Defeat the imperialist war! For an Independent Workers Ukraine!
- Workers of all imperialist countries your main enemy is the imperialist bourgeoisie at home!
- For general strikes and mass actions against the imperialist war machines in Europe, the US and Russia!
- Close US/UK and EU foreign and NATO bases!
- No to Sanctions, they function as war on working people!
- No to No Fly Zones!
- For workers self defense militias! For International Workers brigades!
- Defeat the NATO covert and overt military forces!
- Defeat the Russian invasion forces!
- Soldiers build a Come Home Now movement!
- Soldiers refuse to handle, fire or use nuclear or bio or chemical weapons!
- Soldiers in the field mutiny, arrest your officers, elect your own officers, fraternize across front lines and protect civilians!
- Defeat the fascist battalions, their militia and their foreign nationalist fighters!
- Open the secret pouches of the imperialist belligerents and open the books of the imperialist bourgeoisie and big capitalist enterprises!
- Free all anti-war protesters! Drop all charges!
- Hot cargo all imperialist belligerents’ freight. For workers’ control of logistics and distribution!
- Convene a new Zimmerwald conference! For an anti-imperialist workers united front. For “war against war” to “turn inter-imperialist war abroad into class war at home”!
- Build revolutionary workers parties and a revolutionary workers international based on 1938 Transitional Program
Why?
The Character of the Ukraine War
This is an inter-imperialist war over the material resources and geo-strategic advantages of Ukraine. On the one side the forces of the declining hegemon, US/UK/EU imperialism and its military tool NATO greedly eye Ukrainian resources and military advantage. On the other side, greatly outweighed, is the ‘upstart’ imperialist Russia, reasserting Tsarist dominion, in the name of great Russian chauvinism defending its domain from NATO encirclement. Russia is counting on its allies in the CSTO and as economic and possibly military back up, China.
The CCP, itself a target of the Pacific Pivot and the aftermath AUKUS, is an imperialist military ally and economic partner of Russia but does not want to get pulled into a hot war. So China is positioning itself as the new and wise arbiter of world peace and international reconciliation employing the long view of history as a guide to dialing back the drive toward WWIII. So they say.
Ukraine, after capitalist restoration across the USSR, did not have the economic or military power to sustain its national independence from imperialism. National liberation in the age of imperialism is a privilege only of imperialist nations and the gain of workers’ states when they can sustain themselves. Capitalist restoration and subsequent subordination as semi-colonies by most of the eastern bloc Soviet satellite states is a reverse proof of the theory of permanent revolution.
With a pro-western-imperialist government, and economic deals and ties to the west, Ukraine is now subordinated to western capital yet still linked to Russia by mutual cultural history, language, proximity, families, business and competing claims to the resources of the region. Or, as Putin cynically claims, “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.”
The counter-revolution and capitalist restoration in Ukraine put the unfinished tasks of the national democratic revolution back on the agenda; tasks which can only be achieved by a workers’ state in an Independent Soviet Ukraine.
After the counter revolution Russia was able to resist being subordinated as a semi-colony. The use of legacy institutions of the Soviet plan and centralization and mechanisms of state capitalism allowed Russia to maintain its independence from imperialism and emerge as an imperialist power. The Russian subordination of the CSTO countries and its military strength are indications of its emergence as an imperialist competitor fighting for its own imperialist bourgeoisie’s interests. Those interests today are securing a cut of Ukrainian resources and pushing back the other big imperialist bloc.
Ukraine, the frontier/ border land, has been caught in the middle for centuries; it provides a safe port for western imperialism in Odessa which serves as their only economic lifeline for export of massive grain harvests and raw materials. Today its government serves as a pawn of western imperialism, straining to maintain a semblance of a state for its national bourgeoisie. Like its Russian counterpart class, a layer of ‘oligarchs’ has risen from among the apparatchiki of the old Soviet system who took advantage in the ‘shock therapy’ days of capital accumulation during the period of the capitalist restoration. Today they cobble together a Ukrainian capitalist class with its own interests, but they lack the economic power to secure independence from imperialism. Feeling its economic backwardness and military weakness they surrendered their nuclear weapons for a promise that none of the signatories ever had intentions of keeping. Such are the lessons of imperialist treaties, cease-fires, lines of demarcation etc.
