“…the division of the world has been completed; on the other hand, instead of the undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century.”

Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Captalism. P. 81. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/28/mine-m28.html

“To the extent that these issues are mentioned, it is in the most puerile and one-sided fashion: Russia bullies its neighbors through its important supply of natural gas, and the US and Europe seek to heroically intervene to stop this. No questions, however, are asked, as to what interests the United States and its European allies have in Ukraine or, for that matter, Russia.”

This attempt to defend imperialism contradicts Lenin’s book on the subject, which they have quoted in an attempt to associate their defense of imperialism with its greatest critic! This invention of an “undivided monopoly” of “the United States and its European allies” puts the WSWS into the camp of imperialism, which they see as a progressive force for organizing production more efficiently, more socially. This view can only make sense to someone who has no interest in ending the class divide, the class oppression of capitalism. Someone who has received millions of dollars from the corporations and the police can see progress in imperialism, someone who appeals only to the “labor aristocracy” to establish social chauvinism over communist internationalism even within the revolutionary party. We need to counter-pose to this defense of imperialism a powerful assault by the working class against privilege and secrecy, the enemies of socialist democracy.

“[Zbigniew Brzezinski] argued that Ukraine was critical to the US asserting its hegemony against Russia in Eurasia. ‘Without Ukraine,’ he wrote, ‘Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’”

Their own source calls Russia an empire. They make no attempt to explain this fact.

Article: “Controlling raw materials is not crudely about a country hoarding resources for its own use. It is equally, if not more so, about ensuring that key commodities and markets remain in the hands of an alliance of imperialist powers led, in today’s world, by the United States.”

We are to assume from this that the United States and “an alliance of imperialist powers” will use these commodities and markets to produce all the necessities for mankind as a whole for the next century. In fact, the United States can only be trusted to destroy these valuable resources and cut them off from world production in order to increase to demand for their own products. The economic sanctions, Marxists will argue, will give us a better insight into the military plans for a future Russian state after a “successful” American invasion. The WSWS will continue with their idealistic defense of the imaginary “undivided monopoly” of the United States.

Lenin, p. 25:

The banking system “possesses, indeed, the form of universal book-keeping and distribution of means of production on a social scale, but solely the form”, wrote Marx in Capital half a century ago (Russ. trans., Vol. III, part II, p. 144).

“Universal distribution of means of production”—that, from the formal aspect, is what grows out of the modern banks… In substance, however, the distribution of means of production is not at all “universal”, but private, i.e., it conforms to the interests of big capital, and primarily, of huge, monopoly capital, which operates under conditions in which the masses live in want, in which the whole development of agriculture hopelessly lags behind the development of industry, while within industry itself the “heavy industries” exact tribute from all other branches of industry.”

Perhaps this may sound confusing to the WSWS, but Lenin does not see “exacting tribute” as productive activity! The heavy industries, including resource extraction, should come under the control of the working class, not Russian capitalism, which feeds into Chinese-Russian Eastern imperialism. Yet the WSWS would have us believe that the best interests of the working class lies in defending the Russian state from Western Imperialism. In fact, each working class in every country must oppose their own leaders, regardless of which side they take in the imperialist struggle for markets.

Lenin’s book mentions Germany 195 times, despite Germany having no colonies and not belonging to the “imperialist alliance” of the UK, France, and the US.

On Page 58, Lenin shows this chart comparing colonial possessions:

A similar chart showing today’s powers would list countries that have their militaries stationed in foreign bases as a measure of their colonial influence. The US might be number one on the list, but as Lenin pointed out, other powers seek to share in the US monopoly while developing their own, especially by seeking out a “neutral” position between China and the US, i.e. the development of a new empire. While the US may seek to deny Russia the right to export its goods to Europe, have they really accomplished their supposed plan of stealing Russian physical assets? No! And they have not stopped Russian exports either. They have merely stolen money from their ally, the EU, and given the money to their enemy, China, by forcing the EU to stop importing Russian goods and giving China a discount on the excess Russian goods manufactured for export. China, of course, as a capitalist and an imperialist power, will not use this advantage to elevate the conditions of its people but to expand its military power to defend its own exports into different regions of the world, displacing Europe even further.

