On the Wagner (Putin’s Azov) mutiny:
causes and consequences
Thankfully we are not kremlinologists, the most dumb and unfortunate category of “experts” ever, which boasts an unsurpassed record of wrong predictions. We are not forced, therefore, to interpret the occult (which, notoriously, exists only in Russia; here “with us”, however, the wieldings of power are always in the light of the sun…). We use in these notes only the somewhat certain elements to try to understand the causes of the Russian events of these days and their consequences on the ongoing war between NATO and Russia on the skin of Ukrainian and Russian workers.
It was a mutiny, not a coup, nor the beginning of a civil war
1. First of all: it was not a coup, nor the beginning of a civil war – to deny the latter thing is the complete extraneousness of the population to the events. In and around the western chancelleries there was a fervent rooting for this to be the case. Even usually cautious commentators such as L. Caracciolo [the editor of the Italian geopolitical journal “Limes”] ran rampant to talk about a “coup” that “will change everything”, with the start of a possible process of civil war that could even lead to the “disintegration of the Russian Federation”. While Zafesova, a true hyena of anti-Russian belligerent propaganda [a journalist of Russian origin of the daily newspaper “La Stampa”, owned by the Stellantis group], has launched herself so recklessly after her wishes that she has come to define the entire construction of power that culminates in Putin as a “paper village”. For NATO officer M. Molinari, occasionally director of Repubblica [the most diffused daily newspaper owned by the Stellantis group], we are at the beginning of the end of Putin’s regime. Boom! It was certainly something relevant, but much more modest: a mutiny of the most organized and influential of Russia’s private military companies (there are about twenty of them today), which has so far played a prominent part in the war in Ukraine.
The reasons for the mutiny
2. What caused the mutiny? According to Putin to “personal interests and immeasurable ambitions that have led to the betrayal of the country”. According to Prigozhin to the fact that “they were going to dismantle the CMP Wagner”, to give it “physical and intentional destruction”. Half truths, half lies. There is something truly immeasurable in between: it is the economic interests at stake in this clash of power. That is, the non-military supplies to the army, of which the Prigozhin conglomerate has been the record holder for years – Putin himself said that Prigozhin’s “Concord Company” received 80 billion rubles (854 million euros) from the state between May 2022 and May 2023 for the delivery of food to the Russian armed forces; the military supplies to Wagner and the sumptuous financial “prizes” assigned by the state; the role in the management of the immense mineral wealth of the Donbass: Wagner is specialized in this latest lucrative activity in Syria, and then in Libya, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, dealing with oil, diamonds, gold, precious wood and other such humanitarian little things.
Fresh from the “victory” in the horrid carnage of Bachmut/Artemovsk, where he claims to have lost 25,000 militiamen, Prigozhin has shown that he wants to cash in by claiming to have his say on Russia’s military leaders, and asking for the replacement of those he branded irreverently like the “two pigs” – Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gerasimov. However, he was faced with the government and state decision of having to submit his company from 1 July, like the other PMCs (including the Chechen special force Akhmat commanded by Kadirov), to a binding contract with clauses established by its opponents. Thus, he saw suddenly vanish the dream of conquering for his trusted men the military summit that decides on a military budget that has grown, in a quarter of a century, by more than 800%, from 9.3 billion dollars in 2000 to $84 billion for 2023 (40% more than expected in 2021). A budget that is small when compared to the Pentagon’s ten times higher, but for Russia it is of the utmost importance, and is expected to increase further in the years to come, especially if – everything suggests it – the war in Ukraine does not end soon, and will trigger others. The founder and undisputed head of Wagner, that is a twin (in large) of the Azov battalion/regiment inserted in the military machine of Kiev, the “Three-Star Hero of Russia and the Donetsk Republic”, who savored other well-paying “medals”, made up of mountains upon mountains of rubles, dollars , euro, was forced to play the desperation card: mutiny. And it has created a certain turmoil, since taking control of Rostov, the directing center of military operations in Ukraine without encountering any resistance, and arriving only 200 km from Moscow, not without having first shot down several helicopters and planes, is not something to little. So much so that his old sponsor Putin, who remained silent (accomplice?) in the face of his other previous verbal provocations, was forced to call him a traitor to his country to be punished, albeit without ever naming him (interesting, isn’t it?).
