The current class war is not what you think it is
Paweł Mościcki is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the author of numerous books and a blog: pawelmoscicki.net as well as substack pawelmoscicki.substack.com
Cross-posted from Pawel’s Substack
There’s class war, all right, but it’s my class,
the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Warren Buffett
1.
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.
2.
This does not mean, however, that this class is completely united and that there are no significant cracks within it. Since it controls a large part of political, social, and economic processes, cracks within it fundamentally affect the condition of everyone else. It is a kind of butterfly effect 2.0: a minor reshuffle in the “power group” can lead to serious fluctuations at the bottom. Today, once again, “one is divided into two,” as Mao wrote, although this phrase now only describes fluctuations within the ruling classes. The only revolution that awaits us in the near future is a cultural revolution within these classes. A change of personnel at the top, which will confirm and radicalize—rather than reverse—the murderous tendency of the system in which we live.
3.
How is the contemporary bourgeoisie divided? Volodymyr Ishchenko’s reflections during his speech at the War, Peace and the World Order conference, which took place in Florence in September this year, are inspiring in this regard. Referring to the war in Ukraine, he proposes a perspective that rejects “methodological nationalism” in favor of a more global, systemic perspective centered on the issue of class conflict. In his view, it is impossible to understand this war without understanding the class dynamics characteristic of the post-Soviet space.
Nor can it be understood without understanding how it was influenced by the process of gradual capture of the region by Western capital and Western political institutions.
In Eastern Europe—Poland being a perfect example—the political system has been almost completely reorganized under the dictates of international corporations, installing a whole generation of politicians and capitalists dependent on the opportunities offered by global capital structures.
In countries such as Ukraine and Russia, this process has encountered certain obstacles, leading to the emergence of a class that Ishchenko calls “political capitalists.” This is the part of the bourgeoisie that has linked its class interests to the privileges resulting from close ties with the ruling elite.
Phenomena typical of this area, such as corruption, appropriation of national assets, and business-political connections, have allowed the entire capitalist class to grow in strength thanks to insider rents, i.e., profits collected through participation in political power structures.
Interestingly, Ishchenko points out that 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.
At the other end of this new class struggle, however, are those capitalists who see their interests in deeper integration not with the local power system, but with the structures of international capital. This was the behavior of some Russian oligarchs who lost their influence (in part or in whole), and it is the behavior of some Ukrainian oligarchs, especially those with better connections to political and financial institutions in the West. The difference between Ukraine and Russia in this context would be that the former did not have a politician capable of centralizing political power to such an extent as to permanently link the interests of the national bourgeoisie with state institutions. Therefore, the Ukrainian oligarchy is more chaotic and divided, and ultimately plays a rather destabilizing role in the system.
However, it is this globalist bourgeoisie (i.e., the national bourgeoisie seeking to integrate with global capital) that has the middle class on its side, which is most favorable to the project of connecting their country to the broader political and economic system of the West. In the post-Soviet space, these are representatives of non-governmental organizations who almost professionally represent the interests of the US and the EU in their country. They are also the ones who have most perfectly symbiotized with the system of values, sensibilities, and aspirations represented by international capital. As Ishchenko writes, this is a “fundamentally comprador” class, which sees the national bourgeoisie and state capitalists as its greatest political, cultural, and economic enemy.
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.
4.
But doesn’t this kind of tension, or rift, also appear within individual Western societies? Let’s look at the US. Weren’t the recent presidential elections a duel between the “globalists” from the ranks of the Democrats, i.e., the classic bourgeoisie of neoliberal globalization, and the Republican base (or rather the MAGA movement), which could be called something like the national bourgeoisie? The latter also operates globally, of course, but sees its interests in close cooperation with the state, which translates into contracts and participation in legislative processes. Above all, however, it believes that the US should focus on building the power of the Republic, rather than wasting energy on maintaining an Empire that, in the form we have known in recent decades, can no longer be saved.
Elon Musk is a perfect example of this new type of oligarch. He does business globally, but it is in political change within the country that he sees an opportunity to protect his interests, which are increasingly struggling to defend themselves in global competition with rapidly growing companies from China. No wonder that during the takeover of Trump’s presidency by the neoconservative blob, this oligarch has also been sidelined, at least for now.
When talking about class conflict in the US, it is worth remembering that the country has long since become an oligarchy, if it has not always been one.2 This means that the interests of the working classes are not represented at all in the legislative practices of official state institutions. So there is no bourgeois party and no workers’ party. Both major parties act solely in the interests of their sponsors, who are recruited entirely (or for the most part) from among the wealthiest capitalists and the interest groups they organize. Each successive election is essentially an auction organized by the ruling class for the best representative of its interests.
It is worth recalling here the argument of Adam Tooze, who pointed out that in a class analysis of recent politics in the United States, three classes should be distinguished. In addition to capitalists and workers, there is also the professional managerial class (PMC), described by Barbara Ehrenreich and Catherine Liu, among others. This is the part of the workforce that, due to its status and more specific interests, acts as a cultural vanguard of the upper classes. This is true even—or especially—when it sees itself reflected in its own social sensitivity and even in various revolutionary and radical mythologies. And because this class has been closely associated with the Democratic Party for years, today right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump can charm the working class by expressing their aversion to the values, sensibilities, and cultural norms of the PMC. However, seduction does not mean representation. This is where the gap between his vague “social” election promises and the ultra-capitalist presidential agenda of the incumbent president comes from.