Lenin P. 51-52:

“But concentration in Europe was also a component part of the process of concentration in America…And then, in 1907, the German and American trusts concluded an agreement by which
they divided the world between them. Competition between them ceased…

But the division of the world between two powerful trusts does not preclude redivision if the relation of forces changes as a result of uneven development, war, bankruptcy, etc.

An instructive example of an attempt at such a redivision, of the struggle for redivision, is provided by the oil industry.”

German and American trusts concluded a deal in 1907 to divide the world. The WSWS would have us believe that Germany and America now had an unbreakable alliance that would allow the two countries to dominate the world in an unstoppable alliance. The WSWS lies consciously in taking this position. They know full well that Germany and the United States fought against each other in the First and Second World Wars. Never mind that, though! These are only just facts!

They also leave out all the inconvenient facts in their theories about the US-NATO agreements. Trump almost pulled the United States out of NATO and intended to do so from the beginning. Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO after the US, has concluded deals with Russia to import Russian military equipment in the face of threats from the US. Hungary, a member of NATO as well, has refused to allow any NATO troops on to its territory because it sides with Russia against the Ukraine. Leave out all these inconvenient facts, and you have yourself some of the WSWS’s “famous” idealism, their new substitute for Marxist materialism. When they cross back into materialism, it is only in the form of the neo-Malthusianism of the EcoHealth Alliance.

P. 54

We see plainly here how private and state monopolies are interwoven in the epoch of finance capital; how both are but separate links in the imperialist struggle between the big monopolists for the division of the world…

Extremely instructive also is the story of the formation of the International Rail Cartel. The first attempt of the British, Belgian and German rail manufacturers to form such a cartel was made as early as 1884, during a severe industrial depression. The manufacturers agreed not to compete with one another in the home markets of the countries involved, and they divided the foreign markets in the following quotas: Great Britain, 66 per cent; Germany, 27 per cent; Belgium, 7 per cent. India was reserved entirely for Great Britain. Joint war was declared against a British firm which remained outside the cartel, the cost of which was met by a percentage levy on all sales. But in 1886 the cartel collapsed when two British firms retired from it. It is characteristic that agreement could not be achieved during subsequent boom periods.

You can see from Lenin’s example that British firms sabotaged the agreement even though Great Britain won 66 percent of the foreign market in the cartel agreement. Competition between British firms interfered with the ability of the British state to organize an undivided monopoly. Whatever agreement the US government manages to sign with the E.U. central government can collapse if any American corporation or pair of corporations decides to drop out of the agreement. These American corporations can receive finance capital from China, France, India or some other competing power and decide to drop the deal, leaving the European and American monopoly broken.

P. 55

In the next quote from Imperialism, we will see the WSWS exposed as Kautskyist, as obscuring the substance of the struggle of imperialist cartels and emphasizing “specific and temporary causes.” The WSWS in its abandonment of Marxism and its open defense of the unifying power of imperialism, really a defense of imperialism itself, has really not accomplished anything except “to sink to the role of a sophist.”

Certain bourgeois writers (now joined by Karl Kautsky, who has completely abandoned the Marxist position he had held, for example, in 1909) have expressed the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking expressions of the internationalisation of capital, give the hope of peace among nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd, while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defence of the worst opportunism. [Emphasis added.] International cartels show to what point capitalist monopolies have developed, and the object of the struggle between the various capitalist associations. This last circumstance is the most important; it alone shows us the historico-economic meaning of what is taking place; for the forms of the struggle may and do constantly change in accordance with varying, relatively specific and temporary causes, but the substance of the struggle, its class content, positively cannot change while classes exist. [Emphasis added.] Naturally, it is in the interests of, for example, the German bourgeoisie, to whose side Kautsky has in effect gone over in his theoretical arguments (I shall deal with this later), to obscure the substance of the present economic struggle (the division of the world) and to emphasise now this and now another form of the struggle. Kautsky makes the same mistake. Of course, we have in mind not only the German bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie all over the world. The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it “in proportion to capital”, “in proportion to strength”, because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism… To substitute the question of the form of the struggle and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow warlike, the next day warlike again) for the question of the substance of the struggle and agreements between capitalist associations is to sink to the role of a sophist.