The working class demands show us all imperialism’s secret deals-OPEN THE DIPLOMATIC POUCHES! Free Julian Assange, Free Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning! Free the Russian Anti-War protesters and Drop all Charges!
Ukrainian Natural resources:
World Atlas identifies coal reserves in the contested Donbas region which could meet Ukraine’s energy demand for the next 500 years as it is the world’s 7th largest and Europes 2nd largest coal reserve. Likewise the nearly 130 million tons of oil, the 3.7 billion tons of shale oil and 80,000 tons of gas condensate, most of which is in the Dnieper-Donetsk area. Rich iron ore deposits approximately amount to 10% of the world’s known reserves, most of which is marketed to China. The largest manganese ore deposits in the world, the largest titanium and uranium deposits in Europe, along with potash, salt, gold and being a massive agricultural breadbasket which could, according to Roman Leshchenko at the Atlantic Council, feed the world, makes Ukraine an economic prize much more than just a geo-strategic buffer.
Stalinism and Russian Nationalism
In the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine the Russian Communist Party (CP) leadership issued its statement supporting the resolution to recognize the People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. In the USA today, Usec’s Socialist Action, Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Workers Word Party (WWP), Communist Party USA (CP) and their milieu take leadership from the Gennady Zyuganov’s social patriotism and are turning themselves into social patriots for Russia, (some are having second thoughts). These organizations want to be able to claim allegiance to their abbreviation of Liebknecht/Lenin appeal to the workers in the imperialist countries that , “…our main enemy is at home…,” more often than not leaving out the last phrase in Liebknecht’s statement, “…We must wage this political struggle alongside the proletariat of other countries, as they struggle against their own imperialists.”
Zyuganov does not provide the class analysis of Russia as capitalist or imperialist, which for consistent Leninists would raise the tactic of dual defeatism. Zyuganov correctly points to the role of the Zelensky government as a proxy of US/NATO imperialism. On this we can agree. What Zyuganov ultimately does is close the door to Ukrainian workers. He paves no road for the socialist revolution nor does he assert the Bolshevik program of an Independent Soviet Ukraine! Rather he invites the left on a path of Great Russian Chauvinism and the fake socialist groups, which built and sustained the main US anti-war coalitions, go there with him.
Lenin, Bolshevism and Self Determination in Ukraine
None would expect an authoritarian imperialist billionaire formally trained by the KGB to be a Marxist historian. The rhetorical method of the geo-political foreign policy makers and imperialist bourgeoisie is to disregard class struggle as the motor force of history, so as to rewrite history sans lutte des classes. Lest the lesser classes notice their power and act on it; better to portray world events as the consequence of the actions of “Great Men” wielding the levers of geo-economic/strategic forces beyond the comprehension of the toiling masses.
In his February speech Putin wrote the class content out of the history of the Russian Revolution and reduced the issue of the rights of nations to self determination to a capitulation by Lenin to nationalists, betraying Russia. Like all the CEO’s of imperialist states he wants to write working class agency out of the equations of history and most certainly not to have any potential agency in current events.
For Putin the fringes of empire were not peopled by nations imprisoned by the Tsarist empire yearning for of their national revolution to be independent from the landlords and domination by Tsarist imperialism and authoritarianism, they were military and administrative problems of geo-strategic security to be solved without concessions to nationalists. For Putin Lenin got it all wrong and Stalin made it worse-which of course he did, but Putin sidestepped his own legacy and complicity.
In retrospect, writers (self identified Marxists Kowalewski, Eric Blanc) have reviewed the struggles of the European and Russian workers movement on the national question. These histories recount the issues of great Russian chauvinism in social democracy and ultimately the Bolshevik party itself which confounded the revolutionary movement and its advance westward as it stumbled on the issue of Ukrainian national self determination. The tasks of the national revolution (agrarian reform, unification of internal markets, democratic rights and national independence), in Russia and even more so in its frontier nations, were dependent on the growing over of the national revolution into the socialist revolution.
