Russia has annexed the breakaway Republics in Ukraine. It now says it will defend them by all means, as part of Russia. At the same time, Ukraine has made a fast-track application for NATO membership, which it was probably unlikely to do unless it had been given a nod in that direction by the US/NATO, which will be highly embarrassed were it, now, to have to reject it! Its pretty obvious that NATO is already effectively involved in the war, not just by the provision of weapons, cyber warfare, intelligence and so on, but also via personnel in Ukraine, and the use of Special Forces. It undertook the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. If NATO admits Ukraine, the existing war means that, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, NATO itself would become directly involved with its own troops, fighting openly in Ukraine. That is why UK armed services families have been told to prepare for their sons and daughters to go and fight in Ukraine. But, any such war would inevitably become a nuclear war in short order, with NATO already believing it is able to “win” a nuclear war.
Even the doltish and doddery Biden has blurted out that we are headed for nuclear Armageddon. His reference to the former situation of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, is most apt. The two situations are almost identical, but reversed. Then the US deployed missiles in Italy and Turkey, prompting the USSR to deploy similar missiles in Cuba. The US objected to this deployment on its borders, just as Russia has objected to NATO expansion right up to its borders, indeed even closer to its borders than was Cuba to the US, and with NATO now surrounding Russia far more extensively than was ever the case in relation to Cuba and the US. The US blockaded Cuba, threatening to fire on soviet ships, and to unleash a nuclear holocaust.
Of course, as Russia threatens something similar today, the US response and that of the western media that has become more totalitarian in nature during the period of blanket lockdowns over the last three years is quite different to what it was in relation to the US threats of nuclear annihilation. But, the threat is indeed real, as it was then. It illustrates the point made by socialists prior to WWI that, not only is the main enemy at home, but war posed the choice for workers of socialism or barbarism. With nuclear weapons that choice is even more stark. Then it meant that a war on an industrial scale could result in societies being thrown back to a degree that not only would advance to socialism become impossible, but even the advance to industrial capitalism would be at threat. Today, it means that humanity itself, and indeed most organic life on the planet would be wiped out.
Socialists cannot support war involving millions of workers for the limited aims of one group of workers in one country, no matter how justified they might be. We certainly cannot support war simply to preserve the corrupt, reactionary regime of Zelensky, and even less can we support it, when the real basis of it is that Zelensky and Ukraine itself is simply being used by US imperialism - indeed much as the US uses the EU - to advance its own global imperialist ambitions.
The social imperialists such as Paul Mason, Andrew Coates, the AWL, Anti-Capitalist Resistance et al, in their continued backing for NATO imperialism's war against Russia in Ukraine, must, then, accept the logic of their position that they are prepared to see humanity destroyed in such a thermonuclear war, just as much as those backers of Putin's regime, and his war against NATO imperialism, must accept responsibility for such an outcome. The nature of this war as reactionary on both sides could not, now, become much clearer than in this imminent threat, arising from it, of the end of civilisation, if not of humanity itself.
Paul Mason in his latest missive on Medium - “Putin's Nuclear Threats... How Should The West Respond?” - at least, no longer even pretends to be giving an analysis from the perspective of the interests of the working-class, or socialism. He does not bother to ask the question of how socialists, or the working-class, should respond, but only how “the West”, i.e. US/NATO imperialism should respond? At least that is more honest than the position of those like the AWL, ACR and so on, who pretend that there is anything socialistic about their position. Paul Mason is, in the way he formulates the question, openly illustrating that he has abandoned any independent working-class analysis, and that he now simply acts as a full-time, professional mouthpiece for US/NATO imperialism. The other social-imperialists should be equally honest.
