The Russian decision to recognise the rebel regions of Ukraine, in Donetsk and Lugansk, of itself is irrelevant. As a pretext for sending in, or having "invited" in Russian troops, called "peace keepers" or not, is not irrelevant, but is a reckless act that increases the possibility of war. Socialists must demand "Russian 'peace keepers" out of Donetsk and Lugansk".
In his long rambling speech, yesterday, ahead of announcing his decision to recognise the breakaway regions, which have now de facto been separated from Ukraine for 8 years, and under the terms of the Minsk Agreements, should have already been granted regional autonomy, Putin was right in one thing. He is right that the geography and history of the region is complicated. Much of that is due to the past actions of imperialism (Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian), which physically moved large numbers of people, as well as periodically redrawing lines on maps around peoples.
Putin is accused of saying that Ukraine does not exist as a nation. In fact, what he said was that "modern Ukraine", does not exist as a nation. That itself is a question of debate. What is required for a nation is that there is a settled history of common culture, and shared identity, of language and so on. But, a state can exist, which is not a nation state, but which is a multinational state. For example, Switzerland is a multinational state. There is no Swiss language, but three languages, French, German and Italian, each with equal standing, though in practice, every such state tends to settle on a single language used by all for commercial purposes. The question is whether the peoples within such a state feel they can live together, which Marxists would always argue for them trying to do, or whether they cannot, and the best solution is to separate, in which case, Marxists argue, not for the right of self-determination, but the right to peacefully secede. I have set out why we argue the latter rather than the former, on previous occasions, because, as Lenin set out the liberal demand for self-determination is misused as cover by liberals and social-patriots to mean "defence of the fatherland".
Modern Ukraine is not something that arose from within, but which has been shaped from without by larger states, pieces being added on and taken away to and from neighbouring states in Lithuania, Poland, Russia and so on, including the bureaucratic redrawing of maps undertaken by Stalin and Khrushchev. And, of course, Marxists do not fetishise lines drawn on maps, and see them as fixed and frozen in time, or which must determine our attitude to the relations between peoples on either side, or within them. That is rather the approach of the liberals who can never escape their fetishisation of the state itself, and so their continued domination by the ideas of narrow nationalism. On the contrary, we want to wipe away all such lines, not draw them thicker, either with layers of steel, or just layers of red tape. It is why we oppose Brexit.
The classic example of such states, and the intermingling of populations within them was, the Balkans, and, like the states of Eastern and Central Europe, their history and geography was also shaped by the actions of other great powers, in particular the Ottoman Empire, and the Hapsburg Empire. Behind both stood Germany, whilst opposing them, and standing behind the slavic nations seeking liberation from the Ottomans stood the Tsarist Empire in Russia. As now in Ukraine, the liberals in Russia, argued for intervention, to "liberate" the Balkans from the Turks, just as today, liberals in the West demand intervention against Russia to prevent its occupation of parts of Ukraine. The ultimate result was not just the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, but also the spark that ignited the European War of 1914-18, that was part of what has been called The First World War.
The history of the two Balkan Wars is instructive, because, as Trotsky describes, in his writing on those wars, as war correspondent, the second which was not a war of liberation, but a war between Bulgaria and its former Balkan allies, as well as with the Ottomans, as the resultant carve up of territory from the first war, left dissatisfaction all round. As Trotsky pointed out, the solution to this problem would not be resolved by the intervention of larger powers, whether they claimed to be intervening as liberal do-gooders to stop atrocities (they committed equally horrible atrocities themselves), or on the basis of coming to the aid of fellow slavs.
“The Balkan war is an attempt to solve in the quickest possible way the question of creating new state-political forms that shall be better adapted to the needs of the economic and cultural development of the Balkan peoples.
The fundamental view of European democracy, Western and Eastern alike, on this question is perfectly clear: The Balkans for the Balkan peoples! It is necessary to vindicate the possibility for these peoples themselves to settle their own affairs, not only as they wish and see fit but also by their own strength, in the land where they are established. This means that European democracy has to combat every attempt to subject the fate of the Balkans to the ambitions of the Great Powers. Whether these ambitions be presented in the naked form of colonial policy or whether they be concealed behind phrases about racial kinship, they all alike menace the independence of the Balkan peoples. The Great Powers should be allowed to seek places for themselves in the Balkan Peninsula in one way only, that of free commercial rivalry and cultural influence."
(Trotsky - The Balkan Wars, p 148 - 152)
Trotsky put the liberal retort to this.
"The Balkans for the Balkan Peoples! But this point of view signifies nonintervention. It means not only opposition to the territorial ambitions of the Great Powers, but also rejection of support for Balkan Slavdom in its struggle against Turkish rule. Isn't this a policy of narrow nationalism and state egoism? And doesn't it mean democracy renouncing its very self?"
And, he responds,
"Not at all. Democracy has no right, political or moral, to entrust the organisation of the Balkan peoples to forces that are outside its control – for it is not known when and where these forces will stop, and democracy, having once granted them the mandate of its political confidence, will be unable to check them.
The Balkans for the Balkan peoples! This means not merely that the hands of the Great Powers must not reach out towards the border of the Balkans but also that, within this border, the Balkan peoples must settle their own affairs, with their own forces, and according to their own ideas, in the land where they live.”
(ibid)
And, so too, with Ukraine, as it should have been, also, in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990's. It is up to the people of Ukraine to resolve their disputes, not for either Russia or NATO to intervene within them.
