There have been three forms of Pink Floyd. The first, with Syd Barrett, was an unshapely collective that perfectly fit the historical moment, the early era of wide-spread use of synthetic drugs. Then, without Barrett but with David Gilmour on board, they became the inventors of a somber, pompous variety of rock music, fancied by progressive filmmakers, aspiring physicists / mathematicians, and educated young bureaucrats. Once they weren’t cool anymore, the band became alternative-commercial: alternative because of their ostensibly non-mainstream cultural aura, and commercial because their records sold very well. Commercial and rich. The latter circumstance predetermined the third form of Pink Floyd’s existence, from the early 1980s to the present day, full of scandals, fighting over money and songwriting credits, and so on. The band may not exist as a collective, but it does as a cloud of discord and endless reunion rumors that make its still-living members all the richer.
But there has not been a strife over politics between them before, not a public one anyway. David Gilmour expressed support for Ukraine and even recorded the song “Hey Hey Rise Up” (based on the Ukrainian march “Chervona Kalyna”) together with Boombox singer Andriy Hlyvnyuk. The song was released under Pink Floyd, not just as a Gilmour solo track, because, as a result of one of the quarrels from many years ago, the band name belongs to Gilmour and two other members of the band. Roger Waters, who composed most of the band’s anthems about the flaws of the world, has performed solo since then, but he has kept the right to sing Pink Floyd’s hits at his concerts, which he does from time to time, for example, by performing live the album The Wall (the one with “We Don’t Need no Education”) in its entirety.
Waters is also very political, one of the staunchest leftists in the pop music industry; his critiques of the world order are extensive; for instance, a radical stance on the Palestinian question coexists in his mind, as it often happens, along with a vague variety of pacifism that proliferated in the early era of synthetic drugs. For a whole year now Waters has been protesting against supplying arms to Ukraine, which Russia is trying to wipe off the map, and even shared his thoughts on the subject at the UN Security Council, apparently at Russia’s request. His speech generated a lot of buzz in spite of lacking coherence in content. In this address Waters backtracked from his previous comments made in an interview to the newspaper Berliner Zeitung. In that interview, he sounded very much like someone from Russian TV, like an Oleg Gazmanov: not an invasion but a “special military operation”; Nazism in Ukraine; Russians in Donbas had to be protected from genocide; Putin didn’t invade Vietnam or Iraq. While he wasn’t indeed responsible for Iraq, the mention of it is typical: it was precisely that fateful crime of George W. Bush’s administration and Tony Blair’s government that created a rhetorical and moral pretext to the crime that’s being currently perpetrated by Putin’s regime. Waters’ interview is worthy of an extended quote:
“I am now more open to listen [to] what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I listen to, he governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government. There are also critical intellectuals in Russia, who have been arguing against American imperialism since the 1950s. And a central phrase has always been: Ukraine is a red line. It must remain a neutral buffer state. […] Isn’t the word origin of “Ukraine” the Russian word for “Borderland”? It was part of Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time.” This isn’t just thoughtless talk: it is an internally logical, prepared-for-use position, constructed a long time ago, that successfully mystifies its true ideological origins and content. Waters considers himself a leftist, progressive, and pacifist, as do those around him, but what is his true place on the current political/ideological spectrum?
Certainly, it is not internationalism, but colonialism. In accordance to this worldview, the planet is divided between two or three great powers, and the rest of the nations, territories and regions can only exist as either parts of the empires, or “neutral buffer zones”. They do not and cannot have any agency.
Certainly, this is typical conservatism and not progressivism at all. What he presents as the “norm” is the order established in the last few centuries, including the 70-odd years between the October Revolution and the collapse of the USSR. Supposedly a “leftist”, Waters sees no difference between the Russian Empire and the USSR. In theory, Waters should like the latter, but not the former. However, it turns out that, in the context of countries beyond the so-called West, the questions of social justice, class struggle, and progress are entirely unimportant. None of that matters unless it affects the state of affairs “here” in a world where “we” are – safely – fighting American (and before that, British?) imperialism. Accordingly, there is no difference between Tsar Nicholas I, Lenin and Putin. They all have ruled the same eternal Russia, which for a few decades was known as the Soviet Union. And “borderline” regions must, in line with this logic, always stay under this eternal Russian control. From this “always” follows the next point.
