On September 15th the Centro di Documentazione Contro la Guerra organized an open assembly called “La Guerra in Ucraina non va in Vacanza” (The war in Ukraine doesn’t go on holiday) to which IP participated. The venue was located in a central nerve of Milan at the COX 18, an occupied space since 1976, also home to the well known Calusca City Lights, now the Archivio Primo Moroni, an extensive archival project of leftist literature. The purpose of the assembly was to denounce the barbarism that is still underway in the Ukraine after 19 months from its inception, with still no end in sight.
The assembly lasted about two and a half hours and the format was very open: after a concise introduction given by the organizers, in which they restated their position of “revolutionary defeatism”1, Sandro Moiso who writes for the journal Carmilla spoke for about 45 minutes delineating the current “world disorder”; afterwards, the floor was open to discussion.
Many people intervened without any formal restraints, stating their positions, adding nuances and posing questions. The tone was never academic and many voices were heard. According to the organizers the modest turnout of about 30 people was a bit disappointing since the aim was to open the discussion of the war to a wider audience and not only to “few experts who are already certain of everything ”. But regardless of the turnout, the format and tone of the assembly was successful in connecting a range of experiences to “defeatism”, a position which was continuously bolstered throughout the evening.
In his opening remarks Francesco of the CDCG stressed that the current war in Ukraine is not simply another war among many; rather it is an inter-imperialist conflict that signals the beginning of generalized war, one that is characterized by a “new disorder” in which American unipolarity is being challenged. Once again, he said, capitalism is offering us an “out-out” situation: socialism or barbarism.
The second point that Francesco underlined was the necessity to combat the “habituation” to the war, which, he said, is nothing less than the preparation for the working-class to join in the butchery on a multi-polar terrain. As the habituation to the war deepens, he noted, there has been a growth of pacifists on the left, including many anarchists, who are in support of sending weapons to the Ukraine. This must be countered, Francesco said, by exposing the link between War and Capitalism. An assembly, he admitted, has no pretension of being a political organization. It can only point to things. Francesco, but also others from the assembly, urged the participation in upcoming strikes and protests in Italy (Oct 8, Nov 4 and 19) saying that it is imperative to intervene with a defeatist position, since the war is either absent from the agenda or holds a secondary place in these strikes and protests.
Sandro, in his talk, tried to stress the fact that this war has taken on characteristics reminiscent of previous world wars. For one, war is no longer being conducted through “special military operations” (even though they are spun that way on the home front), but is being fought by mobilizing the general army and on a massive human scale. Evidence of this, for example, is the fact that the Ukraine has recently asked the EU to send back military aged men (and boys) that have deserted “their” country. Now that Ukraine is on the counteroffensive, they need more weapons and more soldiers.
Another indicator of a move towards generalized war is the emergence of new “global players”, characteristic of the multi-polarity through which this war is likely to evolve: China, Brazil, Turkey, to name a few. War, Sandro stressed, brings contradictions of all kinds such as the formation of coalitions like BRICS, which enfolds countries who have historically been in conflict, including Ethiopia and Egypt; in this same context China has also mediated between Iran and Saudi Arabia; German and French right wing parties are now poised “against the war” due to Europe’s dependency on a Russian gas supply; and with the virtual drying up of the Silk Road commerce, Biden, at the recent G20 summit, proposed a shipping corridor linking India with the Gulf States and Europe in order to circumvent China, a fantasy because Chinese companies control virtually the entire Port of Piraeus in Greece which would be fundamental link in this supposed rout…All these contradictions are all expressions of an anti-unipolarity (sometimes understood as an anti-Americanism). But this must not, Sandro highlighted, be confused with anti-colonialism. We must understand these contradictions, Sandro insisted, by giving importance to the aleatory chaos that accompanies history and war.
Politically, all of this disorder and contradiction makes the formation of any mass anti-war movement very difficult. However, according to Sandro, war can become a catalyst for igniting a social antagonism. Regardless, he concluded, in the absence of a proletarian mass struggle, we can only exist as propagandists.
At the end of the talk many voices were raised from the assembly.
A few people spoke about the voracious militarization of civil society by the Italian state, now taking place in the schools, the militarized restructuring of the police and a rise in state’s expenditures on military propaganda as well as modernizing military bases (like the one in Ghedi that can now rapid-load nuclear warheads onto F35s).
One worker expressed optimism on the grounds that recent worker movements have gained some terrain in their struggles for wages and that these movements, which are a sign of worker’s strength, should not be neglected.
Another worker spoke passionately on the need of desertion and revolution.
A militant, working with COBAS (one of Italy’s national trade unions that attempts to maintain a base committee structure), stood up and declared that revolutionary minorities should “move beyond propaganda” and attempt to form united fronts. This sparked a discussion in which the dangers of the united front, as a sort of organizational form of compromise, were pointed out on a historical basis; even Genova was denounced as a failure due to a united front2.
When it was my turn to speak I pointed out the dangers of nationalism in preparing the terrain for the worker’s involvement in capitalist wars. This sparked a discussion on new and “subtle” forms that nationalism has taken. In particular how “individualist fears” are able to capture the class by involving them in the war economy; such as, for example, when inflation hit, prime minister Mario Draghi appealed to people’s precarious condition by saying “tighten your belts for the sake of our nation”. I insisted that defeatism must adjust to the way that the formation of the identity of the collective-worker has been integrated into nationalism on racial, xenophobic and ethnic grounds. I argued that this aspect of using biological and semi-biological markers to divide the working class has become a central part of modern warfare; and that this characteristic of imperialism, which was taken from colonialism, continues to be a further basis for the disappearance of any distinction between soldier and civilian, since entire populations can be portrayed as “the enemy”.
Sandro spoke with regards to the dangers of “ethnic nationalism” imagining the possible ease with which an American proletariat could be shifted onto a pro-war terrain by fabricating a “yellow fear”, reminding us that during the Vietnam war, the protests that helped defeat the American home front, were mostly made up by students, the black working class and veterans, while the white working class remained in the factories and in support of the war.
In the end, it was emphatically restated that capitalism has no choice but to proceed through its worsening crisis and accelerate towards war. Anti-war voices that propagate a “revolutionary defeatist” position, in which no side can be taken, must remain intransigent! In no uncertain terms must we ally ourselves with visions that would lead to a participation in capitalist barbarism!
IP applauds efforts such as this assembly that openly denounces imperialist barbarism and attempts to understand war as an inevitable outcome of capitalist relations of production. Moreover, the assembly format is able to engage the working class through open discussion while maintaining a revolutionary attitude towards crisis, nationalism and war.
2 The anti G8 protests that took place in Genova 2001 became famous both because of the protest’s scale and for the brutal state violence in repressing the demonstration which ended in the outright execution of Carlo Maria Giuliani. Sandro argued that the Social Forum which was the main organizer of the demonstration was essentially a united front. While police charge thousands of protesters on the coast, supposed representatives the Forum told people to go home, that the demo had been a success. In the end the media pinned the violence on a handful of black bloc.
On September 10, Internationalist Perspective co-organized a public debate in Woodbine, a community hub in New York city, on the war in Ukraine, entitled “War and capitalist crisis”.
Since then, the war in Ukraine has escalated and many more ordinary people from Ukraine and Russia have died for worse than nothing. The Ukrainian forces, armed to the teeth by the US and its Nato-allies, have retaken some territory, Russia annexed provinces in eastern Ukraine, missiles of both sides sowed destruction on both sides, Putin ordered mass mobilization, provoking scores of protests, resistance and an exodus of many thousands refusing the role of canon fodder. All this and more has happened, but the fundamental question debated at Woodbine has remained the same: is this a local conflict in which the invaded nation deserves universal support? Or is it an interimperialist conflict, resulting from the global crisis of capitalism, in which the working class has nothing to gain and everything to loose?
Opposing perspectives follow from these assessments. In this debate, moderated by Ross Wolfe , three of the four speakers argued that this is a war between competing capitalists in which the working class is the victim and that the latter therefore can only defend its interests by refusing to fight each other and fight instead the ruling class in both countries. This position is known as “revolutionary defeatism”.