Because the Russian bourgeoisie in general was too weak to accomplish the tasks at hand themselves, those tasks fell to the working class and its ability to internationalize the revolution by demonstrating the superiority of the proletariat’s commitment to end national oppression. It is the permanent revolution and the working classes’ agency, which Putin and all imperialist geo-strategists want to write out of history. The tasks of the national democratic revolution in Ukraine were so deeply intertwined with the struggle for self-determination that the fate of the internationalization and victory of the Russian Revolution hinged on it.
At first the Bolsheviks got it wrong; such were the limitations of the movement under Tsarism. Their base in Ukraine was centered among Russified workers of the Eastern mining and industrial centers and the local and national center of Bolshevism was not informed by nor integrated with the leaders of the Ukrainian speaking masses. Calcified great Russian chauvinism dominated and it took class struggle to break its hold.
Kowalewski recounts in 1918,
“… Rakovsky’s government — which was on paper that of an “independent republic” — considered itself a simple regional delegation of power from the Russian workers’ state. But objective reality is implacable. Faced with Rakovsky’s attempt to impose a Greater Russian communist centralism, the national reality, already explained by Bolsheviks like Shakhrai, and also in their own way by Bolsheviks like Pyatakov, made itself felt. This centralism unleashed powerful centrifugal forces. The proletarian revolution did not lead the national revolution, nor did a proletarian military leadership impose itself at the head of the armed national and social insurrection of the masses. (bold ours ed, note.) In order to achieve class consciousness, the masses of an oppressed people have first to pass through the stage of achieving a national consciousness. Having alienated and even repressed the bearers of this consciousness, recruitment to the administration was restricted to the often reactionary Russian petty bourgeoisie, who were accustomed to serving under whomever was in power in Moscow. Things were the same for the army: recruitment took place amongst people with a very low level of consciousness, not to say lumpen elements. The result was a conglomerate of disparate armed forces, with commanders ranging from Nestor Makhno (presented by the central press in glowing terms as a natural revolutionary leader of the poor peasants in revolt, overlooking entirely his anarcho-communist beliefs, totally at odds with Bolshevism) to straightforward adventurers such as Matvii Hryhoryiv.” (See A. Sergeev, “Makhno,” Izvestiya, no. 76 (627) (1919).)”
Bolshevism missed the opportunity to lead the Ukrainian national struggle to grow over into the permanent revolution and internationalize democratically under the leadership of the working class. Rather it was dragged along without winning the masses which opened a vulnerability to the counter revolution which asserted in the west across Hungary, Romania and Poland. Bela Kun lamented this weakness and we can realistically consider the negative impact these shortcomings had on the course of unfolding of the world revolution which was turned back in a series of defeats across Eastern Europe.
Local Ukrainian communists, Borotbists who later fused with the Bolsheviks, understood the dynamic interplay between the development of Ukrainian national consciousness growing over in the course of social revolution to proletarian internationalism and equated it with Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.
Trotsky’s speech to the troops theoretically rearmed the Bolsheviks in 1919, as he led the Red army into Ukraine to defeat Denikin. This is ultimately what Putin is against and categorizes it as Lenin’s capitulation to nationalism:
“Ukraine is the land of the Ukrainian workers and working peasants. They alone have the right to rule in the Ukraine, to govern it and to build a new life in it…. Keep this firmly in mind: your task is not to conquer the Ukraine but to liberate it. When Denikin’s bands have finally been smashed, the working people of the liberated Ukraine will themselves decide on what terms they are to live with Soviet Russia. We are all sure, and we know, that the working people of the Ukraine will declare for the closest fraternal union with us…. Long live the free and independent Soviet Ukraine!
(Kowalewski quoting L. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 2 (London: New Park Publications, 1979), p. 439.
The civil war was won under the slogan of a free and independent Soviet Ukraine, yet sustaining support of the Ukrainian nation proved difficult. The failure of the revolutions in the west and subsequent isolation lead to the Thermidorian reaction. It was Stalin’s foreign policy, his theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’, the bureaucracy’s accommodation to imperialism, the privileges of the NEP men and the whipsaw zig-zags of Stalinism, that lost the hearts and minds in Ukraine under forced collectivization and administrative mishandling of the famine with its millions of deaths. This collapse of Bolshevism under Stalin created the cracks in Ukrainian internationalist consciousness that the Bandera fascists filled.
