No To War Over Ukraine

NATO and Russia are facing up to each other once again, now over Ukraine. Neither will actually want to go to war with each other, a process that could quickly spiral uncontrollably into a World War fought with nuclear weapons, but the processes that lead to such wars are, by their nature, unpredictable, and take on a dynamic of their own. Thatcher and Galtieri didn't actually want, or expect, to go to war with each, forty years ago, over the Falklands, yet they did. The global working class has no interest in any such war, just as we had no interest in a war over the Falklands, a desolate piece of rock in the South Atlantic with more sheep than people. We have to say no to war over Ukraine. As with the Falklands, we have to say that the interests of the whole working-class override the interests of the people of Ukraine, however, harsh that sounds.

Again, as with the Falklands, the main responsibility lies with the workers and labour movements in the contending imperialist and expansionist powers, i.e. those of the NATO countries, and of Russia. It is up to the workers, socialists and labour movements in all those countries to demand that their own bourgeoisie ends its sabre rattling, and keeps their noses out of Ukraine. But, the workers of Ukraine also have a role to play, because they should also demand that their government stops inflaming the situation with its provocative approaches to NATO, and its military expansion right up to the Russian borders. Given the history of Russia, and its repeated invasion by Western European powers, and later by imperialist powers, its no wonder any such action is seen as a provocative threat, and one that plays into the hands of Putin, and the Russian kleptocratic regime.

In WWII, it was the USSR that defeated Nazi Germany, in effect even before the US even entered the war. In December 1941, the soviet troops turned back the Nazi advance, and continued to push them back from that point onwards. It was the USSR that suffered by far the greatest losses as a result of the war, losing 25% of its territory, and economic capacity in the first few months, and it lost 30 million people, far exceeding the deaths for all the other combatants combined. That, of course, came after the losses it suffered in 1918, when it was invaded by 18 imperialist armies that allied with the old vile, feudal landlord class, to try to overthrow the revolution. And, similarly, after the USSR had defeated the Nazis, those same imperialist states, quickly created NATO (1949) as they started again to isolate the USSR, leading Moscow to respond by moving more quickly to install its own puppet regimes in Eastern Europe, and to create the Warsaw Pact(1955) as a military counter to NATO.

NATO claims to be a “defensive alliance”, which is a joke. Firstly, the imperialist countries that comprise NATO have individually, more or less, been continually involved in some offensive war in other parts of the globe since WWII itself ended. Some times they have done so in concert. For example, in Korea, and later in Vietnam, which then spilled over into attacks on other neighbouring countries in South-East Asia. At other times, it has been individual countries combining with others with similar parochial interests, for example, Britain and France joining with Israel to attack Egypt in the Suez crisis of 1956. That also, however, shows that even within NATO, the economic and strategic interests of some of its members still outweigh their overall military/strategic interests, as the US, screwed over Britain and France, in order to replace their old colonial era relations with the Arab states, in order to further the interests of the giant US oil companies in the region.

That was also the reason for the US, via the CIA, overthrowing the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran, and replacing him with the puppet regime of the vile butcher, the Shah of Iran, which also exposes the lie that NATO, and its imperialist member states is an alliance in defence of democracy. The same was true of the CIA's actions with the Chilean state to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile, and the US support for the gangsters of the Batista regime in Cuba, and similar butchers in Nicaragua, El Salvador and so on, and their attempts to prevent and overthrow popular revolutions in all of those countries. More recently, following the overthrow of the US's puppet in Iran, the US backed the vile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, providing him with chemical and biological weapons, and expertise on how to use them in the battlefield, as it promoted his war against Iran.

The US also backed, financed and armed Osama Bin Laden, and the Mujaheddin he led in Afghanistan, in attempt to overthrow the soviet puppet regime in Kabul that had begun modernising the economy, including providing education for girls and so on. Later, it used its relation to Bin Laden for him to contact the criminal butchers of the Kosovan Liberation Army, whose main claim to fame until that time was their exploits in harvesting human organs, for sale on global black markets. Via, Bin Laden, they provided finance, arms and training for the KLA, enabling them to launch attacks on Serb villages in Kosovo to provoke communal violence, which led to the Serbian army entering Kosovo, to defend Serb villages, which gave NATO a pretext for its war against Serbia.

That war is a good example of the dangers now presented in Ukraine. As NATO forces pushed forward in Kosovo, whilst Russian forces were heading towards them, British Commander, General Mike Jackson has since reported that he was told, by the US Commander, General Wesley Clark to take Pristina Airport before the Russians, even if that meant opening fire on the Russians to do so. Jackson, notes that he refused to obey this order, telling Clark "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you"

Ukraine is a bourgeois state, as is Russia. In such conditions, the position of Marxists is that of “revolutionary defeatism”. In other words, we do not go out to deliberately cause the defeat of our own state, but nor do we take any part in defending it either, as against continuing to work for its revolutionary overthrow by the workers, and the creation of a workers state in its place. That is the position that the workers of Ukraine should adopt, now. Anything else amounts to social chauvinism, and alignment with the bourgeoisie against the workers of other countries. The bourgeoisie, and its representatives amongst the liberals and social-democrats, of course, raise the cry of “the right to self-determination”, but that demand is a bourgeois-democratic demand, which cannot be given precedence over the interests of the working-class in general. Moreover, as Lenin described, the demand for “the right to self-determination” had to be abandoned, precisely because it was being so misused by the bourgeoisie to justify social chauvinism, and “defence of the fatherland”.  Lenin proposed,

“Instead of the word self-determination, which has given rise to numerous misinterpretations, I propose the perfectly precise concept: "the right to free secession".

That does not mean that we are indifferent to the rights of Ukraine, or any Russian aggression against it, which would infringe those rights. But, the primary goal of Ukrainian workers and socialists is the overthrow of capitalism in the Ukraine, and the establishment of a workers' state, it is not to align themselves with their own, bourgeoisie against Russia, and still less to align themselves with the imperialist powers organised militarily within NATO.  NATO is using Ukraine as part of its global strategic manoeuvring against Russia, just as it has also done in the Balkans, and against both Russia and China in Central Asia, where the US has lined up to support various butchers in the so called “stans”, and as it has done with its military intervention in Syria, to oppose the extension of influence of Iran, which in turn acts as proxy for Russia and China. The agency that workers and socialists look to to prevent Russian aggression is neither the Ukrainian capitalist state, nor NATO, but is the Russian working-class and labour movement itself, which must be called upon to similarly oppose the plans and ambitions of the Kremlin kleptocrats.

Similarly, it is workers and the labour movement in NATO countries that must mobilise to oppose the drive to war that threatens humanity itself. We must build an independent, working-class response to the imperialists drive to war that unites workers in NATO countries with those in Russia, China, and Ukraine. Our mantra should be neither Washington nor Moscow, nor Beijing nor Kiev, but international socialism, and workers solidarity.