Answers of Michael Karadjis.

 

Following the:

Questions to Michael Karadjis.

Michael Karadjis

Hi Ιωάννη

At the moment I’ll just respond to your first 3 questions – the Syria question is more major, and I also have a great deal more knowledge and conviction in relation to those important questions related to the whole course of the revolution, so I’ll leave that to a special response a little later. 

On the imperialism questions, I hardly claim to be an expert but am happy to offer my opinions:

1. 

Is the new imperialist world multipolar or (potentially) (again) bipolar?

I guess by bipolar you mean, is the Ukraine war pushing together US and European imperialism on one side and Russian and Chinese imperialism on the other side? Or do you simply mean, despite Ukraine, the real major imperialist rivals are only the US and China? Either way, I wouldn’t go so far, but I tend towards the second interpretation. 

I think there is serious inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China; oddly, the Ukraine war comes as something of an aberration. Perhaps that’s not logical – obviously Putin must have been planning this for some time aware that it would put Russia into heightened conflict with the West. But from the US and EU point of view, it has remained business as usual with Russia despite the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, the slaughter in Syria etc. 

Yes there were mild sanctions after Crimea, but so mild that no-one noticed; not only was Russia the major supplier of oil and gas to Europe, but nearly all European powers sold weapons to Russia; the US was somewhat more hawkish, but still for the most part it was business as usual, with a great deal of direct cooperation in Syria in particular. If the US was engaged in a “war drive against Russia” as “anti-imperialists” claim, it is funny that there was zero build-up in Eastern Europe right up until the Russian invasion. The US rivalry with Russia was, kin my view, more about US rivalry with the much more economically powerful (compared to Russia) EU; the US, since the 1990s, has feared a Eurasia-wide EU-Russia economic-military convergence that would freeze out the US and give more teeth to an economically powerful Europe. But as long as the S can keep this at bay (which Putin has just done for the US!), China remains the key US rival, not the EU nor Russia.

Nevertheless, Putin has forced a new West-Russia rivalry onto both the US and the EU, so we can hardly deny that at this moment there is a serious clash between US-EU and Russia!

But has the EU become completely subservient to the US? And has China lined up completely with Russia? I would say no to both. China has not voted for Russia in any UN resolution, and is not helping Russia other than by buying its oil, something China would buy from anyone. There is still underlying rivalry between China and Russia, eg, China’s ‘Belt and Road’ across southern Asia to Europe competes with the Russian-EU connection to some extent, and Putin has just boosted the ‘China road’. Meanwhile, China is happy to see the US get bogged down in Europe over Ukraine rather than spend too much energy in east Asia and the Pacific. And while NATO has been boosted and US hegemony over Europe seems stronger than at any time for 30 years, the overtures of France, Germany and Italy to Putin reveal a different underlying view and interests. Yes Germany used the crisis to double its defence budget and announce a ‘return of Germany’, but since ahs sent very little to Ukraine; an increased German military actually adds to the spectre more long term of a more independent Europe.

So my view is it is somewhat mixed, but with one major rivalry (US v China).

 

2. 

Is the territorial-centric aspect of the new "Eastern" imperialism (as its reactionary aspect) a complementary or an essential element of it?

By “Eastern” I assume you mean Russian? Because China for example has not annexed anywhere (well, except for the islands in the South China Sea formerly belonging to Vietnam, over several decades, but small islands that no-one in the world notices are hardly similar to a massive country like Ukraine). Meanwhile, China’s economic imperialism, without territorial conquest, now takes place on a massive global scale.

I guess for Russia it is a bit of both – ‘complementary’ in the sense that Russia does already engage in economic imperialism, especially in parts of the Mideast and Africa so it is not purely ‘territorial-centric’, but ‘essential’ in as much as Russia’s economic reach is so limited compared to the US, Europe or China. 

I think an imperialist superpower like Russia refuses to see itself as weaker, or as ‘hemmed in’ geographically by Europe on one side and China on the other; 

I believe domination of the Black Sea both for its resources and as a strategic waterway was seen as virtually do-or-die for Russian imperialism’s unrealistic aims of equality with other major imperialisms. It is arguably at odds with a more rational capitalist integration of Russia into Europe as part of ‘Eurasia’, but one which would not be dominated by the world’s new ‘Peter the Great’. 

I think we’re partly dealing with the subjective factor here alongside Russia’s underlying economic weakness.

Russia has this in common with certain other small-scale imperialist powers, above all Israel.

 

3. 

The necessary alliance with the "enemy of the enemy" is a cause of the alienation of the sectarian anti-imperialists of the West, but does it not also pose a danger to the leftists of the East "from the other way around"? Beyond wishful thinking, how and when will the peoples of the whole world meet, when they are thus divided into opposing, necessarily, allied formations?

I’m sure it poses the same problem for leftists in the East in reverse, in seeing Western ‘liberal’ imperialism as preferable, perhaps even tending to fall in behind the absurd rhetoric of ‘democracy versus autocracy’, as if the US does not continue to support bloody dictatorships, tyrannical monarchies and apartheid regimes. The more conscious leftists we are in touch with in Ukraine for instance are very well-aware of this, but it’s hard to be sure how widespread illusions may be. Of course, this is also a danger for leftists in the West who rightly reject the sectarian “anti-imperialist” shilling for Putin and other reactionary regimes on ‘the other side’ but out of disgust go one step too far. We need to be very aware of this danger and to reject it.

Just at this moment tough, the problem is that it is Russia invading and occupying a large country, so there is a need to get that defeated. In 2003, it was the US, in Iraq. The US has just been driven from Afghanistan. Israel continues to occupy Palestine, but this has not been an ‘East-West’ division, with Putin’s excellent relations with Israel and China, which bought the port of Haifa, having massive economic relations with Israel; and in any case this is an ongoing issue. Likewise the Saudi atrocities in Yemen; Saudi Arabia has excellent relations with both Russia and China and has refused to condemn Russia in the UN, and likewise Russia supports the Saudi-backed Yemeni government as the legitimate government (as does China). The acute world focus now is Ukraine, which both gives us western leftists responsibilities to support Ukraine evicting the Russian occupation, while also not letting up on the crimes of western imperialism and its smaller allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

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