What we have here is the good old extreme right-wing “geopolitics”, a speculative area that presupposes the existence of “eternal”, ontologically charged entities. Anglophobes say that “England always wants to humiliate or destroy Russia.” Russophobes insist that “Russia has always wanted to conquer this and that”. Central Asia, for geopoliticists, is “always the scene of the Great Game between big Western powers.” “Russia will never let go of Ukraine”, and so on. Substitute “Russia” for “Great Britain” and “Ukraine” for “Ireland”, and evidence from the past hundred years will annihilate the logic behind this reasoning, but that does not seem to bother geopoliticists. The main thing about the “always” is that it rejects historicism by attempting to disavow the diversity of the world, its past, present and future, denying human will the ability to change anything.
Finally, these are the views of a white Westerner who grew up and built a career during the Cold War. It is a pity that Waters has seemingly forgotten how in the Soviet Union, where daring intellectuals bravely criticized American imperialism, colleagues of a careful Putin banned Pink Floyd for a song that included the words “Brezhnev took Afghanistan / Begin took Beirut.” This song (“Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert,” 1983) can help us reconstruct how Western leftist logic unraveled after the end of the Cold War. In the song from 1983, military action occurs on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the occurrences are listed in the same breath as events of the same order: Brezhnev invades Afghanistan, Begin storms Beirut, the Argentine junta seizes the Falklands, Thatcher sends a cruiser to recover the islands. All this is evidence of the dire state of our world, where blood is shed so easily for essentially minuscule reasons. It is a melancholic view that does have certain cultural and even moral validity.
Just nine years later this stance was challenged. The Cold War was over, making the attitude known as “plague on both your houses” obsolete. There was only one enemy left: putative American imperialism and its “subordinates” (plus British imperialism, of course, plus Zionism, etc.). A void formed in place of the second element in the Cold War’s binary mechanism. While the right were quick to fill it with “Islamic terrorism”, the left found themselves in an awkward situation; so, for people like Waters, Putin’s coming to power in Russia and his use of a “multipolar world” rhetoric felt like a relief. In a sense, everything was back to normal; as for the conservative (to put it mildly), nationalist and repressive nature of Putin’s autocracy, it is as unimportant to them as was the the sinister nature of the Soviet repressive apparatus to 1983 Morning Star’s columnists like Jeremy Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn has a much greater knowledge of politics and history than Roger Waters. He has been in politics for fifty years and counting. Corbyn is a radical socialist, a relic of a purely left labourism who somehow managed to survive the Labour party’s takeover by a humanized version of Thatcherism under Tony Blair. Though almost the same age as Waters, Corbyn’s life has been very different: his leftism has developed through years of political work on behalf of working people and the underprivileged. Corbyn knows British life inside and out. Since the beginning of Russia’s aggression, he has repeatedly spoken out against Western military support for Ukraine, called for immediate peace, and even suggested that it was U.S. imperialism that forced Putin’s Russia to resort to extreme measures.
As in the case of Waters, this could be attributed to naivete or even ignorance. Except Corbyn can hardly be naïve after decades spent in one of the dirtiest political systems in the West, and he is certainly not ignorant. So why has this moral paragon of the British Left suddenly become so responsive to the lies of an unprincipled dictator who seems to embody everything Corbyn has fought against all his life? Once again, the answer is to be found in the history of Western leftism, and, in particular, in the history of leftist pacifism after World War II.
Corbyn was actively involved in the movements against the Vietnam and Iraq wars, even more so against the aforementioned Falklands conflict; he participated in mass protests against nuclear weapons and the establishment of American military bases and missiles in Europe. He also advocates for dissolving NATO. Corbyn is a typical old-school Western pacifist, who no reasonable person could disagree with. War is horrible. Nuclear war is fatal for humankind. Disputes must be resolved peacefully. It is impossible to object to pacifism as a moral paradigm, whether it is based on the Bible (e.g. in the case of the Quakers or Leo Tolstoy), or on the belief in a priority of reason over passions (as in Herbert Wells), or on a combination of one of these elements with a reinvented one such as Hinduism (Gandhi) for instance. However, like any radical utopian vision, pacifism can only be reasonable as a horizon of moral and political thought: something we can aspire to but are never able to achieve, a benchmark to which to compare the present state of affairs. The pacifist movement’s important purpose is communicating to the governments that a large part of society is against killing and intimidation as an instrument of foreign policy. Yet a consistently pacifist foreign policy is hardly possible today: it would only lead to even more killing and violence. It always depends on a particular political situation.