Today the fate of the world lies in the ability of the international proletariat to see the permanent revolution bound up in the national revolution of the semi-colonies, always under attack by the permanent counter-revolution asserted by both the US/UK/EU imperialist bloc and the Russia/China imperialist bloc.
Sanctions: “Peaceful, Silent, Deadly”!
Some of the leaders in the socialist movement such as Gilbert Achcar (USFI), LIT, RCIT, say the current war in Ukraine is not an inter-imperialist war because there are no NATO boots on the ground or for the ICL and IG because the belligerents are limited to Ukraine and Russia who, for them are both capitalist states, and Russia is not imperialist. We deal with the inter-imperialist character of the war elsewhere in this article. We argue here that NATO is in this war with both feet because sanctions are political and economic warfare! The argument that US/NATO are not at war with Russia, besides denying covert activities, denies that sanctions are war. The denial also gives the “what-aboutists” grist for their mill. An element of our argument is that sanctions are exactly what they are designed as-acts of war.
Sanctions are a modern version of the ancient strategy of siege warfare. Credit where credit is due, but nothing new here. Ever full of their own ingenuity the acolytes of imperialism love to credit themselves for their inventive brutalities.
L’arme économique, sanctions, delivering a “peaceful,silent deadly remedy,” are said to have been conceived or or re-invented during the 1919 peace talks as a replacement for future wars. President Woodrow Willson hailed them as,
“…something more tremendous than war”: the threat was “an absolute isolation . . . that brings a nation to its senses just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclinations to fight . . . Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside of the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon that nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”
Yet, no less a voice for US imperialism than Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post boasts “The West has invented a new weapon.”
“With Western institutions refusing to deal with Russia’s central bank, roughly half of its reserves have been paralyzed. The result is panic. The central bank has been stripped of its credibility as a defender of the ruble, so the currency has fallen sharply against the dollar. Russian authorities have fought back by hiking interest rates to 20 percent, imposing austerity on ordinary Russians to slow the flow of currency out.”
From the League of Nations until today in London, Brussels and Washington, this “peaceful, silent, deadly remedy,” is antiseptic and clean and acceptable, to the casualty averse populations at home. The businesses and bankers of the international consensus cut the tens of thousands of threads that interconnect the internationalized capitalist economy with the victims of war by other means.
No surprise, some wanna-be Bolsheviks have now written into their programs that sanctions are not war! Employing this obscurity, our erstwhile socialist leaders claim this is not an inter imperialist war for them the war is between Russia and Ukraine alone.
These excuses allow the RCIT and USec to avoid calling for mutiny of NATO soldiers and general strikes to overthrow US/EU imperialism as part of their anti-war strategy. These Bolshevik tactics they reserve for the Russian soldiers and workers to conduct on their own, with no hope or promise of action by the workers in the imperialist countries across the front lines. Likewise the Robersonites let themselves off the hook characterizing the war as one between two capitalist states, so dual defeatism applies, but US/EU imperialism is off the hook.
For decades the left, guided, often by Cuban Castroist leadership, have repeated the argument that sanctions are war. Today the Stalinists, Marcyites, Socalist Action and various ‘tankie’ outfits hang their what aboutism on this truism. Who among the anti-war campaigners has not pointed to the 7 year air, sea and land blockade of Yemen by the Saudis and the UAE, the Zionist policy of blocading Gaza, or the 60 year blockade of Cuba and denounced the sanctions that starve the citizens as acts of war against populations?
The ongoing sanctions on Russia, combined with the US overt military training and covert CIA operations trainings, and supplying of weaponry, as well as Ukraine’s on again-off again intent to join NATO and the strategic encirclement of Russia and China by NATO and AUKUS are elements of the Putinites’ and mono-polar worldview aherants’ arguments that NATO initiated a war pushing Putin into a defensive invasion of Ukraine. This is the argument of those who see Russia as a leader of an anti-imperialist bloc of emerging (dependent semi-colonies) nations, including not only the aforementioned US sects but their allies the Bolivarians, Castroites and Bashir Al-Assad, the butcher of the Syrian Revolution.