Sanderr of IP emphasized how capitalism’s incapacity to overcome the economic, social and climate problems rooted in its own systemic crisis, drives it to war. Not ‘which state to support?” but “war or revolution” is the question posed by the events in Ukraine. The full text of his presentation at the meeting can be found below.
Andrew, a communist from Kharkhiv and author of the “Letters from Ukraine” published in Endnotes, stated “we should be looking for signs of the smallest revolt against the state and nationalism and trying to understand the possibility of its contagion and spread, beyond the national borders too, as the economic fallout of the war spreads further and further (…) Instead of hoping for a better “Left” party, we should seek to facilitate and exploit the cases of individual and mass looting, draft evasion and desertion, strikes cutting against all the patriotic bullshit in the atmosphere, both in Ukraine and beyond”. The text of his presentation can be read HERE.
Lilya, originally from northern Ukraine, now living abroad but still in close contact with the folks back home, reported on the growing misery caused by the war. Much of the initial nationalist fervor in Ukraine has dissipated, she said, but resistance to the war will not come from parties but from ordinary working class people who really are suffering right now.
A starkly different point of view was defended by John of Insurgent Notes . He claimed that revolutionary defeatism never existed (ignoring the fact that it was the revolutionary defeatism of the working class, in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918, which ended world war one) and argued instead for “defensism”, meaning that workers and pro-revolutionaries should join the war effort of the Ukrainian state and Nato, while maintaining an autonomous position towards the state. He also said we should reconsider nationalism, claiming there could be forms of nationalism with an anti-capitalist content and a revolutionary potential. His bottom-line was that living under Zelensky’s liberal capitalist regime is preferable to being ruled by the ‘fascist’ Kremlin. The same ‘lesser evil’ argument which has been used time and again to enlist the working class in capitalism’s wars.
His position was denounced by others. An (expanded) version of another IP-comrade’s reply can be found below, after Sanderr’s text.
CAPITALIST CRISIS AND THE WAR IN UKRAINE
We live in troubling times. The amount of pain humankind is afflicting upon itself grows by the day. The saddest thing is that much of that pain is avoidable. There is no law of history or nature that forces humans to destroy Syria and Ukraine.
We live in a world awash in crisis. Is there a connection between this context and the war in Ukraine? We think there is. The system, the capitalist ground rules, makes it impossible to overcome the existential threats humanity faces. This impossibility fosters the possibility of inter-imperialist war.
Capitalism makes solving the climate crisis impossible. That this crisis is real and a mortal threat to our species and many other is becoming obvious in the year 2022. It’s obvious too for many that green tech is not going to stop it. Competition, the compulsion to grow, and the dependency of that growth on the consumption of ever larger quantities of energy, assure that in regard to the climate, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Capitalism can only try to contain the results of this crisis – the catastrophes, the pandemics, the forced migration, the conflicts over resources – while making its cause worse day by day.
Capitalism cannot solve the social crisis. Worldwide, poverty, hunger, homelessness are spreading. The income gap has grown to absurd proportions. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of billionaires it took to equal the wealth of the world’s poorest 50 percent fell from 380 to 26.
In some countries, the population can’t take it anymore and mass protests erupt, they usely lead to a replacement of the upper management of the state after which things essentially stay the same. It doesn’t matter whether the government is leaning left or right. Conditions vary but the direction is the same everywhere. In South Africa, the gap between rich and poor is now much wider than under apartheid. Not because the government was better back then but because defending the national interest can be nothing else than defending the interest of capital. In times of crisis even a left wing government like Syriza in Greece must first and foremost restore the credibility of the national capital. In the present crisis the value of all existing capital, of all the hoarded assets and money-capital, came under threat. This strikes at the heart of the system: if money cannot be turned into more money, if it cannot be stored without losing value, why produce at all? Hence the policies of the state in defense of the national interest are aimed at saving the profitability of its capital, by lowering its costs (at the expense of the working class) by forking over massive amounts of new money to it. They make the income gap, the growing misery of the many and the concentration of purchasing power in the hands of the few, ever larger.
It’s clear that capitalism cannot solve its economic crisis. Since the “Great Recession” of 2008, world profitability fell to near all-time lows. The collapse was only avoided by borrowing heavily from the future. At the turn of the century, global debt stood at $84 trillion. It has since risen to $296 trillion by 2021. That’s 353% of the total annual income of all countries combined! Inflation is skyrocketing and there is no plan, no prospect of climbing out of the hole by any “normal” means. Increase or reduce taxes, stimulate or rein in spending, reduce or expand the money supply, nothing works against the crisis of the system which is dependent on growth, on the accumulation of value, yet increasingly incapable to accomplish it. The restoration of favorable conditions for value accumulation requires a devaluation of existing capital, an elimination of “dead wood” on a massive scale. Is it a coincidence that in the same period of growing economic insecurity and crisis, global military spending has increased year after year and the number of military conflicts has increased sharply?
Wars are raging and tensions are rising in almost every continent. The US and China accelerated their armament efforts with each other as justification. Global arms spending has increased by 9.3% (in constant dollars) over the past decade and is now topping $2 trillion annually.
Before the 20th century, capitalist wars roughly fall into two categories. The first are wars between rival capitalist states, fought to consolidate the emerging nation-state or to expand its frontiers. They typically led to the redrawing of the borders but not to the expulsion or extermination of populations; they were confined to hostilities between armies.
Secondly, there were wars between capitalist states and pre-capitalist societies. Those were genocidal, and involved the construction of racism to justify the reduction to slavery or the extermination of native populations.
Since the 20th century wars between capitalist states have taken characteristics of the second category, that is, they have become genocidal. The development of military technology made it possible to erase any distinction between combatant and non-combatant, soldier and civilian, and xenophobia and racism made the extermination of the foe – now primarily the civilian population — an integral part of the very structure and organization of war.
In global conflicts , the initiator of the battle more often than not is the intrinsically weaker party, obsessed with the threat of encroachment, seeking the advantage of attacking first. The German demanded ‘lebensraum’ when they started world wars 1 and 2, and now it’s Putin’s Russia’s demand. They always expect a short war.
What does that mean, lebensraum? Space to live, for whom? It means space for capital, control over resources and markets, it means access to profit.
For lack of time, I will skip the specific reasons why Ukraine has become the locus of the war escalation. See on this, my article “Don’t fight for “your” country!”
I want to point out three factors that limit the war for now.
The atomic threshold. It means Russia cannot be attacked directly, even though it is militarily much weaker than the West. That limits the confrontation for now, like in the cold war, which did not really end. But it is no guarantee that a future step by step escalation towards nuclear war is impossible.
Likewise, the globalization of the capitalist economy is a factor that weighed much less in global wars of the past. But again, that’s no guarantee. Even though it’s bad for profits, the war dynamic can lead to a restructuring of trade patterns, as we see already to some extent with the western sanctions and the redirection of Russian trade towards India and China.
The third, most important check on escalation: the lack of social submission. In a limited war, the mobilization of the population can seem unnecessary. Putin, who was counting on a short war, so far managed to limit the impact of the war on the living conditions of the average Russians. He has 150 000 soldiers in Ukraine, only a fraction of his army. Yet there is no draft, there are no conscripts at the front, instead he uses prisoners and mercenaries, Chechens and the Wagner brigade. It shows he doesn’t trust his own army. He does not have the population in his pocket like Hitler had the Germans. Nationalism is both the goal and the condition here. Putin hoped that the war would whip up nationalist fever, redirect the anger of the working class against a foreign enemy. But for that he needs to win the war, lest he tumbles from his pedestal like the Argentine junta after the Falklands war. But to win, he needs to escalate, and to escalate, he needs the nationalist fervor to be present, he needs a population mobilized for war, willing to endure the hardships of war, from which so far he has zealously tried to protect it. It’s a dilemma.