Early in World War II, George Orwell described British pacifists as reluctant allies of Hitler. The war caused disarray within the Quaker movement, unable to abandon one of its basic principles. After WW2, the Left essentially lost interest in the issue of pacifism’s practical and moral ambiguity. Instead of the fight against the Absolute Evil it was now a fight between two relative evils; and this war was a “cold” one that needed to be cooled even more. In this sense, leftist pacifists of the Vietnam War era were right: the enormous crime against millions of people had to be put to end; but it wasn’t the fiery-eyed young idealists from Berkley who stopped American napalm attacks, but rather North Vietnamese soldiers armed with Soviet weapons. They did it because they were fighters in a civil war who had to either kill or be killed by the enemy. The communist regime established throughout Vietnam’s territory after 1975 was atrocious. However, it was this atrocious regime that five years after defeating the South, overthrew another even more atrocious regime: the Khmer Rouge in neighboring Kampuchea. The world’s complexity, then and now, is something that pacifism is not willing or able to accept. Reason against passion. Enlightenment against romanticism: an aspect Orwell noted when he wrote of Wells’ pacifism: “On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man” (“Wells, Hitler and the World State”).
By the time this essay was written in August 1941, the two sides of Wells’ binary hopelessly intermixed: Hitler, with his vision of a “world order” and obsession over “hygiene” and “purity” (including racial purity), was fought by people driven by a genuinely romantic motivation to defend their homeland from the enemy. The division became even more problematic in later years: who was on the side of reason and who was the agent of passion during the Cold War? Soviet ideology under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev insisted on being scientific, while Soviet repressive practices were based on romantic, national principles – hence the ethnicity-based deportations and the anti-Semitic campaign. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, democracy and the market economy insisted on their innate rationality and reasonableness, but the very word “innate” raises serious suspicions of romanticism. What is interesting is that in speaking out against American nuclear missiles, the young Corbyn pretended not to be aware of the obvious fact that such a protest was impossible in the USSR. Soviet authorities may have organized rallies against American bombs but those who dared to question, even privately, the necessity of their own missiles were ruthlessly prosecuted.
The end of the Cold War gave old-school pacifism a chance and then immediately took it away. Nothing can be said against the motives of hundreds of thousands, even millions, who protested against the war in Iraq in 2003. Whatever rhetoric Christopher Hitchens used to justify the U.S.-British invasion, whatever monster Saddam Hussein was, it was as clear then as it is clear now that political swindling and profound corruption produced a disaster of horrific proportions that continues to this day in modified form. 2003 was a convergence point of old-fashioned leftist pacifism with new movements like anti-globalism. Common ground, however, was found not in the rejection of imperialism, aggression and injustice in general, but only in the injustice brought on by the US. And it was only downhill from there. Twenty years later, it isn’t the defenders of Ukrainian dignity and independence (romantics, in Orwell’s classification) who are regarded as heroes by many on the left, but Russian nationalists, protofascists and sadistic Kadyrovites torturing homosexuals. Also romantics, in a way. Reason, in this case, is nowhere to be found.
We can say that this picture is part of the overall canvas titled “The End of the Western Enlightenment”. One might also refer to the famous work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and note that many of the “romantic” atrocities were embedded in Enlightenment itself. And yet, the question is why, or rather, how did the Western Left get here?
The demise of full-blooded leftism in the West was not brought on by the denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult or the Hungarian events of 1956, but by the collapse of the USSR. When Eric Hobsbaum was asked in one of his last interviews whether he regretted staying in the Communist Party after 1956, his answer was mild but negative, and the rationale he provided, simple and clear. Communism may have made mistakes and even committed crimes, but still it is based on the idea of justice, which makes it better than capitalism.
After 1991, however, it was either necessary to invent an entirely new version of communism (or a “true socialism”), or to develop an action agenda, one that would, instead of simply responding to capitalist narratives, offer its own program, such as environmentalism, feminism, and so on. The Left had lost initiative and a vision for the future; they had nothing to offer to society anymore. They are still effectively working on the ground, defending “workers achievements” made during the Cold War, when the existence of the USSR forced capitalism to become more humane. But local politics, even when scaled to the national level, no longer feel satisfying. It is no coincidence that late capitalism has used right-wing populism to disengage the “working masses” from their vital interests. This is especially unfortunate for the Left, which used to be strong in publicity.
