As I wrote in my response to McDonnell's article, the Left's support for the Viet Cong, as against its opposition to US imperialism, in Vietnam, was indeed something that left a lot to be desired, and the same error has been replicated in many other such national liberation struggles, be it in Ireland, in Iran, in Palestine, and elsewhere, in which it has descended into petty-bourgeois nationalism, and "stagism", which is the foundation of its “idiot anti-imperialism”.
But, at least, the Vietnamese Stalinists represented not only a struggle against imperialism, but also against landlordism and capitalist property forms. As with the Stalinists in the USSR, and elsewhere, the methods of doing so were brutal, crude and bureaucratic, but setting aside the concerns of moral socialists, despite all of that, the transformation of property forms remained historically progressive, as Trotsky had described in relation to Stalinism in the USSR. It laid the basis for a political revolution by the workers and peasants to move forward from those existing forms to a democratic control over them, and of society.
Indeed, Trotsky's approach to defence of the USSR, despite Stalinism, sets out clearly the way that Marxists should respond. Trotsky, whilst conducting the most strenuous opposition to Stalinism, and the need to overthrow it, via political revolution, requiring the independent organisation and political programme of revolutionary forces, made clear that, precisely because of the historically progressive nature of the property forms in the USSR, the revolutionaries would defend it against being overturned by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces. That might mean that those revolutionaries would also have to make tactical alliances, in action with the Stalinists, to fight against the counter-revolutionaries, but they would do so on the basis of the United Front, of march separately strike together. All the time, whilst fighting, in action, against the counter-revolutionaries, the revolutionaries would point out the conservative role of the Stalinists, and the danger they represented to a successful outcome of the struggle against counter-revolution, indeed that it was the conservative role played by the Stalinists that created the counter-revolutionary threat in the first place. As he wrote, in relation to Poland.
“Our general appraisal of the Kremlin and Comintern does not, however, alter the particular fact that the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure. We must recognize this openly. Were Hitler on the morrow to throw his armies against the East, to restore “law and order” in Eastern Poland, the advanced workers would defend against Hitler these new property forms established by the Bonapartist Soviet bureaucracy.”
But, in Ukraine, it is not even a question of defending a state where Stalinists have transformed property relations, by brutal and bureaucratic means, in an historically progressive manner. Quite the opposite! It is a case where existing statised property has been overturned, and privatised, and bourgeois property relations restored, and, as with in Russia itself, restored in a peculiarly corrupt and crony fashion. Again, that can be compared to China in the 1920's. Whilst it provides every reason for Marxists opposing the invasion of Putin's Russia, it gives absolutely no reason for them to give support, conditional, unconditional, critical or uncritical to Zelensky's regime, or to the Ukrainian state.
On the contrary, our task is to support only truly revolutionary forces in Ukraine, including pointing out to them the danger represented to them by the Ukrainian state, the need to organise politically, organisationally and militarily against it, as well as against Russia. The Ukrainian revolutionaries need to develop their own programme involving the creation of workplace and community defence squads, and workers' militia. They need workers soviets to democratically control those militia, and organise their provision of weapons. They cannot simply limit themselves to opposition to the Russian invasion, especially as they face immediate attacks on basic workers' rights by the Ukrainian state. As Trotsky put it in relation to Spain,
“the slogan “Against fascism, for democracy!” cannot attract millions and tens of millions of the populace if only because during wartime there was not and is not any democracy in the camp of the republicans. Both with Franco and with Azaña there have been military dictatorship, censorship, forced mobilization, hunger, blood, and death. The abstract slogan “For democracy!” suffices for liberal journalists but not for the oppressed workers and peasants. They have nothing to defend except slavery and poverty. They will direct all their forces to smashing fascism only if, at the same time, they are able to realize new and better conditions of existence. In consequence, the struggle of the proletariat and the poorest peasants against fascism cannot in the social sense be defensive but only offensive. That is why León goes wide of the mark when, following the more “authoritative” philistines, he lectures us that Marxism rejects utopias, and the idea of a socialist revolution during a struggle against fascism is utopian. In point of fact, the worst and most reactionary form of utopianism is the idea that it is possible to struggle against fascism without overthrowing the capitalist economy”.
At the present time, Zelensky's government is attacking Ukrainian workers' living standards, removing basic trades union rights and so on, and yet the AWL/USC continue to argue support for it, as the Stalinists did for the KMT, rather than demanding that the Ukrainian workers organise and rise up against it. In essence, they call on the Ukrainian workers to suck it up, until such time that the Russian invasion is defeated, which is exactly the Popular Frontist line that the Stalinists advocated in China in 1927, and in Spain in 1936, and which led to disaster.
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