Nationalism is the most essential weapon of capitalism. It is the window through which capital wants us to look at the world. What you see then is the national interest and all the rest follows, including the need for war. When you wave an American, Ukrainian or Russian flag you help to strengthen that view of the world, you make a little contribution to the preparation of future wars, for which nationalism is a requirement. If instead you denounce all nationalism, racism and xenophobia, you help to open another window on the world: one that shows the common interest of all, of the global working class. Then all the rest follows: the need to refuse to fight each other and to fight together against the common enemy, the capitalist system.
We reject fighting for national self-determination. We want self-determination for everyone. Everyone should be free to determine his or her own path. Everyone should be free from exploitation and oppression. All humans share the same basic needs. Meeting those needs must replace profit as the motivation of production, only then real self- determination can flourish.
But we reject self-determination if it means that your interests are the same as those of the rulers of the piece of land where you happen to live, and different from those of people like you who live outside its borders, while the opposite is true. National self-determination means a defense of the state, of its military, of its faction of capital, while our common interest is to do away with them.
Revolutionary defeatism is not a passive stance. It is not pacifism. It involves sabotage, strikes, resistance, both to the Russian and Ukrainian rulers, on an autonomous class basis. While we express the wish that soldiers on both side refuse to obey, refuse to fight and fraternize, we realize the obstacles to this in practice. But it happens to some extent. Thousands have deserted on both sides. If the war escalates, and its consequences are more felt, we may see class resistance rising, in Russia and elsewhere.
Yesterday, The New York Times quoted Oxford professor Goldin who said, “we’re living the biggest development disaster in history, with more people being pushed more quickly into dire poverty than has ever happened before”. The Guardian published a report of the risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, which stated that in 101 countries, there is now a heightened risk of social conflict and instability. Already the UK is experiencing the biggest strike wave in decades. So fasten your seat belts, we’re in for serious social turmoil, in which the core issue will be nation or class: through which window are we going to see our world?
Sanderr
DO SOMETHING!
A common refrain against revolutionary defeatism is that it is nothing more than a slogan, and can do nothing to help those on the front lines. The situation is too dire, we are told, to tout abstract principles and politics of purity. We have to do something!
Well, what are you going to do? To whom will you send your “material support”? The vast majority of the billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine is aid to the Ukrainian state’s war effort. Whom will you lobby to stop the fighting? What will their “peace-keeping actions” look like? All of these efforts will be funneled into the existing power groups to meet on the front lines as fire and blood.
Any “real-world” interventions should start with an analysis of that world. As Marxists, we recognize that capitalism structures this world from top to bottom. All of us are set in motion by it, spending our lives following its perverse, self-perpetuating incentives in order to survive. Even those with the most power have it only so long as they follow its laws. That this war drags on at such great cost to so many should show the immense momentum of this world out of our control. In this era of inter-imperialist conflict, there is no position which can “take a side” without being swept up in the war machine driving the carnage. For the vast majority of humanity, the global working class, there can be no war effort which will fight for their interests.
Wanting to do something for those trapped in this horror is understandable, but waving one flag or another does not make the world a better place. Defense of the nation is always bought at the expense of its subjects. As internationalists, we condemn calls for a longer but more equitable balance sheet of bloodshed.
“Russia’s war in Ukraine [is] a fight for global democracy, experts say”1
When the elite speak of freedom and democracy, duck and take cover!
We know this story all too well. Once our ancestors fought and died to liberate Jerusalem for the one true God, then for King and Country, for the Fatherland, for der Fuhrer, Il Duce, Uncle Joe (Stalin) and worst of all for ethnic nationalism. More generally they fought and died in conflicts claiming to be struggles between good and evil. God is always on the side of the soldier. In WWI they fought to “Make the world safe for democracy” and 30,000,000 deaths later some precarious form of democracy was attained; only to be swallowed by competing powers in the next decade, e.g. the Weimar Republic becomes the Third Reich and back to a democratic republic in a few short years. War needs the patriotic banners; the people need the songs and the sound of trumpets that urge them on to perform heroic deeds on the battlefield and to die for a glorious cause “if necessary.” In short, it would seem that the citizens need lies and democracy provides the most seductive deceit of them all.
What is this lie we call democracy and what is its relationship to war?
The very word democracy is shrouded in distortion and mystification. This mystification contends that when true democracy is achieved and the true sentiments of the people are expressed then the outcome would correspond to humanity’s communal nature conceived as the universal ideal for society. As such it is posited as a stepping-stone in the glorious march towards revolution, liberation, freedom and universal progress. History however, paints a very different picture. Democracy is a delicate mechanism of totalitarian rule that can be dialed to the left or right to spawn democracy’s authoritarian form. This tyranny and this tyrant are not counter to democracy but rather part of its safety valve. The tyrant is always waiting in the wings, ready to evoke a “state of exception” and assume authoritarian power. When the crisis ends and the world is safe for capitalism, some form of popular tyranny returns claiming to represent the people’s will. Democracy and its advocacy is above all the primary locus of class collaboration, the anti-chamber for counter-revolution and war.1 It is also conceived as a politically neutral form of governance that implements the will of the citizenry, but, not always with a humanitarian outcome.
Even in ancient Athens the democratic form enabled a popular tyranny. For instance, in 462 BCE the Athenian “democratic” Assembly voted to assist the Spartans’ repression of a slave revolt. An army of 4000 Athenian Hoplites slaughtered 30,000 Helot slaves. On the Island of Melos during the Peloponnesian war the Athenian “democratic” Assembly voted to kill all men and enslave all women and children on the island because of their refusal to pay tribute. Need we point out that modern democracies have been quite comfortable with brutal colonization, slavery, imperialist war and genocide? There is nothing about democracy that guarantees a peaceful humanitarian outcome. What is the real content of democracy in time of war? It is to forge a national identity where oligarchs, right wing militias, bankers and workers all identify first and foremost with the nation as Ukrainians, as Russians etc.
The democratic machinery serves primarily to modulate the congenital conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in a way that guarantees the permanent asymmetry of power in the favor of capital. To share in even a miniscule slice of power within the democratic machinery the workers must relinquish their revolutionary impulses. In other words in order to collaborate they must compromise to the point of self-betrayal. In times of war this betrayal becomes a death march into battle.
The best example we have of this form of collaboration was during the pre WWI years in Germany. The German Socialist Party (SPD) was organizing peace marches on the one hand while declaring their assurance that socialists would defend the Nation in the event of war with Russia on the other. Gustav Noske, in a much discussed speech in the Reichstag on March 25, 1907 assured his listeners that in case Germany were attacked, Social Democrats would fight for the country with the same “loyalty and devotion” as the bourgeois parties….” As early as 1907 at the Party Congress of Essen Bebel said: If ever we should really be called upon to defend the fatherland, we will defend it because it is our fatherland, the soil on which we live.
It is not by accident that Ukraine is suddenly lauded as a modern liberal democracy, fighting heroically as the veritable vanguard of international freedom, while the press largely ignores the actual conditions in pre-war Ukraine. The list of Ukrainian oligarchs that have their greedy hands in all sectors of the economy, who have significant control over local and national politics, who employ private armies and share close relations with right wing militias, closely resembles the balance of forces we can see in Putin’s Russia. Is this really an international fight to “make the world safe for democracy” once again! Or is it to make the world safe for the Ukrainian oligarch, the Russian and American imperialist or the everyday kleptocrat?
Defining democracy or delineating its functions is difficult to say the least.
Claude Lefort, along with numerous left social critics, argue that democracy is a revolutionary mode of governing precisely because it posits a “system founded on its own lack of a foundation;” meaning that it expresses the unmediated will of the people in form and content. But democracy does have a foundation, a foundation that mostly goes unnamed: We call it Money, “the bond of all bonds… that is also the universal agent of separation.2 Democracy’s great value for Capital is its ability to conceal the ensemble of practices that constitutes the modern mode of production. This is not merely a mode of self-governance it is a mode of subjectivation i.e. shaping and controlling the democratic subject. This control is also a form of self-control one that is perceived positively by the subject. Democratic man sees his chains but is comforted by the fact that he can wave his arms to the right or left and know that the decision was his.
