Multipolar Disorder

Here is a little tet-a-tet I had with a member of the SWP recently. It is a comment I posted in the discussion on the fine Splintered Sunrise blog here:

http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/dont-mess-with-the-tsar/#comment-6653

It was very hastily written in the last five minutes of a lunch break so please excuse the clunkiness. I should really work on it further.


`However I still don’t understand the relevence as we are not here dealing with a bipolar world.’

And here is the SWP’s sophistry out in the open. In a bipolar world the major powers fight proxy wars, in a multi-polar world the major powers fight each other directly. This is a multi-polar world, Russia is fighting Georgia therefore Russia is fighting the West. Therefore Georgia can go to hell and we won’t take sides. And why do the SWP peddle this line? Because they have Stalinist friends in the Stop the War Coalition who support this war outright either because they still have some nostalgic or financial relationship to the ultra-chauvinist and ultra-servile Russian Communist Parties or both. Unfortunately the cost of maintaining their alliances will be the complete and utter discrediting of the coalition itself at a time when it needs all its strength to organise against an attack on Iran. It is ironic that the same people who bang on about Cuba all the time support this Russian onslaught as if the Oligarchy who completed the blockade of that island and nearly starved its people to death and who have plundered the people’s property through outright theft or state organised financial scams are capable of anything remotely progressive whatsoever.

In actual fact, what is happening is that the major powers are redistributing the world between each other, smashing up, betraying, making false promises, pandering to semi-colonial nations, invading them, conceding what they have to to each other. When the redistribution is finished and it is clear who has won and who has lost the most then and only then, due to their own internal contradictions, will the major powers confront each other directly in a full blown, global conflagration. Before that, however, they will have to smash the will of the world proletariat, that spectre which haunts them all but which, in the SWP’s hands, looks more like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

If you oppose the SWP’s tacit support for the Russian invasion of Georgia you will be called a `liberal bomber’ and an `ethnic cleanser’ which would be correct if you supported direct Western intervention but which, are in fact, a lie. If a direct confrontation between Russia and the USA comes about on Georgian soil then we will be for the defeat of both sides through the self-organised opposition of their respective working classes.

The reverse arguements are used by the AWL to support Zionism. They are prepared to justify ANY Israeli assault on Iran and anybody who isn’t is an anti-semite and a BNP supporter. Doubtless when Iran is attacked we will get the same arguement about the major powers and the main enemy being at home intended to make us turn a blind eye to what has been done to Iran as the SWP want us to turn a blind eye to what is being done to Georgia. The AWL has handed its organisation over to Zionism lock, stock and smoking barrels. The SWP have handed theirs over to Stalinism.

Tough negotiations are taking place between the US, Britain, Poland, the Czechs on one side and the Russians, French and Germans on the other on how this conflict will play out in the near future. How far can the Russians take their assault on Georgia, will they finally give the green light to an Israeli/US strike on Iran in exchange for Israeli complicity in their invasion and getting the missile shield moved onto Russian soil where they all agree it would be better placed to confront the `real’ enemy China, possibly the last thing the imperialists will agree on before tearing each other apart.

The SWP and the AWL are centrist remnants of the Cold War whose theoretical weaknesses stand exposed in their inability to cope with the new realities and in their treacherous and opportunist alliances.