Mutual ruin? Or working-class revolution?

This essay is both a review of Ishchenko’s book and a discussion of the implication of the statement Marx and Engels wrote at the start of the Communist Manifesto:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.

Ishchenko’s title Towards the Abyss implies “mutual ruin” in the context of the Russian attacks on Ukraine. But the time span of this book covers two different “mutual ruin” time frames. The first is the collapse of the former Soviet empire, including the Former Soviet Union (FSU) itself. The second is the current crisis of global capitalism and its states, with the war in Ukraine being just one instance of that.

Towards the Abyss is a collection of articles written at various times, from January 2014, when the Maidan protests in Ukraine were at a relatively early stage, through December, 2022, when the full-scale invasion by Russia was less than a year old. It also includes an undated preface, titled “A Wrong Ukrainian,” which was presumably written sometime in 2023 or early 2024. The book thus reflects the author’s changing views through a tumultuous period of history and his increasing distancing from much of the Ukrainian left. As indicated by the book’s title, the author views Ukrainian history since the dissolution of the USSR as having been a journey to the abyss of ruin. He offers no solutions to the current bloodbath, which is disappointing though hardly unique to him. Although I am unwavering in my support for Ukrainian struggles for self-determination (unlike Ishchenko), I also see no path that points to a satisfactory end to the mess other than a massive social movement to transform Russia—and I certainly offer no political route to this desired end.

I will point to one or two high points and to a few places where I think he is abysmally wrong. (I will then turn to the second part of the paper, some ruminations on the “mutual ruin.”)

The Maidan and anti-Maidan movements in 2013 – 2014

Ishchenko usefully points to the internal political conflict that took place in various parts of Ukraine during the Maidan uprising of 2013-2014 and after. There is some tendency on the part of supporters of Ukraine against Russian invasion to downplay this uprising, but it is important. Ishchenko correctly argues that the Maidan uprisings of 2013-2014 were confusing to many people in Ukraine. Various aspects of people’s lives and communities affected their reactions to it. Ischenko discusses at some length the fact that many people in the eastern and southern parts of the country were afraid that the uprising might lead to discrimination against people of relatively recent Russian origin or people who were primarily Russian-speaking. This fear was based on hostility in parts of western Ukraine to the Russian language and a history of (oligarchs’) political parties making an issue of language. These fears, and fears that the Maidan movement was “led by Nazis,” were reinforced by Russian newscasts.

As Ischenko points out, this fear led to a willingness on the part of some people in the Donbas to support efforts to seize local power by anti-Maidan elements, some of whom were local. (Others were Russian nationals with various official and unofficial ties to the Russian government or parties.) His argument accords with what I remember from the time and with my experience during my trip to Odesa in early February, 2014. A good friend who grew up there was herself lukewarm to the Maidan movement and said that many people she knew were not impressed by it. (After Russia seized Crimea, however, she became a strong Ukrainian patriot.) Kudelia’s detailed study of anti-Maidan and pro-Maidan political conflicts in this period in the Donbas, Kharkiv, and Odesa supports Ishkenko’s claim that the anti-Maidan efforts in these areas had a degree of support although not simply working class support; it included some local political and economic elites and received various degrees of leadership and physical support from political groups based in Russia.

It is useful to put this situation in the context of other revolutionary movements—something Ishchenko does not do enough of. Revolutions are complicated processes, and often people in and outside of the country where they take place oppose or support them because of different estimates of where they are headed. This varying support can sometimes lead to violent resistance by groups you might expect to support a revolution in outlying areas, as happened during the French Revolution after 1791 in the Vendée.

The rulers of Ukraine and Russia

Ishchenko usefully discusses the nature of the ruling class in Ukraine and in Russia, and, based on this analysis, the reasons Russia invaded Ukraine. When the Former Soviet Empire, and then the Former Soviet Union itself, fell apart approximately 35 years ago, Russia and Ukraine went through a process that created a sharp economic, health, and social crises. Former members of the ruling bureaucracy, together with leading members of criminal gangs, took possession of factories, mines, and other forms of productive assets and formed a class of kleptocratic capitalists whose first decade of rule saw gigantic rises in poverty and disease. (See Dzurasov, 2014; Friedman & Reid, 2002; Yurchenko, 2018). Ischenko argues that in such kleptocratic oligarchies where the state is dominated by shifting or at least potentially shifting alliances of oligarchs, much of the surplus value comes from the allocation of political favors and contracts by the government; in this economic logic, the owners transfer much of their profits to foreign banks or foreign investments to keep them safe from political expropriation when political alliances change. Ischenko further argues that this economic system leads to slow growth, an impoverished working class (even by the standards of neoliberal capitalism), and an incentive for the rulers of powerful states (Russia) to grab new territories by imperial conquest in order to expand their profits.