NATO itself created the conditions in which this potential conflict is taking place. When it invaded sovereign Serbian territory in Kosovo, it created the precedent for Russia to do exactly the same thing, which its has done in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, as it did in Crimea, and is now doing in Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine. In Kosovo, the US used its links to Osama Bin Laden to establish links with the gangsters of the KLA, which it financed and armed to engage in attacks on Kosovan Serb villages to create communal violence, provoking a response from the Serb government, which, in turn gave NATO a pretext to attack Serbia and invade Kosovo. Russia has used attacks on ethnic Russians in Georgia and Ukraine (though unlike the attacks on Serbs in Kosovo, the reports of Human Rights Watch and the OSCE indicate the attacks on ethnic Russians had nothing to do with provocations but were actual
attacks by Georgian and
Ukrainian government forces, many of which do constitute war crimes) as its pretext both for recognising all these breakaway regions, and for sending in its own troops.
Marxists demand they be withdrawn whatever pretext is used for their deployment. But, nor do we give any support to NATO and the war mongers that stand behind it, including all of the social-imperialists in the labour movement. It is precisely, because we call upon the Russian workers to be the instrument of the withdrawal of Russian troops, should they be deployed that we can be seen to give not the slightest glimmer of support to our own imperialists, and their war machine. We cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with Russian workers in that struggle if we are simultaneously seen to be standing alongside or behind our own imperialist aggressors, who are not only the enemies of Putin, but of the working-class everywhere. Given a choice, NATO and Putin would line up side by side against a revolutionary working-class, just as in the 1920's and 30's, the imperialists in Britain and elsewhere lauded to the rooftops the coming to power of Mussolini and Hitler, as their saviour against revolutionary workers in Italy and Germany, taking their lead from the workers in Russia, and who saw fascism as the vaccination they required to stop that infection of revolution spreading to the workers in France and Britain.
The intervention of these big powers, be it Russia or NATO is not the basis of a solution, but the source of further conflagrations. Asked by the Brunswick Committee of the German SDP about their attitude to Prussia's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, Marx and Engels replies,
"The military camarilla, the professors, burghers and pot-house politicians claim that this] is the means whereby Germany can be forever protected against war with France. Just the opposite. It is the best means of turning this war into a European institution. It is indeed the surest way of perpetuating military despotism in the rejuvenated Germany as essential to retaining possession of a western Poland – of Alsace and Lorraine. It is an infallible means of turning the coming peace into a mere armistice until France has recovered sufficiently to demand back her lost territories. It is the most infallible method of ruining both Germany and France by internecine strife.
The knaves and the fools who discovered these guarantees of eternal peace ought to know from Prussian history, and from the drastic treatment laid down by Napoleon in the Peace Treaties of Tilsit that such violent measures of pacifying a viable people produce an effect exactly opposite to that intended. Compare France, even after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, with Prussia after the Tilsit Peace!
If, as long as the old political conditions obtained, French chauvinism had a certain material justification in the fact that since 1815 a few lost battles meant that the capital, Paris, and with it France, were at the mercy of the invader, what new nourishment will chauvinism not imbibe when the boundary line will run along the Vosges in the East and at Metz in the North?..
Anyone who has not been entirely overawed by the din and noise of the moment and has no interest in overawing the German people must realise that the War of 1870 will necessarily lead to a war between Germany and Russia just as the War of 1866 led to the War of 1870."
And, those who now rush to respond to the Russian intervention, by demanding a response by NATO to Russians actions are themselves guilty of giving yet a further twist to this same dynamic described here by Marx and Engels, and by Trotsky in relation to the Balkans that leads inevitably to inter-imperialist war, which now, will mean the destruction of mankind. Our solution does not reside in looking to nation states and their militaries, a solution that can only lead to workers being set against workers in a new terrible global conflict, but rather resides in looking to those workers themselves to fight primarily against their own ruling class and its state, and its military and strategic ambitions.
For us, the mantra remains, "The Main Enemy Is At Home", and primarily, now that means we call on our brothers and sisters of the Russian working-class to resist the militarism and expansionism of Putin's kleptocratic regime that is your immediate enemy, and which oppresses and exploits you, just as we say to workers in NATO countries, resist the militarism and expansionism of NATO, and its war plans against Russia and China, including its use of economic sanctions, which will damage the lives of workers everywhere, whilst boosting the paper wealth of the speculators. And, we say to the workers in Ukraine, your main enemy is not the ethnic Russian populations of Donetsk and Lugansk, nor the workers of Russia. Your enemy is the right-wing and corrupt government in Kyiv, and the fascist gangs it has been associated with, and is the NATO imperialism that will try to take advantage of your plight for its own advantage. We call on you to resist that governments war drive, with its attacks on the peoples of Donetsk and Lugansk that has given Putin a pretext to intervene.
Marx and Engels noted that the consequence of the Prussian occupation of Alsace-Lorraine could not be a lasting peace, but only future war, including the descent into war between Germany and Russia, a prediction that was to prove true in the European War of 1914-18, and its continuation in 1939-45. There was one means of preventing that, they wrote.
"I say necessarily, inevitably, except in the improbable event of a prior outbreak of a revolution in Russia.
If this improbable case does not eventuate the war between Germany and Russia must already now be treated as an accomplished fact.
It depends entirely upon the present conduct of the German victors whether this war is going to be useful or harmful.
If they take Alsace and Lorraine France and Russia will make war upon Germany. Needless to point to the baneful consequences.
If they conclude an honourable peace with France that war will liberate Europe from the Muscovite dictatorship, will dissolve Prussia in Germany, allow the western part of the Continent to develop in peace and finally will help the Russian social revolution – the elements of which need only such an impetus from without for their development – to erupt, from which the Russian people too will benefit.
But I am afraid the knaves and the fools will continue their mad game unhindered unless the masses of the German working class raise their voice..."
(ibid)
And, that laser focus on the agency of the working-class, and rejection of any alliance with the bourgeoisie and its state remains our beacon today.
No War - Stop The Warmongering - Russian Troops Out - The Main Enemy Is At Home - Workers of the World Unite
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