Radhika Desai in the Valdai Discussion Club argues that despite the proclaimed intention of the UK, France and the US to ‘collapse the Russian economy… by all out financial war… that takes out Putin,’ the US hegemon has shot itself in the foot. First, because debtors defaulting take down creditors, second by “…denying creditors access to their assets, the US has destroyed the advantages of being a creditor,” and third that the US, the worlds bank, has shown its hand cautioning TransNational Corporations to check their blinders, as “…its central bank and legal systems are far from independent and its financial system is untrustworthy.”
With the ruble crashing the short term effects of the sanctions will squeeze the Russian people while some 400 western corporations wait to settle accounts. They will be eating the costs on their balance sheets while Putin threatens to nationalize their fixed capital assets or pay them in devalued currency. Koch industries claims its Russian operation is no concern for US national security and thumbs its nose at the sanctions just as JP Morgan keeps Russian accounts flowing for its corporate clients while retail banks are shut. A handful of Russian billionaires may lose yachts and second or third homes; the real victims will be workers and oppressed internationally.
Ranking What-aboutism
What About–Refugees:
One of the talking points of the Putinites, RT socialists and their milieu is the criminal anti-immigrant practices of Europe and US toward refugees from the Global South. As Africans and Indians tried to escape to Poland and points west they faced racist exclusion. What about that?
Contrast to the welcoming open arms the Ukrainian refugees find-at least in Western Media– the millions from the Global South displaced by climate catastrophe and imperialist wars over resources and territory. In the main the what-aboutists avoid explaining the inter-imperialist nature of the proxy wars. Millions of the displaced black and brown workers and farmers are refused entry to Europe and the US, drowning crossing rivers and oceans or dying in the outback of deserts and mountains; of those who may survive the journey millions are caught up at borders, in refugee camps or ICE prisons and many, like the Haitians face deportation by the tens of thousands.
The US immigration system is designed to turn back, hunt and deport most poor working class black and brown folk, seeking refuge from poverty, starvation and war. What about: the US imperialists history of bringing its collaborators “home” following the US defeat in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The doors were not open to collaborators and had to be forced open by the public’s moral outrage. Today the doors are opening for Ukranians despite the xenophobia. The pro-Russian Trumpian Breitbart Press reports only 33% of Americans approve the plan to bring 50,000 Ukrainians to the US.
What about–You were warned, and knew better:
Another favorite of the Putin apologists is that despite being warned, by Moscow, international and US foreign policy strategists, policy makers, diplomats and academics including George Kennan (1998), Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, Jack F. Matlock Jr., CIA director Bill Burns and many others, NATO pushed and pushed and pushed-no denying that! The face off across the Donbas has been used to justify the invasion of Ukraine when the legitimate objection is to NATO bases in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary etc. We object to NATO and say close the NATO bases, troops come home now. Poking the eye of the tiger is a game played on both sides, which is the tiger and which is the pussy-cat? To a mouse the danger is the same!
What about US vs Russian economic and military power!
By GDP, FDI, OFDI, military spending, warm sea ports, aircraft carriers, men under arms, technology, banking and on and on by every metric the US with or without its NATO allies outweighs the power of Russian imperialism. But when all that is said and done, where the finger hits the button, so to speak, Russia is ranked 2nd internationally for total available firepower. There is no justifying the invasion.
What about–Zelensky’s respect for semi-colonial populations under siege
Ukraine has deals worth USD 3 billion to provide agricultural goods to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. Last year in February, 2021 as the Saudis and the UAE blockade of Yemen was going on 6 years, starving Houthi civilians and pounding them daily with US munitions, Zelensky visited the UAE to secure these deals.
While the Rohingya are suffering, the Myanmar military is conducting a counter-revolutionary war against its population fighting for its national self-determination and democratic rights. Even after Kiev voted in the UN to halt the flow of arms to Myanmar, the Kiev-Naypyidaw arms pipeline is still flowing. China and Russia were and remain the primary suppliers of arms to the Myanmar military sustaining the Permanent Counter-Revolution in south Asia, but there has been room for Ukroboronprom and Ukrspecexport (arms, chemical and machinery exporters) to collect their pound of flesh.