Only a temporary compromise
3. It is very difficult to say whether or not this extreme gamble, even for an illegal immigrant like him, has produced a stable compromise, and whether this compromise is more favorable to the group around Putin or instead to that of Prigozhin. We’ll see. Strologing about it today is a fatuous exercise, since there is too much unverifiable news circulating. The only two relatively certain elements, for now, are that Wagner’s role in Africa will not be affected as an arm of Moscow’s foreign policy, a sort of Muscovite India Company of a purely colonial stamp (Lavrov’s word) and that the militiamen of Wagner who refuse to be absorbed into the army will be allowed to move freely in Belarus (Putin’s word). Swearing by these two reassurances would be a pointless gamble. Far more useful, for those of us who fight against the war from class and internationalist positions, is to reason around the arguments brought forward by Prigozhin and Putin’s response, as well as the foreseeable consequences on the war of the events of recent days.
The head of Wagner dubbed the march towards Moscow as the “march of justice” aimed at the incapable and corrupt military leaders of Russia, whose children, like the children of the rich, “wipe their nails on the beach”, while the young “sons of the people” and his brave militiamen leave their lives on the battlefield for the “homeland”. He didn’t limit himself to this. He also invoked his positive models: “You have to live a few years on the model of North Korea … you have to shoot two hundred people, like Stalin did”, who certainly “would not have allowed” such laxity and corruption – here the jab is clear , is addressed to Putin who by now methodically recalls the glories and methods of the “Great Patriotic War” to legitimize the ongoing war. In short, the skilful Prigozhin has been able to strike sensitive chords with families, mostly proletarians, who have lost their children forever or have seen their children return disfigured, resorting to a social-nationalist rhetoric also fielded by the Kremlin.
In turn, calling him a traitor to his country, Putin wanted to refer to 1917, with an implicit, but very clear for those who want to understand, reference to Lenin and the Bolsheviks who, according to him, would have betrayed (tsarist) Russia which was on the verge of winning the war, backstabbing her. In short, the furious battle for power between ultra-bourgeois interest groups which has been taking place in Russia in recent days for the immeasurable swag of war expenses and profits, and which still appears to be taking place, was waged by both sides with arguments nationalists or social-nationalists with an eye attentive to the mass of Russian workers, who are already paying for the war and the wars to come and will have to pay the immeasurable cost. All clashing interest groups need the support, or at least benevolent passivity, of the working class.
NATO will try to take advantage of this, pushing to escalate the war
4. It is normal for NATO and Zelensky’s increasingly Banderist gang to take advantage of it: both on the propaganda level, in a big way, and on that of military operations, although on this second level with enormous effort. Despite the always high-sounding and false warmongering rhetoric, the mood in Kiev and Washington has never been so depressed regarding the Ukrainian “offensive” which has so far proceeded at a snail’s pace and with once-admittedly large losses also from Kiev. Overall, however, the acute contradictions in the Russian ruling elite that the insubordination of Prigozhin and part of Wagner has highlighted encourages NATO warmongers to relaunch war operations. And since the Ukrainian ground troops are less and less motivated to fight after the carnage of this year and a half, the Anglo-Polish option and that of the most extremist wing of the Biden administration is making its way: to strike Russian territory by any means , Crimea, etc., and to bring NATO troops into the field in an ever more direct way in the form, for now, of large contingents of volunteers. The only sure thing is that the Russian turmoil of the last few days (whether or not they were encouraged by NATO, it’s secondary; in any case it was a matter of a big objective aid to NATO) make the search for a negotiated solution even more unlikely. The war in Ukraine seems destined to turn cruel. Those within the EU and NATO who are pushing to open a second front with Russia in Kosovo so as to accentuate its attrition have certainly won points. Moreover, not taking advantage of Russia’s obvious difficulties would be contrary to the logic of imperialist war.
In turn, Russia will be pushed to do everything to mask its difficulties and, in any case, to prevent them from becoming magnified – Russia’s ruling class well remembers the revolutionary results of the 1905 war defeats against Japan, and of 1917 against Germany. It is no coincidence that in recent weeks the use of tactical nuclear power in Europe has been advanced publicly by some influential advisers (or ex-advisers?) of the Moscow government such as Sergei Karaganov and Dmitri Trenin who have presented it as a necessary means “to break the will of the West to support Kiev and force it to withdraw strategically”. On the opposite front, those who are undertaking to supply Kiev with ever more powerful means of attack are doing nothing but pushing in this same direction, with the intention of doing everything possible to provoke Moscow to react with extreme decisions. We have said it many times: neither side can afford to lose this war. All the more now. Workers of Ukraine and Russia, workers of all countries of the world, should bear this in mind.
