Articles Book reviews

Marx Was No Friend of Moscow, by Rasmus Fleischer – 5 March 2026

As early as 1864, Europe’s left was split by a Russian war of aggression against a democratic neighbour — namely Poland. For Karl Marx, the matter was simple: the labour movement must defend the right to self-defence, especially for democracies. Even if that means cooperating with liberals.

In late September, 2,000 socialists gathered in a concert hall in the heart of central London. Left-wing groups from a dozen European countries had come together to form an international alliance.

At first, things went smoothly. Nine of the ten proposed points were passed without notable debate: demands for shorter working hours, better working conditions, fair taxes, and trade union rights.

But on the third day of the congress, the subject turned to foreign policy. Suddenly, the left split into two camps.

One side spoke of defending democracy against aggression from authoritarian states. They pointed above all to Russia, which had not only allied itself with the most reactionary forces in Europe, but had also launched repeated wars of aggression to expand its territory. Russia would not be satisfied, they argued, but would use every conquered country as a springboard to the next. The labour movement must therefore pressure its governments to resist Russian attempts at influence.

The opposing side spoke of preserving peace. In a multipolar world, we must acknowledge that every great power has its sphere of influence, ran a recurring argument. It is the West that is stoking war by refusing to let Russia control a buffer zone. Slogans about democracy in Eastern Europe were dismissed as propaganda, designed to conceal how the Western powers want to advance their positions and seize natural resources. The conclusion was that socialists must declare themselves neutral, demand immediate peace, and halt arms deliveries.

Does the schism sound familiar? Today, the Ukraine question cuts straight through Europe’s left. A few years ago, Nordic and Eastern European left-wing parties formed a new cooperative body, after tensions grew too strong with socialist parties that had refused to support economic aid and arms deliveries to Ukraine.

The debate I have just recounted, however, did not take place last year — but in the autumn of 1864.

The organisation formed in London at that time was called the International Workingmen’s Association, today better known as the First International. The fault lines that would eventually split anarchists and communists were there from the start. This split is usually explained by the anarchists being anti-authoritarian and wishing to abolish the state, in contrast to Karl Marx and his followers. But in the autumn of 1864, the argument was not about abstract visions of the future. Instead, the congress’s defining question was “the foreign policy of the working class,” and it concerned concrete world events.

The year before, the Poles had risen in arms against Russia’s occupation, fighting for an independent and democratic Poland. The two Western powers, Britain and France, expressed sympathy but gave no practical support. The Russian Empire was therefore able to crush the uprising in Poland while simultaneously continuing to expand southward into the Caucasus and Central Asia. Meanwhile, the American Civil War was raging, with the Confederate states fighting to preserve slavery — armed with weapons supplied by Britain and France, themselves busily colonising other continents.

In short, the world order of the 1860s was what we now call “multipolar.” There were several great powers, among which Britain was not only clearly the strongest, but also the only one where socialists could rent a large concert hall to found a world-subverting international. Something comparable would hardly have been possible in Vienna, Berlin, or Paris, and least of all in St. Petersburg.

After a long debate, a vote was held, in which the majority came down in favour of an independent Poland and for “annihilating Russia’s intrusive influence in Europe.”

Behind those formulations stood a political refugee who had lived and worked in London for fifteen years: Karl Marx.

For most of his life, Marx remained committed to activism for a democratic Poland. He warned the labour movement not to underestimate Russia — a counter-revolutionary force in Europe, always ready to crush democratic aspirations. Marx believed that the Russian tsar’s agents were secretly attempting, through infiltration and disinformation, to influence politics in Western Europe. In all of this, Marx saw an unbroken tradition of “oriental despotism” stretching back to 1263, when the Grand Duchy of Moscow was founded — first as a vassal of the Mongol Empire, then as an independent state that copied its former masters’ political culture, oriented toward expansion. From being one of many small Russian principalities, Moscow began to conquer its neighbours and crushed the republic of Novgorod. Since then, “Muscovite Russia” has continued to be driven by an insatiable hunger for expansion, one that will settle for nothing less than world domination — if we are to believe Karl Marx.That Marx was fiercely critical of Russia has long been known. But the parallels between his nineteenth century and our own present emerge with new sharpness in Timm Grassmann’s book Marx gegen Moskau, which so far exists only in German. The book deserves to be translated, for today’s left too can learn something from Marx’s attitude toward the multipolar world and an expansionist Russia — not least from those parts of his life’s work that were airbrushed out by the Soviet Union.

Timm Graßmann, Marx gegen Moskau: Zur Außenpolitik der Arbeiterklasse (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2024), 222 pp.

As one of the editors of the ongoing new edition of Marx and Engels’s collected works (“MEGA 2”), Grassmann is uniquely placed to expose what was swept under the rug in twentieth-century editions, where the selection of texts was designed to confirm the Moscow-certified variant of Marxism-Leninism. Writings with too sharp an edge against Moscow often went unpublished, leaving a lasting imprint on the image of Marx.