Democracy is a specialized form of political domination deployed as a universal objective value, it is set in place as a political end or ideal for society by an elite whose real power over society is not political at all but is grounded in an all-pervasive economic exploitation.3
This definition, borrowed from the journal Anarchy, captures the essential nature of democracy and will be expanded in a future text. We will just add here that democracy is not merely a form of political domination; it is also a form of generalized social domination that plays an essential part in the reproduction of capitalism. In other words, the democratic state is a bourgeois state i.e. a capitalist state, not because the bourgeoisie holds the positions of power but because it is itself the political expression of capital with an essential parallel development to the evolution of capitalism. This is to say that the state was and is an essential component of the capitalist mode of production; it makes it possible to own property without actually possessing it or occupying it, to insure that the laws, especially contract laws, are applied equally, to collect taxes, to manage the state debt, to insure the stability of the currency, to maintain the forces of order etc. All political tendencies and economic demands since capitalism became a system of exploitation must operate within this framework irrespective of discursive tendencies, right or left.
This war in not about democracy, it is unambiguously an imperialist war and cannot be supported on any side by the revolutionary left. The western powers will tap into all of the mystifications regarding “freedom,” ‘democracy,” the “fatherland,” “blood and soil,” the “Nation,” and if none of this works Gods themselves will enter the fight.
When the left worries about the isolation that may result from taking a revolutionary position we should remember Karl Liebknecht who stood alone in the Reichstag on December 2, 1914 and declared
A speedy peace, a peace without conquests, this is what we must demand…..
Only a peace based upon the international solidarity of the working class and on the liberty of all the peoples can be a lasting peace….. I vote against the war credits demanded.
Berlin: December 2, 1914
Today the imperialist swindlers are in control of both warring powers, and no matter who wins this conflict the working class of both countries will lose. Peace will not bring security and permanent warfare will be our future. The only choice today is the same as Rosa Luxemburg so forcefully declared at the outbreak of WWI: Today the choice is not between war and peace, the choice today is between socialism and barbarism.4
B. York
4/24/2022
1 See “ Hostetter, Richard. “The SPD and the General Strike as an Anti-war Weapon, 1905-1914”In 1900 August Babel, one of the co-founders of the German Socialist Party told the Reichstag that “…if it came to a war with Russia… I would be ready, old boy that I am, to shoulder a gun against her…. In the 1906 Party Manual with the line “The Social Democracy recognizes that the nation …. Cannot be left defenseless.
2 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844 p.377
3 Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #60, Fall/Winter 2005–06, Vol. 23, No. 2.
The following powerful text was written by the comrades of La Oveja Negra in Argentina.
No war is easy to understand, no “geopolitical” situation is simple to grasp. Even less so when it is assumed that there are no social classes in the world: there are only countries, leaders and political ideologies. Thus, there are those who support and justify the massacres and the horror of war. There are those who forget or want to make people forget that wars are fought for money. As comrades in Russia point out at this moment, behind the war there are only the interests of those who hold political, economic and military power: “For us, workers, pensioners, students, it brings only suffering, blood and death. The siege of peaceful cities, the bombings, the killing of people have no justification.” (leaflet of the Section of the International Workers’ Association of the Russian Region KRAS-AIT)
War makes explicit the horror of a society based on accumulation and profit. It is capitalist peace by other means. What is happening in Ukraine is added to the wars and invasions that unfortunately are nothing new (Palestine, Yemen, Syria) and to the millions of dead from hunger, misery, work, preventable diseases or suicide.
In conflict zones, there are also deaths and hardships due to bombings, lack of water, food, medicine, shelter and energy. Just as it also happens in refugee camps, in prisons, on the front lines. They recruit proletarians from different countries to massacre each other for the interests of their exploiters and rulers, for the interests of the bourgeoisie! They imprison those in Russia who oppose the war and manifest it publicly and collectively. They militarize and increase the intensity of labor while imposing more austerity measures. This is war! These are the wars against the proletariat!
War is the sphere of controlled destruction, of premeditated disaster, of the management and administration of death and misery. This competition is inherent to Capital. Proletarians fight, die and suffer the state of war in the name of one or another bloc, when we proletarians have no fatherland or nation to defend. As Marx pointed out: “The worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, for his nationality is labor, free slavery, the sale of himself and of his own labor. He is not governed by France, England or Germany, but by capital. The air of his land is neither French, nor English, nor German, but the air of the factory. The soil that is his, is neither French, nor English, nor German, but awaits him six feet under. Above ground, money is the industrialist’s homeland.”1
Despite everything, there are those who, determined to belong to or identify themselves with some capitalist, that is to say, murderous side, justify one war or another, one attack or another, one State or another. With stale arguments, be they Stalinist or liberal, fascist or anti-fascist, even anti-imperialist, they all concentrate on propping up exploitation and oppression: capitalism.
Of course, there are differences, just because they are all shit does not mean they are the same shit: Zelensky, Biden, Putin, NATO, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, Russian neo-Nazis. The leaders of states, their conflicts and alliances, their peace and wars, their developments and destructions, their sciences and religions, their humanitarian aids and security controls all serve only one interest: to maintain the dominance of social peace, which is nothing but the peace of the cemeteries.
There is not, nor was there, nor will there ever be “good” or “bad” bourgeois leaders, “good” or “bad” bourgeois parties; nor does it make sense to speak of “good” or “bad” nations or States. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, the interest of the bourgeois class is and will always be at war with the proletariat. Labor, exploitation, misery and war are the concrete forms of this interest.
In war and in peace we adjust ourselves “for the interests of the country”. But as we have been saying for decades and decades on all continents: the enemy is also “in our own country”, it is “our” bourgeoisie.
The revolutionary strength of the proletariat depends on its capacity to fight against the different bourgeois fractions, against the different forms of domination that Capital deploys. It is in this sense that in the face of every bourgeois war the revolutionaries stand in solidarity with their peers in other regions and, as they have done in the past, today raise and will always raise an internationalist and revolutionary slogan against war. These slogans may not currently have the necessary force to be a mass practice of the proletariat, but they are nonetheless a direction and perspective.
In peaceful and deathly Argentina, the governments lower the social wage for the good of the country, the false critics tell us that the problem is not the local bourgeoisie but the IMF. They speak to us of “people” as if in this land there were only national interests and no class interests. Thereby, they want to tame us and prepare us for even worse conditions, or even for war. In Ukraine, martial law has been decreed to repress all kinds of actions considered unpatriotic, unleashing in turn a violent campaign against people who shoplift or engage in looting. In the rest of the world, the worsening of living conditions as a result of the war has already begun. Both in the countries directly involved, in their neighbors in Europe, and in the rest of the world, it will be the proletariat who will pay the costs. When the “war” on the virus seemed to be over, another one has begun. A new justification to tighten our belts. In Argentina, during the first week of March, flour increased 52% in four days. Since the beginning of the conflict, the prices of the basic ingredients of the poor nutrition in this region have skyrocketed. And there are still those who think that they decide the course of the country because they vote every few years.
Everybody hates war. Most of all the people who send other people to die on the battlefield. They claim that they abhor it, but alas, they’re forced to it by the other side. The other side, which is encroaching on our traditional hunting grounds. The other side, which is invading a “sovereign” nation. We have no choice! We must defend ourselves… Which “we” are you a part of? Relentless propaganda on both sides pushes everyone to pick a side, to become an active participant or cheerleader in the war. Because the other side is truly horrific. And it always is.
The Russian army is accused of war crimes. A strange term, “war crime.” A redundant one, really, because war is by definition a crime, the greatest of all crimes. Whatever the goal, the means are always mass murder and destruction. There is no war without atrocious massacres. The term suggests that there are two ways of waging war: a civilized one and a criminal one. If ever there was a difference between the two, it was erased by advances in military technology. Since the early 20th century, the percentage of civilian casualties in wars has grown steadily. In the 19th century American Civil War, military personnel still accounted for more than 90% of total war deaths. In World War I, civilian casualties were 59% of the total. In the second it rose to 63%, and in the Vietnam War to 67%. In the various wars of the 1980s it climbed to 74% and in the 21st century to 90%. Not since World War II have so many people been displaced by war. The difference between combatants and non-combatants, between military and non-military targets, has largely disappeared in contemporary warfare. The greater destructive force each side deploys, the greater the “collateral damage” to the civilian population. The more the war in Ukraine escalates, the more lives of ordinary Ukrainians are destroyed, the more the country becomes a ruin.
