The talk of “the political outlook of the Ukrainian government of the day” is facile, and indicates the extent to which Marxist discourse and understanding has deteriorated. It is of the same kind as the confusion of government office with state power that led to reformist formulations of the type “Labour Take The Power”, or calls for a Labour government to “nationalise the top 200 monopolies”. Marxists, in assessing such matters, are not in the least concerned by the political outlook or complexion of the government of the day, but with the class nature of the particular state!
Had Britain had a Labour Government, in 1939, even one led by Nye Bevan, it would not, in the least, have changed the nature of the British state as an imperialist capitalist state, or the nature of its war against Germany as being an inter-imperialist war, reactionary on both sides, and which Marxists would oppose! Though, at least, Bevan denounced Labour for imploring the people on recruiting platforms to put themselves under the leadership of their opponents. In France, the government was led by the Socialist Daladier, but it didn't change the nature of the French state as a capitalist, imperialist state, or of its war with Germany as an imperialist war. And, in the 1945 Attlee Labour Government, Bevan opposed British unilateral nuclear disarmament. That government also sent troops to break strikes, and supported the US in the Korean War.
Marxist opposition to adopting a bourgeois-defencist stance in Ukraine is not determined by the reactionary, corrupt nature of Zelensky's regime, but simply by the fact that it is a capitalist state! The fact that this capitalist state also has a reactionary, corrupt government, which has promoted fascists and ultra-nationalists into prominent positions, that it is actively attacking Ukrainian workers organisations, and even the liberal media, merely illustrates the crass nature of those that have been providing it with unconditional support, given that they have, as with he AWL, used precisely those kinds of arguments to reject support for liberation and resistance struggles, for example, by political-Islamists in Iraq, or in relation to Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine and Lebanon. To have rejected support for these reactionaries, was correct, because we only have a responsibility to support such struggles by truly revolutionary forces, as the Comintern's Theses On The National and Colonial Struggles, puts it, but the fact that the social imperialists show such inconsistency, not just in practice, but even in their arguments, illustrates the opportunist nature of their politics.
The USC also talk about support not being determined by “the posturing of Western governments”. That is true, but only in the context discussed above. In 1941, Marxists supported defence of the USSR, despite it having a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime, because that regime was merely the superficial manifestation of a deformed workers state, as it came into existence, in the specific historical and material conditions. In fact, James Burnham and Max Shachtman, the mentors of those now in the AWL, and likewise the SWP, opposed Trotsky and the position of defence of the USSR, precisely on the basis of this superficial political regime. In defending the deformed workers' state, Marxists, of course, welcomed the military and material support that US imperialism provided to the USSR, as it shouldered the bulk of the task of defeating the Nazi war machine.
No matter what the extent of that support, no one was in any doubt that the war being conducted by the USSR was being fought on its own terms, and not in any way being determined by US imperialism. It was a deformed workers' state, and that meant that, objectively, that state had to act in a way that was historically progressive in defending the advances that the revolution had brought, even if it did so in a brutal and bureaucratic manner. But, can that be said about the role of NATO imperialism in Ukraine? No. Again, if we take, not even the question of an existing capitalist state engaged in a war with another capitalist state, but the question of a colony or annexed territory seeking independence, the position of Marxism/international socialism is again clear. Lenin notes,
“ It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement”
And, when Stalin and the Comintern followed a line similar to that of the USC, today, in relation to the Chinese revolution, in the 1920's, demanding support for the bourgeois-nationalist KMT of Chiang Kai Shek, Trotsky reminded them of this position.
“What tasks did Lenin set before the Comintern with regard to the backward countries?
“It is necessary to carry on a determined struggle against the attempt to surround the bourgeois democratic liberation movements in the backward countries with a Communist cloak.”
"In carrying this out, the Guomindang, which had promised to establish in China “not a bourgeois régime”, was admitted into the Comintern.”
"In what form, then, did Lenin visualize the alliance with the bourgeois democracy of the colonies? To these, too, he gives an answer in his thesis written for the Second Congress:
“The Communist International should enter into a temporary alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie of the colonies and backward countries, but should not fuse with it and must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement – even in its embryonic form.”
It seems that in executing the decisions of the Second Congress, the Communist Party was made to join the Guomindang and the Guomindang was admitted into the Comintern. All this summed up is called Leninism”.
(Trotsky – Stalin and The Chinese Revolution)
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