The war is wearing both Russia and Ukraine and the NATO front – the role of private military companies
5. The war in Ukraine is wearing down the two camps, both the one that is “winning” on the field for now (Russia), and the one that has lost positions so far. The human cost – dead, wounded in body and mind, refugees – however carefully it is hidden from us, is certainly high. The material cost is very high, given that every military supply, at any latitude and longitude, from the minimum to the maximum, is a source of super-profits from monopoly and/or corruption. Furthermore, the EU has even admitted that it has difficulties in finding the raw materials necessary for the huge military supplies to Ukraine. Militarism eats away at the social fabric, and also at the hard-won social rights of the working class. Social polarization is accentuated to the extent that contemporary warfare is an insatiable water pump, and the military-industrial complex is the most untouchable of capital’s sanctuaries, especially in times of war. The rapid emergence of private military companies in recent decades further accentuates the costs of war, and gives an even more anarchic and brutal character to the entire process of warfare and the militarization of social relations.
Facts about Russia? Nope! Once again, the United States is the vanguard of this course of sucking, unbridled and devastating imperialist militarism. Do the names of Hulliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel, Intercon, American Security Group, Wackenhut, Fluor, C3 Defense, Pathfinder Security Services and dozens more companies mean anything to you? In thirty years, 3,601 contracts have been concluded between the gringo Department of Defense and these death-billing companies to the combined value of $300 billion (declared). And then to follow the United Kingdom (it is one of the few sectors in which this rotting kingdom still holds), South Africa, Israel and Italy, always a little behind, never absent in this kind of rankings. Russia is in the deck, China as well. And their percentages of “ground recovery” are remarkable, although they start from behind, especially China, since Russia is much better equipped.
The growing weight of private military companies – not only in the war in Ukraine – is due to a complex of factors: the salaries they ensure (Gazprom’s security company, headed by Redut, pays over 7,000 euros a month, Wagner around 5,000 in Europe, about half in Africa); the strong ideological motivation, in the case of Azov a hyper-nationalism with strong Nazi references, in the case of Wagner a hyper-nationalism mixed with fasci-Nazi references (her motto “Blood, honor, country” needs no explanation); the possibility that they, like the Foreign Legion of the past, offer people on the margins of social life or who see such a risk looming over them, as well as authentic born to kill depraved (this is the title of a Yankee magazine at the time of Vietnam), to find a “reason for living”; and finally, certainly not least, the growing difficulty in fully motivating non-professional, or not strictly professional, troops. We do not believe that Prigozhin is lying when he says: “the divisions of the Ministry of Defense, or rather the recruits who were sent to stop our path, stepped aside”; nor when he claims that the results of the Russian regular army have been inferior in the field to those of his Wagner. As for the Ukrainian troops, will there be a reason for the war cred won by the Azov battalion over the regular troops, or not?
The social and political effects of growing global disorder
6. The growing difficulty even for the ruling classes of two countries officially at war like Ukraine and Russia to thoroughly motivate their non-professional, or not strictly professional, troops we have just mentioned, and the relative deafness of the mass of workers to warmongering bass drum (outside of Ukraine and Russia), are two elements to leverage. More generally, it is the growing global disorder that sees – even within the borders of Europe – an intensification of clashes between interest groups and nation states that can throw more fuel on the fire of a new recession always on the verge of breaking out .
The first objective reflections of this overall process, which sees the needs of inter-capitalist war and the preparation of war impose themselves on all other social needs, have materialized in recent months in Europe in various social and trade union mobilizations, the trait of which d’union is the workers’ opposition to the austerity policies and the high cost of living brought about by the war economy. Unfortunately the mass of strikers and demonstrators who crowded the squares in France, Great Britain, Greece and Germany has not yet introjected the need for a clear and explicit opposition to the war, also (but not only) due to the opportunist role, and more often than not openly “chauvinistic” in the anti-Russian sense, of the trade union and majority political leaderships. This “gap” should spur the most genuine class political and trade union forces to intensify their propaganda and agitation work against war and militarism, and to make every possible effort to coordinate on an international scale.