What constitutes a war crime or not then becomes a matter of opinion. Like “terrorism,” which has become a cheap swear word that everyone hurls at the opponent in every conflict, it is an excuse disguised as an accusation. Because “terrorism”, having been defined by mass media and politicians as the greatest of all evils, implies that all means are good to suppress it, and is thus the cut-and-dried excuse for using terror oneself. Likewise, the accusation of ‘war crimes’ justifies the crimes ‘our own’ side commits, which ‘our’ media barely mention, or sometimes not at all. Think of Yemen for example, where the Saudi forces have bombed and starved civilians much worse than the Russian army so far has done in Ukraine. The Saudi air force would hardly have lasted a week without British and American military/technical support and supply of weapons. Is that too “a war for democracy”? This atrocity is ongoing, outside the media spotlights. Move along, nothing to see. No war crimes here.
Modern war
It has often been observed that in wartime the line between propaganda and reporting becomes difficult to perceive. When the Russian army carries out a (failed) missile attack on the television tower in Kyiv, the Western media call it a war crime. But when NATO (successfully) bombed Belgrade’s radio and TV tower in 1999, it was “a legitimate military target.”
That the Russian army’s “special military operations” are criminal has been abundantly proven in Grozny and Aleppo, to name only the most extreme recent examples of cities it reduced to rubble. In Ukraine it has not yet gone this far, perhaps because the pretext for the invasion is that the Ukrainians are a brotherly people who must be liberated. But to achieve its military goals, Russia must step up the war and overwhelm that “brother people” with its superior power of destruction. The logic of war drives the Russian invasion toward an escalation of devastation.
Let us not pretend that this is a Russian phenomenon. During the Gulf Wars, the Americans bombed shelters (with bombs designed to crush bunkers) in Baghdad resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. Many more died when fleeing soldiers were massacred from the air on the “highway of death” in 1991. In the wars the West fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 380,000 civilians died. The countless drone attacks that the U.S. military has carried out since then also show no respect for the difference between combatants and non-combatants. Not to mention what Washington’s most loyal vassal Israel has done in Gaza. They are all capable of it. This is modern warfare.
War is the ideal framework for tightening the grip of the state over its citizens. That is abundantly clear now in Russia, where you risk 15 years in prison if you call the war a war, where protests against the war are brutally suppressed, where all media that are not mouthpieces of the Kremlin are silenced. But it points to the weakness of the regime that it needs this naked repression. There is no doubt that this is not the case in Ukraine. There, everyone stands behind Zelensky. That is, as far as we are allowed to know. In the many interviews with Ukrainians on Western media, you never hear someone express opposition or even doubts about the war, although we know, from social media and our own sources, that they do exist. But according to the media, everyone there is willing to die for the nation. Yet Zelensky found it necessary to issue a ban on all men from 18 to 60 years of age from leaving the country. Everyone must remain available as cannon fodder for the homeland. He also found it necessary to ban opposition parties and force all television news channels to combine in “a single information platform of strategic communication” called “United News.” All in the name of the defense of freedom. Of course, the media that call on Ukrainians to kill as many “Russian cockroaches” as possible can continue to spew their poison. Many western media — even papers like the New York Times — chose not to report Zelensky’s authoritarian measures. The Times’ famous motto says “all the news that’s fit to print,” and this kind of news does not fit the story that this is a war for democracy.
Liars
The Russian and Ukrainian governments both claim the censorship is necessary to protect the population from misinformation. That’s another slippery word. Like “war crime” and “terrorism,” it is “in the eye of the beholder.” Of course, misinformation is teeming in social and other media. But who decides what it is? In Russia, the state decides who can speak and who must remain silent. In the West, that task is largely outsourced to the private sector, the companies that control the mass media and social media platforms. But they too are being prodded by the government. “We will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the EU. The state-owned companies Russia Today and Sputnik and their subsidiaries must no longer be allowed to spread their lies that justify Putin’s war. We are developing instruments to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. And indeed, loyal Russian news channels and other sources that do not follow the pro-Western line are no longer accessible on Facebook and other major social media outlets. But don’t call it censorship, that’s what the enemy does.
Russians and Westerners each get a very different picture of the war. They are being lied to, especially by what their media choose to show or not show. For example, the Russian viewer sees time and again images of Ukrainians telling them they were beaten and threatened by ultra-nationalists because they spoke Russian and the Western viewer sees time and again mothers saying goodbye with tears in their eyes to their husbands who say they are willing to die for Ukraine. Both kinds of images are presumably real but each side chooses to show what fits in their propaganda narrative.
In the West, the story is about a gritty underdog bravely defending himself against a vicious bully. Of course we cheer for the brave heroes, of course we help them, of course we wave the yellow blue flag. It’s as simple as that.
soo simple
Russia’s story is not very sophisticated, it’s a grab-all of accusations in the boorish style of the former USSR. Ukraine is suffering under a corrupt, neo-Nazi, genocidal regime. We are not waging war against Ukraine, we are just preventing it from becoming an outpost of NATO, a threat to our homeland. We’re fighting for a world without Nazis. With the same kind of transparent pretexts, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and Prague at the time. As in every propaganda story, there is a grain of truth. The push of NATO is real. There is an ultra-nationalist current in Ukraine. There are fascist groups like Svoboda and the Azov Battalion (now integrated in the Ukrainian army) that attack gays, feminists, Roma and Russian speakers. Of course, Ukraine is far from the only country where the far right is rearing its ugly head. It does not mean that the political system in Ukraine is fascist. Less so than in Russia at least. And genocidal? What the Russian military did in Syria and Chechnya was immeasurably worse.
Those who want to beat a dog will always find a stick. All states lie when their armies go out. The US as well as Russia. Think of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and his non-existent ties to Al Qaeda that were the pretexts for the US invasion of Iraq.
The true story
The true story is called inter-imperialism. For however global the world has become, it is a world based on competition. Commercial competition that becomes military competition, cold and hot war, as circumstances require. Circumstances like loss of power, loss or potential gains of markets, economic crisis. We live in a system that brutally clashes with the needs of humanity. A system at war with the planet, at war with life itself. Fighting back, defeating the capitalist system, is the only war that makes sense.
The cold war did not end. At most, there was a pause. The Warsaw Pact disappeared but NATO did not. Yeltsin suggested that Russia should also become a member of it but of course that was not possible: the NATO’s raison d’être was to subdue Russia. A fierce discussion ensued about whether NATO was still needed now that Russia had also become a capitalist democratic country. The question was answered affirmatively in practice. NATO advanced to Russia’s borders, breaking earlier promises. Fourteen ex-Warsaw pact countries were integrated in the anti-Russian alliance. American missile bases were installed in Poland and Romania. Capturing Ukraine was the latest phase of that offensive. For profit but even more so to contain Russia. Ukraine did not yet become a NATO member but began to cooperate militarily with the West.
The expansion of NATO meant a huge market expansion for the American (and other Western) arms industry because new members are required to make their arsenals conform to NATO standards. In order to meet these norms Poland’s military spending increased with 60% from 2011 to 2020 and Hungary’s with 133% from 2014 to 2020. The cash register was ringing. But the NATO expansion was also driven by the realization that Russia, with its military might and especially its nuclear arsenal, remained a potential threat to the pax americana. It is still the only country against which the US cannot wage war against without risking quasi-total destruction itself. Just like during the cold war. Which thus did not end. Washington’s strategy has remained the same: containment. To contain Russia and to reduce its sphere of influence, to weaken its power without entering into direct conflict with it. During the Cold War, this conflict was fought out with coup d’états and national liberation movements. Now Ukraine is the eager volunteer to die for the “free west,” led by the “sympathetic” actor and millionaire Zelensky who is so bellicose that, like Che Guevara during the Cuban missile crisis, he wants to escalate the conflict to a world war if necessary. That would be the risk if his demand for a “no fly zone” — an air war between NATO and Russia — were granted. Like Che, he will not get his way. Direct confrontation remains taboo. That is one reason why drawing parallels with pre-nuclear wars can be misleading.