Lenin’s point that the capitalists divide the world not out of malice but due to the force produced by concentration of capital and the need to obtain profits. Capital itself does not have the freedom to act any differently. Russia and China as capitalist countries have no choice but to follow the same course of imperialism, attempting to divide away allies from the US until they can create a balance of power. Whatever arguments exist between the US and Europe cannot withstand the forces of imperialism, the forces of redivision for the sake of profit by every new concentration of capital produced repeatedly as the only means of obtaining profit.

Having completely ignored Lenin, the article goes on to produce, like a monopoly of ignorance, an almost limitless supply of sophistry:

For a period, the US had been content enough to allow China to dominate the processing, and to a lesser extent, the mining of these minerals. Extracting and processing metals and minerals is one of the most environmentally hazardous parts of global industry. Doing so cheaply means rampant pollution and toxic waste that constitutes a major human health problem. China has served as the sweatshop of the capitalist economy for several decades. With the productive operations of the imperialist nations concentrated in the immense factory towns of China, including electronics, it made sense to concentrate global economic mineral processing there, including its waste.

This leaves out the fact that American monopolies had a “special” or colonialist relationship with China, thus allowing American corporations and banks to receive a majority of the profits from the sale of these resources extracted in China. It also assumes American monopolies turned to China as a way of protecting the health and the labor rights of American labor! As if anticipating the Kautskyist arguments of the WSWS, Lenin responds on P. 63:

Of course, the bourgeois reformists, and among them particularly the present-day adherents of Kautsky, try to belittle the importance of facts of this kind by arguing that raw materials “could be” obtained in the open market without a “costly and dangerous” colonial policy… But such arguments become an apology for imperialism, an attempt to paint it in bright colours, because they ignore the principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism: monopolies. The free market is becoming more and more a thing of the past; monopolist syndicates and trusts are restricting it with every passing day… Where, except in the imagination of sentimental reformists, are there any trusts capable of concerning themselves with the condition of the masses instead of the conquest of colonies?

The WSWS seems unable to separate reality from their imagination as sentimental reformists. They think they have found a way to turn American privately held corporations into defenders of the environment, as defenders of the health and rights of labor. In fact, American corporations have done immense harm to the health and rights of American labor, as well as the environment within the United States itself. The real reason for the concentration of capital in China had more to do with destroying the labor movement in the United States, itself a sort of monopoly on industrial peace with the workers. Imperialism accomplished its war on US labor not only through the closure of factories in the United States and the transfer of capital abroad. The corporations accomplished this through police state tactics and corporate infiltration, bribery, and extortion of the trade unions. They accomplished this through the “war on terror” and domestic spying. Corporate spies can buy the private information of any labor or socialist activist, thanks to illegal government spying. These policies do not “make sense,” as the WSWS puts it. They argue it does because they sympathize with those extracting profit from the working class, from the substance of imperialist relations, the class divide, the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the very small oligarchy. They only see their particular interests aligned with Eastern Imperialism.

The article contradicts all of its own arguments about Russia’s gas exports when it says, “The US has major leverage over China when it comes to China’s oil imports, but China has leverage over the US when it comes to critical minerals.”

It also contradicts itself when it quotes the Telegraph, “China’s dominance of critical minerals may be as dangerous for Europe as Russia’s energy weapon… Europe has woken up very late to the global scramble for critical materials.”

Admission of China and Russia’s power as empires with dangerous economic and not simply military weapons does not coincide with the WSWS insistence that the US has an undivided monopoly, taking all of NATO along with it. The US itself has a great number of divisions which China and Russia can exploit economically to bring about changes in policy with the US itself. Furthermore, Europe has far greater division both within and against the United States. The powerful economic and military weapons of Russia and China will work on these divisions until they lead to the collapse of old agreements based on World War II nearly 80 years ago or the aftermath of the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR over 30 years ago. Such agreements never last forever under capitalism since the main substance of capitalist economics at the heart of political change is the profit motive, the accumulation of personal wealth, not such lofty, humanistic goals as world peace or good governance.

As Lenin pointed out,

“…the division of the world has been completed; on the other hand, instead of the undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century.”

Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Captalism. P. 81. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf

From the article:

“Russia’s role in global nickel production is reflected in the soaring price of nickel following the outbreak of war. Nickel was trading at less than $20,000 per ton in 2021. Now, it is just short of $30,000 per ton. In the first weeks of the war the price briefly increased by 100 percent. Russia has 6.9 million tons of nickel reserves, or seven percent of the world’s total. Russia is the fourth largest holder of reserves.”

As Lenin argues about Kautsky, the same applies to the WSWS. “Naturally, it is in the interests of, for example, the German bourgeoisie, to whose side Kautsky has in effect gone over in his theoretical arguments (I shall deal with this later), to obscure the substance of the present economic struggle (the division of the world) and to emphasise now this and now another form of the struggle. Kautsky makes the same mistake.” The WSWS makes the same mistake. This emphasis on critical minerals is an emphasis of another form of struggle. The underlying question is really a suggestion for American imperialism, why do they not just buy the materials from Russia at the market rate?

This is a fallacy, because every mining company already has contracts with refiners who have contracts with manufacturers who have contracts with distributors. All of these companies already have arrangements with the banks and the stock-holding companies. These banks and financial companies all have arrangements with the state and the military to protect their assets, their contracts, and their territory. To take it a step further, they all have protection from the union bureaucracies and the leftist parties who make every apology as the WSWS does for their behavior as part of their Kautskyist defense of the capitalist system. They may claim to oppose capitalism, but in their defense of Russian capitalism as a system immune from the general economic laws of monopoly and imperialism, they introduce the Kautskyist virus that infects the revolutionary body.

This is the virus Lenin worked to eliminate through the antibodies of revolutionary consciousness, through the publication of Imperialism as a criticism and not an acceptance of Kautskyist arguments. We should remind ourselves now who Kautsky was: he was the considered the authority on Marxism of the Social Democratic Party and wrote the Erfurt Program, adopted in 1891 as the political program of the SDP. He gained fame as a friend of Fredrich Engels, who assigned Kautsky to edit some of Marx’s works. After Engels’ death, Kautsky gradually succumbed in theory to bourgeois ideology. His arguments against Rosa Luxemburg forced her out of the party in 1910, because she had advocated for a general strike in opposition to the war while the SDP supported the war. She would later be assassinated by the SDP government who sent veterans of the war to capture and kill her. Such a deadly virus circulating within the party should convince us to fight with all our strength to create and distribute real revolutionary theory within, around, and about the party to the widest possible audience until the threat is thoroughly washed away. They should find themselves flooded by a revolutionary opposition that gives them no ground to stand on. Otherwise, they will make the same mistake as the SPD and later the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia. They will compromise with the bourgeoisie and assassinate all the real leaders of the revolution, preventing the working class from establishing its own state and extending the era of imperialist war for decades.

Also from the article:

• “Russia is the third largest reserve holder of iron, with 25 billion tons.”
• “Russia is the fourth largest holder of [nickel] reserves.”
• “Russia is the second largest producer of rhodium and platinum in the world.”
• “Russia is the second largest cobalt-producing country.”
• “Russia is the sixth largest producer of graphite in the world.”
• “Russia is the third largest producer of scandium.”
• “Russia is the third largest producer of titanium sponge.”
• “Russia is also the second largest holder of coal reserves in the world, 175 billion tons.”
• “Russia is a leading producer of polysilicon.”
• “Russia is a leading source of these materials.”

The WSWS seeks to bring shame on Lenin for their own failure to understand either capitalism or imperialism. This was not Lenin’s fault, since he made the effort in his short 95 page work Imperialism. Yet the writer of the WSWS article did not seem to make it past the first 10 pages. He would have known, if he did, that the above observations strengthen the argument that Russia is not a colony but an imperialist power. They may not be a colonial power of the highest order, but neither was Germany, as Lenin pointed out. Germany had close to zero colonial holdings against the large empires of France, the UK, and the United States. Yet Germany became the principal aggressor in the first and second world wars due to their significant monopolies, protected industries, and growing influence in the world economy that ran up against the borders created by the other empires. Their industry, in effect, gave them the power through banks and monopolies to choke off production in a large part of the world, forcing through a renegotiation of production and distribution contracts in their favor.