One of the arguments, put from the start of the war, has been that, if Russia stopped fighting, the war would end, but if the Ukrainian army stopped fighting Ukraine would end. That is false, on many levels, and goes against everything that Marxism has discovered in the nature of capitalism, and imperialism. For one thing, if Russia stopped fighting, the Ukrainian army would not stop fighting, in order to retake the annexed regions, so the war would not end, and if you are an ethnic Russian living in Crimea, or one of those areas, that is of no inconsiderable concern to you. But, also, even setting that aside, no serious analysis would indicate that US/NATO imperialism would be, or will be, satisfied with just incorporating the whole of Ukraine within its sphere, and pushing ever further up to Russia's borders, any more than it will be satisfied with incorporating Taiwan, and pushing up closer to China's borders, any more than it was satisfied with having incorporated East Germany, when it had said it would move no further East.
The whole history of NATO imperialism is that it would use these advances as forward bulwarks from which to launch further attempts to spread its reach. It would look to again move into Russian majority areas in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where it has previously launched genocidal attacks, using Georgian proxies. It would move on to using proxies, and instigating uprisings in Chechnya, and other Russian Republics, as it seeks to carve up Russia itself, and it would do the same thing in China. It did that, in the 1980's, in Afghanistan, when it armed and financed, via its Pakistani and Saudi proxies, Osama Bin Laden to fight against the Russian backed regime in Kabul, and when it used its links with Bin Laden, to arm and finance the gangsters of the Kosovan Liberation Army, so as to provoke ethnic conflict against Serbs in Kosovo, giving it the pretext for war against Serbia, and the carving out of Kosovo from Serbia.
So long as capitalism and imperialism continue, there is no possibility of an end to such wars, only the existence of intermittent armed peace, that continually breaks out into further wars and conflict. You may not like the fact that Russia has annexed these majority Russian parts of Ukraine, but it is now a fact. The solution resides in a combined workers' struggle against the global ruling class (immediately its Russian and Ukrainian sections), not reliance on one section of that ruling class against another.
Marxists could not support the Zionists in their creation of a Zionist state in Israel, over the bones of the Palestinians already living there, and those Marxists that did abandon Marxism to support that solution, themselves ended up as Zionists, or, at the very least, reactionary nationalists, in order to defend their position, in the tragedy that has unfolded in the nearly 80 years of continued conflict, and division of the working-class, that has resulted from it.
But, the Zionist state, in Israel, is a fact, and any attempt to turn the clock back would be thoroughly reactionary, and involve a terrible war, in which millions would die. Marxists could never support such a position, and nor can they support a similar war designed to overcome middle-class moral sensibilities about the annexation of parts of Ukraine, whose result would be continued deaths in the thousands, continued division of the working-class in the region, and, now, a significant risk of a global imperialist war, leading inexorably, and in short order, to a thermonuclear war, and the destruction of humanity.
In 1871, on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx and Engels, having seen the formation of a unified German state, resulting from the role of Prussia, argued in favour of a victory for Prussia, against France, because they thought that such a victory would enhance that process, and hasten the proletarian revolution in Germany and France. Marx wrote to Engels,
“If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc.”
However, in a parallel to the argument of those who believe that, if Ukraine were to win back the annexed regions, it would mean an end to hostilities, they changed their mind, precisely, because they came to conclude that, as majority French regions, in Alsace-Lorraine, the people in those regions, backed by France, would continue to seek to retrieve them. The same has been seen in the Middle East, where the consequence of Zionism, and creation of the Zionist state, by the seizure of Arab lands, has simply led to 80 years of war and conflict.
Marx and Engels wrote to the Brunswick Committee of the German SPD,
“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?
That the Lorrainers and Alsatians desire the blessings of German government even the... Teuton does not dare to maintain. It is the principle of Pan-Germanism and of ‘secure’ frontiers that is being proclaimed, which, if it were practised by the Eastern side, would lead to fine results for Germany and Europe.
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”.
