The truth is that, were the workers, in Ukraine, to actually organise themselves into independent revolutionary units, linked by a network of workers councils/soviets, which also asserted workers' class interests, then, Zelensky's regime would look to its allies within the Nazis of the Azov Battalion to break them up. It, along with its NATO backers would put the war with Putin on the back burner to defeat them. And, the same is true were Russian workers to actually organise, in a proletarian revolution against Putin. NATO imperialism wants to see Putin overthrown, but certainly not by class conscious Russian workers!
“Politicians of the Wang Jingwei type, under difficult conditions, will unite ten times with Chiang Kai-shek against the workers and peasants. Under such conditions, two Communists in a bourgeois government become impotent hostages, if not a direct mask for the preparation of a new blow against the working masses.” (p 97)
Unfortunately, there is little prospect, at the moment, of any such revolution in either Ukraine or Russia, but that illustrates just how far from reality is the description of the war as, in any way, a revolutionary war, as against what it is, a war of two capitalist states, reactionary on both sides, and which socialists should oppose.
Trotsky also sets out how serious this is, and the way a revolutionary approaches it.
“We say to the workers of China: The peasants will not carry out the agrarian revolution to the end if they let themselves be led by petty-bourgeois radicals instead of by you, the revolutionary proletarians. Therefore, build up your workers’ soviets, ally them with the peasant soviets, arm yourselves through the soviets, draw soldiers’ representatives into the soviets, shoot the generals who do not recognize the soviets, shoot the bureaucrats and bourgeois liberals who will organize uprisings against the soviets.” (p 97)
In line with the Theory of Permanent Revolution, and the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, Trotsky's position was that, even in the case of a war of national liberation, “The Main Enemy Is At Home”. The idea, proposed by the Stalinists, and by Tchen Duxiu, that the class struggle, and construction of soviets had to be postponed until after the war danger had been removed, was anathema to that perspective.
“War danger is a class danger. It can only be ended by crushing the great landowners, by annihilating the agents of imperialism and of Chiang Kai-shek and by the building of soviets. Precisely in that lies the agrarian revolution, the people’s revolution, the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, i.e., the genuine national revolution (in the Leninist, but not in the Martinovist sense of the term).” (p 98)
And, in this sentence is summed up everything that has been wrong with the approach of the “Left”, to national liberation struggles, in the post war period.
Trotsky, also, sets out the different class approaches to impending war. The bourgeois and petty-bourgeois look at it, and think, “what will be in it for me?”. The workers look at it, and ask,
“In which direction will the relationship of forces be changed by the war? Will it increase the role of the men on top or the masses below? Will it straighten out the proletarian class line of the Party or will it accelerate the shift towards the high-ups under the pretext of a “national war” (in the Stalinist interpretation)?” (p 100)
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