The WSWS, in describing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, wrote the following:

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the hubris of the Bush administration knew no bounds. Hurling insults and threats against whomever dared question the right of the United States to dictate to the world, Bush and his associates promised to teach Iraq and everyone else a lesson they would never forget. But it has not turned out as the administration expected. In the era of the Vietnam War, nearly four decades ago, it required several years before the gross fallacies of the political and military strategy upon which the American intervention was based became clear. In this war, the bankruptcy of the entire project has been exposed within one week.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/20/dnre-m20.html

Now they are quoting a Fellow of a “Center” funded by the US State Department in Kiev as if they have all the facts. “Russia’s war against Ukraine will end with the break-up of the Russian Federation. It will be replaced by small, demilitarized and powerless republics with neutrality written into their constitutions.” This represents a complete abandonment of the Marxist principles that the SEP used to stand for. They have substituted the hubris of the Pentagon propagandist for the calm reflection of a Marxist analyst, losing any objectivity and completely giving in to the fascist “Zeitgeist” of American imperialism.

Their claims that Russia can have “neutral” republics completely ignores the underlying economic structure, which Marxists place first. Russian demilitarized republics would still have China, Turkey, Iran, and Hungary, as well as Western Europe, and furthermore various competing American corporations all forcing these republics to choose their own side in the conflict. A republic would not last very long, since contracts and treaties would come before the rights of the people to choose. The dominance of one or another group within one of these would sooner or later conquer the rest, and this is especially true since the infrastructure passed on for many generations, the trade routes, etc. would all function most efficiently under a single authority. That single authority would be most representative of imperialism, rather than its greatest enemy. In fact, this reunified whole in theory closely resembles the Putin regime, a great servant of imperialism that destroys the Ukraine and cuts off energy to Europe so as to raise the profits of the large energy giants and big banks, while denying food to the working class, cheapening the value of labor as mere survival becomes the greatest priority for billions of people.

The real aim of NATO encirclement of Russia could not be the breakup of Russia but a move anticipating the inevitable expansion of Russia. By making the expansion difficult for Russia, they can extract profits from Russian energy and mining, as well as manufacturing and heavy industry. They can negotiate, as the Ukraine had done, over transport to markets, entry into markets as Brussels had done, and over the price of the products as China has done. These will slow the expansion of Russia, but as a capitalist country, Russia has no option but to expand.

If the forced breakup of Russia could occur, which seems unlikely since they could resort to nuclear war to defend their borders, then what would stop a breaking up of Europe or the United States for that matter? US corporations have their headquarters in different states throughout the country, each exercising regional power that they would like to turn into a separate national power. US corporations have far more power over the government than Russian corporations, but these corporations siding with separatism even as a negotiating tactic would open markets for them in countries hostile to US expansionism. They could even find partners in countries vying for power with each other within the US alliance. Such separatist negotiating tactics could lead to actual concrete steps towards separatism, as has happened with California, Texas, and New York. Canada has a powerful separatist movement in Quebec. A large American corporation allied with a foreign power could bring separatist plans into fruition. So what does talk about a Russian break up really amount to? It is simply a negotiating tactic for opening Russian markets, removing protections for Russian manufacturing, and reducing the price of Russian exports so as to secure greater profits for failing enterprises in Europe and America. Those failing enterprises could easily turn on the US government itself, dividing it and releasing a large amount of trapped, public or regulated wealth for pure, capitalist exploitation. Is it that hard to imagine a state, with the support of a giant corporation, arguing that they will ban the IRS from obligating its residents to pay federal taxes? The threat of such a law passing may convince the federal government to make concession to that one state, and then many others as the federal system unravels.

Socialist must argue on the contrary, that only a conscious opposition to capitalism as a global economic system can bring to power a world government and global economic planning designed to satisfy the demands of the international working class, the majority of the world’s population. This goal has a far more support than the division of either Russia or the United States. Not only does it have popular support, it also has a real foundation in the economic laws of the increasing socialization and globalization of production. It also provides for the real needs of the international working class, its need to win victories in industrial conflicts for the sake of its survival into future generations, which it can only accomplish through the regulation and expropriation of finance capital by a global authority responsive to their own interests.