Many Western leftists have tried to fill the void created after the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. The part was assigned to those opposing the arch-enemy, global capitalism embodied by American imperialism. But by focusing their hatred on America and its allies, they fail to see that their own favorites (“communist” China, “sovereign” Russia) are just as much a product of global capitalism as the United States. It is a knee-jerk, hysterical reaction of wanting to simply discard whatever annoys you. But there is no way to just discard capitalism. It presents itself as if it has always existed and always will: a deception, of course, but it is impossible to recognize it as such without leaving emotions aside and relying on a historical way of thinking.
Modern leftist thought is desperately trying to find some hope. But SYRIZA failed in Greece, Corbyn’s Labour was eventually beaten by a landslide, the American Left was very intelligently absorbed by Biden into his presidential campaign; Venezuela’s dictator Maduro remains a sinister, brutal oaf, while Daniel Ortega simply annoys everyone. As for the Left’s recent victories in Chile and Brazil, they hardly pose a serious threat to U.S. imperialism. Such a threat comes from China (undoubtedly) and Russia (unlikely, but let’s say it does). In spite of the “communist” label, Western leftists have a hard time falling in love with the modern China. The Chinese state’s methodically repressive nature is difficult to ignore, while certain things that might appeal to socialists – ambitious programs to fight rural poverty, for example – are being overlooked for trivial reasons: the language barrier, lack of expert information, selective and incidental coverage in Western media. Thus, only Russia – which, unlike China, has managed to successfully export its propaganda – remains in focus of attention.
Lastly, one final point. Examining the history of socialist and communist political thought reveals that leftist theoretical and para-theoretical writings lack the conceptualization of a “communist (or socialist) foreign policy”. Leftist theory has been brilliant in its critique of capitalism as a way of organizing society, the state, and people’s minds. We can find truly revolutionary ideas about new types of government in the writings of communist theorists, but there is hardly anything on socialist or communist foreign policy or a system of international relations.
It might seem odd, but there is an explanation. In practical terms, the best foreign policy to accompany a socialist domestic policy is when no one interferes. Which is why socialism exists in a part of the world where foreign policy does not play a fundamentally important role – in Nordic countries or in Germany and Austria, where it is protected by evil American imperialism. Opportunist foreign policy based on the principle of reacting to specific situations and trends, acting reasonably and safely and pursuing only modest goals works best for this kind of socialism. There is no theory to speak of here.
Communist theorists are uninterested in foreign policy: after the world revolution wins, states will die out and with them the function of conducting international affairs. The benchmarks are very clear. Communist theorists who became practitioners, like Lenin after 1917, were also entirely pragmatic in their foreign relations. Some eventually came up with the concept of “socialism in one country”. As for Western leftist theory, especially critical theory, it has mostly been just that – critical, not as much concerned with practical questions.
That being said, communist and socialist luminaries did have some ideas about international politics and even some preferences. But how did these ideas align with their theories? For instance, in Marx’s and Engels’ writings on the Crimean War and European international politics in general, there is one bad guy, Russia, and a few nice guys, from Britain and France to the Austrian and even the Ottoman Empires (!).
The reason was simple. Marx and Engels were communist democrats. They believed in human progress. On the scale of progress, France under the crook Louis Napoleon was ahead of brutal Nicholas I’s Russia. The Left in the mid 19th century advocated progress that would inevitably lead to the establishment of a just society. The pace of this movement was the subject of some very heated arguments, but its direction seemed doubtless. Thus, they heavily favored the French or the British Empire over Russia.
Today, leftists tend to think of progress solely as technological progress, which destroys nature. Thus, it’s bad. Democracy is hopelessly corrupted by right-wing populism (while left-wing populism isn’t strong enough to take hold). As a result, Putin’s Russia, a stronghold of sinister aggressive traditionalism, has become the last hope: perhaps it could crush the American Empire of Evil after all? And then history will supposedly reset – and something new will begin. Something that words can never express. “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
This publication was supported by Сhto delat e.V.