The enemy can no longer be portrayed as the “communist danger” but that does not make Russia an ordinary capitalist country like ours. The rich there are not capitalists like ours but “oligarchs.” Who are they, these oligarchs? Billionaires who became rich thanks to corruption, exploitation and speculation and who like to show off their fortune in ostentatious luxury consumption. In other words, capitalists. The adage “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” was not invented in Russia. But there “the great crime” is still quite fresh. The new capitalist class in Russia consists in large part of members of the old capitalist class, people who were factory-directors, party-bosses, bureaucrats in the pseudo-communist USSR, and who made out like bandits when state assets were privatized. The privileged class remained the privileged class, now as private capital owners. But as managers of the state as well. The interests of private capitalists are intertwined with and subject to the state apparatus that Putin seems to have firmly in hand for now.
The disbandment of the old USSR and privatization of the ‘central command’ state-capitalist economy was the result of a crisis caused in the first place by the crushing cost of maintaining an empire and the unwillingness of the working class to work harder for less. But the desire of members of the ruling class to be not only managers of capital but also private owners of capital, with access to the whole world of capital, was an important factor as well.
They plundered the economy while the average standard of living sank like a stone. Russia’s GDP in 1998 was only a little more than a third of what it was in the last year of the USSR. Industrial production had declined 60%. But starting in 1999 the prices of Russia’s main export product, oil and gas, began to rise. This fueled a recovery which improved living conditions. The state consolidated, with the security apparatus at the center of power. With Putin, an ex-KGB colonel, at the helm, Russia began to reassert itself. The army was rebuilt to such an extent that the arms industry (which employs more than 2.5 million Russians) struggled with overproduction. That army bloodily restored “order” in the interior (Chechnya) in border states (Georgia, Kazakhstan) and outside (Syria).
But in 2015 industrial production was still below the 1990 level. Only the oil and gas sector exceeded pre-privatization production levels. But that year, the oil price began to slide again and so did the Russian economy. GDP fell from $2.29 trillion in 2013 to $1.48 trillion in 2020, less than that of Texas.
So the challenge to Russian capital was multifold:
– to defend the market position of its main export-industry, oil and gas;
– to reduce its dependency from it: with its wild price swings and uncertain future, it is an unreliable crutch for a crippled economy;
– to either shrink its overproducing military industry or increase the use of its products;
– to hide the fact that it has nothing to offer to the working class, to distract the proletarians from their miserable conditions, by engaging them in a campaign of national pride against a foreign enemy who is to blame for the deteriorating conditions of survival.
It is a recipe for imperialist aggression.
Ukraine is an attractive booty. It has the world’s largest iron ore reserves, gas and other mineral resources, excellent farmland, industry, shipbuilding, ports… it also has a modern arms industry, a rival to Russia’s, which is one reason why Moscow insists that Ukraine be “demilitarized.” And then there are the pipelines that carry the Russian gas and oil through Ukraine to western Europe. Of course Russia wants to control them.
Russia provides 45% of the European gas imports through those pipelines, but in recent years the US has nibbled at its market. Russia is the third largest natural gas producer in the world. The US is the largest, and its gas industry has known a prodigious growth, thanks to new and ecologically damaging ways of extracting it (fracking). However, lately it has been struggling with overcapacity and aggressively seeking new markets. Since 2018 its export to most EU-countries and the UK has been growing fast. The exception was Germany, the terminus of the new Nordstream 2 pipeline under the Baltic sea that bypasses Ukraine. It’s not in use yet, and as things look now, it might never be used at all. It was German capital’s hope for a stable cost-effective energy supply and expanding trade relations with Russia in general. Now Germany is back in the fold, investing in new terminals for receiving liquefied gas from the US. Heavily polluting coal-fired power plants are getting a new lease on life. The EU commission announced a plan to reduce Russian gas imports by two thirds by next winter and end them by 2027. Even though that goal may not be reached entirely, the direction is clear. In as much as the war in Ukraine is a war over the European energy market — and that is clearly part of the picture — the US has already won.
The current war does not come out of the blue. The struggle over Ukraine has been going on since 2008. In 2014, that struggle became a war. Since then, Ukrainians and Russians have been inundated with patriotic war propaganda. Ukrainians have the misfortune of living in the country that neither Moscow nor Washington want to cede to each other. It is reminiscent of King Solomon’s judgment: two women both claimed motherhood of a baby. Solomon said: then I will chop the baby in two and give you each half. To which the real mother said: no, give him to her intact. But in the case of baby Ukraine both women say: chop it.
Desert !
Fake news and real news are now so mixed that it is difficult to understand what exactly is happening in Ukraine and Russia. For example, on February 27 we were told that thirteen Ukrainian soldiers on “Snake Island” had chosen to die for the fatherland. “Fuck you,” is how they would have responded to a Russian warship’s demand to surrender. In Ukrainian and all Western media their heroism was praised to the skies. Their statue was already being ordered, so to speak. It was hard to believe. Were those soldiers so intoxicated by propaganda that they embraced a useless death? Like suicide bombers, did they hope to be rewarded in the afterlife? No one benefits from their deaths. They should not be celebrated as heroes but mourned as victims of patriotic insanity.
Fortunately, it turned out pretty quickly that the soldiers had wisely surrendered after all. Whew. Even after they were shown alive and well on Russian TV, many media outlets in the west failed to report it.
Fighting for the homeland is not in the interest of the vast majority of the population of Ukraine. Whatever the advantages of living in a country integrated into NATO and the EU, they do not outweigh the disadvantages of war. When, in a few weeks, months or years, the guns fall silent and the smoke above the bombed cities dissipates, the Ukrainians will have a poisoned country full of ruins and mass graves. And Western countries will likely be less generous with money for reconstruction than they are now with weapons.
Suppose that Ukraine “wins” the war, what will the people there have gained? The “honor of the nation”? Freedom? After the war ends Zelensky and Ukraine’s own “oligarchs” will still be wealthy, but only deep misery awaits ‘ordinary’ Ukrainians.
The best news we’ve heard about the war is that some Russian soldiers are sabotaging their own equipment and are deserting. How many is unclear. We can only hope that the desertion will become massive. On both sides. That Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fraternize and turn their weapons against their leaders who sent them to their death. That Russian and Ukrainian workers strike against the war. Peace demonstrations alone cannot stop the war if the population continues to endure the war and all its consequences. It becomes possible only when the great mass, the working class, turns against the war. World War I was stopped by the working class’s revolt against war, first in Russia in 1917 and a year later in Germany. But that was some time ago. Today there is no atmosphere of mass rebellion in Russia but the disastrous consequences of the war may awaken a sleeping giant.
In both Russia and Ukraine, the gap between rich and poor has increased steeply. In both countries, the “oligarchs” (Putin and Zelensky included) hide fortunes in offshore tax havens and pay little or no taxes. Meanwhile, real average wages in Ukraine have not been raised in twelve years while prices have risen sharply. Social spending has been cut by successive Ukrainian governments from 20% of the budget in 2014 to 13% today. The vast majority of the Ukrainian population was already poor and will be much poorer after the war. Its interests and those of the ruling class are not the same. Just like in Russia. In Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are killing each other for interests that are antagonistic to their own.
Hiding for bombs under a destroyed bridge
A Coincidence?
We don’t know how this war will end. Perhaps there will be some kind of compromise that will allow both camps to claim they have won and that in fact is just a breather in anticipation of the next war.
Since the “Great Recession” of 2008, the global economy has been in deep crisis. World profitability fell to near all-time lows. The collapse was only avoided by creating gigantic amounts of money and borrowing heavily from the future. At the turn of the century, global debt stood at $84 trillion. When the 2008 crisis began, the meter stood at 173 trillion. It has since risen 71% to 296 trillion by 2021. That’s 353% of the total annual income of all countries combined!