Irony, hypocrisy or campism–whatever, it’s capitalist wealth of nations, division of labor played out on the backs of civilian populations disregarded and crushed for profit. Like Michael Corleone, in the Godfather put it “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
What about—Fascism in Ukraine and Social Chauvinism in Russia
Putin tells the world and appeals to Russian and Ukrainian people claiming “denazification” as a main goal for invading Ukraine. Is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
From Bandera and today’s Bandera Azov militia to Dugin’s fascist euroasian NazBol nationalists and ethno chauvinists each conduct an internecine struggle for political dominance and leadership of the eurocentrism and western chauvinists. The fascist movement faces off against itself across this political divide in Ukraine. There, fascist led and Russian-backed people’s republics stake their nationalist claims under leadership of adherents to the ultranationalist newspaper “Zavtra” and the paramilitary group “Russian National Unity.” Claiming the mantle of ‘self-determination of oppressed minorities’ they have faced off militarily against US/NATO backed Ukraine since 2014.
The fascist Bandera military brigades have been integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and have gained guidance and training from the CIA and US military. Whether there are 1250 of them or only 900 as some Ukrainian socialists claim, they are a mortal danger to the workers’ movement. The fact that they are embryonic, or largely grouped in one city does not decrease qualitatively the virulence of their murderous hatred. They need to be crushed by politically astute Ukrainian workers’ militias. Already the necessity for community defense is causing the formation of workers’ militias. These desperately need education in ‘class-for-itself’ politics. Tomorrow they will need it like water, food and ammunition.
The Putinites and RT socialists pose taking the high ground, pointing to the fascists in Ukraine while adjusting their blinders and hoping no one catches them playing footsie with Dugin and Putin. This bloc of RT socialists, Stalinists, NazBols and Putinites is a new Red/Brown international standing up the Permanent Counter-Revolution against the Permanent Revolution.
What about—14,000 dead in Donbass and the people’s republics
The right of self-determination of nations is extended by Marxism; it is extended with the understanding that while imperialism prevails, the tasks of the national revolution cannot be completed in the semi-colonies. To make these rights concrete Marxism fights to overthrow capitalism and imperialism and does not use nationalism to draw an oppressed people nearer to its oppressors and exploiters. Hence the demand For an Independent Soviet Ukraine. While defending the rights of the people of Ukraine, the rights of those in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk are also respected.
Yet all expressions of the nationalism of oppressed minorities do not fly a bee line toward national liberation and especially not when the capitalist class relies on ultra-nationalists and fascists and drive the movement into the awaiting arms of one or the other imperialist bloc. Following the Euromaidan both east and west Ukrainian nationalists and compradore bourgeois suppressed any rise of the forces of proletarian internationalism and drove the respective nationalism adherents into the arms of the exploiters, and this exploded into a proxy war over the Donbass frontier. Forgotten by many, for their own interested reasons, is the power the rightists had in the immediate post-Maidan days and their effort to suppress the Russian language. Forgotten, but we mean to say buried by the Putinites, are the original leaders of the “Peoples Republics,” whose social project drove fears in Moscow of a belated return to socialism. The true popularity of their ideas forced Putin to disappear them, even as the Russian invaders adopted their cultural trappings.
Volodymyr Ishchenko, sociologist at the Freie University of Berlin interviewed in Links on March 17th, stated “…the separatist republics in Donbas were seen as proto-socialist states, while in reality they are puppets of a very non-socialist Russian regime.”
And the Putinites make Hue and Cry about 14,000 dead which they put squarely at the feet of the Ukrainian state and what Putin describes as a fascist-infused military. The victims of this 8 year blood-letting are two similar statistics for each side.. While the majority of the dead are soldiers including Russians, Ukranians and foreign fighters, approximately 4,000 civilians died. This what-aboutism disingenuously puts all the blame on Ukraine for denying self determination to the breakaways which are today little more than Russian puppets.