Take, for example, Sven-Eric Liedman’s excellent Karl Marx: A Biography, which despite its 800 pages manages to completely ignore its subject’s years-long commitment to a free Poland. During the Polish uprising of 1863, England’s liberals and socialists united in their support, though for different reasons. Unlike the liberals, Marx did not idealise the democratic state, but saw his goal as a communist society without a state. But this did not mean that all states are equally bad under capitalism. Rather than formulating a general theory of “the state,” Marx distinguished, as Grassmann shows, between two kinds of states: the democratic republic and the authoritarian state. Democracy is preferable because it provides space for organising and struggle that is not available under an authoritarian regime or foreign occupation. A free Poland would also weaken the reactionary bastion of Russia and thereby improve the prospects for revolution across the entire continent.

Before long, England’s liberals lost interest in Poland and stopped organising solidarity demonstrations — even as Russia introduced new bans on speaking Polish and began mass-deporting Poles to Siberia. Karl Marx, however, persisted in treating Poland’s liberation as a central issue for the labour movement, organising public meetings in London year after year. Participants drank tea, listened to speeches by Polish exile activists, collected money for the cause, and sang Poland’s national anthem.

Today, similar gatherings are held for Ukraine — and the organisers tend to be either liberals or libertarian leftists. By contrast, solidarity with Ukraine more rarely engages those who call themselves Marxists. To be sure, almost all Marxists were quick to condemn Russia’s invasion in February 2022, even if some of them hasten to add that everything is really NATO’s fault. Many express principled support for Ukrainian independence but prefer to avoid the subject — because they are uncomfortable with the feeling of standing on the same side as the liberals and NATO.

Other Marxists have clear ideas about how much territory Ukraine should cede to Russia — ideas that align with Donald Trump’s so-called peace plan. When Marxist journals publish their special issues on anti-imperialism or decoloniality, the arguments are made with reference to many other parts of the world map, while Eastern Europe remains a blank space most conveniently ignored.

Karl Marx, however, was no Marxist — something he himself pointed out. Timm Grassmann’s book illuminates this by showing how he navigated foreign policy questions without reducing everything to calculated class interest.

“Historical materialism,” as the dogma is called in traditional Marxism, was for Marx no universal explanation, and he returned again and again to the inability of states to understand and act in accordance with their long-term interests — an inability he simultaneously believed Russia had made a speciality of exploiting.

But not even Russia’s endless expansionist policy could be seen as a simple expression of the self-interest of Russia’s ruling class. On the contrary, Marx took great pains to clarify other motives, including ones of a more irrational nature, such as the Russian Orthodox fantasies of Moscow as the “Third Rome.” Similar fever dreams of Russia’s historical mission play a role in today’s Russian war of aggression against Ukraine as well.

This is not in conflict with the fact that the war also concerns natural resources, or that the arms industry stands to make large sums from a prolonged war. Marx always took an interest in economic factors, but he was no historical materialist, if by that one means reducing war to economics.

Toward the end of his life, Karl Marx learned Russian and grew increasingly interested in the social dynamics of Russia. But contrary to the picture sometimes drawn, he did not become more conciliatory toward the Russian state — he continued to argue that Russia’s “lodestar — world domination” was not only unchanging, but a decisive threat to the labour movement in Europe.

Grassmann is careful to distinguish between the companions Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The two were united in their solidarity with Poland and their hostility toward Russia. But Engels tended to think in more military terms and fantasised about a “war to the death”: democracy against despotism, west against east, Europe against Russia. Marx did not reason in such black-and-white terms; he was always careful to highlight authoritarian tendencies in the West, as well as democratic traditions in the East.

Marxists often point out — rightly — that a purely moral critique of capitalism is insufficient. Karl Marx’s greatest contribution was his analysis of capital’s internal contradictions. These lead on one hand to recurring crises and an escalating climate catastrophe, but on the other hand create the conditions for a classless society. The critique of economics is not about who is good and who is evil, but about the harmful incentives created by the pursuit of profit.

But when it came to foreign policy, Marx did not hesitate to moralise. Grassmann shows that Marx fundamentally believed that states should act toward other states in accordance with a “categorical imperative,” in the same way that Immanuel Kant believed people should act toward one another. That is: wars of aggression are wrong, but it is right to help a neighbouring country defend itself against an invasion.

So when France invaded Germany in 1870, Marx supported the Germans’ defensive war — not out of patriotism, but on principle. But then the tide of war turned against France, and as soon as German troops marched into Alsace and Lorraine, Marx switched to supporting France’s defensive war. In these cases, the position was straightforward and required no revealing analyses of material interests. For Marx, a simple moral principle sufficed: you shall not invade your neighbour.

At times, Marx’s position coincided with liberal opinion in Britain. At other times he went against it, as in his support for Irish republicans and other anti-colonial movements. It is not “what the middle class finds expedient” that should guide the working class’s foreign policy, Marx argued in 1865. Accordingly, he saw no problem in temporarily cooperating on specific issues with liberal friends of Poland.

