Ukraine: Turn imperialist war into a revolutionary class war
War in the Imperialist Epoch
The war in Ukraine is a test for revolutionaries, and those who take it seriously go back to Lenin (and Trotsky who adopted Lenin’s position on imperialist war) for guidance. Lenin had a fully developed position on the first Imperialist War (WW1) in which national self-determination was subordinated by inter-imperialist war. In other words, national self-determination of colonies and semi-colonies is not possible short of the defeat of the imperialist powers that oppress them.
Today the overwhelming majority of self-identified socialists who should be leading the international working class in Class War Against Imperialist War have instead lined up with competing imperialists in the name of national self-determination to betray themselves as social imperialists. Literally in the name of peace they have joined the conflict cheering workers on into the meat grinder!
Who is fighting for class war against the war and who is lining up with one imperialist power or the other and its prox(ies)? There are forces marching here today (March 18th) supporting Putin’s war for the re-establishment of the Czar’s empire. There are forces elsewhere who tell you peace only requires a Kiev regime victory or a Russian withdrawal, almost saying ‘take your pick”! We reject all these social-imperialist slogans and logics. These are pro-war politics, and the calls for negotiations in both flavors are either Washington or Moscow poses.
Peace can only be achieved by a victorious working class state, as different from the warring bourgeois states as can be. We are supporters of peace and Ukrainian identity and self-determination, which neither western banksters nor their Russian opposites will abide in the real world. A fake left that indulges or supports these “only sides” or a pacifist ‘neutrality” collapse into liberal anti-worker positions. We say class war against war is the only anti-war position.
On May Day 2022 we said:
“Today the world faces war between imperialist powers that could easily escalate into a Third world war. The causes of this war are well known to Marxists – imperialism is capitalism in decline, parasitic on workers and nature. When the parasite exhausts its host, nature, there is no way out but to destroy everything it has created including its support system, the biosphere. So the ruling classes of rising great powers challenge the declining powers for hegemony over the ruins of civilization. Humans, the vast majority of which are workers and farmers, are part of nature and they too are expendable. This terminal crisis of capitalism is what has brought us to the war in Ukraine.
Dual defeatism and Self Determination
The bourgeois doctrine of self-determination of nations means the democratic right to elect governments to create a national market for national capital. As we know, the limits set by national borders to capital accumulation was the cause of capital export and the rise of imperialism more than a century ago. As capitalism overflowed the limits of national markets (inevitable as capital must expand or die), the stronger nations colonized the weaker nations until the world was divided between the big powers and their ‘spheres of influence’. This has led, several world depressions and wars later, to the current situation in which the US bloc and their client states (NATO, ANZUS etc) are in a zero-sum fight to the death with the Russia/China bloc and their client states (BRICs, SCO etc).
The fate of semi-colonies (politically independent but economically oppressed) and colonies (still ruled by imperialist powers), is to be occupied, partitioned, and turned into client states of whichever great power wins the political, economic and military wars. Which means when imperialists are competing to dominate semi-colonies to expand their sphere of influence, no one imperialism is more or less evil than the other. They are equally oppressive in search of their privileges. And so is the opportunist social imperialist left desperate to hold onto its privileges. In Ukraine, the right to self-determination, as with all bourgeois rights, emphatically facing the terminal crisis of capitalism, can be realised only by permanent revolution. Lenin, writing in 1914 a few months before the outbreak of war states:
‘To the workers the important thing is to distinguish the principles of the two trends. Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation….
…The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support, at the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness; we fight against the tendency of the Polish bourgeois to oppress the Jews, etc., etc…
…we firmly uphold something that is beyond doubt: the right of the Ukraine to form such a state. We respect this right; we do not uphold the privileges of Great Russians with regard to Ukrainians; we educate the masses in the spirit of recognition of that right, in the spirit of rejecting state privileges for any nation…
…In this situation, the proletariat, of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights, for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind, of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organisations, amalgamating these organisations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness…
…Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.’
National self-determination today, meaning independence, and economic equality, like all bourgeois rights, cannot be won by a militarised ‘peoples’ front’ as the proxy for US imperialism. It is possible only as the result of the armed workers and small farmers, led by a revolutionary party, overthrowing the capitalist Bonapartist regime, imposing their own program, forming a workers and small farmers government, imposing their ‘workers democracy’, overthrowing the ruling classes, ending the imperialist war, and allowing the right of self-determination of all peoples to be realised through political and economic unions or federations of socialist states.
Since imperialism is the primary cause of national oppression, national self-determination and the defeat of imperialism are aspects of class war transformed by permanent revolution. Therefore, we take the abstract positions of neutrality between imperialist protagonists, combined with support for Ukraine’s or Russia’s self-determination and concretise them in a program of dual defeatism in the imperialists’ countries and armed independence of Ukrainian workers and peasants against both imperialisms and the national bourgeoisie.
The “anti-war movement” one year out!
