source: A Jazeera
What are we to make of an article from a left web site that starts like this:
‘The supply of cluster munitions by the US to Ukraine must be opposed. Anti-capitalists and internationalists support unconditionally the people of Ukraine in their armed resistance to liberate their country from the Russian genocidal invasion. But the support for Ukraine is not necessarily uncritical. We have been critical of the Zelensky government attack on labour rights in the country and its embracing of neoliberal policies. Now we have to criticise its use of cluster munitions.’
The first sentence might seem to require no comment, but even this is not the case, what does opposition entail?
The second declares that the Russian invasion is ‘genocidal’, which is simply untrue. However bad it is, the point of the invasion is not to destroy the Ukrainian people, and such claims only promote the war: after all, if this is the point of the invasion then there is no point in not fighting to the death, and, given such stakes, the use of old cluster bombs hardly looks excessive.
The truth, however, is that the purpose of the Russian invasion, as the article later acknowledges, is not this, but ‘Ukraine’s de-Nazification and demilitarization and implicitly integration into Russia’s orbit.’ However one understands this, it is far from the destruction of the Ukrainian people, and the employment of the term not only belittles the history the word does apply to, but also shows scant regard to the real nature of the war, what approach should thereby be taken to it, and therefore how it might be ended.
We have been over many times the deception of describing the war as one of ‘the people of Ukraine in their armed resistance to liberate their country’, when the war is waged by the Ukrainian state and the liberation sought includes areas that wouldn’t welcome it. What matters here is the assertion that ‘Anti-capitalists and internationalists support unconditionally’ Ukraine in its war. In other words, all the words of condemnation of the use of cluster munitions will not dent their support for ‘Ukraine’, so simply dissolve into moral handwringing.
How do we know that this condemnation is worthless? Well, because it involves no change in approach, as the article acknowledges. It says that ‘support for Ukraine is not necessarily uncritical. We have been critical of the Zelensky government attack on labour rights in the country and its embracing of neoliberal policies. Now we have to criticise its use of cluster munitions’. So, previous criticism has not dented support and neither will the use of cluster munitions; just as previous claims that the supply of offensive weapons would not be supported, so this red line of the pro-war left breaks exactly at the same time as western imperialism crosses it, in perfect sequence.
If this ‘left’ can support a capitalist state when it attacks workers’ rights and imposes ‘neoliberalism’, by which is presumably meant rabidly pro-capitalist policies, what barriers remain? What could the Ukrainian state do that would lead this ‘left’ to oppose it when its support is ‘unconditional’? In the major geopolitical struggle in the world today, what role does this left play that is in any meaningful way different from western imperialism itself? If ‘unconditional’ means what it says, then there can be no conditions placed on imperialist support for its ally. This ‘left’ has bound itself in a tight embrace not only with the rotten and corrupt Ukrainian state and its ruling class but with their own states and their own ruling classes.
‘It is understandable that Ukraine wants to get all the arms necessary to get a quick and decisive victory against the Russian army’, says the article! Has the author not noted that the war has been going on for 18 months; that the much anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive is stalling and was never expected to achieve much anyway; that the Russians are now advancing as much as the Ukrainians? Does this left accept every stupid statement of the Ukrainian state at face value; and if it does, how does this not invalidate its own qualms about cluster munitions if the possibility of ‘a quick and decisive victory’ is not a reasonable thing to anticipate?
Their lofty and high-minded approach departs further from the real world as it states that ‘whatever the military arguments, opposing the precepts of the Convention on Cluster Munitions will make it harder for Ukraine to argue for the international rule of law. If Ukraine gets weapons that most UN member states (including the UK) are seeking a ban on, it will affect its ability to win solidarity and condemnation of Russia’s illegal occupation by these states.’
What exactly is the ‘international rule of law’, perhaps their ‘left’ version of the imperialist ‘international rules-based order? ‘ Both equally fictitious and utterly irrelevant when conflict becomes a test of strength and power. Who will be affected by the claimed reduced Ukrainian ability to ‘win solidarity’ when this left itself will not be impacted in its own support? Does it believe western imperialism gives a shit about the impact of cluster munitions?
Perhaps it believes that there are sections of the world’s population who will oppose cluster munitions and not hold a position of ‘unconditional’ support to Ukraine; who might then question the virtue of this state and the justness of its war, and might then go on to draw conclusions about it–that it should be opposed, and the cluster munitions-wielding Ukraine should not be supported?
What then for the loyal left, which supports Ukraine ‘unconditionally?’ Surely it would be honour bound to redouble its defence of Ukraine against any possible wavering of support. That, anyway, is the logic of its position, the logic of its ‘opposition’ to cluster munitions.
Of course, in mealy-mouthed fashion it notes that ‘Ukraine has also used cluster munitions, albeit on a much smaller scale. While not used on cities, they nevertheless did cause death and injuries to civilians.’
At this point one might wonder what the point of the article is; this boat has already sailed, so why the advice that ‘If Ukraine wants to maintain the solidarity around the world, it should not break the ban on cluster munitions by over 100 countries’?
Ukraine has not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, so has not and is not breaking from its policy, or previous practice (as in 2014-2015 in Donetsk city for example) and has repeatedly asked to be supplied by them.[i] The pro-war left makes no distinction between solidarity with Ukraine as a state, as a people, or a working class, but in this case it is clearly only the state that can decide not to use cluster bombs. So, it either has to appeal to this state to forego their use, which is hardly likely, or to its population or working class, although this would open up recognition of the difference and invite the conclusion that they are not synonymous and even have separate interests.
