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!