In other words, the people in Alsace-Lorraine saw themselves as French not German. As soon as France felt strong enough, it would seek to address that view, and enable them to return to French rule, requiring another war to bring it about – an event that occurred via WWI. The same is true with the majority ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine, and other states neighbouring Russia. Particularly as anti-Russian sentiment is stoked by the US and its NATO allies, and is used by the governments of these neighbouring states, as they seek to solidify their own attachment to, and sense of security from, NATO, ethnic Russians, in these other states, will see themselves the victims of that anti-Russian xenophobia, and will, in turn, seek support from Mother Russia, thereby, dividing the working-class of the area against each other, and preventing their unified struggle against their real enemy, the capitalist ruling class. The liberals think that the lure of “democracy” as against Russian authoritarianism will override such concerns. It won't.
As Trotsky put it, explaining why the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, chose Nazi rule, in Germany, over “democratic” rule in Czechoslovakia,
“Intolerable social and political conditions must exist for citizens of a "democratic" country to be seized by a desire for fascist power. The Germans of the Saar in France, the Austrian Germans in the Europe of Versailles, the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia felt themselves citizens of third rank. "It will not be worse," they said to themselves. In Germany, at least, they will be oppressed on the same basis as the rest of the population. The masses prefer under these conditions equality in serfdom to humiliation in inequality. The temporary strength of Hitler lay in the bankruptcy of imperialist democracy.”
The ethnic Russians in Crimea, and in Eastern Ukraine, saw themselves repeatedly voting for politicians that best represented their interests, only for their wishes to be frustrated. The most obvious example of that was the CIA backed coup in 2014, to remove the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovitch. The promised regional autonomy for these areas, resulting from the Minsk Accords, not only were never implemented, but the attempts of ethnic Russian in the LPR/DPR, to implement them were met by shelling from the Ukrainian military, spearheaded by the Nazis of the Azov Battalion, which escalated in the weeks preceding the Russian invasion. That was part of what even former Blairite NATO Secretary General, George Robertson has described as being NATO goading Putin to invade. Long before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian state and its military was at war with the ethnic Russians in these regions, with at least 8,000 civilians, in these regions being killed, as a result, in the period between 2014, and the Russian invasion.
The issue of NATO membership has been a touchstone of the dispute, with the argument made that a manifestation of national self-determination for Ukraine is its right to join NATO. But, repeatedly, large majorities of Ukrainians voted against joining NATO, but their opinions were ignored, and the US backed governments installed in Kyiv, pushed ahead with it anyway!
Sraid Marx has pointed to the view of Ukrainian socialist Volodymyr Ishchenko,
“‘In reality, Euromaidan was a deficient revolution. It did not form any national unity, but the elite groups which benefited from it (together with ideological cheerleaders) need to sustain this illusion for internal and external legitimacy via combination of silencing and repression. It is, therefore, in their interest to paint the alternative positions on Ukrainian past, present and future as “non-Ukrainian” or even “anti-Ukrainian,” even though these positions are shared by many (if not most) Ukrainian citizens. As a result, these Ukrainians are more and more deprived of a voice in the domestic and international public spheres.’
‘Ukraine has not simply turned into an object of the Great Powers’ play. In an especially humiliating way, Ukraine is exploited to cover imperialist interests and misrepresent them as a noble endeavour. The pathos-laden references to Ukraine’s sovereignty parallel the reality of the state, which is more dependent on foreign powers politically, economically and militarily than ever before since the Soviet collapse.’
As Ishchenko goes on to point out:
‘In December 2007, on the eve of the infamous Bucharest summit that settled that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” less than 20 percent of Ukrainian citizens supported joining NATO. The majority of Ukrainians were split between support for a military alliance with Russia or retaining the non-bloc neutral status.’
He notes the (partially prophetic) views of some:
‘Many other Ukrainians feel that NATO membership would forfeit more of Ukraine’s sovereignty to the West, which they feel has been happening since 2014, and, at the same time, would increase tensions with Russia, escalate internal tensions among Ukrainians, and drag the nation in one of the U.S.’s “forever” wars, one of which just recently ended in a humiliating defeat.’”
