Pawel Moscicki on class warfare in Poland and elsewhere

Pawel Moscicki:

Although after the collapse of the USSR it was decreed that class struggle no longer existed and did not describe any reality, it did not end. Only Capital is winning this battle so decisively that the struggle itself is no longer noticeable. The ruthless victory of the ruling classes means that today they have almost unlimited opportunities to exploit not only the working classes in poor and developing countries (which they also did when there was a peculiar truce in the Western core of the system, known as the welfare state), but also at home. Today, we live in a post-socialist era in the sense that, in essence, the Western world is one of the integral domination of financial capital over everything: the economy, politics, culture, not to mention society.

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… in Putin’s Russia, the exercise of power by a narrow “clique” of bureaucrats has led to a reduction in the naturally centrifugal influence of the political capitalist class. Ultimately, the destabilization of the system by the oligarchs of the 1990s was brought to an end by a gesture of subordination to central authority, or rather, the centralization of their interests within the ruling group in the Kremlin.

In this way, the “collective Putin” can pursue long-term vested interests, stabilizing the system through political coercion, skillful management of interest groups, and even the incorporation of some elements of middle-class or working-class aspirations into the political process.

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The war in Ukraine would thus be one manifestation of a much broader class conflict, the essence of which is the clash between the long-term interests of political capitalists (in Russia) and the alliance of the middle classes with international capital (in Ukraine). Of course, this conflict also exists within each of these countries, but today the centers of political power are more or less clearly divided along these lines.

Therefore, the war between Russia and Ukraine is also, in a broader sense, a war between the national bourgeoisie fighting for autonomy in a globalized world and the comprador bourgeoisie profiting and gaining power from subordination to international financial institutions.

And most dramatically, neither group is interested in peace today, because the ongoing conflict best secures their interests. The situation is similar in the West itself, where both the neoconservatives, who are overrepresented in the American bureaucracy, and their protégés in the European Union have a class interest in continuing the war rather than ending it.