A Bourgeois Peace Campaign or a Proletarian Anti War Movement
One of the biggest debates on the left in the US and in western European imperialist centers is what strategy for the anti-war movement. Coalitions are being tested and molded daily during the course of the war as participants hone their analysis, consider their tolerances and align their class orientations.
Peace is the cry of moral outrage seeing the bloodied bodies day after day in all the western media. Had we seen 1/10th of the photo journalism and coverage from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, or Myanmar we may have heard those cries much sooner. But the MSM owned by the capitalists know black and brown victims of imperialist war do not make bankable copy.
As the anti-war momentum is built up it can look back decades at a peace movement with a historic practice of building cross class peace coalitions. Those coalitions linked up the dovish liberal Democrats, trying to corral the movement into the next election campaign with pacifists and non-denominationals who provided creative outlets to peacefully advocate for peace. This historic movement channeled the campaigns into supplication to international intergovernmental organizations-UN, World Courts-Treaties, Cease-fires etc. all controlled by the major imperialist powers concerted providing no agency for the working class.
Just to their left, but not too far, are all the radical leftists, of the communist and socialist groupings, the social democrats and internationalist trade unionists as well as action groups from the communities of the specially oppressed. When these groupings converge for mass common actions with the liberal doves and the pacifists the political and class lines are easily blurred. During the Vietnam war the SWP (Socialist Workers Party US) argued that the movement was anti-imperialist with the demands limited to “Out Now” because its implementation objectively meant victory of the National Liberation Struggle. Despite not serving imperialism a terminal blow or even attempting to with a class struggle or a class war strategic orientation, these self named communists limited the movement and its potential.
How easily the communists and socialists in the imperialist hegemon escaped their duty to declare “war on war” to defeat their own bourgeoisie–the maximum purveyor of violence and oppression internationally, as MLK is often quoted as saying. The left flank of the anti-war movement orients to the pacifists and liberal Democrats, social Democrats and Greens with tactics and strategy which do not challenge for class power. Their target audience is the liberal leaning middle class not the rank and file workers with the power to shut down the economy.
The anti-war movement among the US working class and its leftish flank is not prepared to offer an alternative to the inter-imperialist war. The US anti-war movement is an awkwardly ever shifting coalition of pacifist, trade unionists, socialists, activists and intellectuals has been in qualitative and quantitative decline for decades. Partially because many have made their inner-peace with social chauvinism and ultimately with the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The way this manifests appears contradictory. Consider the same individuals and organizations that give soft and sometimes overt electoral support to the imperialist Democrats like Obama, Clinton, Biden and Sanders who may let slip the term ‘imperialism’ while explaining their refusal to oppose Assad and Putin bombing Allepo and Idlib because, being from America, “their main enemy is at home.” As if to say, “we have no international proletarian duty to oppose capitalists and imperialists abroad” even as their counter-revolutionary military intervention crushes the permanent revolution in Syria, Yemen and across MENA.
They pretend not to know that the real parliamentarists, the electeds know they are fighting to stifle and suppress the permanent revolution, just like every tinpot dictator, just like the ostensible “enemies” of the moment of the U.S. bourgeoisie, just like the Capitalist imperialists who employ them and their kept media henchmen around the globe. Supposed Leninists and Trotskyists who have made peace with bourgeois pacifism think they have disproved the idea that their politics is suicidal when they get up each succeeding day unhurt. But the masses in Ukraine and Russia have a right to ask you to stop with the bourgeois non-solutions!
What are these bourgeois solutions being promoted by the “anti-war” left from the pacifists to the fake Trotskyists? These proposed solutions take agency away from the international working class and put the ball in the world court of the bourgeoisie. Rather than turning the inter-imperialist war into a war for workers power the “helpers” make proposals that will kick the can down the road further by “cease fires”, redux of the Minsk agreement, No Fly Zones (who) sanctions on the “oligarchs” (but actually choking the Russian economy on main street.) Led by liberalism the non-Putin Pal antiwar movement does not deal with the existence of fascist forces among both belligerent states, scarcely realizing they have been decoyed by Kremlin propaganda. The real workers’ movement needs to see fascism anywhere as an existential threat. But the anti-dialectical forces also have compartmentalized the January 6th experience, as if it couldn’t possibly have any international significance! And now suddenly, perhaps due to Bernie Sanders’ flip flop, sanctions are no longer acts of war?
