No sooner was the spectacle on, then it was off and the Wagner circus never made it to town
The failed Russian coup of June 24th, reminiscent of a comedy ‘banana republic’, is history repeating itself as farce.
To be fair, it was farcical last time round when a clique of die-hard Soviet alcoholics tried to oust Gorbachev in 1991 to preserve a decaying Russian empire drained by war.
Despite the shallow similarity with the past, this farce was much more high stakes. Choosing between Putin and Wagner’s Prigozhin is like choosing between Stalin and Pol Pot. It was not going to turn out well whatever the result.
Like so many aspects of this war, it is both violence and spectacle with patriotism and deceit masking the ruthless pursuit of power and wealth.
However long Prigozhin has until he falls from a Novichok smeared window, he offered nothing but bloody escalation of a brutal capitalist machine.
This was not a war weary army rebellion but a failed warlord coup against another savage palace oligarch.
But Putin’s victory may prove pyrrhic. Where was his army’s emphatic response? Where were the masses in the streets to protest the outrage? Where were his chosen elite?
While rumour has it that he had left the city haven’t been verified, members of the political elites certainly panicked. Flight radar services pinged dozens of private jets leaving Moscow.
Capitalist barbarism doesn’t come to an end by palace coups, it must be ended by it’s deceived, coerced or deluded victims. The working class who produce the wealth to be butchered in the stealing of it, either side of the front lines.
The masters of capital are well read and know their history and the danger they face from our class. Putin more than most as an old Soviet political apparatchik. No wonder that he lied so desperately in his appeal to national patriotism:
“This is a stab in the back of our country and our people. Such a blow was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War – but victory was stolen from it. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned into the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories.”
Putin misremembers 1917 at his peril. He uses the Nazi defence of the military being stabbed in the back by political intrigue to divert attention that the revolution was exactly the war weary mass of the exploited, in and out of uniform.
The army collapsed when conscripts refused to fight, turning their guns on their generals rather than their own people. Workers and peasants occupied the workplaces and the land creating their own direct forms of self-government to negate the state.
Its ultimate defeat was from the intrigues of the Putins and Prigozhins of the time. masquerading as ‘leaders’ or ‘saviours’ to snatch power from the exhausted masses through bloody counter revolution costing millions of lives.
The chaos we have now is the descendant of the defeat of 1917 when the state again stabbed the workers in the back. The ruling class on both sides know this, and as we have previously written about, both sides are struggling with military discipline and desertion.
The majority of soldiers in the trenches are forced conscripts and the coup will hopefully infect trust and morale at least amongst the Russian forces. Putin will have noted his arse was saved not by their resistance but by another, this time Chechen, warlord.
Whatever else, the morale of ex Wagner soldiers, marched like the Grand Old Duke of York, up the hill only to march down again, should now sink to the level of the rest. Hopefully adding a corrosive cynicism and contempt for their leaderships.
In this lies the key to the end of war. Recognising that our interests are not with our rulers or their generals in whatever uniform, but with each other as the exploited, the working class across frontiers.
Only class war can end this madness and that is what we mean when we say No War but the Class War!
AnarCom Network 