Inflation is skyrocketing and there is no plan, no prospect of climbing out of the hole by any “normal” means. Increase or reduce taxes, stimulate or rein in spending, reduce or expand the money supply, nothing works against the crisis of the system which is dependent on growth, on the accumulation of value, yet increasingly incapable to accomplish it. The restoration of favorable conditions for value accumulation requires a devaluation of existing capital, an elimination of “dead wood” on a massive scale.
Wars are raging and tensions are rising in just about every continent. The US and China accelerated their armament efforts with each other as justification. Global arms spending has increased by 9.3% (in constant dollars) over the past decade and is now topping $2 trillion annually. The biggest spender by far is the US (778 billion in 2020, an annual increase of 4.4%) dwarfing all others, including Russia (61 billion in 2020, an increase of 2.5%). Total military spending in Europe in 2020 was 16% higher than in 2011. Even the pandemic-triggered recession did not put a brake on the trend. In 2020, while global GDP shrank by 4.4%, global arms spending increased by 3.9% and in 2021 by 3.4%. The war in Ukraine is accelerating the process. Business will boom for arms producers in the coming years.
Europe is once again the locus of a possible world conflagration. But there are important differences from comparable moments in the history of the last century. First: The nuclear factor is putting a brake on escalation. Second difference: the economy is more global than ever. The interests are intertwined. You cannot punish your enemy economically without cutting into your own flesh. Russia is only the eleventh largest economy and its main export, oil and gas, was largely spared from sanctions for now. While Europe sends weapons en masse to Ukraine to fight Russia, Russian oil and gas continue to flow to Europe through Ukraine. The mutual dependence limits escalation.
But both these brakes on escalation are no ironclad guarantee. The red line which the military powers are supposed not to cross may become a matter of interpretation, especially for the losing side. Russia made public in 2020 a new Presidential directive on nuclear deterrence lowering the nuclear threshold “to avoid the escalation of military actions and the termination of such actions on conditions that are unacceptable to Russia and its allies.”The threshold may be lowered by the use of “dirty bombs” (that combine conventional explosives with radioactive material), chemical or biological weapons. From there an escalation to tactical nuclear weapons may not seem such a big step. And so on. To trust in the sanity of the ruling class to avoid such a course would be foolish.
The intertwining of economic interests is no guarantee either. This is what the present moment makes clear. The war is disastrous for the economies of both Russia and Ukraine. The capitalist class in both countries will make less profit as a result. The world economy as a whole will suffer as well. Especially from the economic sanctions, which have been surprising in their severity. It’s all bad for profit and yet the hunt for profit is what sets it in motion. The war and the sanctions will accelerate and deepen the coming recession which was becoming inevitable anyway. Now the war can be blamed for it. Biden will call it “Putin’s recession”. Putin will blame the West’s economic war on Russia.
The hardening of the sanctions regime after the war would signify a preparation for future conflict. It would mean that, in the current dynamic of capitalism, profits are sacrificed for the sake of winning the war. Being protectionist, the sanctions go against the globalizing tendency of profit-seeking. Trade relations are broken, logistical ties are cut. But in the war economy they would be reorganized. The targets of the sanctions — Russia, Iran, North Korea and in the future possibly China — may band together against the common enemy. The geostrategic implications of the war will be the subject of another article. The point here is that we cannot trust in globalization to protect us from global war.
But there is a third, crucial difference with pre-world war moments of the past. It is about consciousness. What any ruling class needs to submit its own population to an all out war effort, is the destruction of class consciousness, the atomization of individuals and their unification in the phony community of the nation. Putin isn’t there yet. He does not have the Russian people in his pocket like Hitler had the Germans. It’s true that despite the numerous protests in Russia against the war, resistance against it remained limited for now. But patriotic manifestations of support for Putin were nowhere to be seen, aside from one mass meeting in which many were pressured by the state to participate. Putin, aside from his military capabilities, cannot escalate the war as Hitler could because his ideological control is too weak. On the other hand, that is why he must escalate: without a victory, he risks falling off his pedestal like the Argentine junta after the Falklands defeat.
Similarly, in most other countries with a tradition of social struggle, ideological control is too weak to drag the population into a large-scale war. But it is being worked on. We are being molded. We are learning to revere soldiers as heroes again, we are learning to cheer for victories on the battlefield again, we are learning to accept that we must make sacrifices for the war effort. And while there are no national solutions to any of our problems — economic crisis, climate disruption, pandemics, impoverishment, etc. — we are learning that there is nothing more beautiful than fighting for borders, dying for the homeland.
Don’t let them format you. As Karl Liebknecht concluded his appeal for revolutionary defeatism in 1915: “Enough and more than enough slaughter! Down with the war instigators here and abroad! An end to genocide!”
Sanderr
3/23/2022
Sources of military data: Sipri, IISS, Ruth Leger Sivard. Economic data: IMF, World Bank, Bloomberg News, Macrotrends.
The onslaught of the Russian military against the population of Ukraine is grotesque. Cruise and ballistic missiles and tanks are used indiscriminately against residential areas in cities and towns, and within days of its launch a million refugees and displaced people flooded the roads and railways; such numbers have not been seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Internationalist Perspective will comment more as the situation unfolds. There are many aspects to this war but, for now, we want to stress a few key points.
The geo-political context for the current war is the rivalry between Russia and the Western powers in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite its assurances in the early 1990s, NATO moved east, absorbing several of the former Warsaw Pact countries and pushing right up against Russia’s borders. Over the decades since, Russia has been involved in several wars to prevent further fragmentation and to push back against Western encroachment: two Chechen wars, another in Georgia, and – following the replacement of pro-Russian by pro-Western leaders in Ukraine – the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas area (in 2014). Following the recent crushing of popular revolts and bourgeois faction fights in Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russian forces were in a position to increase the ongoing pressure on Ukraine.
While antagonism between Russia and the West never disappeared, the logic of capitalist economics drew both together in an unprecedented way. The Yeltsin auctions of state assets led to the wholesale fleecing and impoverishment of the Russian population by Western banks and other investors, and by the newly-created home-grown (so-called) oligarchs. However, Russia did not become a true oligarchy, as political power was seized by factions inside the state security apparatus from which emerged Putin as the leader. Putin effectively gave the oligarchs a life-rent: if they did what he told them to do, and stayed out of politics, they could keep their lives. Their wealth had to be hoarded of course and this required its laundering in the West, a need the global financial system was pleased to meet. The US, UK and Switzerland as well as their own and others’ offshore financial jurisdictions profited hugely. Not only finance, but raw materials and supply chains all became more and more tightly interwoven: as is well-known, Russian gas and oil have become increasingly important to Western Europe, especially Germany.
The tightening of economic ties and the heightening of geo-political tensions have led to the contradictions in the current situation. Germany needs Russian energy, London needs Russian money; neither needs a hot war in Europe. During the Cold War conflict was outsourced to ‘national liberation struggles’ round the world. The Russian military entered a decade of hot combat in Afghanistan in 1978; NATO forces did the same for twenty years with their ‘War on Terror’ after 2001. And now, once again, both sides are up against each other in Europe. This has shocked the West; some American and British journalists describe the refugees as ‘looking just like us’ and ‘living just like us’, differentiating these Europeans from the non-white-skinned peoples the West usually pulverises in its own refugee-creation programmes.
The brutality of the attacks on the population by invading forces is deepening identification with the Ukrainian state – understandable given previous behaviour of the army that razed Grozny in an act of the utmost barbarism, behaviour that was repeated in Syria in support of the Assad regime. No wonder the will to resist the same fate is so great. But this has the effect of weakening the working class’s defence of its own interests. And not just in Ukraine, it reinforces the force of nationalism in other countries too. With eight years of war against Russia, the population has been groomed in nationalism by the state and the bourgeois class in general. This nationalism also dovetails into the democratic ideology that over twenty years out of the Russian orbit has made more credible.