On the other hand, this economic explanation is only part of Ishchenko’s analysis of the Russian motivation to attack Ukraine. He correctly sees (although based on a class analysis I critique below) that the rule of these kleptocratic oligarchs is unstable, and relying on the great mass of the people to be passive, apolitical, and disorganized. The Maidan revolution in Ukraine showed this vulnerability (once again) to the people of Russia, and Putin and the rest of the Russian rulers were deeply threatened by it. As I argued at the time, the Russian seizure of Ukraine and fomenting of strife in the Donbas in 2014 were designed to ensure that the Maidan revolt did not turn left (which seemed like a real possibility at the time). It also led the movement to become “patriotic” and thus not to focus on removing the kleptocratic ruling class. This process also made it easier for Russia’s rulers to repress dissent in Russia itself. Then, in the early 2020s, mass popular movements took place in Belarus and Kazakhstan, and more-contained mass unrest took place in Russia–once again raising the spectre of revolution spreading to Russia. After helping the oligarchs of Belarus and Kazakhstan to maintain their power, Russia invaded Ukraine to undercut popular unrest in Russia itself. In addition, although Ishchenko does not make this point, much of the Russian ruling class had become increasingly invested in Great-Russian imperial ideologies.

Misplaced nostalgia

Older Ukrainians and Russians lived through the last years of the USSR, and younger ones grew up with their elders’ stories and analyses of the Soviet years. Most Ukrainians I have known have strong negative feelings and beliefs towards the Communist era. Ishchenko, however, is much more positive and describes himself as a “Soviet Ukrainian,” adding, “Soviet Ukrainians were the product of a social revolution; its degradation destroyed them as a political community” (p. xxviii). He definitely looks back on the Soviet period as one of technological triumphs. (His parents were deeply involved in this development.) When he discusses the history of the USSR during the 1930s (p. xvii), he does so in functionalist terms that describes what happened as a strategic necessity that led to a strong nation state. He makes no effort to look at internal contradictions or class or bureaucratic interest. He makes no mention of mass starvation or of the Holodomor as part of this history, although he had briefly  made note of the Holodomor on p. xix and of the Stalinist Great Terror as part of his family history later in this same paragraph. Politically, this position is crippling: He expresses no sympathy or empathy for those who reject “socialism” due to its equation with the Soviet past, even though any successful socialist movement in Ukraine needs to find ways to adjust to this memory and develop a clearly non-Stalinist concept of workers’ power.

Workers and other classes

Ishchenko analyzes the anti-Maidan movement of 2014 as supported by the workers of Eastern Ukraine. Yet, he seems to have no understanding of, or contact with, workers. Further, when he discusses revolutionary possibilities in Ukraine or Russia, although he seems to yearn for a new Bolshevik Revolution, he never frames this possibility as the product of a revolutionary working class. Workers are also absent from his discussion of how the political capitalist class came into being. His analysis of the crystallization of oligarchic economic power frames this process as “primitive accumulation” by interpreting it as the initial “hoarding of gold” (p. 98). Again, workers are absent, and he does not seem to understand that Marx explicitly argued that amassing wealth was not what he meant by “primitive accumulation.” Marx viewed primitive accumulation as the creation of “free” workers who were free of ties to the soil or other sources of material survival and who were thus available for employers to hire and exploit. In Ukraine, this took place to some extent in Tsarist years, but to a much greater extent during the Holodomor and after, supplemented perhaps by the Second World War devastation. This “freed” many millions to become exploited as workers.

He does have a concept of class conflict in Ukraine and Russia, but again it ignores the working class. He sees the main (non-war) conflict in Ukraine as between oligarchic capital and middle class/intellectual/NGO/transnational capital:

The central class conflict in the post-Soviet world: that between, on the one hand, the professional middle classes allied with transnational capital and, on the other, local political capitalists (colloquially known as ‘oligarchs’) who could only rely on the passive consent of a segment of the working class, mainly in heavy industry and the public sector (p. 3).

He then uses this idea to frame the Maidan movement as based on these middle class elements and thus as incapable of transforming society. His analysis of the instability of rule in Russia and Ukraine rests on describing the governments as Bonapartist and as balancing between these middle class elements and political capitalists.

This analysis fails to notice the overt working-class presence in the Maidan struggles in Krivih Rih and the diffuse participation of millions of workers in other Maidans. It also means that he fails to formulate political strategies based on the working class.