From this point of view, the PMC is a double edge sword. The Democrats use it to mask the radicalization of capitalism with “politics of care,” and more or less performative rebellion, etc. The Republicans, on the other hand, use it as a scare tactic to point the finger in the wrong direction for a working class degraded by economic exploitation. And also to radicalize capitalism under the guise of “anti-system”. This dynamic shows that the rich have not only won the class struggle by effectively suppressing all impulses of potential revolution, but also that, in order to maintain their rule, they will not hesitate to produce a simulacrum of it.
5.
Can’t a similar battle be seen in Poland? Doesn’t the dispute between Civic Platform (PO) and Law and Justice (PiS), the new and actually eternal “war at the top,” in fact conceal a class conflict? But not in the sense of liberal elites on one side and the working class on the other. This opposition is merely a moment of political information from election committees, not political reality. PO is that part of the comprador elite that legitimizes itself through integration with the ruling class in the EU and the US. Its strategy is also to subordinate the Polish economy more deeply to the interests of international capital. The eternal “catching up with the West” and pedagogy based on complexes, which Boris Buden described so well in his book Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus. The attempt by PiS in 2015-2023 to build “new elites” was, on the other hand, a project aimed at creating a class of political capitalists who would profit from cooperation with the state, and in fact would be created thanks to generous assistance from the national budget and participation in government. Daniel Obajtek would be a good example here.
If, despite such a sharp polarization, these two groups do not differ in terms of their subordination to Atlanticist ideology, it is because they are merely two wings of the comprador elite. The Polish state is so deeply subordinated to external influences that a truly independent national bourgeoisie would have no basis from which to emerge.
In any case, PiS has failed to create one strong enough to resist pressure from Western elites. A perfect example of this is the party’s complete servility towards Trump. From this point of view, the paranoid tracking of “Russian influence” common to both groups is merely a symptom of their repressed subordination to Western influence, so obvious and yet so overwhelming that it is impossible to even talk about it. Revealing it would presuppose an external position towards these influences, and such a position hardly exist in Polish public life.
6.
Several questions arise in connection with this outline of the “class struggle at the top.” First, is the national bourgeoisie capable of acting in today’s conditions as a force striving for the economic and political sovereignty of a peripheral country? Or will it merely be a “patriotic” cover for another group installing itself in the system? The PiS social experiment has so far proven that the more the party played internally for the integration of political and economic power, the more helpless it proved to be in the face of the influence of international capital. Or rather, that it would not be able to truly establish itself without infringing on the privileges of that capital, and it is simply too weak to do so.
Secondly, can a sovereignist turn, i.e., some kind of systemic attempt to correct or reverse the negative effects of globalization, take place without a return to radical nationalism and the political and social catastrophes associated with it? And will this new nationalism, or fascism, ultimately not simply be the guardian of the tightening noose of the coming authoritarian capitalism? This question is inevitable, given that the middle class (Polish PMC) reflects the mentality of compradors, so the sovereignist impulse will arise from questioning their values.
Here, one could see the long-term effects of the Confederation and Confederation of the Polish Crown (Grzegorz Braun’s party), whose political vision is so anti-social that it can only give rise to the armed or populist arm of some Polish Pinochetism.
No wonder that, in order to compete with these trends, Donald Tusk is already behaving as if he were looking back nostalgically at the legacy of the Chilean dictator. As we know, he would not be alone in the Polish political class, even the most “liberal” one.
The third, final, and most dramatic question: why has the left slept through all these changes? Today, it is something that can only be described as AA – the “Avant-garde of Alibi.” Where increasingly ruthless capitalism needs a cultural or moral cloak to cover its naked power, the left proves to be most useful. It provides global capitalism with a service similar to that provided by the Independence March and other patriotic pageants to the national bourgeoisie, which wants to enter the salons with the Polish flag only to enjoy the same privileges that liberals have enjoyed so far.
Today, the left offers the perfect alibi for the system by building a moral and emancipatory aura around European militarism. Here, not only the interests of the working classes, but even those of the national bourgeoisie have disappeared from view in favor of slightly digested propaganda messages from arms industry think tanks, which the left internalizes, glorifies, and broadcasts to the professional managerial class. And the latter, because its identity is based on class hypocrisy, now knows only the language of ostentatious moralizing, having learned it over the years from its native compradors.
Of course, many questions should be asked about the fate of this new class struggle on a global scale. From the point of view of someone interested in real change to the current system, and in fact in preventing its inevitable entry into a phase of “barbarism” (as Rosa Luxemburg would put it), the fundamental question is: are the BRICS countries, which want to break the hegemony of the US, capable of changing the system to a more socialist one, or will they only create a new bourgeois oligarchy (or several local oligarchies) profiting from regional or national systems of exploitation? Will the fact that socialist China is at the head of this alliance guarantee that other countries – such as Russia, India, and Iran – will be drawn toward a more pro-social economy? One might also ask: how should the left play its cards to ensure that a positive scenario comes to pass in this regard? What should it do to ensure that this transformation is accompanied by an attempt to curb the authoritarian tendencies of domestic capitalism?
This question would make sense if such a left existed in Poland (or in the West) at all. Meanwhile, the left supports Wall Street, NATO, Five Eyes, etc., because it believes that these organizations will protect it from the barbarism of the East. It therefore permanently confuses the monstrosity of the system with the propaganda figure of its potential opponents or reformers. Once again, instead of class analysis, we have nationalist animosities, this time disguised as the remnants of revolutionary traditions regurgitated by the mass media. Today, it is war in the name of international capital that is supposed to emancipate, decolonize, civilize, and moralize us. Apparently, since the collapse of social democracy during the First World War, we have made some progress: today, social democracy is no longer collapsing, but is sinking into the mud (or blob) in which it has long since settled.
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