It is a calamity of the highest order that the working class of the twenty first century lacks a revolutionary international to call its own. Our movement will not function on a purely national basis, and we should support any genuine attempt to build towards an international coordination of revolutionary forces.
None of that has anything to do with the founding forum of “Sovintern – for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century”, which took place over the weekend of 25-26 April in the House of Unions in Moscow. Sovintern is the initiative of the Just Russia party (Spravedlivaya Rossiya, or SR), one of the biggest parties in Russia and, by its own description, “socialist”. In this case, “socialist” means an alliance of different flavours of conservatism: the party came about as a 2006 merger of nationalist conservatives Rodina (“Motherland”), populist right “Party of the Pensioners”, and the “Russian Party of Life”, which described itself as “left nationalist”.
SR was almost explicitly founded as “controlled opposition”, spearheaded by Kremlin tactician Vladislav Surkov. It has 28 seats in the state Duma (out of 450), where it sits and nods through any policy Putin’s party, United Russia, tells it to. In 2021, clearly feeling the balance of forces wasn’t quite nationalist enough, SR merged with the party of far-right novelist and demagogue Zakhar Prilepin, who is now Deputy Chair.
Given the state of play in Russian politics today, it’s little surprise that the founding of any new “socialist international” would have little to do with socialism or internationalism. The congress was addressed in a video message by Putin himself, who welcomed the initiative wholeheartedly.
The forum discussed four topics: “digital partisans” and political messaging in the digital era; the Sovintern platform, titled “socialism, social media, AI”; “the conflict in Donbas as a global focal point”, and “the situation in the period of WWIII and the strengthening of the anti-imperialist and antifascist front”. A heady mixture of technocratic social media strategy and revanchist campism, all with a verbal nod to opposing the greater evil of NATO.
The “anti-imperialism” capable from the forces gathered in that hall would in fact be an exercise in propping up a number of imperialist projects. In this framing, Russia invading its former colony is an “anti-imperialist” victory. It is not “anti-fascism” to be cheerleaders for a state that allowed the Wagner Group to recruit soldiers directly from its prisons. In fact, this entire event was putting a “left” dressing on standard Russian nationalist talking points.
The Forum released six statements https://sovintern.org/en/forum: against the war in Iran (with explicit support for the current Iranian government); against the blockade of Cuba (with explicit support for the current Cuban government); a statement of explicit support for the North Korean government; a statement calling for “compensation” for Africa for colonialism which appears, in practice, to be expressing support to various African nationalist governments and the concept of “multipolarity”; a statement innocuously named as addressing “the root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine, while actually calling for its “denazification and demilitarisation”, i.e. an all-out Russian victory; and a statement calling for the release of Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
All of this points towards a model we’ve seen the Russian government play into many times before: ‘multipolarity’ and ‘anti-imperialist fronts’ are the names given to a geopolitical alliance that is anti-America at the expense of any positive political ideals or actions, and in practice means the justification of political support for regimes like the Iranian theocracy, responsible for killing tens of thousands of political opponents this year alone.
The content of the conference was a foregone conclusion: I could have written you all of the speeches before the weekend began. The interesting questions are: who was there, and why has this been allowed to happen in the first place?
The list of dignitaries is full of plenty of unnoteworthy representatives from neo-Stalinist and nationalist organisations, particularly those of the Balkans, Africa and Latin America. But there were video addresses from much bigger names: Evo Morales, former president of Bolivia, and Fernando Lugo, former president of Paraguay, chief among them.
Also in attendance were the leadership of the American Communist Party, Jackson Hinkle and Haz al-Din’s extremely-online and dangerously right-wing split from the CPUSA, and none other than George Galloway, leader of the so-called Workers Party of Britain.
Outside of an online following that has little to no impact on the real world, the ACP are not a going concern, and unless they grow considerably or start to show real purchase in the American labour movement, are not worthy of attention. Galloway is a different story. His organisation does have some real-world presence, and his political history in the British socialist movement lends him an entirely undeserved credibility, which he uses to build his party, not least by winning four new councillors in addition to the four they already had in the local elections.
It is no new thing that Galloway is a terrible excuse for a socialist, nor that he is explicitly pro-Russia in his international politics. For years, he was a mainstay on the state-run TV channel Russia Today. But there is a risk that some will see his attendance of a conference that calls itself socialist and give him the benefit of the doubt. They shouldn’t.
The Sovintern, much like the SR party itself, is not a question of left-wing parties taking the initiative. Putin is in such tight control of his “opposition” that he gives speeches at their events. So why allow the forum in the first place?
The first reason is optics: Putin could do with some good international PR at the moment. The war in Ukraine has made him public enemy number one, and any attempt to gather international forces, no matter how insignificant they may be in their country of origin, is an attempt to demonstrate popularity.
The second reason is domestic, and has to do with the balance of forces in Russia’s opposition. A clear motivation for SR to found the Sovintern is that it puts them on a level with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the second-largest party in the country and one-time challenger to Putin in the late 90s and early 2000s. Though the KPRF has been nothing but docile, and elections in modern Russia are a foregone conclusion, Putin is happy to allow SR to leech some of the KPRF’s credibility and popularity away from them, leaving both parties comfortably worse off than United Russia.
So a sham conference, being carried out as an exercise in nationalist flag waving and support for Russian imperialism, as well as support for several other nationalist demagogues. Two further questions remain, and this writer can’t answer either of them: why on earth would supposed leftist Galloway attend this circus, and why would any British socialist in their right mind vote for his party if he has?
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