranks of the great powers. Going further back, but similarly, Germany in 1870 was not an imperialist power. Prussian victory over France in that year provided the conditions for both German unification and an imperialist expansion.

1870

1870 is a better guide to our political tasks than either 1914 or 1940. As Mason asserts and Callinicos accepts, the workers’ movement cannot possibly use this war to challenge for power, as the 1912 Second International Congress at Basel urged and as Lenin and Zinoviev urged in 1914. We do not have a powerful mass movement, built up over decades, which could pose an international alternative.

Equally, however, this is not 1940. The Russian regime is authoritarian, but not fascist. There have not been mass arrests of oppositionists, as in spring 1933 in Germany, but merely harassment and repression of protests. There continue to be multi-party elections - violently skewed in favour of United Russia, true, but Republicans and Tories aspire to skew elections in the US and Britain in their favour too. Our own states increasingly demand police permission for demonstrations, and so on. Russia plays footsy with far-right nationalists - but so does the ‘west’ - and not only in Ukraine. To advocate a people’s front with ‘liberal’ imperialism - as Callinicos rightly says Mason does - for fear of Russian ‘fascism’, is to repeat the betrayals of the Eustonites and other ‘left’ backers of the invasion of Iraq.

In 1870 Germany was not yet an imperialist power. The war appeared to be a war launched by French emperor Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III). French victory would have prevented German unification and secured the subordination of the Germanies as semi-colonies. The left had small and divided forces. But Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel - leaders of an organisation less than 10,000 strong who by chance held parliamentary seats - raised their voices against the Prussian regime and its war plans. Their principled commitment - ‘Not a penny, not a man for this system’ - allowed German social democracy to build a voice of unambiguous opposition to the regime under which they lived, which was able to grow on a mass scale because it offered a voice of unequivocal opposition.

Today, again, the left has small and divided forces. But we can raise our voices against our own state’s wars: and by doing so take a stand which in the long term can rally forces for unequivocal opposition to the warmongering imperialist regime under which we live.

"Neither 1914 nor 1940" by Mike Macnair