Mutual ruins

The fall of Rome was a major topic of historical interest in Europe throughout Marx’s life and was clearly one of the examples of mutual ruin that he and Engels had in mind. They may also have been thinking of events in some areas of Europe in which serfs and lords got into conflict in the ideological framework of religious “heresies,” only to have outside forces take over their localities in the name of the True Church with considerable bloodshed and worsening of conditions for the agricultural producers. Here, I will discuss the fall of Rome with particular attention to how Kevin Anderson analyzed what Marx wrote near the end of his life. Marx analyzed the impasse facing the western part of the Roman Empire. Slave rebellions broke out in many areas, often with some initial success. Plebians, who were the descendants of former peasants whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the transition of agriculture into slave operations over a wide part of Italy and other locations, were a potential powerful ally of the slaves. They lived to a large extent on “bread and circuses” provided by the ruling classes in an early form of welfare, undoubtedly supplemented to some extent by petty trading, some rudimentary crafts, and involvement in criminal activities. The plebian class was also an important source of soldiers for the army, which held out the possibility of economic advancement and “retirement” as a peasant-holder of conquered lands. When the Empire could no longer conquer and hold new territory, this cut off the supply of new slaves (whose living conditions did not allow for widespread reproductive maintenance of the slave labor force) and also threatened the ability to hold the loyalty of plebians via military service. This failure led first to the split of the Empire into western and eastern portions, with the East able to avoid the “mutual ruin” by basing itself far more on peasant agriculture. In the West, on the other hand, the ruling classes were unable to establish a viable social order but were able to divide the plebians from the slaves (via racism-like advantages and ideological distinctions) and thus prevent the lower classes from reconstituting the society via successful revolution. The form this mutual ruin took was an inability to prevent outsiders from conquering them, destroying the Senatorial ruling class and its slave-based economy and, along with it, the public works and culture that the Europeans of Marx’s time admired.

As discussed above, the Former Soviet Union and its empire found itself in the 1980s at a similar impasse. Its ruling nomenklatura, which has been disparately analyzed as a state capitalist ruling class, a bureaucratic collectivist class, or as a privileged bureaucratic stratum by various forces on the Left, was unable to meet corporate capitalist economic and military competition. Its working class had been unable to replace it and reconstitute society, as most clearly shown by the defeat of the mass, ideologically diverse but dynamic Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s. This incapacity led to the fall of the previous social relationships and their replacement from above by new social relations. As in the case of the Roman Empire, this fall led to different outcomes in different parts of the empire, with corporate neoliberal capital dominant in East Europe and kleptocratic political capital dominant in Ukraine, Russia, and some other countries. Beyond that, China, with its similar forms of social relations in the 1970s, and facing a succession of economic and political crises (most visibly, the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989), was able to set up what became a thriving form of state- and party-led capitalism and thus a reconstitution of social relations without undergoing a period of mutual ruin.

The entire world, unfortunately, faces the prospect of a far deeper “mutual ruin.” Put in other terms, we face a crisis that can optimistically be framed as “socialism or barbarism” or pessimistically (realistically?) as “socialism or extermination.” Capitalism has become universal over the surface of the Earth, and it faces several deep crises. On the one hand, there is an economic crisis that has been evident since 2008 if not before. So far, neither capital nor the working class has been able to resolve this crisis, and its political impacts make solving the other crises more difficult. Secondly, there is a deep crisis of the imperial order posed by the rise of China and other countries as rivals to the hitherto-dominant North American world order and to its sub-imperial countries in Europe, Japan, and Australia. The last such crisis in imperialism brought about the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear war. Finally, capitalism has created a deep and multi-faceted environmental crisis, with climate change its most immediate apparent threat (and pandemics as a possible additional immediate system-threatening catastrophe). This crisis, too, makes the other crises harder to resolve, since it is causing ever-increasing efforts by tens of millions of people per year to move to other countries—and the racialist far right wing has (so far) been able to use this to strengthen the domination of right-wing capitalists over politics.

Globally, capitalist leaders have failed to resolve any of these crises, and the rising power of fascist and semi-fascist politicians is making it less likely that they will do so before ecological collapse or nuclear war creates barbarism or extermination of humanity. Unfortunately, working class movements and movements of the oppressed have been unable to mount adequate responses to these challenges either. Symptoms of these failures include genocidal or potentially-genocidal wars in Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine, a potentially out-of-control conflict between nuclear armed India and Pakistan, the misery and incarceration in what can only be thoughts of as concentration camps of vast numbers of displaced and refugee populations, and worsening economic conditions (including attacks on medical care, public health, education, income support and much else) for working classes throughout the world.

Ishchenko’s book offers a glimpse of how this mutual ruin is playing out in Ukraine. It offers no solutions either to what is happening in Ukraine or to the global crisis. Nor will I attempt to do so here. The pages of left and environmental publications are filled with a wide mix of efforts to describe solutions. However, although Ishchenko does not seem to realize this, the first step in the revolutionary solution to the crises will have to start with seemingly-spontaneous uprisings that destabilize and replace political regimes in ways that set off a spreading series of similar upsets, followed by social revolutions conducted “from below” by workers and members of oppressed groups. The Left can contribute ideas and to some extent organizational support for this process, but particularly in the opening acts, these movements are multi-class and politically diverse as were the Maidan political revolution, the upsurge that unseated multiple presidents in Argentina in a few weeks early in this century, or Polish Solidarity in the early 1980s.

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Featured Image credit: Edgar Degas; modified by Tempest.