Up until the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, NATO was organized as a counter-revolutionary bloc to contain the degenerated worker’s states and maintain the authority of US imperialism in Europe as part of the encirclement of the USSR and China with NATO, SEATO and CENTO. This bloc has been augmented by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the AUKUS tying Japan,Taiwan, Australia and the UK to the US encirclement project.
After the restoration of capitalism in Russia, NATO moved eastward embracing the color revolutions as Russia wiggled out from under control of the western vulture capitalists to assert the rule of the oligarchs consolidation of economic and political power. Russia sought to consolidate its sphere of influence despite the loss of the Baltic states. Russia fought back the color revolutions and western influence in the former Soviet States, eventually losing control of Ukraine in 2014.
The trajectory of Russia’s emergence as an imperialist power became evident in 2008 based on the inability of the west to subordinate it as a semi-colony, its military strength and it’s ability to subordinate former Soviet states. The state control of former institutions of the Soviet state gave the new oligarchs the power to resist subordination to western imperialism and chart an independent course and act independently both financially and militarily as a counter-revolutionary force acting to put down the permanent revolution in Syria and most recently Kazakhstan.
The German bourgeoisie had split allegiances, which were reflected both in the NATO 2030 Making A Strong Alliance Even Stronger and the Russian Strategic Goals 2021 documents as their dependence on Russian gas exports have played an important role in its stability. Some in Germany and the west hoped to break Russia from China to join NATO and push the western imperialist bloc eastward while the Russian’s looked at Germany as a vulnerable weak link in the western bloc which could be leveraged to split up NATO.
Trump and the isolationists fed the Putin dream of breaking up the western bloc but the US ruling class put its foot down, displacing Trump with Biden and the hawkish Democrats committed to containing Russia and maintaining Germany in their sphere.
The Putin/Xi meeting on February 4th consolidated the Russia/China imperialist bloc, something that has been obvious for a long time since BRICS, SCO and CSTO built the alliance of the two emergent imperialists power into a rising imperialist block facing off against the declining US/UK/EU imperialist bloc in the ‘Great Game’ for Eurasia. Now they are contending for Africa, Latin America and into Eastern Europe, first with the looking outward strategy and the Win Win tactics of competitive loans and development projects which bring Chinese capital, corporations, managers and labor to the semi-colonies. More recently China and Russia are integrating with the Belt and Road initiative.
Ukraine won its formal independence from Russia in 1994, but the true independence has never existed and can only be won under the slogan and implementation of an Independent Soviet Ukraine which recognises the national rights of Donbass and Crimea. Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it has an untapped wealth of fertile soils ripe for the picking by the imperialist power that succeeds in drawing it into its sphere of influence. This civil war in the East, which is in reality a proxy war between Russia and the US to claim control of this prize, reflects the intensity of the struggle. See “Chartbook #81 Permanent crisis or Black Earth agro-giant? Alternative futures for Ukraine (Adam Tooze)”
Both the Kiev and the Moscow governments have made use of fascist reaction. Today the fascists are a minority in Ukraine and the break-away People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk which referenced the socialist program in their struggle have bowed to Russian power at their back. Russia in turn employs Russian fascists in a paramilitary role.
The Ukraine government, caught between the two imperialist blocs, nevertheless is economically and militarily subordinated to the western bloc and NATO. Russia correctly identifies the western bloc and NATO as an economic and strategic threat. Thus as a pawn in the great game the workers and peasants of Ukraine have no way out from under the thumb of imperialism but the path of permanent revolution.
This means that the call ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ of the Third Camp socialist tendencies is in fact a social patriotic slogan in favor of US imperialism since there can be no Ukrainian independence as a vassal of Western or Eastern capital.
To secure Ukrainian independence socialist revolution is required. And this requires factual hostility. Class against class, with fraternization and mutinies and a proletarian military policy turning the war drive of the imperialist powers into class war. The ILTT takes the side of neither imperialist bloc and rejects the theories of sub-imperialism of the opportunists who seek a way to support Putin and Xi against the socialist revolution.
The Stalinist parties take an unapologetic pro-Moscow ‘peace’ position reflective of their origins of the Moscow parties in the USSR days and without reference to which class holds power in Moscow today. According to the Stalinists, capitalist Russia is a leading force in the anti-imperialist bloc of nations. In reality, Russia as an imperialist power, like the United States and the EU, is a leading counter revolutionary force against proletarian permanent revolution internationally.
We call on workers in the US and Russia and all nations to turn inter-imperialist war into a civil war at home to bring down the capitalist class, bring the workers to power in Workers States to expropriate the capitalists, bring the troops home and build national and international centrally-planned economies, world peace and rational socialist economic development.
As the martyred German socialist Karl Liebknecht said: “The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.”