It is also a bit absent to dismiss the ‘military arguments’ with a ‘whatever.’ The pro-war left have pointed to the absolute necessity for military support–‘Ukraine also needs a mass solidarity internationalist movement that supports its armed resistance’–and since Ukraine is running out of ammunition, the US has stated it has no choice but to supply cluster munition because it doesn’t have any other.
The whole article is blind to its deception. It reads as the necessity to maintain the reputation of the Ukrainian state, with opposition to cluster munitions entirely secondary. Where, for example, is the appeal for the Russian state not to deploy them, or to the international working class to demand this? But of course, on the coat tails of western states and their mass media, Russia, its people and its working class are beyond the pale.
Human Rights Watch is quoted as documenting their use, but that ‘Ukraine used cluster munitions, albeit on a much smaller scale. While not used on cities, they nevertheless did cause death and injuries to civilians.’ But this is not quite what the report, and one referenced by it, says:
‘Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least eight civilians and wounded 15 more, Human Rights Watch said. . . . The total number of civilians killed and wounded in the cluster munition attacks that Human Rights Watch examined is most likely greater. Russian forces took many injured civilians to Russia for medical care and many had not returned when Human Rights Watch visited.’
‘Ukrainian armed forces reportedly used cluster munitions in attacks on Izium city, Kharkivska region, between March and September 2022, when it was controlled by Russian armed forces, according to the Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. The commission provided three examples illustrating this use of cluster munitions in Izium..’
‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’, that stands over this article, is blind to the reality of this war because it has abandoned a Marxist understanding of what is going on. That is why the article is incoherent. Nothing provides a better example of this than the statement that ‘Reconstruction after the war must be for another Ukraine with economic and social justice, not one where the country’s assets are handed over to western capitalism.’
How this is to be achieved through the arms of western imperialism wielded by a corrupt capitalist Ukrainian state is unexplained. No explanation is possible.
Marx said of his politics that it did not appeal to “an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself” but was based on “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. The reality of the war in Ukraine will not adjust itself, during or after, to the otherworldly moralising of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and the movement that will abolish war is that of the working class, not ‘the Ukrainian resistance’, not ‘a mass solidarity internationalist movement that supports its armed resistance’, and not the supply of only ‘good’ weapons by Western imperialism so that the blushes of ACR can be spared.
[i] These requests follow (according to a report) that ‘Ukraine in 2011 . . . cluster munitions constituted 35 percent of its stocks of conventional weapons, which totaled two million tons of ammunition.’
Sráid Marx 
Pingback: War as the continuation of politics by other means – the case of Ukraine 3 of 3 – 🚩 CommunistNews.net
The name of the group itself is confused and shows its reactionary petty-bourgeois nature. Confused because, does it mean resistance to “anti-Capitalism”, or does it mean they are “anti-Capitalists” who are resisting, in which case resisting what? We know its the latter, which is the ideology, not of Marx, but of Sismondi, or the Russian populists the Narodniks. Marx and Lenin’s ideology was based not on resisting capitalism, but on encouraging its more rapid and rational forward development, so as to heighten its contradictions, strengthen the working-class, and the development of the productive forces required to construct Socialism.
“And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class.”
(Lenin – Two Tactics of Social Democracy)
So, its no wonder that, in the era of imperialism, when capitalism, and its development have long since burst out of the constraints of the nation state, these petty-bourgeois, reactionary nationalists, are still trying to “resist” its development, and turn it back to the conditions of the 18th and 19th century, when the task of creating the nation state still lay ahead of it as a progressive task. They are like those other petty-bourgeois reactionaries that seek to protect small capital, by forming “anti-monopoly alliances” and so on, or restricting the development of these more progressive forms of capital, essential to the construction of a global market, and the creation of planned and regulated production under the control of workers, by imposing windfall, and other taxes on them, and handing subsisidies to the reactionary inefficient forms of small capital, to enable them to cling to existence.
But, what is the logic of what they say in this article?
1.) They are critical of Sunak’s Tories and its anti-working-class policies in Britain.
2) Sunak and those Brexit Tories say that Britain is under attack by the EU, hence its need to Brexit. As they believe that the capitalist nation state and imperialism defends workers’ interests (though for its own reasons don’t you know), they should give unconditional support to Sunak’s Tories in defending “Britain” against the EU, and so support Brexit.
3. If that conflict of interest intensifies, for example, over fishing rights in the Channel, as happened in the 1970’s, with Britain’s Cod Wars against Iceland, in the North Sea, or perhaps over the question of the NI Protocol, and issues over the border, and turns into physical conflict, then whilst continuing to wrong their hands at the Tories “anti-working class” policies, they should support Britain’s military response, because it is defending the Fatherland, defending Britain’s national independence, and self-determination, which, as they lump British workers in with British capitalists in a Stalinoid populist concept of a non-class nation, or “people”, is how they arrive at the conclusion that this capitalist state is defending workers’ interests!
Its the same logic applied by Stalin to supply arms to Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT, which he claimed represented the whole of Chinese people “the bloc of four classes”, even whilst protecting his back for the future by noting its bourgeois nature, but still subordinating the workers and poor peasants to it. Its the same logic that led to the petty-bourgeois Left supporting the reactionaries of the Viet Cong, even as they were murdering Vietnamese Trotskyists, who were supporting the interests of Vietnamese workers and poor peasants, of their support for the anti-working-class forces of the Algerian NLF, or Khmomeni’s medievalist forces in 1979, or the Catholic nationalist forces of PIRA, and so on.
They are a total shambles, and have spent the last 80 years, at least, supporting reactionary, anti-working class forces, simply in the name of pursuing the bourgeois liberal ideals of the 18th and 19th century of national self-determination, rather than even the 20th century ideals of international socialism, and the self-determination of the global working-class, let alone the even greater necessity for that in the 21st century.