But he did not trust liberals’ fine words, pointing out how they often betrayed their own principles and were happy to do Russia’s bidding when profitable business was on offer. At the same time, he had little patience for the self-styled friends of peace who refused to distinguish between wars of aggression and wars of defence, or between authoritarian and democratic states.

Timm Grassmann is not a Marxist but a Marxologist. His aim is to clarify what Marx actually meant and how his arguments positioned him within his own time — not to present Marx as infallible. Yet when Grassmann recounts the foreign policy fault lines within the First International, he does take a clear position — not primarily for Marx, but against his opponents. The picture that emerges is that it was actually Marx who stood for an anti-authoritarian politics — as opposed to the anarchists.

The anarchists in the First International were not a uniform group. They included the French disciples of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as well as the Russian Mikhail Bakunin and his followers. Both groups opposed an independent Poland, but for entirely different reasons.

Proudhon was not driven by sympathy for Russia, but more by a contrarian reflex. Since liberals in France expressed sympathy for a free Poland, Proudhon took the opposite position. He also championed a mechanical philosophy of history of the kind often mistakenly attributed to Marx. History was a gradual forward movement destined to culminate in a proletarian revolution. The struggle for national self-determination thus belonged, in Proudhon’s view, to an earlier stage — one that his France had already completed through its revolution. Poland, by contrast, had missed the train, been partitioned by the surrounding great powers, and disappeared from the map. World history had entered a new era in which what mattered was the workers’ strictly economic struggle. Proudhon regarded the balance of power among Europe’s empires as a historical necessity and a guarantee of peace, while the struggle for a free Poland risked leading to war.

Bakunin, with his more romantic view of revolution, called instead for uncompromising struggle against the state. Unlike Marx, he made no distinction between authoritarian and democratic states — all were equally contemptible. Rather than thinking in terms of historical stages of development, his analysis rested on the innate character of different peoples. Above all, Bakunin despised the Germans — according to him the state-building “race” par excellence, in contrast to the peaceful Slavs. Everything bad about Russia came from outside: “the Russian state was for him a Mongol, Byzantine, and above all German institution,” Grassmann summarises. He could urge the Poles to rise up, but not in order to restore an independent republic. Such a Poland, in Bakunin’s view, would have been no advance — just another detestable state, at odds with his image of the Slavic folk spirit.

Marx regarded this stance as wishful thinking. Nothing suggested that the great masses of peasants in Eastern Europe would suddenly unite in spontaneous revolt against the state. The revolution Marx sought required the working class to organise itself — but the conditions for organising scarcely existed in a Poland that remained subjugated by the Russian Empire.

Karl Marx struggled against the current within a left-wing movement where many were sceptical of a free Poland. His opponents’ arguments were characterised by “sectarianism, radical posturing, class reductionism, conspiracy thinking, whataboutism,” and an unwillingness to listen to comrades from Eastern Europe, writes Timm Grassmann. He makes no secret of the fact that this simultaneously characterises that part of today’s left which refuses to recognise Ukraine’s right to self-defence.

Some in the nineteenth-century left were drawn toward an “anti-imperialism” that directed itself only against the most powerful of the empires — capitalist Britain — while persuading themselves that its adversary Russia represented an alternative to capitalism. A similar position is taken today by post-Maoists such as Torkil Lauesen, Vijay Prashad, and the venerable left-wing journal Monthly Review. In brief, they envisage China and Russia as a “multipolar bloc” predestined to lead the way to socialism — but only after the United States has been defeated. Even a reactionary dictatorship like Iran is transformed in this analysis into a positive force, while democracy movements — in Iran as well as in Belarus or Georgia — are treated with suspicion and portrayed as directed by the United States.

Torkil Lauesen today takes a clear position in favour of Russia’s victory in Ukraine and expresses his hope that Putin’s regime will retain power — while simultaneously being promoted as an anti-imperialist authority in, among others, Swedish Marxist podcasts such as Komintern and Apans anatomi, as well as in journals like Röda rummet and Parabol. It is above all Parabol and the publishing house Karneval — both of which consider themselves to stand beyond left and right — that have become gathering points for commentators who actively oppose solidarity with Ukraine and show understanding for the Putin regime’s worldview. These include peace researchers such as Ola Tunander and Frida Stranne, who present themselves as politically neutral “realists” when arguing that Ukraine should cede parts of its territory to Russia in exchange for peace.

Allowing such peace researchers to become the left’s guiding stars is the same as refusing to listen to socialist comrades in Ukraine — those who oppose the Zelensky government’s policies, but rally behind the defence against Russia’s invasion, fully aware that a Russian occupation would not permit left-wing forces to organise.

Much recurs from the debates about “the foreign policy of the working class” in the First International. The self-styled Marxists who today turn against a free Ukraine often do so with the same kinds of arguments that were once used against a free Poland — not by Karl Marx, but by his opponents.

Rasmus Fleischer is an economic historian and author.

The Swedish original of this article originally appeared in Flamman. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.

, , , ,
Views: 83
More content from this blog
, , , ,