Displaying items by tag: Azerbaijan

The dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Upper Karabakh, between Azerbaijan and the Armenian independentists who control the area has triggered a war that has blown two ceasefires since it began on 27 September.

The current territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the southern Caucasus were part of the tsarist empire and were incorporated into the USSR after the October revolution. The territory of Nagorno-Karabakh maintained a special status within the Soviet federation, as an autonomous territory with an Armenian majority integrated into the territory of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The break-up of the USSR led to a confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan from 1988 onwards, and after its fall a bloody war began which, following the intervention of Russia and imperialism, ended in a precarious ceasefire in 1994. Azerbaijan is an oil and gas extraction power, linked to Turkey by language and history. Armenia is a small mountainous country of just over 3 million inhabitants, whose industrialization advanced with its integration into the USSR and then fell back abruptly with its fall, and receives large remittances from the so-called diaspora, some 10 million Armenians who live outside this republic, after being expelled from eastern Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, through the genocide of over a million people.

The social basis of disorder

What characterizes the present historical period is, on the one hand, a tortuous process of assimilation of the former laboring states to the capitalist system and, on the other hand, the advance of imperialist decomposition that at the same time determines the difficulties to complete this assimilation. This is exacerbated by the disorientation of the US imperialism, which has not had any coherent policy in the region and is rather plunged into its own internal economic and social crisis and electoral dispute. On the other hand, the EU, which was the supra-state structure that was supposed to organize the assimilation of the former workers' states of Eastern Europe, is, on the contrary, immersed in the negotiation of the exit of one of its main partners with Brexit. And it has been paralyzed in its policy for its south-eastern border, because of divided positions on its relationship with Turkey, whose bourgeoisie defined to stop fighting for the entry into the European bloc (which led to a coup attempt in 2016). This division is exposed by the different positions in relation to the Turkish advance in the hydrocarbon prospections in the Eastern Mediterranean, its policy in Cyprus, its interventions in Libya and Syria and finally its position of open support to the Azeri government in the current war in High Karabakh. While the French President, Macron, is trying to lead a policy of more confrontation with the Turkish Erdogan government, with the support of the right-wing Greek government, Merkel and the German government prefer a policy of appeasement. However, it is necessary to say that the obstacles for the assimilation of the former Soviet states are not given by a flaw in the foreign policy, but by the tearing apart of the European imperialist project in its material capitalist bases, especially since the outbreak of the crisis in 2008. Today, we can speak of a new crisis that is a continuation of that, but not a linear one, exacerbated by the pandemic and by the disastrous consequences of the destruction of workers' conquests of the previous decades, which the European imperialist bourgeoisie used under the banner of austerity to try to find a bourgeois way out.

Before this imperialist decomposition and the erratic foreign policy of the metropolitan states, the Turkish bourgeoisie tries to design its own road map as a regional power, what could be called an "operetta empire" with totally semi-colonial bases, not less brutal and murderous. In its turn, the Bonapartism of the Russian proto-bourgeoisie led by Putin must face the contradictions that burst in the borders of its state rule, as it is the case of the crisis in Belarus, the semi-insurrection in Kyrgyzstan and the war we refer to in this note. Here, we find it interesting to take up Leon Trotsky's hypothesis in relation to capitalist restoration, which proposed that the counter-revolutionary leadership that would lead the restoration processes, in its contradiction of not being able to conform in class, would generate, in its relation to the tendential laws of the world economy, a capitalist chaos. In this case, it extends to the periphery of the former USSR, where sectors coming from the state bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie of these countries are pushing for territorial control under the guise of arguments of international law and nationalist ideologies in an attempt to establish new, undoubtedly semi-colonial states, seeking a balance between the different surrounding international forces (both Armenia and Azerbaijan belong to countless post-war international coalitions) in a period of capitalist decline and, therefore, of the decline of the state form of bourgeois domination, the nation state.

The truncated experience of the USSR

In the face of the current war, which already counts dozens of deaths, hundreds of refugees and the bombing of major cities in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, some groups and intellectuals are proposing a return to the "cosmopolitan and internationalist values" of the Soviet state as a solution for achieving peace between peoples. The Marxist basis of the revolutionary program, which led the Bolsheviks to seize power and develop the experience of the USSR as a state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, denies that a program is based on ideologies. Because it is the social being that determines the consciousness and not the other way around. The problem of the national minorities who were trapped in the then called "prison of the peoples", the Tsarist empire, was taken very seriously by Lenin. These oppressed nations were living under conditions of backward economic and social development. The appeal of the communists, materialized in the Congresses of the Third International, was to integrate into a Federation of Socialist Republics in a revolutionary alliance with the Russian proletariat in order to overcome this backwardness through socialist forms of economic and social organization, by compressing the historical stages. The transition from capitalism to socialism under the leadership of the proletariat through its dictatorship, these were the material bases that would allow the democratic reorganization of the peoples within the federation. A socialist future would pose new problems, but it would undoubtedly make it possible to liquidate the fratricidal struggles sown by backwardness and the subsequent needs for territorialization of profit typical of capitalism.

In fact, the experience of the USSR enabled the Caucasian nations to live together and achieve relative industrial development. However, the experience was truncated by the bureaucratic counter-revolution led by Stalin, who established the rule of this caste over the proletariat and national minorities in the USSR, strengthening the state apparatus instead of laying the social foundations for its extinction. The passage of the bureaucracy into the ranks of the open capitalist restoration in the early 1990s liberated all the centrifugal tendencies of capital, leading to wars like the one in the Balkans, and this process will continue to develop for a certain period of time, the duration of which we cannot define a priori, as we cannot find a stable capitalist way out given imperialist decomposition. And neither a progressive way out, given the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This conditionality will be determined, in turn, not by "values and ideals" to the taste of the nostalgic, but by class struggle, by the clash between the proletarian forces of the world revolution and the bourgeois counter-revolution. "To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate, means to abandon such finished social categories as capitalism (and therewith "state capitalism") and also socialism. But besides being completely inadequate in itself, such a definition is capable of producing the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible. [...] Doctrinaires will doubtless not be satisfied with this hypothetical definition. They would like categorical formulae; yes-yes, and no-no. In our analysis, we have above all avoided doing violence to dynamic social formations which have no precedent and have no analogies. The scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action.". (L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed)

We revolutionaries are opposed to the fratricidal war between Armenians and Azeris, which is led by the sectors that want to create small vassal states of imperialism in the region. It is part of the general militarism to which the Bonapartist tendencies around the world in the face of bourgeois decay are leading. We are fighting for a workers' solution, based on a program of expropriation of the expropriators, the defeat of the proto-bourgeoisies that run the republics of the former Soviet Union and for a Socialist Federation of the Caucasus. The Russian working class is called upon to support the Azeri, Armenian and Georgian workers in this task, starting with the paralysis of the arms and military equipment factories and their transport, intended to arm both sides for the benefit of Putin and his acolytes. We also call on the workers of Turkey, the European countries and the USA to labor actions against the intervention of their bourgeois states in the region, which as it was shown in Kosovo, only serves to increase the massacres and hardships of the workers and poor people. Once again, and in an increasingly urgent manner, we call on all the revolutionary currents that defend the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat and fight for the reconstruction of the Fourth International to promote an International Conference.