As of yet the “anti-war” and the workers movement has not developed a revolutionary dual defeatist attitude toward the war. Rather competing coalitions and groups stake out positions in support of either the imperialist Russian invasion or the Ukrainian ‘Resistance’ under the control of the reactionary Ukraine bourgeois state.
The various counterposed peace movements couch their respective social-imperialist positions in defensist language. The “peace” advocates like Scott Ritter favor a Russian victory and call for negotiations between the belligerents; for them NATO encroachment and ‘deNazification’ legitimize Russia’s incursion as consistent with the UN article 51 right to self-defense. His ilk are faking the history of the 21st century in a curious parallel to the white power world of ‘alternative facts.’
Still others abstain, chiefly in Europe, advocating ‘neutrality,’ an absurd position that neither recognizes Ukrainian identity nor interrupts the slide toward WW3, an inter-imperialist war properly so-called, total and without any asterisks!
Our comrades at Class Struggle explain how workers view petty bourgeois neutrality:
“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital driven to expand its territories to extract super-profits by means of occupation and war, as well as the export of capital. Marxist practice in response to super exploitation and national oppression is not petty bourgeois ‘neutrality’ which negotiates with different imperialist powers for shares in the colonial booty, but the global proletarian struggle led by a revolutionary communist party, to defeat imperialist oppression at home, and in the oppressed countries! The task of the revolutionary vanguard taken up by the ILTT is to build such parties internationally and form a new revolutionary workers’ International.” Class Struggle (NZ/Ao) Autumn 2023
Two, Three Many Peace Movements
Major anti-war coalitions have planned a March on Washington and San Francisco on March 18th. It will unite many of the activists and voices of ‘the movement’ who backed away from taking the stage at the Libertarian-led Rage Against the War Machine (RAWM) rally on February 19th.
The RAWM action represented a layer of the isolationist capitalist class, many of whom like Tucker Carlson favor Russia. Carlson’s twisted quip that “Putin never called him a racist” buries the fact that white supremacy has contaminated the Kremlin (contrary to the fake anti-imperialism of RT/Peoples Forum ‘socialists’). The Libertarian organizers of RAWM allotted fascist LaRouche (Schiller Institute) speakers three slots!
Chris Hedges and Max Blumenthal were the only notable voices of the ‘left’ who lowered themselves to speak on stage with capitalists and fascists – with a fascist Larouche poster as their backdrop.
Hedges’ religio-biblical peace sermon ranged from the forces of Moloch, sanctimonious deification, misappropriation and misrepresentation of MLK and “our Red Rosa.”
What-abouter, radio personality and conspiracy promoter Jimmy Dore, blind to inter-imperialist conflict and hyped as a beacon of reason by many confused leftists, neither explained the class nature of the conflict nor was he capable of motivating his vast radio audience to take to the streets.
Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, fake peace advocate Scott Ritter, who attended, and neo-Ricardian economics professor Richard Wolff (who poses as a Marxist retailing a redux of FDR’s New Deal and Mondragon corporate socialism) tip-toed out of their earlier endorsements although Benjamin and Ritter left a social media record building the action. Benjamin found ample opportunity to be photographed with other social patriots advocating inter-imperialist negotiations. Needless to say, this alleged socialist described no role for the working class; not in the U.S.A., nor in Russia, nor in Ukraine. For Code Pink only the imperialist butchers get to steer the war events or the supposed peace after it.
UNAC and March 18
But for the presence of the capitalist Libertarian Party and the LaRouchite fascists there was not as much as a dime’s worth of difference between RAWM and UNAC, (United National Antiwar Coalition). Both want to abolish NATO, Free Assange and raise other democratic demands, but both find common cause with imperialist Russia, favoring its victory. Thus an essential identity politically.
Two days after the RAWM show, February 21 at a UNAC webinar, one of those who backed away from the RAWM stage, arms control and disarmament expert/advocate, Scott Ritter, explained that indeed the Russian Special Military Operation phase was a soft process, not a full on Shock and Awe invasion and that it was designed to get Ukraine to negotiate. But NATO scuttled the April 1st negotiations, he says, and armed Ukraine to do its bidding to weaken Russia. This is fake history and what he would be doing on the same platform with any actual socialists would reflect badly but impermissibly on the latter!
In a parody of righteous sincerity, Joe Lombardo executive director of the UNAC on February 21, 2023 at a webinar building for the March 18th marches, echoes (at time mark 32:26) Scott Ritter’s support for a Russian victory as the only viable road to peace. Lombardo proposes Russian victory is preferred because it will weaken the hegemonic US/NATO imperialist bloc, deNazify Ukraine, and prevent nuclear weapons being placed on Russia’s borders.
One wonders if this fake Trotskyist ever understood that the only viable road to peace is victory of the working class spreading socialist revolution against imperialism’s wars.
‘Socialist’ Solidarity with Zelensky
Firing at UNAC from across the barricades are ‘comrades’ of the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Committee (USSC). Oakland Socialist playing a leading role in the committee stakes out their State Department ‘socialism.’
