The USC respond to the charge of being on the side of NATO and the Tories, by saying,
“Socialists cannot decide our policy by putting a minus where the ruling class or its dominant faction puts a plus. We have to develop an independent working class policy.”
Quite true, but that is not what the USC do. They see Putin as the main enemy, and place a minus sign where he places a plus. They operate on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend, and so end up aligned with Putin's enemy, NATO/Ukraine. There is nothing independent, nor working-class, about that. Socialists should, of course, oppose Russia's invasion, but that does not require support for Ukraine's capitalist state, nor its reactionary government, nor for NATO. Our means of opposing Russia's invasion is to support independent, working-class action against it, and, in particular, encouraging the development of a genuinely revolutionary working-class movement in Russia.
In terms of resisting Russia's invasion in Ukraine, that should take the form not of support for its capitalist state, but of the development of a truly revolutionary working-class movement there too, independent from the Ukrainian state. Indeed, in order to effectively defeat the Russian invasion, Ukrainian workers need not only their own independent revolutionary organisation, but to oppose and overthrow the Ukrainian capitalist state itself, which will never undertake a genuinely anti-imperialist struggle, how could it, when its on the side of the biggest imperialism in the world, NATO, and wants to be a part of it!
The importance of that is shown in the USC's statement,
“In any case, we are not simply in the same camp as the Ukrainian government, let alone its foreign imperialist allies. Our starting point is solidarity with the Ukrainian people as a whole against Russian imperialism.”
That is what the Stalinists said in the 1920's to justify their popular front with the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai Shek. Trotsky rightly ridiculed it.
The word "people" is abstract and used by liberals to gloss over the fact that this “people” is comprised of antagonistic classes. All such use of the term “people” has been used by liberals to present the interests of the bourgeoisie and its state, as being synonymous with those of everyone in society. It is a bourgeois deception. The interests of Ukrainian workers are not those of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie whether in time of peace or war. The actual war being conducted is one by the Ukrainian capitalist state, and it is with that that the USC are standing in solidarity.
And, the USC further illustrate that when they say,
“The Ukrainian labour movement as a whole, virtually unanimously, supports Ukraine’s war of self-defence and liberation. The Ukrainian trade unions are far from tiny, with millions of members. The more radical unions support and participate in Ukraine’s war too.”
In WWI, trades unions overwhelmingly supported the imperialist war conducted by their respective ruling classes too. Is the USC saying that that legitimised those imperialist wars?! That sounds like populism and tailism, not Marxism. Again the same argument was used to legitimise the KMT, and their subordination to it. Indeed, those trades unions organised labour battalions to go and fight in those wars, and also, after the war, those same forces went on to fight alongside the White Armies in Russia, to try to overturn the Revolution, and kept schtum when it came to British imperialism's role in the Chinese Revolution, with its gunboats sitting in Chinese rivers and territorial waters.
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