But, of course, the truth is also that, even if a majority of Ukrainians did, now, vote for NATO membership, that would not be the only consideration for Marxists, precisely because what might appear to be simply a question of “national self-determination” for Ukraine, necessarily impacts on its neighbours, and primarily for Russia. There is no more reason why Russia can be expected to sit idly by whilst NATO expands up to its borders, with a view, undoubtedly, to go beyond even that, any more than the US sat idly by whilst Cuba associated itself with the USSR, following its revolution, and invited Moscow to site nuclear missiles on its territory to deter further incursions by US troops following the Bay of Pigs. The US response to that, 60 years ago this month, led to the last time the world stood this close to nuclear annihilation, in virtually identical conditions, though reversed, to those which exist, today, in Ukraine.
Marxists are not moralists, basing themselves on how people, classes, or states should act, according to some preconceived moral code, but upon how we know they do act, based upon material and specifically class interest. As Trotsky put it, prior to WWII, we may not want war, but unless we control the state, we will have war!
“We must of course fight against the war not only “until the very last moment” but during the war itself when it begins. We must however give to our fight against the war its fully revolutionary sense, opposing and pitilessly denouncing pacifism. The very simple and very great idea of our fight against the war is: we are against the war but we will have the war if we are incapable of overthrowing the capitalists.”
See: On Conscription
Marxists do not fetishise land borders – we want to scrap them all – and nor do we fetishise the bourgeois liberal concept of national self-determination – we seek not national self-determination, but the self-determination of the proletariat, irrespective of nationality. Our goal is not bourgeois-democratic reforms, but Socialism, and the former must always be subordinated to that goal, fundamental to which is never to privilege the demand for national self-determination above the interests of the global working-class as a whole. It is clearly not in the interests of the global working-class to be wiped out by nuclear war, simply for the limited goal of national self-determination for Ukraine, even if that were what was really at stake, as against, merely the continued rule of the corrupt, reactionary regime of Zelensky, and the Nazis upon which it depends, funded and armed by NATO imperialism.
In contrast to the social-imperialists and their apologism for US/NATO imperialism, Marxists adopt the position set out by Trotsky prior to WWII, which is particularly relevant when considering the reactionary, corrupt, capitalist regimes in both Ukraine and Russia, neither of which represent any kind of "democracy", such as that which existed in the US, to be defended.
“We Bolsheviks also want to defend democracy, but not the kind that is run by the sixty uncrowned kings. (NB. Trotsky was writing to his US supporters, and this reference is to the 60 top financial families) First, let’s sweep our democracy clean of capitalist magnates, then we will defend it to the last drop of blood. Are you, who are not Bolsheviks, really ready to defend this democracy? But, you must at least, be able to the best of your ability to defend it so as not to be a blind instrument in the hands of the sixty families and the bourgeois officers devoted to them. The working class must learn military affairs in order to advance the largest possible number of officers from its own ranks.
We must demand that the state, which tomorrow will ask for the workers’ blood, today give the workers the opportunity to master military technique in the best possible way in order to achieve the military objectives with the minimum expenditure of human lives.
To accomplish that, a regular army and barracks by themselves are not enough. Workers must have the opportunity to get military training at their factories, plants and mines at specified times, while being paid by the Capitalists. If the workers are destined to give their lives, the bourgeois patriots can at least make a small material sacrifice.
The state must issue a rifle to every worker capable of bearing arms and set up rifle and artillery ranges for military training purposes in places accessible to the workers.
Our agitation in connection with the war must be as uncompromising in relation to the pacifists as to the imperialists.
This war is not our war, the responsibility for it lies squarely on the Capitalists. But, so long as we are still not strong enough to overthrow them and must fight in the ranks of their army, we are obliged to learn to use arms as well as possible….
Just as every worker, exploited by the Capitalists, seeks to learn as well as possible the production techniques, so every proletarian soldier in the imperialist army must learn as well as possible the art of war so as to be able, when the conditions change to apply it in the interests of the working class.
We are not pacifists. No we are revolutionaries. And we know what lies ahead for us.”
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