“Any thinking worker – no less any real socialist – will say, “of course the people of Ukraine have the right to defend themselves, arms in hand, against the Russian invaders.” That is what the Ukrainian people are doing, and they should be supported not just politically but militarily.{ed. emphasis}
Political support so enunciated is nothing short of the uncritical support of the US proxy capitalist Zelensky regime. They do not even attempt to cover their social patriotism speaking on stage in San Francisco under the flags of the USA and Ukraine. Neither USSC speaker John Reimann nor Cheryl Zuur (admin of the USSC FB page) breached the concept of social revolution, or suggested the working class has a word to say or role to play! Rather they did their utmost to distance themselves from the crimes of the USSR and abdicate their duty as socialists to turn their rhetoric and guns against US imperialism. Yet they do their best to absolve the US of any responsibility for this conflict. Zuur posted Dissent’s Michael Kazin article without reservations or explanation. Kazin quotes his cousin historian David A Bell to absolve the west of any nefarious role in the conflict, Bell writes:
“…judge every international situation on its own terms, considering the actions of all parties, and not just the most powerful one. . . . the horrors Putin has already inflicted on Ukraine, and his long-term goals, are strong reasons . . . for continuing current U.S. policy, despite the attendant costs and risks.”
Kazin further likens the $46.6 billion of lethal aid to Ukraine to a “rounding error” in the bloated US military budget. He identifies those who oppose defending the Kyiv regime as in league with Trump, Tucker Carlson and the Putin regime. While considering that a negotiated settlement might be the “only way the war ends”, he admonishes the left that “without a strong and consistent policy of support to the government in Kyiv, the agreement would be on Putin’s terms.” (emphasis ours, ed.)
Their method of prying every international situation out of the actual unfolding inter-imperialist conflict and redivision of the world is exactly the pragmatism State Department socialists have preferred in a direct and tediously long trajectory, running as fast as possible from Lenin and Trotsky’s dialectics, though Burnham and Shachtman to Biden’s coattails.
Reimann and Zuur in their speeches and posts clearly advocate cross-class People’s Fronts uniting politically with Zelensky, dropping all reference to the workers or workers’ independent political action and replacing our class’s role with the class neutral “people.” Zuur refrains from closing her ‘socialist intervention’ with any calls for workers power, instead opportunistically playing to the sea of blue and yellow flags with the anti-soviet Banderite war cry “Slava Ukraine!”
But don’t take our word for it, listen to theirs. You will not hear advocacy of class struggle, rather they ‘seize the day’ by solidarizing themselves with the right of Ukrainians to “receive the best arms’ they can.
The pro-Kyiv regime “socialist peace” bunch advocates orienting workers toward that layer of trade union bureaucrats who historically bind the working class to the US imperialist overlords via the Democratic party. Objectively they protect the military industrial complex, the Wall Street War profiteers and their forces of destruction from class struggle by explicitly calling for the renewal and upgrading of the western imperialist NATO nations’ armaments industries in order to continue supplying the proxy Zelensky regime the weapons it requires for years. Most of the funding these ‘peace advocates’ support and the US has promised, will not reach Ukraine until 2025 or even 2030 given that the arsenals are depleting and the funding will be used to replenish, upgrade and renew them. For this, the manufacturing base necessary no longer exists, resulting in the greatest war production mobilization since Korea, and this right at the moment that banks are imploding! Aborting socialist revolution against war like their mirror opposite, UNAC, they promise workers the peace of the graveyard for the rest of the decade. That’s one promise they can keep, too.
Oakland Socialist editor Reimann, USSC organizer, a self avowed ‘socialist’ Biden voter is the ESSENCE of social-imperialism and is exactly the political mirror image of UNAC and Lombardo! No one should be fooled by the camouflage covering up the impossibility of peace OR national self-determination being delivered by any bourgeois regime in Kiev! This regardless of the extent of territorial gains against the Russian forces. As Lenin told us, and in total contradistinction to USSC and its guru Oakland Socialist, national self-determination is not possible short of the defeat of the imperialist powers.
For a New Zimmerwald and a new world party of socialist revolution!
The ILTT rejects the pragmatism of the contending fake antiwar movements who write the working class out of the equation. We call for a New Zimmerwald, a meeting of all those who struggle for uncompromising class war against all imperialist contenders and their proxies as the only viable method to stop imperialism’s extinction drive toward World War. The workers’ anti-war united front must build revolutionary dual defeatism to sweep away the warring imperialist and allied capitalist regimes and profiteers. The terminal crisis of capital is evident in the rapid rate of decomposition of capital as the declining US imperialist bloc races towards a head on collision with the rising China imperialist bloc. No force can avert a third world war spinning into nuclear war other than a new revolutionary communist international that turns civil war into class war ending the rule of capital and imposing the rule of the international working class.
For a New Zimmerwald and a New International based on the method and program of the 4th International!
For a United, Free and Independent Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Ukraine!”