The facts confirm more and more every day how the new “multipolar” arrangement of imperialist domination which is the presupposition of the tendency to war, determines in the proletarian and workers’ camp (the only camp that we hold dear as internationalists) a fault line clear and clear, between those who intend to enlist with one of the imperialist camps at war, and those who are against this war in Ukraine and against all wars of capital, without ifs, ands or buts. In the space of a few months, this fault line has torn apart, if not pulverized, what remains of the “old families” of the twentieth-century labor movement (Trotskyism, Stalinism, workerism, etc.), as a whole degraded towards varieties of reformism, dividing them within them in hostile and irreconcilable camps. A dynamic not so different (albeit in sixteenth or one hundred and sixteenth place) from the one that occurred on the eve of the First World War, when a large part of the workers’ parties and trade unions passed bag and baggage into the “interventionist” camp, while only a minority irreducible to reformism was able to take up the challenge of moving to the “International of revolutionary action”. Perhaps today’s will be even more restricted, since the reformism of today’s reformists is even more inextricably linked to the fate of “their own” capitalism, and of capitalism in general. As the story of this war also proves, the rebirth of the international revolutionary proletarian movement will be a real rebirth – and certainly not a reorganization.
Fighting “sectarianism” in the name of the interests of the class as a whole, above all of its autonomy from every fraction of the exploiting class, means first of all working on the confrontation and connection between all the authentically communist forces (we emphasize authentically because there are ” communist” anti-communist around the world, and quite a lot!! How to call a Zuganov? Or, going down a lot, a Rizzo? [Marco Rizzo is the honorary president of the so-called Italian Communist Party]), revolutionary, anti-capitalist, who oppose war and the governments of war, starting from that of “your own home”.
“Uniting forces against their war”: the mandate of the Milan Assembly of 11 June
7. The strong tensions in Russia, the contradictions that – below the surface – rage in the Western camp, can only be used to our advantage if we do not remain in passive expectation of a mythical “collapse”, but do everything possible to “ join forces against their war” – the watchword of the assembly of 11 June in Milan, organized by Internationalist Revolutionary Tendency, SI Cobas, Political Laboratory Iskra, Communist Front, Front of the Communist Youth [Tendenza internazionalista rivoluzionaria, SI Cobas, Laboratorio politico Iskra, Fronte comunista, Fronte della gioventù comunista]. From that assembly came indications of analysis and struggle that we intend to keep very firm. We call them on the fly.
Italy has been at war since the first day. And our defeatist action against war, wars, of capital must start right from here: from the denunciation and fight against the Meloni government, against “our” capitalist class, founder and active part of the imperialist alliances (NATO and EU) , albeit with a lower rank than that of the bosses from across the Atlantic and Europe, but certainly not as a colony – as certain braying swollen with sinister nationalism would like. To get in the way of the inclined plane of capital, of the general tendency towards a devastating imperialist confrontation (which is a concrete possibility), we must organize ourselves against the peace of capital, and reject without ifs and buts the sirens of an impossible “multipolar” capitalism fair, peaceful, prosperous for all” sponsored by China and the ascendant capitalist countries.
Even if the alarm has not yet been adequately heard by the proletarians, nevertheless the workers experience the pangs of the high cost of living, authoritarianism, the increase in deaths at work, the cut in the RdC, the military intrusiveness in schools and in the most various spheres of social life, although without yet linking it to the trend towards war on a global scale. Hence the commitment, which has marked the work of the assembly from beginning to end, to project ourselves towards the great mass of male and female workers and to dialogue with everything that in any case moves, albeit weakly, in the direction of a action to contrast the war plans of the capitalists, always and in any case anti-proletarian.
At that meeting a threefold commitment was made which must now be honored (and which we intend to carry out in the greatest possible international and internationalist connection):
1) give life to a class mobilization campaign, anti-capitalist, internationalist against militarism and the war economy, which provides for the organization of a national mobilization in front of the Ghedi base, in its dual capacity as the historic headquarters of the air force Italian and NATO military;
2) open a constructive confrontation with all the realities that intend to place themselves on the ground of the open struggle following the war in Ukraine and the arms race, starting with the Coltano No Base Network, to plan together common initiatives that strengthen the drive towards a joint mobilization in the autumn;
3) participate actively in the initiatives already underway to build a general strike of class and combative trade unionism in the coming months, and to make the no to the war of capital live within all possible moments of trade union and social conflicts, to the war economy, to the discipline of war, providing for specific forms of struggle suitable for the purpose.
There is no shortage of work.
Milan, June 11, 2023