The recent link in a letter caught the reader’s attention, leading to an article on the Swiss platform Globalbridge, which, like the author, is surprised by the current state of the German Left. The article, titled “How to Lure the Left into War” attempts to explain why many parts of this party have joined the Kiev fascists and NATO warmongers, advocating for arms deliveries and military buildup and fostering a hatred towards Russians and Russia that is reminiscent of Goebbels and Himmler’s.
Intellectual Decay: When War Advocates Claim to be Liebknecht’s Heirs
Ensel explains it by saying that the mainstream propaganda skillfully used classical left-wing patterns, portraying Russia as an imperial monster that oppresses smaller nations within and seeks to subjugate them outside. This enabled war advocates to claim they are in the antimilitarist tradition of Karl Liebknecht and in the footsteps of anticolonial freedom fighters like Ernesto Che Guevara.
Of course, this colossal mistake is only possible – and this aspect is unfortunately overlooked by Ensel – due to the almost complete collapse of Marxist political education and the intellectual decay of the Left. Bourgeois propaganda can only work if mainstream narratives are consumed without criticism, if the consumer is unable to check them against elementary logic and contradictions.
It is, therefore, only logical that the historical achievement of Karl Liebknecht consisted in opposing the imperialism of his own state, German imperialism, that is. Against actual or alleged foreign imperialism – Russian, French, British – the majority of the German Social Democrats, who joined the “Burgfrieden” with the Kaiser and thus made the most senseless war in human history, the First World War, possible, with its millions of war dead. That is why Lenin called them “Landesverteidiger.”
The idea of Lenin, Liebknecht and the 37 authors of the Zimmerwalder Manifesto was that the world war would be impossible if the proletariat of every country fought against its own warmongers, not alongside them.
What do German Leftists, who want to fight against an alleged “Russian imperialism” have in common with Karl Liebknecht? Nothing! They are the intellectual heirs and spiritual descendants of the “Landesverteidiger” and “Burgfriedler” of 1914. And I do not mean that this is a difficult thought process that only an average intelligent person cannot achieve.
It is not as if the “enemy within” is harder to recognize today as it was 110 years ago. Despite all the EU’s image work, a Leftist, who should have a fundamental skepticism towards the workings of capital, should recognize that the expansion of the EU and NATO has an imperialist character. What else do both want in Ukraine, if not to appropriate its resources, markets and the labor of its inhabitants? The EU – a charitable organization? If one thinks so, then one has no business in a capital-skeptical party.
At least the expansion of NATO should be clear even to the last EU-blinded person with an IQ below average: there is no other logical explanation for the relentless and merciless advance of NATO in the East, except that a preparation for war against Russia is being made. At least, NATO is positioning itself in a strategic configuration, from which Russia cannot be defended and is forced to hand over its riches entirely (and not just partly, as it has so far) to Western capital.
“Imperialist Russia”: They Read Lenin and Understand Nothing
A response to the question of whether Russia itself is an imperialist actor requires knowledge of the theory of imperialism. One must at least have read Lenin’s foundational work “The Imperialism as the Highest (or Last) Stage of Capitalism” and be intellectually capable of abstracting from the conclusions drawn for the time period. No knowledge, by the way, of how Leo Ensel comes up with the idea that Lenin would not have refused a world war if it had been launched by anti-imperialists. If it is not meant sardonically, it is a low point and a defamation. Lenin was a war opponent and was convinced that every nation should at home deal with its warmongers – and that is what the proletariat was called upon to do.
Just because Lenin saw Russia in 1913 as having already reached the imperial stage (a highly questionable and more likely a political agenda of an otherwise great theorist’s debt), it does not automatically apply to the present time. There is no law “once imperialist, always imperialist” especially in the case of Russia, which also had 70 years of socialist development and subsequent absorption by Western capital to create breaks.
Imperialist is a country in the sense of Marxist theory not because it is large (then India would be imperialist) or a multi-ethnic state (then it would be Switzerland), but because the national capital has reached a stage where it no longer concentrates on production at home, but on investment in foreign, colonial, or semi-colonial countries, from which it then extracts its profits.
The “sucking” criterion is decisive here and so one should ask: “Who is sucking what in the case of Russia?”
Simple research on the internet reveals that 26% of the shares of the most important Russian company, Gazprom, belong to a New York bank and almost half of Russia’s largest bank, Sber, are owned by foreign shareholders. Until 2021, up to $200 billion a year in profits of foreign companies were exported from Russia, primarily to the West, with a record year in 2022 of $243 billion, 13.5% of Russia’s GDP. Russia also made a colonial contribution by having a significant part of the retail trade and the hotel industry owned by foreign companies. What is that, if not “sucking” a whole country?
And where and to what extent is the Russian capital “sucking”? At first glance, only investments in the energy sector and the Armenian railways come to mind, which only brought losses, as well as real estate in Montenegro and on Cyprus. Without irony: peanuts.
It is also worth asking whether the “Russian” capital is even national capital of Russia: which “Russian” oligarchs have their main residence not in London and only a Russian passport? A capitalism that makes its main business out of the sale of unprocessed natural resources, with at least a quarter controlled from abroad and whose bourgeoisie has a comprador character, is in its imperialist stage? Is this seriously meant, you German “Left intellectuals”? In all other cases, one would call this a “semicolonial state.