However, it has not been the same in Russia. While lauding the results of fraudulent elections, the Putin-ruled state has repressed the population continuously, imprisoning and murdering protestors, and executing rivals abroad. The state’s achievement has been to politically anaesthetise the bulk of the population. The bulk of wildcat strikes seem to be over non-payment of wages; only very rarely have there been massive movements such as in the Amur region in 2020.
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers that pressured the Russian government in the Chechen wars is only a memory from more than a generation ago, in another era. Today, Russian law deems it illegal to send conscripts to combat zones; but there are recent reports of conscripts being forced to sign contracts to legalise their use in Ukraine. This would contribute to low morale in the invading army, and to make the desertions being reported plausible. It seems that the ruling clique around Putin has not prepared its army for the invasion; there are indications that the invasion plan was confined to the highest echelons in the state, and there are even reports of some soldiers not knowing where they were.
Putin’s action seems to have strengthened the West’s resolve, and NATO in particular. Contributions, especially from Germany, have been substantially increased. Other countries are taking stock of what is at stake here and considering the ramifications. China in particular has an interest through its alliance with Russia; we shall see whether or not Xi approves of Putin’s actions, given the strengthening of the Western alliances and the threat to his efforts to increase trade with Ukraine have all to be put into his calculations. Even the US is affected domestically, as the Republican Party is now having to consider its factionalism over Trump in the context of patriotism.
Capitalism is a crime against humanity. Only the working class can end it. Yet it is more than a century since the last revolutionary wave and there is no personal memory of it left. The experiences in Ukraine and Russia show how difficult it is for the proletariat to react on its own terrain, with its own organisation. Fraternisation between the troops would be a wonderful start. So would anti-war strikes by Russian workers.
Internationalist Perspective
2 March 2022
A bomb shelter in Kiev
The following text was published by the group Class War on February 24
Proletarians in Russia and in the Ukraine! On production front and military front… Comrades!
Proletarians in Russian uniform. For years now, you have been sent around the world to protect the interests of “the Russian Nation”. It started with “defending territorial integrity of Russia” against North Caucasian separatists, then continued with “protecting Ossetians in Georgia” only to culminate in “protecting Russian brothers and sisters against Bandera’s hordes in Ukraine” and “legitimate government of Syria, against Islamist terrorists”.
The similar story was told to generations of proletarians, both “soldiers” and “civilians” in every previous capitalist conflict all over the world in order to make them bleed on military front or in factories behind the lines, on the production front, on the home front… They were fighting for “Tsar” or “Socialism” or “Nation” or “Democracy” or “Lebensraum” or “Christianity” or “Islam”. And the same fairy tale is told to proletarians in uniform of USA, Turkey, UK, Israel, Ukraine, Assad-controlled Syria, Daesh, Rojava, Georgia, Donetsk and Lugansk, Iran, regions managed by Hezbollah, Hamas… and any other national, regional, religious or other false community.
Proletarians in Ukrainian uniform. Your own bourgeoisie makes you believe that you have a homeland to defend against the “Russian aggressor”, that you should join your own exploiters and demand Ukraine to accede to the European Union or NATO. But like all proletarians everywhere in the world, you have only your chains of wage slaves to lose.
Proletarians on the home front. Once again, you are being told to sacrifice yourself, to be “more productive”, to be “more flexible”, to “postpone” the satisfaction of your immediate needs (even to the point of rather going hungry, than eating “food of the enemy”), etc. All that for the greater good of the Nation. You are told to unquestionably support this or that “Holy War”, to forget about strikes and disruption of production of war material, to willingly send your sons, brothers, husbands and fathers to become martyrs for the profits of your bourgeois masters.
Capital and its State had always found a way how to turn proletarians into cannon fodder and let them slaughter each other under the flag of this or that “Motherland”. As if we, the proletariat, the exploited class, had any country to defend. As if the “national interests” represented anything else than the interests of the ruling class. War and the subsequent scramble for reconstruction are nothing else than a concrete form of competition between various capitalist factions. It is an expression of their need to expand their market in order to compensate for the decreasing rate of profit. At the same time, war serves to divide our class along national, regional, religious, political, etc. lines in order to suppress the class struggle and break the international solidarity of the proletariat. Ultimately war serves to physically dispose of the redundant labor force. Or in other words, to slaughter us…
“Russian” soldiers, you are stationed in Syria or Ukraine to kill and be killed by people who just like you and your relatives back home are forced to sell their labor power to Capital in order to survive, people who are a part of the same exploited class as you, people who are your proletarian brothers and sisters on “the other side”. All those military adventures, exercises and arms races are starting to cripple Capital’s ability to appease the proletariat by throwing it breadcrumbs from the bourgeois table.
Capitalism can only bring us exploitation, misery, alienation, war and destruction as it always did. The global proletariat stands at the crossroad: to rise up against it or to fall into the biggest human meat grinder in the history. All around the world, more or less open military conflicts and standoffs between various bourgeois factions are flaring up. Alliances and counter-alliances are being formed and breached, with more and more obvious centralization into few super-blocks. Ukraine is at the center of all that and the war there threatens to escalate into global conflict, that has a potential to end all life on this planet.
Just like in Iran, Iraq, Chile, Lebanon, Colombia, and quite recently in Kazakhstan, the only alternative for the proletariat in Russia and in the Ukraine is to step up the confrontation with the State and directly attack its institutions and expropriate the goods and means of production. Let’s not just protest in the streets, but let’s spread and generalize strikes and develop the class struggle into the production front! Let’s turn the struggle of soldiers’ relatives, who had repeatedly shown in the past a strong anti-war stance into generalized revolutionary defeatist struggle, without limitations of any legalist ideology!
Revolutionary defeatism means to organize all actions aiming to undermine the morale of the troops as well as to prevent dispatching proletarians to the slaughter…
Revolutionary defeatism means to organize the most massive desertion and cease fire between proletarians in uniform on both sides of the frontline, to leave distant fronts and to bring war, not between proletarians but between classes, i.e. class war, into centers of war super-powers…
Revolutionary defeatism means to encourage fraternization, mutinies, turning the guns against the organizers of war carnage, i.e. “our” bourgeoisie and their lackeys…
Revolutionary defeatism means the most determined and offensive action with a view to turning the imperialist war into revolutionary war for the abolition of this class society based on starvation and war, revolutionary war for communism…
You, “Russian soldiers” and “Ukrainian soldiers”, proletarians in the armies of the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisies, have no other alternative (if you want to live rather than go on surviving, if not croaking on the next fields of horror!) than to refuse to once again serve as global henchmen of their interests! Just like many of your predecessors in the war in Chechnya, let’s break the ranks and fight no more! Just like the “Red Army” soldiers in Afghanistan or American soldiers in Vietnam, you can shoot or “frag” your own officers! Just like the proletarians with or without uniform in World War I, let’s mutiny and rise up together and turn the global capitalist war into the civil war for the communist revolution!
We of course don’t want to limit ourselves while addressing only to proletarians in Russian or Ukrainian uniform but also to our struggling class brothers and sisters all over the world and urge them to follow and develop examples of defeatism already existing, e.g. soldiers in Iran who expressed their refusal to be used in the repression against our class movements in 2018, policemen and militiamen in Iraq who did the same some months later during the riots that engulfed half of the country from Basra to Baghdad, as well as the police and military in Kazakhstan earlier this year who refused to suppress the proletarian uprising, forcing the Russian gendarmerie to intervene to restore the capitalist order…
Proletarians with and without uniform, let’s organize together against the capitalist system of exploitation of the human labor that lies in the root of all the misery, all the State oppression and all the wars!
Proletarians, never ever forget that it’s our class brothers and sisters at the time who stopped the WW1 while deserting massively, mutinying collectively and making the social revolution!!!
Down with the exploiters! From Moscow to Tehran to Washington to Kiev to the whole world!
Against nationalism, sectarianism, militarism, we oppose the international and internationalist proletarian solidarity!
Let’s turn this war into class war for the global communist revolution!
A bomb shelter in Kiev