Russian Troops out of Ukraine
This demand is fine, indeed, I have raised it myself, but again, only when considered concretely, in terms of who is to bring that about? Coupled with the first bit, demanding the defeat of the invasion, it really means victory to NATO/Ukraine. By contrast, when I have raised the demand, it is on the basis that it is the Russian working-class that it is aimed at. Here is the difference between a Marxist programme of action, whose demands are aimed at the working-class as the historical agent of change, as against pacifist platitudes broadcast to the ether, or social-imperialist demands for imperialist states to be the historical agent of change!
As Trotsky put it in relation to the defeat of Hitler,
“To throw off Hitler by revolution is one thing; to strangle Germany by an imperialist war is quite another. The howling of the “pacifist” jackals of democratic imperialism is therefore the best accompaniment to Hitler’s speeches. “You see,” he says to the German people, “even socialists and Communists of all enemy countries support their army and their diplomacy; if you will not rally around me, your leader, you are threatened with doom!””
It would be nice if there really were an independent, revolutionary proletariat in Ukraine, fighting to bring that about, in conjunction with similar forces in Russia, but there isn’t. Indeed, if there were, its likely that Zelensky and NATO would see it as a greater enemy than Russia and seek to destroy it, just as the petty-bourgeois liberals turned on the revolutionary workers in 1848, as Chiang Kai Shek turned on the Communists in 1927, and so on. In fact, they have already acted, even against elements of the Ukrainian media, and banned 13 Ukrainian socialist organisations, whilst they have promoted and praised the representatives of Ukrainian Nazism!
That is illustrated further in the demand for support for Ukrainian resistance “in all its forms”. So, that means, given that the Ukrainian government has praised the Azov Battalion as its best fighters, and promoted its representatives, and those of the Right Sector, to leading roles, outright support for Ukrainian fascists! Where is that suggested in any Marxist text! It is the equivalent of if in, say, Iraq, with jihadists being the best fighters against US imperialism, Marxists were to say that to fight for “self-determination” and support resistance “in all its forms”, we should support them, and subordinate ourselves to them! It would be like supporting and subordinating ourselves to Hamas in Palestine, and so on.
There is a clear difference between actual, truly revolutionary forces engaged in a struggle, who are politically and organisationally separated from, and independent of, the forces of our class enemies, making temporary tactical alliances, in the field, and in taking weapons from anyone who will provide them, as against supporting popular fronts that subordinate those revolutionary forces to our class enemies, let alone raising demands that, in reality, are directed, not at such revolutionary forces, but which attempt to present the forces of our class enemy as being such revolutionary forces! It is to do what the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, specifically says we should oppose.
“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries”,
and, as stated above, Ukraine is not a backward country seeking self-determination, but is a developed capitalist economy, backed by the huge military might of NATO imperialism!
In 1850, Marx having learned the lessons of 1848, certainly did not argue for a refusal to make alliances, in action, with the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, but he did emphasise the treacherous nature of those classes, and so the need for the workers, at all times, to insist on their organisational and political separation from them. Compare the revolutionary tone of Marx with the liberal, popular frontist pleas and platitudes of the EBFI, which elides class antagonisms, in its abstract talk of “national interests”, and so on, implying a class neutral state.
“At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner...
Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.”
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