‘Dialectics is foresight over astonishment.’-Leon Trotsky
‘The imperialist propaganda machine insists that Putin has failed in his objective, and that the Russian army’s advance has been halted by the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian army.
…Ultimately, it is the balance of forces that will determine the outcome. And that is overwhelmingly in favour of Russia.
Far from retreating, everything points to the Russian army advancing uninterruptedly by stages, capturing one key point after another. Russian forces are surrounding the capital Kiev from different sides and have also surrounded the second city, Kharkiv. They are advancing from Crimea to the North and North-west, reaching Mykolaiv, and also towards the North-east, along the coast of the Azov Sea, where they have taken over Melitopol and Berdiansk, and have nearly managed to close off the key city of Mariupol, thus linking up with the forces coming south from Donetsk.
…The issue will be decided – as was clear from the outset – not by negotiations, but on the field of battle. And there, Ukrainians will find themselves hopelessly outgunned. A few shipments of arms from Berlin will make very little difference.’-Alan Woods, 28 February 2022
What a difference a month makes. The Russian assault on Ukraine has failed miserably, and the heroic Ukrainian people have thrown back the forces of fascism. Ukraine is now winning the war, by a long shot. The useless Russian army has been driven from Kiev and from large parts of northern Ukraine, and is now confined to the extreme east of the country. It now prepares to make its last stand in Donbas. The hope is that it will be able to resupply for a renewed offensive. The Ukrainian counter-offensive, however, makes it increasingly unlikely that this will happen.
It isn’t all that long ago that our ‘leading theoreticians’ of Trotskyism were assuring us that Russian victory was inevitable. And yet, over the last couple of months, there has been a stunning reversal. So much for foresight over astonishment. Woods’ laughable ‘bourgeois empiricism’ was on display in that ridiculous article he wrote on the conflict. Seeing only raw numbers of men, material and economic power, Woods deduced from this the conclusion that Russian victory was a racing certainty. He did not count upon how the interaction between these two forces would give rise to social-psychological transformations that would galvanise the Ukrainian people and drive the Russians to demoralisation, despair and defeat. He didn’t even take into account Russian generalship (or the lack of it), military doctrine or other silly things of that kind – the sorts of things that Friedrich Engels, who took a keen interest on all matters military, would surely not have neglected. He failed to use his own, much-vaunted dialectical materialist method to analyse the situation. He chose instead the method of a rotten positivist. Using similar methods, Woods might well have concluded that the Persians would inevitably defeat the Greeks in the Greco-Persian Wars, or that America would definitely defeat North Vietnam in the Vietnam War.
Before anyone from the IMT declares that I am now a convert to dialectical materialism after previously denouncing it as phony, they should be warned that they are missing the point. Everything that is supposedly unique to ‘diamat’ is in fact common sense. Any good analysis of anything should take into account multiple factors as well as how things are likely to change when those factors are actually put to the test and there is a clash of living forces. It should also accept that not all factors can be fully quantified, if at all. One can accept these aspects of ‘diamat’ without embracing the nonsensical aspects embedded in it, indeed, without even being a Marxist at all. Woods, due to his personal prejudices and his rotten intellectual dishonesty, consciously chose to give the most vulgar and lazy analysis possible. His membership deserve better. As we always said when I was in the organisation, it is a rotten general who leads his troops into battle without an idea of how the course of the battle is likely to go, and a plan of attack which is either too rigid nor too vague. That was why we needed dialectical materialism. Perhaps in his old age, the Master is losing his grip.
In a particularly hilarious example of Trotskyist coverage, there was a lovely bit of Trot-on-Trot carnage at the beginning of March when the SEP published an article condemning the IMT for not being anti-West enough in their position on the war. Anyone who has been following my blog knows that this is complete nonsense. The only good thing about these repulsive little nobodies and their vile nonsense is that they provide people like myself with quality entertainment. That’s when they aren’t doing my head in. Speaking of the IMT, they have been awfully quiet about Ukraine as of late. Over the past couple of weeks, only a few articles have been published on the situation, including a particularly invidious one condemning ‘Russophobia’. We won’t see anything similar about the ‘Ukrainophobia’ being whipped up by Putin, who is committing genocide as we speak. No doubt the organisation is too embarrassed at its obvious failure to properly estimate the balance of forces within Ukraine, despite claiming ‘dialectical foresight’. It couldn’t anticipate the war, nor could it accurately foresee the course of said war once it had begun. That they are utterly full of shit is apparent to everyone outside their cult. They probably won’t publish an article about the Bucha massacre. It is probably for the best, given their loathsome coverage thus far. The SEP published something particularly disgusting about the genocide:
The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.
The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.
Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.
Even if it were established that Russian troops fired on civilians—and that has not been established—that would not mean that they were acting under the instruction of the Russian government.
This foul rubbish is one big heap of fallacious reasoning. Russian troops withdrew – and so what? They were there long enough to kill people. Yes, it took some days for the full extent of the massacre to become apparent. Nothing suspicious about that. The second paragraph is leading us to the tendentious suggestion that the Ukrainians killed their own – a monstrous notion and a highly improbable scenario, given that it is their country that is being invaded by their murderous imperialist neighbour. We are told that there is no ‘smoking gun’ in the form of video evidence – as if the people being killed would have had an opportunity to film their butchery in the moment. As if any film evidence would not have been destroyed by Putin’s regime. Then we have the laughable suggestion that even if Russian troops were responsible, the Russian government, despite the manifold evidence of its genocidal rhetoric and intentions towards Ukraine, not to mention its decision to invade in the first place, had nothing to do with it.
This evil article then goes into a bunch of whataboutery about American imperialism, and we are back to our standard SEP hysteria about how NATO is seeking to bring about WWIII – the usual nonsense.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Gareth Stedman Jones’ book Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion for the past week or so. I want to write a review of it and Jonathan Sperber’s book on Marx for my next post. For the sake of my mental health, I think I need to unplug from reading about Marx and Marxism for the foreseeable future. That is part of the reason why my posting here has become increasingly less frequent – that, along with the fact that there is only so much one can find to write about these people. It’s all so predictable really. There is so much important non-Marxist stuff I want to get through – stuff which is likely to be even more intellectually rewarding than trying to wrap my head around the fantasy that is Marxism, important though it is for understanding what I believed and what was used to control me. It is always good to have some fun at the expense of these morons, which is why I think that two months after the invasion of Ukraine by a genocidal dictatorship, the false prophecies of these goons should be held up to ridicule as publicly as possible.