The “left” anti-war coalitions in the US have a broad historic appeal to a base of working class and oppressed peoples, consistent pacifists, layers of trade union activists, a few unions, some anarchists, anarcho-Democrats, social democrats, socialists and communists who are the regular participants. In particular ANSWER, IAC, UNAC, CODE PINK among others have historic traction and name recognition sufficient to host large anti-war gatherings when the masses are motivated. But more than providers of a stage, porta potties and collection tins these coalitions provide political guidance and tussle over tactics and strategy. For long term participants, those on the periphery and objective observers the political tendencies with all their nuance are apparent. Together they let the bourgeoisie do their thing, protesting the provocations but never providing a total picture of the inter imperialist collisions that threaten all life. This is the work they do for the “anti-imperialist bloc of nations,” this fiction being run principally by Xi, Putin and Khamenei.
From the early 1990’s with the counter-revolutionary capitalist restoration in the USSR and its sphere of influence as well as Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, the Cold War ended and the US/EU imperialist bloc emerged victorious with the US the undisputed hegemon. The “war on terror” (actually a war against the completion of semi-colonial national revolution-by Permanent Revolution) never posed the existential or political threat that the nuclear weaponized degenerate workers states posed to imperialism. The 3000 dead of 9/11 that put the US in a 20 year war are dwarfed by the weekly COVID-19 deaths even as the pandemic is being downgraded to endemic.
The last 30 years of US/EU war on the semi-colonies including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yeman, Libya, Chad, DRC, and Sudan were restrained only by episodically significant anti-war mobilizations in the imperialist centers and the ability of the oppressed to advance their national struggles against both foreign imperialists and local compradore bourgeoisies. The weakness of the anti-war movement and the failure of emergent working class independent movements and parties in the semi-colonies resulted in three bloody decades of imperialist military management of its terminal decline.
The anti-war movement in the west had to adapt to the failing legacy of the non-aligned movement and the so-called anti-imperialist bloc. Support for peoples oppressed by imperialism became, for many, the sadly misguided direct political support for nationalist bourgeoisies that raised the Red, Black and/or Green flags of anti-imperialism. For the “Marxist” organizations that fell into this, it meant the abandonment of the fight for world socialist revolution.
Turn the Inter-Imperialist war into Class War at Home!
All too infrequently has the workers movement had leadership fighting for working class independent political and direct action against imperialist war.
To take independent action means the workers need to make a conscious break with the Democrats and Republicans and build a fighting workers-labor party! It means militants must contest for the union leaderships in anti-war shop committees raising transitional and internationalist programs for class struggle anti-war actions. Actions which when aimed at shutting down the war machine can do so.
The Russian anti-war protesters are today the vanguard elements of the world working class and we should take inspiration from them. They are going to prison by the thousands, interrupting the official propaganda news programs, facing automatic 15 year terms for differing from Putin’s fictions. We need to demand “FREE THE RUSSIAN ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS!” and “DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST THEM!”
During inter-imperialist war the workers in the belligerent imperialist centers should be building strikes against the war. Today that means workers in the US/EU and Russia need their organizations to call the entire working class to strike against this imperialist war. What-aboutism only focuses on one side of the problem whereas proletarian internationalism demands dual defeatism and socialist revolution as the solution to inter-imperialist war. In the US and EU workers must launch a class war to defeat our own capitalist class and their war economy, to bring the troops home and to dismantle NATO.
To do this we need our working classes to rise up their own political power though class independent parties and organizations and assert the right of the majority class to cleanse the economy of the blight of the anarchy of production, the capitalist market and its irrational need to destroy the forces of production and means of subsistence. When we show the workers of the east our intention we expect the Russian and Chinese working class will do the same. Internationalist working class anti-war unity is the only real threat the imperialist bourgeoisie fears because for the international working class the expropriation of the means of production and associated wealth is in its collective interest.
Only worldwide socialist revolution can stop imperialist war once and for all! Who can Ban the Bomb? Only the government of the Councils of the Workers and Oppressed, including the Enlisted Service members Councils!
